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Khi'Khi
2016-10-01, 09:50 PM
Barring the oft-gruesome and untimely ends of most PC's, has anyone ever considered the wide differences in lifespan among the more common PC races? Elves, dwarves, and halflings tend to live for decades, if not centuries longer than their human companions, and If I remember correctly other race's lifespans can be measured in mere months.

One player from my current group did really well with this during one of our last sessions. She played an elf from a very isolated and tribal people; in fact meeting our party was her first direct contact with humans. A more recent plot point had my character's human mentor pass away peacefully at the age of 78. The elf offered her condolences that he passed away at such a "young" age, causing my character to explain that humans only very rarely lived past 100. This shocked, and even disturbed her as she realized that the same was true for the rest of the humans in the party; that even under the best of circumstances she would only be able to enjoy their companionship for another few decades. It was a good expansion of the character's point-of-view, and made for a great character moment.

Has anyone had any interesting RP around this plot point?

bulbaquil
2016-10-01, 10:28 PM
I've long maintained that the elves' very long lifespans go a long way towards explaining the environmentalist tendencies stereotypical of the race - what happens 50 or 100 or even 500 years from now is not "someone else's problem"; it's still potentially YOUR problem, and YOU may have to deal with it. When dealing with human nations, they actually see empires rise and fall, think in terms of dynasties more than individual kings, and the idea of hosting an election to change the ruler every 4 years sounds about as absurd to them as having new elections every 3 months would seem to us.

Gastronomie
2016-10-01, 11:09 PM
In a campaign I'm running I made it so even the elves life for only about 120-ish years. It seemed to be really too weird for me to handle.

Dunsparce
2016-10-02, 05:39 AM
My current D&D character is a Diopsid.

It's a 3.5 race of tallish bug people. They become adults at Age 4 and Die of old age anywhere between 21 and 28 years old.

It's brought up occasionally that he's 4-5 years old and will never(under natural circumstances) see the age of 30 when the rest of the party have around human lifespans.

He plans to find ways to become functionally immortal(Or at least see the age of 35 to get in a record book or something if he can't do that) so he can build up a Diopsid-based empire to put the race on the world stage instead of being some obscure underdark race most other beings don't even notice.

SimonMoon6
2016-10-02, 11:33 AM
What I find tricky to deal with is that sometimes, in a particular setting, you may want an event to have happened "hundreds of years ago" so that nobody alive today even remembers the exact details of what happened.

And then the elf pipes in, "Oh, yeah. I was there."

I actually ran an adventure once where the PCs were in a drow city and the warring factions of drow had agreed to have a "neutral" party (the PCs) determine what had happened centuries ago by finding a certain McGuffin. One of the players brought up the point that the drow were old enough to have been around back then and I replied by saying that, while that was true, it *was* centuries ago and few peoples' memories are good enough to remember exactly what happened yesterday or ten years ago, so for something that happened centuries ago, it was still a matter of disagreement.

VoxRationis
2016-10-02, 03:37 PM
It tends to make longer-lived races in my setting rather callous. Elves in my settings (and dwarves to a lesser extent) see little reason to ever put themselves at risk to help humans, since, after all, the humans are going to die inevitably in a small amount of time anyway. It'd be like taking a bullet for a goldfish or a terminally ill cancer patient—noble, but ultimately pointless.

Regarding memory: It's not actually that hard to include ancient mysteries in settings with long-lived races, as (aside from corruption of memories) you can just make your mysteries in areas those races haven't really frequented. An elven population which has had little growth in 4000 years isn't necessarily going to be exploring a lot of places.

JadedDM
2016-10-02, 04:15 PM
In my most recent game, I actually dropped that whole aspect. All the races have the same lifespan as humans now. This came about when I realized that nobody ever roleplayed out the lifespan differences and they really never came into play, either. I mean, if a human PC and an elf fall in love, it doesn't really matter that the elf will outlive the human by centuries, because the campaign won't last that long anyway.

Plus, I would run into the same problem as SimonMoon6, where something would be ancient history for humans but within the lifetime of an elf or dwarf. I also sometimes like to do 'generational' games where we play a game, and when it ends, we fast forward a couple of decades and start a new game with the offspring of the old PCs. But this falls apart with elves and dwarves, who would still be in their prime and any kids they had would still be too young to play.

So yeah, I took a page from Dragon Age and just gave them all the same lifespans.

Trask
2016-10-02, 04:44 PM
I'm of two minds about this issue because on the one hand I find it a bit ridiculous that elves and dwarves can live so much longer than humans but on the other hand I think that is one of the things that separate them from humans. It gives them that unique perspective on life, country, family, pretty much every aspect of their outlook on the world is shaped different by the fact that they live so much longer.

I like that but I feel that it could be implemented better in some settings and by some DMs (including myself) when creating NPCs of those long lived peoples to better integrate it into their culture. Because the awkward ridiculousness of it really comes to light when its sort of just ignored as part of a character's personality and worldview and sort of just that thing that happens to be true about them.

Zweisteine
2016-10-02, 11:17 PM
I haven't had any roleplaying about it, but I have considered it the setting I've been designing a bit.

A good portion of what I've designed is lore surrounding "ancient" history—the civilizations that came before the modern day. The most important one was the ancient Fae* empire, which ruled about like twenty thousand years ago. Trying to decide on that time period was a bit tricky, because it occurred to me that we hardly know anything about humans ten thousand years ago, and any civilization twice that old would likely be long forgotten, especially as most traces of them disappeared when they left.

Then I realized that what a human experiences as 2,000 years, an elf experiences as 20,000. The Fae empire is to the elves what the Roman Empire and other civilizations of that time are to us. The Elves have stories of those ages, and study their ancient history, but few humans know of the Fae much at all. Similarly, the Dwarves, with their shorter lifetime than the Elves, remember the Fae only in their myths.


* My setting's Fae aren't the same as the fey, though they are related. The Fae are outsiders from the what is arguably most important of the non-material planes, and could be represented in game by anything from Pixies to Eladrin to Demons.

Straybow
2016-10-03, 12:31 AM
What's more incongruous is the idea of a 200+ year old elf or 100+ year old dwarf starting an adventure as a level one schlub with the same limited resources as the dirt-grubbing human teenager.

Martin Greywolf
2016-10-03, 03:12 AM
Y'all fail to account for statistics. So, it's math time.

Just because you can in theory live to be 10 000 years old before you die of old age doesn't mean that's your life expectancy. Life expectancy is basically calculated by taking likelihood you'll die in a given year and adding them up. Once likelihood of you dying is over 50%, that's your life expectancy. Thing is, all manner of variables go into this, not just death of old age.

Current estimates of how long would an average human live if we didn't age vary from 500 to about 2 000 years - after that point, more than a half of people of your age are dead. These estimates usually take US as basis, so they really apply to modern countries with access to decent healthcare for everyone and no significant wars going on. If you consider what your average TTRPG setting is like, these numbers are liable to drop like a rock (tough to say how much, though, since we have very little hard demographic data on middle ages).

What complicates this more are some racial immunities - once diseases are not a problem, numbers change again and you pretty much have to be a statistician to get the correct ones.

So, even if you have long-lived elves, there will be few people indeed who will remember something that happened 1 000 years ago, especially if that something is a specific thing they had to witness - they have just one viewpoint after all.

Now, Tolkien's elves lived for a significantly longer amounts of time, but you have to remember that those elves are pretty much superhuman. To compare them to something a tad more modern, they are kinda like Avenger's Asgardians - stronger, immune to diseases, only die of injuries far worse than what would kill a human. Only thing that can kill them, armies aside, are huge natural disasters and bad luck. DnD 3.5 elves don't even come close to this unless they hit higher levels (let's say 8).

slachance6
2016-10-03, 06:22 AM
What's more incongruous is the idea of a 200+ year old elf or 100+ year old dwarf starting an adventure as a level one schlub with the same limited resources as the dirt-grubbing human teenager.

Logically, an old elf or dwarf that's still level 1 would be some kind of outcast or degenerate. In fact, a way to justify the fantasy trope that elves are simply superior to most humans despite having similar racial traits is to say that most adult elves are 4th or 5th level, while most humans are 1st or 2nd level. This is because they just have more time to perfect their combat skills or acrobatics or magic or what have you.

snowblizz
2016-10-03, 06:52 AM
What's more incongruous is the idea of a 200+ year old elf or 100+ year old dwarf starting an adventure as a level one schlub with the same limited resources as the dirt-grubbing human teenager.

Well the human did not spend the last century perfecting the art of lace filigree and comparative philosophical limericking either.

hifidelity2
2016-10-03, 07:10 AM
Well the human did not spend the last century perfecting the art of lace filigree and comparative philosophical limericking either.

Agree

There is also that in Elvish / Dwarvish society you may still be a child until you are 100+ years old and so will not have much money etc

Joe the Rat
2016-10-03, 07:40 AM
There is also that in Elvish / Dwarvish society you may still be a child until you are 100+ years old and so will not have much money etcI took this idea and ran with it.
Elves and Dwarves reach physical maturity a little slower than humans - physically "adult" by 30 or so, depending on subtype. For Dwarves, it's time to learn a trade. Elves, however, take a bit longer to reach emotional and intellectual maturity - they are not considered ready to become part of society until they reach 100. So you have several decades of being physically mature, but a bit irresponsible, flighty, overemotional, freely spending (where money is a thing), and having a penchant for making bad decisions. In other words, they spend about 50 years being High School Seniors or College Freshmen.

This is where Half-Elves come from.

CharonsHelper
2016-10-03, 09:27 AM
Logically, an old elf or dwarf that's still level 1 would be some kind of outcast or degenerate. In fact, a way to justify the fantasy trope that elves are simply superior to most humans despite having similar racial traits is to say that most adult elves are 4th or 5th level, while most humans are 1st or 2nd level. This is because they just have more time to perfect their combat skills or acrobatics or magic or what have you.

Yeah - I always play them that way. Actually - I figure that's how elven/dwarf races can survive at all with their low population and reproduction.

The average human trooper is a level 1-2 warrior and their knight style elite are level 2-3 martials, while the average elf or dwarf soldier is a level 4-6 PC class. Though, humans are also more likely to have the occasional high level outliers.

I'm actually pretty dubious about a long-lived PC starting a campaign at 1 unless they're a young punk who would otherwise have to go through an apprenticeship for 20+ years before he's trusted, which could be a decent reason for an impetuous young punk to go adventuring instead. (Admittedly, I'm playing an older elf in a campaign we started at 1, but it's Strange Aeons and we started with amnesia, so I'm playing as if I used to be more badass than I started.)

If they were mostly level 1-3, elves and dwarves would have been swept away by aggressive/high reproduction goblins & orcs long ago.

Necroticplague
2016-10-03, 09:27 AM
I took this idea and ran with it.
Elves and Dwarves reach physical maturity a little slower than humans - physically "adult" by 30 or so, depending on subtype. For Dwarves, it's time to learn a trade. Elves, however, take a bit longer to reach emotional and intellectual maturity - they are not considered ready to become part of society until they reach 100. So you have several decades of being physically mature, but a bit irresponsible, flighty, overemotional, freely spending (where money is a thing), and having a penchant for making bad decisions. In other words, they spend about 50 years being High School Seniors or College Freshmen.
In the version of DnD I'm native too, this is explicitly the case, except they have it even longer: fully physically developed at 25, fully emotionally developed at 110. So that period lasts about 85 years.

halfeye
2016-10-03, 10:07 AM
I'm of two minds about this issue because on the one hand I find it a bit ridiculous that elves and dwarves can live so much longer than humans but on the other hand I think that is one of the things that separate them from humans. It gives them that unique perspective on life, country, family, pretty much every aspect of their outlook on the world is shaped different by the fact that they live so much longer.

Don't mind me, I'm scientifically inclined: :smallbiggrin: :smalltongue:

The Elves and Dwarves have to be aliens. That is, extra-terrestrials. Evolution works on generations. Human generations are at the longer end of Earthlife. Sleeper sharks may be longer lived, but they're more primative because they have evolved less in the time. To be long lived but human adapted means it took longer to get there, and there just hasn't been that much time in the biology on Earth.

VoxRationis
2016-10-03, 12:27 PM
Yeah - I always play them that way. Actually - I figure that's how elven/dwarf races can survive at all with their low population and reproduction.

The average human trooper is a level 1-2 warrior and their knight style elite are level 2-3 martials, while the average elf or dwarf soldier is a level 4-6 PC class. Though, humans are also more likely to have the occasional high level outliers.

I'm actually pretty dubious about a long-lived PC starting a campaign at 1 unless they're a young punk who would otherwise have to go through an apprenticeship for 20+ years before he's trusted, which could be a decent reason for an impetuous young punk to go adventuring instead. (Admittedly, I'm playing an older elf in a campaign we started at 1, but it's Strange Aeons and we started with amnesia, so I'm playing as if I used to be more badass than I started.)

If they were mostly level 1-3, elves and dwarves would have been swept away by aggressive/high reproduction goblins & orcs long ago.

I'm inclined to agree with this assessment. In a world where martial skill scales like it does in D&D, someone who's been practicing for a century is not going to be 1st level. (And don't tell me that the elf is first level because he hasn't seen combat! Is the mage making everburning torches in the quaint little shop actually a war veteran? The placid little priest who only does healing magic? The NPC master thief who has a moral compunction about killing? Clearly long years of practice translate to levels at some point.)

Telesto
2016-10-03, 12:35 PM
When working in that system I usually require players to read the Book of Erotic Fantasy's passage on pubescence if they grow up in a different society or are mixed heritage.

Pugwampy
2016-10-03, 12:37 PM
I have yet to meet any player that mooks his age to gain some Wis or Int bonuses .

Also your average one year campaign is about say 1 month of the players life . I dont think lifespan is much of an issue .

Telesto
2016-10-03, 12:41 PM
Oh... my own games tend to be on a much, much longer time frame. Downtime alone is about a month times their level every level, and sometimes more.

prufock
2016-10-03, 01:05 PM
I imagine elves would view humans in much the same way humans view chimpanzees or even shorter-lived apes and monkeys. Chimps come to sexual maturity around 8 years old or so (approximately half the age a human reaches sexual maturity), and live to be about 35 (around half a human's average lifespan). A lot of smaller monkeys live even shorter lives.

Plus, to an elf, humans are primitive, dirty, creatures running more on instinct than rational thought. Yeah, they have aspects of some social "culture," and even underdeveloped use of language and tools. I hear some of them can even be trained to make art, if you want to call it that. But really, let's not xoticomorphize them too much; we may share an evolutionary history, but we're a long way from rolling around on the ground.

CharonsHelper
2016-10-03, 01:13 PM
I imagine elves would view humans in much the same way humans view chimpanzees or even shorter-lived apes and monkeys. Chimps come to sexual maturity around 8 years old or so (approximately half the age a human reaches sexual maturity), and live to be about 35 (around half a human's average lifespan). A lot of smaller monkeys live even shorter lives.

That seems unlikely for a couple reasons.

1. Humans are of equal intelligence to elves (a bit lower in Pathfinder - but average humans would still be just a bit subpar for an elf).

2. It's not uncommon for elves to fall in love with and/or have kids with humans. I don't see many humans doing that with apes even if it were possible.

Strigon
2016-10-03, 03:05 PM
Don't mind me, I'm scientifically inclined: :smallbiggrin: :smalltongue:

The Elves and Dwarves have to be aliens. That is, extra-terrestrials. Evolution works on generations. Human generations are at the longer end of Earthlife. Sleeper sharks may be longer lived, but they're more primative because they have evolved less in the time. To be long lived but human adapted means it took longer to get there, and there just hasn't been that much time in the biology on Earth.

Aren't the races in D&D explicitly created by the gods?

prufock
2016-10-03, 08:01 PM
That seems unlikely for a couple reasons.

1. Humans are of equal intelligence to elves (a bit lower in Pathfinder - but average humans would still be just a bit subpar for an elf).

2. It's not uncommon for elves to fall in love with and/or have kids with humans. I don't see many humans doing that with apes even if it were possible.

Neither of these objections has stopped real-life human races from holding similar views about each other. What evidence is there that humans are intelligent, anyway? They can loosely grasp language, but have none of the intricate subtleties. Their mating rituals are crass, and they are promiscuous. They don't even have a concept of treekinship, how can they be sentient?

Long-lived humanoid species with an extended childhood would have a few predictable effects. One is a tightly-knit and complex social structure, with a strong ingroup-outgroup dichotomy. Since pregnancies are also likely longer and less frequent, mate selection would also be very important, and it would likely be very much the woman's option. This means males would go to great lengths in various ways to prove their suitability - such as single-minded focus and dedication (what you'd want in a male when childhood lasts 110 years) to art, craft, and other projects. Cheating is likely very taboo, assuming a 50/50-ish male to female ratio.

All this, of course, assumes at least a somewhat human-like evolutionary path; in a world with magic, anything is possible.

CharonsHelper
2016-10-03, 08:52 PM
What evidence is there that humans are intelligent, anyway?

It's right there in the rulebook. It says that humans get +0 Int, and so do elves.

Telesto
2016-10-03, 10:23 PM
It's right there in the rulebook. It says that humans get +0 Int, and so do elves.

What have humans really done, anyway? They've never made something elves couldn't make, or make better.

Humans are just advanced monkeys.

Zweisteine
2016-10-03, 10:55 PM
Aren't the races in D&D explicitly created by the gods?

Mostly, yes. But not humans. The only truly human god is in Races of Destiny, and he's not a creator-god, he's just a jerk.

I think.

PersonMan
2016-10-04, 04:17 AM
Oh... my own games tend to be on a much, much longer time frame. Downtime alone is about a month times their level every level, and sometimes more.

What happens during the downtime?

I'm honestly curious - I've never been in a game with lengthy downtime and most of my characters would be the type to avoid downtime if it lasted longer than a week or so, unless it's something like "and then the party works to [accomplish X goal] for 7 months", so it's an interesting but very foreign idea to me.

Esprit15
2016-10-04, 04:28 AM
I don't see age disparity as a big issue. It explains a lot of the mindsets of the different races: to an elf, everything passes; to a dwarf, they'll just tough things out; orcs think more in the here and now; races like the thri-kreen don't live long enough to form more than wandering tribes, and why should they, if they won't live to see the fruits of their work?

I actually have had some fun with characters who thought about how long they would live, when the setting had races that lived for different time scales. Some embraced the shortness of their lives and died to make sure their much older and yet you get friends lived, while others worked to stave off death.

prufock
2016-10-04, 06:33 AM
It's right there in the rulebook. It says that humans get +0 Int, and so do elves.
Gee, a book written by humans for humans says humans are just as smart as elves. I'll bet it says they're just as strong as dwarves, just as charming as gnomes, and just as willful as halflings too. No bias there, I'm sure. If you want a real assessment of humans, read Regardien Lova Gwaith.

Telesto
2016-10-04, 08:31 AM
What happens during the downtime?

The characters train to advance themselves (leveling up). They get to do various downtime activities on the side, information gathering and mini adventures, visiting family, seeing NPCs, working their jobs, impressing the local townsfolk with their abilities, maximizing their HP with training, collecting spells, visiting the black market to see if any given day has something new they might want, training their dragons or other mythical beasts if applicable (it frequently is).

Typically the peril is learned of well in advance, and they have time to set things up and plan, other times there isn't really any peril to be had. If the PC is restless, they can always go out and solve problems and do lower level adventures they don't really need to act out.

Tanarii
2016-10-04, 08:48 AM
If you're running a multi-ganerational campaign or one with large amounts of downtime between adventures, you're almost certainly going to have to reintroduce some form of level limits or XP penalty for longer lived races.

I've done both in AD&D 1e, and the level limits, along with slower XP due to non-humans almost always choosing multi-classing, were critical to making the system of constantly cycling through new human adventurers in conjunction with existing higher level non-humans.

Especially in multi-generational, players have good reason to bring back even 'retired' level-capped non-humans every time you do a time-leap forward. They come back out to shepherd and assist their old human comrade-in-arms' children through the difficult (and in AD&D 1e brutally lethal) first few low levels.

eru001
2016-10-04, 09:37 AM
from one of my campaigns

Human Knight: what is your name?

Dwarf: I be Beardhammer Hammerbeard (not his real name just can't remember it)

Human Knight: Oh? Are you perchance named for the great warrior Beardhammer Hammerbeard who so valiantly lead stout dwarven troops to defend my kingdom one hundred years ago from the Orc invasion?

Dwarf: Nay, I be not named for him, I be he.

Human Knight: um... wow... well then Sir Dwarf it is a pleasure to meet, you, my great grandfather stood by your side in that battle, I am honored to do the same today.

Dwarf: Aye, I thought ya looked fermiliar, good ta see ya.

Joe the Rat
2016-10-04, 10:30 AM
One of the D&D books discusses dwarves considering humans worthy of friendship after a couple of generations. They'll trust you if they knew your grandmother.

The disparities run the other way as well - goblinoids and orcs tend to be shorter-lived. This either means having a shorter view of the future (benefit me NOW, since I don't know about later), or being more fanatical to their bloodthristy gods (as you will be meeting them in like 40 years, tops). This is where the aggressive-expansionist or horde-raid approach comes in - get what you need now, while you can, compared to the dwarf/elf/gnome "Don't be hasty" plan ahead and wait approach. This idea takes humans as the balance: Short-lived enough to want to get things done, long-sighted enough to want to build a lasting legacy.


Mostly, yes. But not humans. The only truly human god is in Races of Destiny, and he's not a creator-god, he's just a jerk.

I think.Oh no, he's definitely a jerk. It's a neat story, though.

Mitth'raw'nuruo
2016-10-04, 10:44 PM
I've long maintained that the elves' very long lifespans go a long way towards explaining the environmentalist tendencies stereotypical of the race - what happens 50 or 100 or even 500 years from now is not "someone else's problem"; it's still potentially YOUR problem, and YOU may have to deal with it. When dealing with human nations, they actually see empires rise and fall, think in terms of dynasties more than individual kings, and the idea of hosting an election to change the ruler every 4 years sounds about as absurd to them as having new elections every 3 months would seem to us.

I've wondered if they, or any other human like long lived race is presented correctly. Time still passes at the same rate, a day is still a day, and what can be accomplished in a day, month, or year is still the same. Only experience (knowledge and skills) gained with age changes.

Imagine a reasonable well off working class (businessmen) human, who had been born in 1700 and was still alive & functional (not near death) today.

They might know any number of terms, which have long fallen to disuse. Imagine Prohibition was in effect - they could literally be the only person in America to have been a cooper , and have any knowledge of that profession. Think of the nautical terms, once so commonplace that 170 years after the Age of Sail, many nautical terms are still common parlance in the English lexicon, without scant few knowing their origins.

Imagine the perspective of such a person on Mob rule - that is to say democracy. A Person who lived as a British subject, saw the lawful King, who ruled so many, so well, overthrown, and a Republic founded. A person who kept abreast on the democracy, in France, In Hati, In Mexico, In Columbia. A Person who kept abreast of Political theory, as all literate persons once did.

The perspective of the German republican monarchy nearly win against all challengers until the (then perhaps still a ) Republic of the United States broke with Century & a half of Tradition & became involved in foreign wars. The perspective of someone that can clearly trace that to Germany democracy — mob rule — which leads directly to Hitler.

The Person who saw the Tsar — and Russia, Fall to the dictatorship of communism.

What would such a persons thoughts on government be? Certainly not democracy — not one man, one vote, one time — which is what democracy . Perhaps a Monarchy with a Parliament & hereditary House of Lords - Such as England in Victoran Age. Perhaps a like the German Empire, with it's four kingdoms, six grand duchies, six duchies (five after 1876), seven principalities, three free Hanseatic cities, and one imperial territory. . Perhaps a Republican system as America was founded, however the dozens of failed countries after us would show how dangerous an idea that would be, & certainly there would be great fear of our slide to mob rule & general lawlessness.

Likewise, I believe their would be some concern for nature - but not nearly what is presented. In the end, the world heals. Short of Snarl. One can only wonder if they would support Louis Alfonso's claim to the French Throne. Certainly nothing in French History since the beheading of Louis XVI King of the French suggests they ought to be allowed freedom from Monarchy.

Mitth'raw'nuruo
2016-10-05, 12:16 AM
I have yet to meet any player that mooks his age to gain some Wis or Int bonuses .

Also your average one year campaign is about say 1 month of the players life . I dont think lifespan is much of an issue .
That is because you normally take key stat penalties (str, dex, con) & everyone forgets about that rule.



I imagine elves would view humans in much the same way humans view chimpanzees or even shorter-lived apes and monkeys. Chimps come to sexual maturity around 8 years old or so (approximately half the age a human reaches sexual maturity), and live to be about 35 (around half a human's average lifespan). A lot of smaller monkeys live even shorter lives.

Plus, to an elf, humans are primitive, dirty, creatures running more on instinct than rational thought. Yeah, they have aspects of some social "culture," and even underdeveloped use of language and tools. I hear some of them can even be trained to make art, if you want to call it that. But really, let's not xoticomorphize them too much; we may share an evolutionary history, but we're a long way from rolling around on the ground.

2nd paragraph is spot on.
The First paragraph is not, however your error bolsters your argument.

Consider. Arranged marriages were common in the US & the rest of the western world until very recently. The age of Consent, was once much younger. Even today, federally, the Age of consent is 12, however many people get prosecuted for receiving a photo (age 18), or some other law. In my Commonwealth, age of Consent is 16, but there is a "within" four years of age clause. So a 13 y/o can consent to a 17 year old. However, the parents can revoke that consent, even after the fact. If you're under 18, the best plan is abstinence is best.

Even today, California has no minimum marriage age with parental consent. Massachusetts also has no law, with Common law of 12 for girls & 14 for boys being in effect. in NH it is 13/14 with parental consent, with 5 other States using 15 has the age of marriage, with nearly all of the rest saying 16 as age of marriage with parental consent. Only two States require an age above 18 to marry without parental consent.

In Rome, woman had to be 12, and could not marry without parental approval until 25, however the catholic church recognized women over 12 and men over 14, even if married in secret. In 13th Century England, the age was set at 7.


The first recorded age-of-consent law dates back 800 years. In 1275, in England, as part of the rape law, the Statute of Westminster 1275, made it a misdemeanour to "ravish" a "maiden within age", whether with or without her consent. The phrase "within age" was interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was 12 years.[13] In the 12th century, the jurist Gratian, an influential founder of Canon law in medieval Europe, accepted the age of puberty for marriage to be between 12 and 14, but acknowledged consent to be meaningful if the children were older than 7. Some authorities claimed that consent could take place earlier. Marriage would then be valid as long as neither of the two parties annulled the marital agreement before reaching puberty, and the marriage had not already been consummated. Gratian noted that "If one over the age of seven takes a prepubescent wife of less than seven and transfers her to his house, such a contract gives rise to the impediment of public propriety (http://faculty.cua.edu/Pennington/Canon%20Law/marriagelaw.htm)"


Sir Edward Coke (http://www.faqs.org/childhood/A-Ar/Age-of-Consent.html)(England, 17th century) made it clear that "the marriage of girls under 12 was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was eligible for a dower from her husband's estate was 9 even though her husband be only four years old. .

Thus, if we are playing in a world anything other than modern or future, a human with an age of 30 should have adult children (age 16) likely with grand children, pelor willing.

What then, would a Elf, with and age of consent of 50 (women), 70 (men) think? When a 70 year old man might be standing at the head of five generations.

It also puts into perspective the historical voting age in the English Speaking world. 21. Absent of any other sensible restriction (military service, property) a person 21 years of age likely not only has children, but has had them several years. Their perspective is not their own needs, but that of their progeny, with throughout human existence had remained a Truth - until baby-boomers & keynesian economics. The requirement for the PotUS to be 35, now seen as "young" then meant he was a grandfather, or that his peers were.

How would a Dwarf, with their strong family ties, look upon a human race, with the exception of the most studious of noble families (House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in the UK known as Windsor, The Starks, the Targaryen) 25% of the English Population can trace their bloodline to the House of Plantagenet, with most of those being the sub-branches of Lancaster and York. 531 years. What Dwarf would have no knowledge of their grandfather, his grandfathers his brothers & sisters? Yet few humans, even today, could find out who their relatives six centuries ago were, and almost nothing could be said about their lives, absolutely nothing about who they actually where, their hopes, dreams, fears, or personality.

It is true the current Royal Family COULD trace their decent from the House of Wessex & Alferd the great in 849 anno Domini, but that is only five Dwarven generations, & in all the world, they are the only people that could make such a claim without modern genetics. Thirty Nine Generations (by my count, which may be off a few due to how twisted the tree is) of human monarchs, ruling England, Long and Well, in the life time of 5 Dwarfs.

It put a lot of things in perspective as I thought through this.

hifidelity2
2016-10-05, 04:57 AM
I have to say that as PC’s we had never thought much about life span until the current Adventure we are on

A bit of background – we played a long running campaign – played AD&D 2 with some house rules (on / off over about 5 years) and in the end “Won”

The party was made up of – and where I put ages they will be Human equivalent (e.g., if I say 20 then a dwarf would be say 100 yrs old) by the time we finished

Gnome (in his early “20’s” equivalent)
Human Paladin (approx. 30)
Humans Cleric ( approx 30)
Human Wizard (into his late 40’s)
½ elf (in his late “20’s”)


Anyway as we had a fully functioning world the DM wanted to use it and we enjoyed it so we picked up the adventure again but set 30 years in the future with new characters but with links to the old ones so

Gnome was still young and so became a DPC and I played his Human nephew (Ranger/Druid)
Paladin was old but alive and “king” of a major Orc tribe and had handed his sword to his son (1/2 orc)
Human Wizard was an apprentice of the original Wizard (who has vanished – part of the plot)
Human Expert / fighter is related to a Major NPC in the 1st campaign who is now dead (old age) put still has political power
¼ elf sorcerer (house rule) off spring of the ½ elf and Human

This did show that the none human PC’s had different levels of interaction and different timescales when working towards plans etc

Knitifine
2016-10-05, 05:54 AM
What have humans really done, anyway? They've never made something elves couldn't make, or make better.

Humans are just advanced monkeys.In most settings the answer to this is "Become a god."

It's actually interesting, humans are the most common race among ascended mortals.

I mean obviously we know the real reason for that, but since a lot of this thread is based on similar logic.

Belac93
2016-10-05, 09:28 AM
Slightly related: I once made a character who, through application of being an elf and some class features that made him age slower, was around for about 5000 years before they invented the wheel.

Telesto
2016-10-05, 10:38 AM
In most settings the answer to this is "Become a god."

It's actually interesting, humans are the most common race among ascended mortals.

I mean obviously we know the real reason for that, but since a lot of this thread is based on similar logic.

I really need a sarcasm emoticon

ngilop
2016-10-05, 11:10 AM
Beardhammer Hammerbeard


Greatest name for a dwarf ever.. well cept maybe beardaxe axebeard? but thats tomato vs tomato

Aotrs Commander
2016-10-06, 08:10 PM
I DO have disparity in ages between PC races and further, go more towards Tolkien in the "elves are ageless" issue.

At the same time, I don't buy the idea that longer-lived races would be effectively mentally handicapped compared to humans because it would require them four times as long (e.g. Dragonlance) to reach the same mental age as a human. So longer-lived (humanoid) races mentally and physically mature at roughly the same rate as humans do.

I also work on the basis that simply living will eventualy accrue you experience (because it, y'know, does) and thus it is impossible to get really old without getting said experience.

(I will grant you, the problem of "out of living memory" does provide some problems, especially because I use as close as I can real timescales not the usual fantasy "and hundreds of years passed and nothing changed" sort of thing.)

One of the ways I handle Tolkien's "elves are better" is a natural extension that long life => experience. If the average human will reach level 2-4 (as they are expected to do in my campaign world) in the course of their life, the average level of the average elf is (conservatively) assumed to be 6-8. (So, they're not harder than you just because they're super-better than you, they're harder than you because they're just higher-level than you.)

What this DOES mean is that if the PCs are starting at low level... They are effectively capped in age to a reasonable appropriateness; and this applies unilaterally across all sets of rules and all campaigns.

That means, if my PCs says "can I play a 2000-year old [anything]" the answer is "no, because a character that age that is not basically suffering from very severe health issues (and thus unplayable) is just not going to be level one."

I am not adverse to some artistic lisence, of course and humans with a shorter overall lifespan and lower aging threshold get a bit more latitude. A 70-year old human whose been slowing down for twenty years is (just barely) plausible for a level 1 or 2 character who's had a fairly uninspired life... A 70-year old Elf or Dwarf would have had to have lead a REALLY unexceptiional life to be in the same place, considering they are basically still in their prime.



One interesting thing about long-lived races that is generally ignored in favour of making human shorter life-span a positive thing is something that is an Aotrs speciality ('cos of the organisational-wide Lich thing): preservation of skill base. We all, most likely, have at one point or another have encountered that old boy who's been doing this job for twenty years and knows all the ins and outs. Now imagine that, basically EVERYONE ends up with level of experience without anything like the hemoharrging of that set of skills that humans have to old age. Example: Cohen the Barbarian was supremely skilled, but his age meant he had to rely on his experience. Now imagine Cohen in a body that never aged, with all that experience on top of a body in physical prime. how much more dangerous could he be? In a microcosm, that is the sort of thing you should see long-lived races doing.

However, generally, to stop humans from being as irrelevant as, well, they really kind of ought to be in that instance, what you get is more "long-lived races have what in modern human terms all learning difficulties and our basically bone-idle." Not saying that alternative is necessarily desired, but it is an interesting option.

Khi'Khi
2016-10-06, 08:27 PM
One of the ways I handle Tolkien's "elves are better" is a natural extension that long life => experience. .

See, I personally consider this to be a misconception with Tolkien's work. Elves are by no means "better" than humans, just look at good 'ol Feanor and his kids. In fact the Silmarillion shows that Elves can be just as evil, petty, and destructive as the "second-born."

Not that this disproves any of your points. You all mean "better" physically, whereas I am talking about "better" in a moral sense. This conversation does seem to have taken a turn to mechanics, though I was thinking more along the lines of RP. Long life may make you physically stronger, wiser, etc. than the shorter-lived races, but what then? Does that make you superior in all ways?

Aotrs Commander
2016-10-07, 07:14 AM
Not that this disproves any of your points. You all mean "better" physically, whereas I am talking about "better" in a moral sense. This conversation does seem to have taken a turn to mechanics, though I was thinking more along the lines of RP. Long life may make you physically stronger, wiser, etc. than the shorter-lived races, but what then? Does that make you superior in all ways?

Define "superior."

(Because it should be pretty obvious, for example that I'm going to say yes, Liches are objectively and inherently superior in all ways to literally everything else...)

Morally? That depends almost ENTIRELY on culture.

True, agelessness is likely to preserve things better (e.g. the skillbase) but you can make an arguement that it preserves the lessons learnt by mistakes just as much as say, predjuices which might be reinforced more over time. (Though one might also note that the latter tends to stem more from ignorant and the older an non-aging creature gets, the less ignorant it might be.)

But ultimately, morality has basically crap-all to do with longevity (which is a physical trait); it's nearly the same as asking whether being taller has an effect on morality. Unless you are talking about something that is literally phsyically engineered to have a prevalence towards a morality, but that's not going to be the case with most fantasy races.



The differences, as I said, are likely to be cultural, but not necessarily in the moral dimension. And I suspect that basically nobody (me included) actually follows the natural extension of what effect a retained skillbase would actually do. Let us simply suppose that Einstein or Newton (or pick any scientist you like) had lived even twice as long. How much more might they have discovered? How much further ahead would we be? What would they have discovered if they had met? Could be we be reading "FTL Transit for the Layperson" or something by Newton, Eistein, Hawking et al? Would David Attenborough have been joined by Charles Darwin? That sort of thing.

As I said, if you want to properly examine the effects of longevity on culture, then you have to ask how humans could possibly compete with races that started earlier (typically) and basically ARE "smarter" overall, because they have twice or more time to learn stuff.

The usual answer of "elves are lazy bastards who can't focus long enough, unlike us hard working humans" is, to be fair, a rather humanocentric justification to rationalise why, for example, elves are not the majority species and like, first-world countries compared to everybody else's third world countries. (And I mean in an "Ethieopia realistically cannot pose a threat to Germany/France/Canada" sort of sense, not a sci-fi/fantasy "underdog vrs Evil Empire sense.)

The answer that is commonly used (by all of us) is basically wrong, but, like the mecha genera, it's sort of a genera requirement to make things have an even slightly even keel.

It's arguably no worse than the truly ridiculous amounts of time that most campaign (and fantasy in general) worlds have pass between events, where " a thousand years" is thrown around with abandon because - basically - it sounds impressive. (Even Golarion - which is probably just about the best in this regard, because sometimes it does very nearly get the timescales right - could afford to compress its timeline by a factor of two to five and still be credibile.)

Garimeth
2016-10-07, 07:31 AM
Define "superior."

(Because it should be pretty obvious, for example that I'm going to say yes, Liches are objectively and inherently superior in all ways to literally everything else...)

Morally? That depends almost ENTIRELY on culture.

True, agelessness is likely to preserve things better (e.g. the skillbase) but you can make an arguement that it preserves the lessons learnt by mistakes just as much as say, predjuices which might be reinforced more over time. (Though one might also note that the latter tends to stem more from ignorant and the older an non-aging creature gets, the less ignorant it might be.)

But ultimately, morality has basically crap-all to do with longevity (which is a physical trait); it's nearly the same as asking whether being taller has an effect on morality. Unless you are talking about something that is literally phsyically engineered to have a prevalence towards a morality, but that's not going to be the case with most fantasy races.



The differences, as I said, are likely to be cultural, but not necessarily in the moral dimension. And I suspect that basically nobody (me included) actually follows the natural extension of what effect a retained skillbase would actually do. Let us simply suppose that Einstein or Newton (or pick any scientist you like) had lived even twice as long. How much more might they have discovered? How much further ahead would we be? What would they have discovered if they had met? Could be we be reading "FTL Transit for the Layperson" or something by Newton, Eistein, Hawking et al? Would David Attenborough have been joined by Charles Darwin? That sort of thing.

As I said, if you want to properly examine the effects of longevity on culture, then you have to ask how humans could possibly compete with races that started earlier (typically) and basically ARE "smarter" overall, because they have twice or more time to learn stuff.

The usual answer of "elves are lazy bastards who can't focus long enough, unlike us hard working humans" is, to be fair, a rather humanocentric justification to rationalise why, for example, elves are not the majority species and like, first-world countries compared to everybody else's third world countries. (And I mean in an "Ethieopia realistically cannot pose a threat to Germany/France/Canada" sort of sense, not a sci-fi/fantasy "underdog vrs Evil Empire sense.)

The answer that is commonly used (by all of us) is basically wrong, but, like the mecha genera, it's sort of a genera requirement to make things have an even slightly even keel.

It's arguably no worse than the truly ridiculous amounts of time that most campaign (and fantasy in general) worlds have pass between events, where " a thousand years" is thrown around with abandon because - basically - it sounds impressive. (Even Golarion - which is probably just about the best in this regard, because sometimes it does very nearly get the timescales right - could afford to compress its timeline by a factor of two to five and still be credibile.)

Firstly, I agree with all this, as well as all other posts in similar vein. I think you have to come up with another biological limitation.

In my setting dwarves live about 300 years, and they get in their prime by age 30. Elves can like about 700 years, and while they mature very slowly, they basically never grow old.

By all rights humans should not be even in the running, but for me the great equalizer is birthrates.

The dwarves have an abnormally low number of female births, so the women basically get their pick of a mate and the male has to do his duty to his clan and basically be a career husband and father. Vice versa a female dwarven adventurer would be of great shame to her clan, because the clan needs her to settle down and be a mother.

Elves are in a cycle of reincarnation and there is basically a cap on the number of elven souls. Those souls are either here, or in the fey. Elven births are exceptionally rare, and are basically the result of an elf in the fey being banished from the elven court or choosing to go on vacation by living a mortal life. For them the Prime is their afterlife, so because of this they are more interested in just having a good time and seeing some neat things - its spring break.

In my setting the Dwarves were basically top dog, but they mined too deep and encountered something that wiped out the seat of their empire, and they have been struggling to get their population back up, as well as recover their lost knowledge. This has lead humans, and halflings, with their much faster birthrates to take over.

Aotrs Commander
2016-10-07, 09:11 AM
Firstly, I agree with all this, as well as all other posts in similar vein. I think you have to come up with another biological limitation.

In my setting dwarves live about 300 years, and they get in their prime by age 30. Elves can like about 700 years, and while they mature very slowly, they basically never grow old.

By all rights humans should not be even in the running, but for me the great equalizer is birthrates.

The problem is, just like with the slow maturation rates... It's a similar sort of general justification reasoning. If we look at it with serious consideration, it raises even more problems. Low birthrate means that, perforce, the accidental death rate has to be appropriately lower, or that the birth rate is only lower enough to compensate for the lack of death from old age. Because otherwise, the danger is that a low birth rate will not even the balance, just make the species extinct or effectively extinct the first time a catastrophy happened.

(That said, if your elves' birth rate scales to the number of elven souls available, that solution would seem to work, since it basically garentees that (baring species-extinction-level catastrophy) the Elven population is essentially permenantly fixed, which is an interesting approach.)

But otherwise, low birthrate explains only how there are "not many"; but it doesn't address the effects of the longevity of the ones that are around; it doesn't address the aforemention experience and skill preservation issue. So while it might mean the nations of the races are smaller, it still isn't a good explanation as to why they are not vastly more advanced.

Though you might make some argument that a small population gives a smaller chance of a great innovator, conversely, on Earth, some of the comparitively small and lightly populated countries (e.g. Britain, Japan, further subdividing to Scotland where an apparently disproportionate number of inventions have come from) have punched out of their weight class in that regard; and while you might dent that a little bit w#if the opulation expansion is capped, it probably wouldn't be that much.



Again, let me stress, I'm not saying that I also don't use the birthrate limitation on my own worlds as well - because I do1 - I'm just saying that if we analyse it more thoroughly, it doesn't hold as much water as we might have though it did.



1My elves, for example, have essentially better control over their cycle so they can't generally become pregnant unless they are actively trying to.

Garimeth
2016-10-07, 10:08 AM
The problem is, just like with the slow maturation rates... It's a similar sort of general justification reasoning. If we look at it with serious consideration, it raises even more problems. Low birthrate means that, perforce, the accidental death rate has to be appropriately lower, or that the birth rate is only lower enough to compensate for the lack of death from old age. Because otherwise, the danger is that a low birth rate will not even the balance, just make the species extinct or effectively extinct the first time a catastrophy happened.

(That said, if your elves' birth rate scales to the number of elven souls available, that solution would seem to work, since it basically garentees that (baring species-extinction-level catastrophy) the Elven population is essentially permenantly fixed, which is an interesting approach.)

But otherwise, low birthrate explains only how there are "not many"; but it doesn't address the effects of the longevity of the ones that are around; it doesn't address the aforemention experience and skill preservation issue. So while it might mean the nations of the races are smaller, it still isn't a good explanation as to why they are not vastly more advanced.

Though you might make some argument that a small population gives a smaller chance of a great innovator, conversely, on Earth, some of the comparitively small and lightly populated countries (e.g. Britain, Japan, further subdividing to Scotland where an apparently disproportionate number of inventions have come from) have punched out of their weight class in that regard; and while you might dent that a little bit w#if the opulation expansion is capped, it probably wouldn't be that much.



Again, let me stress, I'm not saying that I also don't use the birthrate limitation on my own worlds as well - because I do1 - I'm just saying that if we analyse it more thoroughly, it doesn't hold as much water as we might have though it did.



1My elves, for example, have essentially better control over their cycle so they can't generally become pregnant unless they are actively trying to.

Ahh, so to clarify. The FEMALES have a lower birthrate - meaning few females are born, they are still as fertile as normal, but there are far fewer to have children at any given time, which slows the population growth. Also the dwarves are MUCH more advanced than the others species when it comes to technology. They had crossbows first, they are better smiths, they will develop guns first, they are better engineers, etc. They just lost the vast majority of their population, resources, and most brilliant minds when they made first contact with XXX. (Not saying what it is in case my players see this post). They are still the most advanced society in almost every way, they just are uninterested in the surface lands as a whole, and are recovering from the collapse of their empire, which was only a few centuries ago, and they still have not recovered their lands. In the meantime the humans have fared better than they have, and are multiplying and spreading quickly, and gaining a monopoly on the natural resources above ground. The humans are still not dominant, this just puts them on even footing.

The elves potential population is fixed at a relatively small number, and in general are completely disinterested in anything in the mortal realm unless it involves having fun or the potential to mess things up in their actual home, the Fey. That's why they are not a major player, but woe to anyone that tried to take them on, because the elves are all essentially timeless, and even though they are weaker in the real world, they are still way stronger than a human. as a result, they are not an available PC race.

Thoughts?

arrowed
2016-10-07, 10:10 AM
I like the idea that powerful beings diffuse out of the Material Plane over time, placed on top of the 'elves have a higher average level because they live longer' thing. My opinion is that very powerful creatures tend to want more space than less powerful creatures... humans live relatively densely, while dragons require miles of territory each, while gods can have entire planes to themselves.
So as older elves climb the levels, the more powerful ones will grow apart from each other, desiring a realm to match their perceived status. At lower levels, this means exploring the world for unsettled land to call home, but at higher levels it is more likely to mean travelling to other planes with infinite expanses of territory to claim.
Sure, the high-level 500-year old monarch of the elf kingdom might stick around, but her childhood friends, each one maybe a level 10+ character, are probably fairly bored of this world and ready to explore the next ones. Either that or they snap and decide to conquer 'lesser species'' lands, only to discover an unlikely band of heroes who gain levels like other people catch colds.

Bohandas
2016-10-07, 11:14 AM
What's more incongruous is the idea of a 200+ year old elf or 100+ year old dwarf starting an adventure as a level one schlub with the same limited resources as the dirt-grubbing human teenager.

That's definitely an issue

halfeye
2016-10-07, 12:29 PM
The differences, as I said, are likely to be cultural, but not necessarily in the moral dimension. And I suspect that basically nobody (me included) actually follows the natural extension of what effect a retained skillbase would actually do. Let us simply suppose that Einstein or Newton (or pick any scientist you like) had lived even twice as long. How much more might they have discovered? How much further ahead would we be? What would they have discovered if they had met? Could be we be reading "FTL Transit for the Layperson" or something by Newton, Eistein, Hawking et al? Would David Attenborough have been joined by Charles Darwin? That sort of thing.
I have heard it said that pure mathematicians have done their best work by the age of 23. Einstein was pretty much done by the time he got to fourty, he worked on, but he didn't get much done. This is obviously limited to humans.

Khi'Khi
2016-10-07, 01:02 PM
But ultimately, morality has basically crap-all to do with longevity (which is a physical trait); it's nearly the same as asking whether being taller has an effect on morality. Unless you are talking about something that is literally phsyically engineered to have a prevalence towards a morality, but that's not going to be the case with most fantasy races.



I absolutely agree with you on this, and its something of my main point.

However, what many players (and writers) of elven characters or elven civilizations seem to automatically assume is that Elves and other long-lived creatures are "perfect in every way." The best example I can think of this is the Na'vi from Avatar, who are basically space-Elves. Not only are they stronger and faster than humans, but they're also wiser, live in perfect harmony with nature, have perfected every craft, and have no possible wants or needs. This is contrasted against the chest-beating, knuckle-dragging humans who blunder about hopelessly and need the Elves to show them the error of their primitive ways.

NOW, this very well may be the way in which the Elves view themselves. Just as humans take a human-centric view, Elves can take an Elven-centric view. But that's all it is. The Elves' "superiority" and humans' "inferiority" both physically, mentally, and morally can be debated until we all can't see straight. The problem is, that the author wants us to take this one viewpoint at face-value and all bow before the superior species.

I'll share a good example of this from one of my previous games. Our party came across a human ranger who had killed a unicorn. The ranger explained that he had been hired by the family of a terminally ill human girl to find and retrieve a unicorn horn which had fantastic healing properties. He also explained that he had purposefully chosen a target that was at the end of its natural lifespan, who would not live longer than the girl if she had been healed. Our elf in the party ignored his justifications and shot him dead before any of the party could react. She also wouldn't let any of the party take the horn of the already-dead creature and take it to the girl's family.

Of course, we then have to deal with the family of the dead ranger, along with that of the girl who had died in her illness. The elf was incredibly callous about this, with the attitude that the life of any unicorn was more valuable than the life of any human. Again, an appropriate worldview for the elf to have, but one that is easily debatable in terms of right and wrong. But James Cameron would have us all agreeing with the elves and condemning the primitive humans.

Aotrs Commander
2016-10-07, 04:58 PM
I absolutely agree with you on this, and its something of my main point.

However, what many players (and writers) of elven characters or elven civilizations seem to automatically assume is that Elves and other long-lived creatures are "perfect in every way." The best example I can think of this is the Na'vi from Avatar, who are basically space-Elves. Not only are they stronger and faster than humans, but they're also wiser, live in perfect harmony with nature, have perfected every craft, and have no possible wants or needs. This is contrasted against the chest-beating, knuckle-dragging humans who blunder about hopelessly and need the Elves to show them the error of their primitive ways.

The Na'vi are frankly, a urine-poor example of anything, especially for the whole luddite anti-technology/harmony of nature bollocks theme scifi seems to love, which is a whole other kettle of Stupid I won't go into (other than to say: tell me technology is teh evils at the point where the metaphorical you requires medical attention). (And they were still required to be saved by a white male human...)

Also, dragons? Mind-flayers? Vampires? Liches (most importantly of all?) Demons (et al)? All of those are long"lived" and none could exaclty be descibed as being morally "better" than humans.



I find the ideas that a species or culture could NOT be morally superior to humans (regardless of their physical make-up and or longevity) or that a species or culture could NOT be morally inferior to humans (regardless of their physical make-up and or longevity) to be equally laughable.

Whether or not Elves or, say, Orcs fill those criterion rather depends on what or whose elves and orcs and what cultures those elves or orcs have.

If you're playing Skyrim or something, they are pretty much all as morally grey as humans.

If you were playing on my Dreemaenhyll, Elves would tend to be Good over Neutral, Dark Elves are almost all Evil and you are VERY unlikely to find a Good Orc (since the latter HAVE been genetically engineered with traits that push them to Evil). Or skip over the distant world of Nuathose which has been ruled or otherwise heavily influenced in the absense of gods by a contingient of angels for ten thousand years and all the humans, elves and half-elves (the only "fantasy races," for want of an easy term, present) are culturally extremely Good. Or the Aotrs itself, which is composed of Liches and is extremely (Lawful) Evil.




I'll share a good example of this from one of my previous games. Our party came across a human ranger who had killed a unicorn. The ranger explained that he had been hired by the family of a terminally ill human girl to find and retrieve a unicorn horn which had fantastic healing properties. He also explained that he had purposefully chosen a target that was at the end of its natural lifespan, who would not live longer than the girl if she had been healed. Our elf in the party ignored his justifications and shot him dead before any of the party could react. She also wouldn't let any of the party take the horn of the already-dead creature and take it to the girl's family.

Of course, we then have to deal with the family of the dead ranger, along with that of the girl who had died in her illness. The elf was incredibly callous about this, with the attitude that the life of any unicorn was more valuable than the life of any human. Again, an appropriate worldview for the elf to have, but one that is easily debatable in terms of right and wrong. But James Cameron would have us all agreeing with the elves and condemning the primitive humans.

If in the world in question unicorns are animals, then yes, that was an overreaction.

If we are talking about D&D unicorns or the equivilent (or Twilight Sparkle or something), we are not talking about an animal, we are literally talking about murdering a sentient/sapient being that happens to be nonhumanoid shaped (which is pretty close to being hard-coded to be Good) for it's horn. Which would unquestionably be Evil. It doesn't matter if it would die anyway at the same time; unless it specifically gives you permission, you are just flat-out in the wrong. You do not get the choice to dictate that a unicorn is worth less than a human. (Or if you do, come join me in the Evil end of the alignment pool.) In fact, swap it around; what is the reaction to a hunter being commissioned to find the liver or heart or something of a girl to save the life of a unicorn? Because if both are people, just of difference shapes, killing one to extend the life of the other is still Evil UNLESS one or other of them is prepared to willingly sacrifice themselves.

That attitude could just as easily have been espoused by a druid of any species. (Or any nonhuman (*cough* *cough*) who has been forced to spend any amount of time among humans.)



There is also the point of the subset of people who WANT elves to be better than humans, because, at their heart, they are sick of humans because humans, as a species, can be... kind of excrements. They would like to believe that, actually, elves or whatever CAN be "better" than humans and that humanity is not the end-all and be-all that can be aspired to. Elves are just the most fantasy obvious go-to choice because they are pretty and/or physically very close to humans.

(They are of course, completely mistaken, as it is clearly Liches that are the best, and of those, I am objectively the best of all.)

GrayDeath
2016-10-09, 04:49 AM
Interesting takes, all and all.

btw aotrs Commander, where would one look at your mentioned settings?



@ Topic: Reading with interest tm nothing to say that hasnt been said.

And really like the Elves are Fae on Vacation Idea.

Gonna steal it. :D

Bohandas
2016-10-15, 12:42 AM
It's arguably no worse than the truly ridiculous amounts of time that most campaign (and fantasy in general) worlds have pass between events, where " a thousand years" is thrown around with abandon because - basically - it sounds impressive.

To be fair, the long lifespans of the fantasy races mean that if "ancient" events are to be actually "ancient" you need long timespans. To an elf the War of 1812 would seem as recent as the Gulf War. And Caesar's conquest of Gaul would seem as recent as the War of 1812.

PersonMan
2016-10-15, 04:33 AM
An idea I've played with in the past with longer-lived races, in part to explain why they don't advance exceptionally quickly / dominate the other societies around them, is that they grow set in their ways more often than not.

So Elven Kingdom A may conquer a region, become the uncontested main power of the area, and then devote itself to culture as its advantage slips away - then, by the time they're challenged, they bring long-antiquated tactics to bear and fall part. More commonly, you'll have something similar to the romanticized idea of China's dynasties. A single, powerful central government that starts strong, gets set in its ways and becomes corrupt / stops working well, then gets overthrown by a new family who revitalizes the state until they grow set in their ways.

There would be exceptions, but if the scope of the setting isn't too large, you could easily have an ancient elven kingdom that no one challenges due to their obvious superiority that, despite still having an army of veterans from the original conquest and a state that runs far better than those around it, is actually working with centuries-old strategies and not as strong as they seem.

Aotrs Commander
2016-10-15, 05:40 AM
To be fair, the long lifespans of the fantasy races mean that if "ancient" events are to be actually "ancient" you need long timespans. To an elf the War of 1812 would seem as recent as the Gulf War. And Caesar's conquest of Gaul would seem as recent as the War of 1812.

"Ancient" as fantasy uses as in "basically everybody's forgotten" is certainly more difficult1; but by the same token, the second sentence is very much more debtable, because in between the times you have all the other wars and events proceeding at exactly the same rate if you use a proper timescale. So to an elf it very likely wouldn't, it'd seem as long ago as it would seem to a human, just the elves have MORE "longer" to remember.

And, unless again you want to do funny things to your immortal's brains, in order to be able to have lifespans that long, they would likely have to have surperior memory storage; even if their memories are not more accurate than a human's, the "volume" required to keep them at the same level of "compression" as it were would have to be much better optimised. So unless you want dragons, elves, demons, celestials to be absent minded (because of the limitations), in practise, it's going to be as long as it seems.

Yes, you will get something along the lines of "now, did that happen before or after that" (if their memories are not naturally more accurate than human's) or "was it really twenty years ago" but on the latter I think even humans don't do that so much with much longer period of time. (Best anedotal evidence for that - ask your grandparents if it seemed like only yesterday when they were first starting work or kids or something.)


1But also, its not always necessary. If elves don't have eidetic memories, then the fine details of Things That Happened five hundred years ago (or two hundred or one hundred) are not nessecarily retained. (Unless, written down, but in that case, it'll be exactly the same case as "typical" fantasy timescales except be more plausible those physical writings have actually survived.) Not too mention the world does actually change; erosion and the like has a noticable effect in places in human lifetimes, after all, nevermind much longer.

So it depends on exactly what it is you need to have "lost" that the PCs have to "find."

Otherwise, it's basiclaly just using big umbers for the sake of big numbers (like all too man fantasy and sci-fi authors or all stripes do) without looking at what those numbers MEAN. I have an engineer's mind and using numbers willy-nilly without the understanding of them annoys the crap out of me and why timescales is one of my personal bugbears.

Jay R
2016-10-15, 07:49 AM
To gain experience, you need to have encounters in which your life is at risk. An adult human is risking maybe as much as 60 years. An adult elf is risking thousands of years.

Therefore the price is too high. It's like an elf having to pay thousands of dollars for a game I bought for $60.

So elves who adventure often enough to reach even the middle levels are extremely rare. (Made even more rare by the obvious fact that going where you might die sometimes works.)

Belac93
2016-10-15, 09:22 AM
To gain experience, you need to have encounters in which your life is at risk. An adult human is risking maybe as much as 60 years. An adult elf is risking thousands of years.

Therefore the price is too high. It's like an elf having to pay thousands of dollars for a game I bought for $60.

So elves who adventure often enough to reach even the middle levels are extremely rare. (Made even more rare by the obvious fact that going where you might die sometimes works.)

I would say that the analogy is more like betting. A human bets 60$, and an elf bets 7000$. But, also, if an elf gains levels, they get to enjoy those levels for longer.

Therefore, the betting analogy. A human has less to lose, but also less to gain.

Bohandas
2016-10-15, 12:26 PM
However, what many players (and writers) of elven characters or elven civilizations seem to automatically assume is that Elves and other long-lived creatures are "perfect in every way." The best example I can think of this is the Na'vi from Avatar, who are basically space-Elves. Not only are they stronger and faster than humans, but they're also wiser, live in perfect harmony with nature, have perfected every craft, and have no possible wants or needs. This is contrasted against the chest-beating, knuckle-dragging humans who blunder about hopelessly and need the Elves to show them the error of their primitive ways.

That seems to be Cameron's intent, but it's not actually what happens in the film.

The Na'vi live without wants or needs because they're the godlike tree entity's pets.

If we want to compare Avatar to something in fantasy it's actually more like the subplot in Lord of the Rings about the Isengard's conflict with the ents than it is like anything directly involving elves.

Regitnui
2016-10-15, 02:24 PM
Eberron has a good view on this; the Elves see their lifespans as short. Even though they live for centuries, that's barely a fraction of the time it might take to fully gain wisdom. A 100-year-old elf is level one because he spent most of those years perfecting every spell he knows by training under the masters of those specific spells (maybe even the elf who invented said spell). The elven fighter's blade work is beautiful enough to make women weep, a delicate tracery of steel. The human fighter just swings his sword around. They're equivalent in damage level and techniques, not expertise.

The human and hobgoblin empires dominated the continent of Khorvaire because their shorter lifespans made them more ambitious. In a century, the elves went from living under an undying court with minor philosophical disagreements to different disagreements. The humans went from immigrants on the far eastern islands to rulers of most of the continent. Yeah, longer lifespans give you time. They don't necessarily make you motivated.

Forum Explorer
2016-10-15, 04:42 PM
I usually go with the whole 'Elves and Dwarves' are higher level as they age, and they have slow birthrates, so they haven't taken over the world. Does this make them vulnerable to extinction? Yes, it really really does. It's also the reason for humans getting so much support from them.

I tend to run a deadlier world, so Elves and Dwarves are on the verge of extinction. Long term speaking, anyways. (IE an elven town being destroyed likely won't ever be restored), so historically they shared their advanced technology and magic with a young prolific race, humans. They act as a sort of buffer to hordes of orcs, mind flayer attacks, and invasions of demons. They also create a pool of people to hire as adventurers to hunt down the occasional rogue monster. Combined with that, Elves and Dwarves spend a lot of time and effort securing their domain and making their kingdoms safe and well defended. It also explains why there are so many Half-elves, (which have a much more complex relationship with Elves and Humans) because their cultures are so intertwined.

It sometimes backfires with humans being the villain or invader, but usually you can still find more humans to help fight the human menace. :smallwink:

But yeah, the vast majority of adventurers are humans. There is the occasional elf or dwarf who falls into 1 of 2 general categories, this is an important mission, or a young reckless individual who has discarded the advice of their elders in order to pursue a life of excitement, despite not officially being an 'adult'.

As for the genius not dying problem, I embrace it. That is the reason the greatest sages are elves and dwarves in my settings. :smallbiggrin:

Bohandas
2016-10-15, 05:17 PM
Eberron has a good view on this; the Elves see their lifespans as short. Even though they live for centuries, that's barely a fraction of the time it might take to fully gain wisdom. A 100-year-old elf is level one because he spent most of those years perfecting every spell he knows by training under the masters of those specific spells (maybe even the elf who invented said spell). The elven fighter's blade work is beautiful enough to make women weep, a delicate tracery of steel. The human fighter just swings his sword around. They're equivalent in damage level and techniques, not expertise.

So kind of like like all the extra props and occult diagrams and fanfare and BS the traditionalist wizards in Discworld throw in when they perform the rite of Ashkente despite the ritual only requiring an egg and one milliliter of blood

The Fury
2016-10-15, 05:34 PM
Just to offer my own perspective, while it's true that some fantasy races can live to be very old, I'm not sure how often that would come up often in a typical adventuring party. Since being an adventurer is a really dangerous profession, everyone's lifespan is... until some falling block trap squashes you, until some dragon devours you, until some evil knight runs you through... You get the idea. Anyone can die gruesomely at any moment, so expecting to live another 20 years or 200 years seems overly optimistic. Let's worry about making it to tomorrow first.

As for the having lived longer, there was a player in my group that offered an interesting perspective on that which I'll paraphrase:

"So, elf you've been studying magic since you were 80, you're 130 now. You only just now figured out 3rd level spells? It took you 50 years to figure out 3rd level spells? I figured that out too! Guess how old I am! 26. It took me less than 10 years to figure out 3rd level spells! Elves make better wizards than humans my butt!"

Cluedrew
2016-10-15, 06:38 PM
It also explains why there are so many Half-elves, (which have a much more complex relationship with Elves and Humans) because their cultures are so intertwined.Any muls? (Half-Dwarfs)

I actually usually just discard the whole lifespan differences. Or make them less extreme (so a elf might live 1.5 times as long as a human) for several reasons. The room for growth over so many years is defiantly one, unless you make the longer lived races... stupid, they will outstrip the short lived races by a huge margin in a generation. That is pretty hard to reconcile.

I suppose you can, although I have more fun when I don't bother and just have a massive asymmetry in it. It makes some interesting stories, but I don't think it would make a very good RPG setting.

Cernor
2016-10-15, 09:19 PM
So kind of like like all the extra props and occult diagrams and fanfare and BS the traditionalist wizards in Discworld throw in when they perform the rite of Ashkente despite the ritual only requiring an egg and one milliliter of blood

50cc (i.e. mL) of mouse blood, actually. But close enough that your point still stands :smallwink:

The better question is why the elf wouldn't get a bonus to combat, considering (s)he would be considered a superior duelist. It seems to me that the difference between "just swinging a sword around" and making "a delicate tracery of steel" is almost the definition of a low level vs. high level fighter.

Bohandas
2016-10-15, 09:54 PM
50cc (i.e. mL) of mouse blood, actually. But close enough that your point still stands :smallwink:

The better question is why the elf wouldn't get a bonus to combat, considering (s)he would be considered a superior duelist. It seems to me that the difference between "just swinging a sword around" and making "a delicate tracery of steel" is almost the definition of a low level vs. high level fighter.

Unless the difference is a bunch of useless flourish as in the Ashekente example

Rockphed
2016-10-16, 02:13 AM
Consider. Arranged marriages were common in the US & the rest of the western world until very recently. The age of Consent, was once much younger. Even today, federally, the Age of consent is 12, however many people get prosecuted for receiving a photo (age 18), or some other law. In my Commonwealth, age of Consent is 16, but there is a "within" four years of age clause. So a 13 y/o can consent to a 17 year old. However, the parents can revoke that consent, even after the fact. If you're under 18, the best plan is abstinence is best.

Even today, California has no minimum marriage age with parental consent. Massachusetts also has no law, with Common law of 12 for girls & 14 for boys being in effect. in NH it is 13/14 with parental consent, with 5 other States using 15 has the age of marriage, with nearly all of the rest saying 16 as age of marriage with parental consent. Only two States require an age above 18 to marry without parental consent.

In Rome, woman had to be 12, and could not marry without parental approval until 25, however the catholic church recognized women over 12 and men over 14, even if married in secret. In 13th Century England, the age was set at 7.

Thus, if we are playing in a world anything other than modern or future, a human with an age of 30 should have adult children (age 16) likely with grand children, pelor willing.

What then, would a Elf, with and age of consent of 50 (women), 70 (men) think? When a 70 year old man might be standing at the head of five generations.

It also puts into perspective the historical voting age in the English Speaking world. 21. Absent of any other sensible restriction (military service, property) a person 21 years of age likely not only has children, but has had them several years. Their perspective is not their own needs, but that of their progeny, with throughout human existence had remained a Truth - until baby-boomers & keynesian economics. The requirement for the PotUS to be 35, now seen as "young" then meant he was a grandfather, or that his peers were.

How would a Dwarf, with their strong family ties, look upon a human race, with the exception of the most studious of noble families (House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, in the UK known as Windsor, The Starks, the Targaryen) 25% of the English Population can trace their bloodline to the House of Plantagenet, with most of those being the sub-branches of Lancaster and York. 531 years. What Dwarf would have no knowledge of their grandfather, his grandfathers his brothers & sisters? Yet few humans, even today, could find out who their relatives six centuries ago were, and almost nothing could be said about their lives, absolutely nothing about who they actually where, their hopes, dreams, fears, or personality.

It is true the current Royal Family COULD trace their decent from the House of Wessex & Alferd the great in 849 anno Domini, but that is only five Dwarven generations, & in all the world, they are the only people that could make such a claim without modern genetics. Thirty Nine Generations (by my count, which may be off a few due to how twisted the tree is) of human monarchs, ruling England, Long and Well, in the life time of 5 Dwarfs.

It put a lot of things in perspective as I thought through this.

My word those are a lot of complications I have never thought about. Thank you for your analysis. I feel enlightened having read that.

Forum Explorer
2016-10-16, 02:17 AM
Any muls? (Half-Dwarfs)

I actually usually just discard the whole lifespan differences. Or make them less extreme (so a elf might live 1.5 times as long as a human) for several reasons. The room for growth over so many years is defiantly one, unless you make the longer lived races... stupid, they will outstrip the short lived races by a huge margin in a generation. That is pretty hard to reconcile.

I suppose you can, although I have more fun when I don't bother and just have a massive asymmetry in it. It makes some interesting stories, but I don't think it would make a very good RPG setting.

No, but that's because my Dwarves have weird biology, being asexual and literally carving their offspring from the living stone beneath their mountain homes.

Regitnui
2016-10-16, 02:54 AM
So kind of like like all the extra props and occult diagrams and fanfare and BS the traditionalist wizards in Discworld throw in when they perform the rite of Ashkente despite the ritual only requiring an egg and one milliliter of blood

Pretty much exactly. See below.


The better question is why the elf wouldn't get a bonus to combat, considering (s)he would be considered a superior duelist. It seems to me that the difference between "just swinging a sword around" and making "a delicate tracery of steel" is almost the definition of a low level vs. high level fighter.

Because a lot of the extra fluff is probably unnecessary, but the elves would never figure that out. To the elves, if you want to hit someone in the shoulder to make them drop their weapon, you'd use the Frog Tongue Jab devised by the great elven swordsman Shern in the 2nd Century BC, and the exact movement Shern used because that's how you disarm someone by hitting them in the shoulder. A human just whacks the guy when there's an opening.

Similarly to spells. A fireball to an elf is cast with precisely the same gestures, words and probably even guano (source) as the first fireball ever cast by elven hands. A human wizard is the one who'll figure out that you could use guano from anywhere, not just the Brisingr cave on the south side of Adrenal harvested under a full moon by a half-nude wizard apprentice.

To go back to the Discworld; an elven Unseen University would cast the Rite of Askh-Ente with precisely the same tools as they always have as a mark of respect to those who have come before. A human Unseen University would create Hex and let the magical computer do the summoning. It's a divide between tradition (elves) and innovation (humans).

Dwarves adapt to innovation better because they've always been cantankerous and looking for an edge over the rival families. Gnomes innovate because they're trying to gather all the knowledge of the universe. Halflings adapt, but as long as it doesn't affect their herds and lifestyle, they don't fuss, while the largely rural orcs and dragonborn (in Q'barra) are largely of the same opinion. Humans drive innovation because they have the right combination of arrogance and ambition to believe that they can always come up with a better solution than what already exists.

Those are all species-wide generalizations. It's entirely possible to get an innovative elf (likely young and from the human city) and a traditionalist human (old and crotchety, more likely than not).

Vrock_Summoner
2016-10-16, 03:54 AM
Elves in my Incarnum setting age at the usual slowed pace, but also age mentally at the same rate and learn much more slowly in typical circumstances. Thus, an elf won't just be as emotionally mature as a human when they're an equivalent amount through their life, they'll also only have retained a little more knowledge (though that knowledge might come from a much broader number of sources, since they've been gathering it across a longer stretch of time). Elves, unlike humans, almost never have the trivia effect where they hear something unimportant offhanded one time and remember it a few months later when it becomes important.

It's not that they're stupid - their reasoning skills are about as sharp as a human's, on average. (Neither race has an intelligence bonus.) The issue is that elves in my setting, as part of the event in their racial history that gave them their long life, also made their souls incomplete, and as a result, the souls of other elves who didn't live what they considered "full" lives are able to cling to them by filling in the gaps, leeching off their life experiences and whispering to them about their own desires from the other side. This is a self-perpetuating cycle, naturally, as the soul of the living elf, both incomplete and constantly being leeched off of by other spirits, invariably ends up immensely dissatisfied with how much life it experienced as well, and latches onto a newborn elf at the first opportunity...

Adventuring overcomes this difficulty temporarily, as extreme danger causes the elf's own soul to go into overdrive, repelling the other spirits at the cost of damage to itself so it can exert its full power, allowing elves to gain experience normally from meaningfully threatening combat. However, this same mechanism makes elves extremely vulnerable to having their souls tainted and becoming lost, preventing the elves as a whole from committing to an adventurer culture.

Dwarves, I have less excuse for. They don't actually live too much longer than normal humans... But normal humans aren't a thing in the setting, and all of the other races (azurins, gnomes, and mishtai) have lifespans based around the azurins, who are a human offshoot (normal humans are extinct) with shorter lifespans. So dwarves have about three times the lifespan of the other races. I chalked it up to the shorter-lived races learning faster (it makes sense with their racial backgrounds, particularly for Incarnum classes), and then level 1 just means something a little better than typical, so it makes sense that both the very-talented who have trained for the normal length of time and the regularly-talented who have had longer than normal to train are all at about that level.

Ravens_cry
2016-10-16, 04:12 AM
I had a setting idea that that elves had no writing. Oh, they could learn, sure, but the elven tongue itself had no written form and generally didn't write things down. After all, a book would probably crumble to dust by the time you needed it. Better it be kept in your head. If you wanted to learn something, you went to another elf and they taught you, if they felt you were worthy to know. This came to bite them in the tuckus, hard, in one setting, when magic went away for about one and a half thousand years, and, with it, their magically enhanced life spans.
Oh, they were still long lived by human standards, getting close to 200 years, very occasionally longer, but nothing like before.
Honestly, the feeling of alieness, of Other, of such long life spans is something I rarely see played out on the tabletop. As a xenophile, I'd love to see it more, but I am not sure how to encourage it.

Aotrs Commander
2016-10-16, 08:07 AM
To gain experience, you need to have encounters in which your life is at risk.

Even to confine this to (D&D) game-XP as opposed to experience in a general sense... No-one gains anything for completed quests or goals or for roleplaying? Does that not mean that basically the only people in the world who will get above first level (and thus achieve any level of competance) are adventurers (or effectively adventurers)?

By that metric, how would one ever get a genius in their field without actually being an adventurer? (Ad hoc bonus granted by the DM would be the only way, one feels.)

I just find it hard to grasp any world where Stephan Hawking or Shakespeare or [insert record-breaking athlete] could be easily outdone by a mid-level adventurer just because they've fought Some Goblins. (In 4E it gets worse, as it means ANY mid-level adventurer...!)



Rolemaster, on the other hand, has a system (in one of the companions, admittedy) for covering the gaining of experience without adventuring. (And if that is used, even a day spent mostly in bed will grant you a few XP, though in RM with 10k between each level, that's not a lot.) RM actually works less... gamey? than D&D in this regard, since levelling up doesn't give you anything but more skills (hit-points and such are skill-based), so RM!Stephan Hawking wouldn't (likely) be any tougher at level 20 as level 1 - unlike D&D!Stephan Hawking, who would be, like, that skit in Comic Relief with Stephan HawkingBot at level 20.

(To be fair, that WOULD be way more awesome.)

This is why I tend to spread "normal (human) people" levels over 1-4, rather than just "everyone but a PC or antagonist is 0th level." Deals with this issue a little bit and allows for a few more outliers, without necessarily going overboard.

Jay R
2016-10-17, 10:17 AM
I would say that the analogy is more like betting. A human bets 60$, and an elf bets 7000$. But, also, if an elf gains levels, they get to enjoy those levels for longer.

Therefore, the betting analogy. A human has less to lose, but also less to gain.

True, but dying and losing 1,000 years of life is a bigger deal than being second level instead of first for a thousand years. So the bet is still much worse for the elf.

------------------


Even to confine this to (D&D) game-XP as opposed to experience in a general sense... No-one gains anything for completed quests or goals or for roleplaying?

Nobody gains experience for completing the quest to do the laundry, or find your missing wallet, or cook dinner, or any other goal that carries no risk, or for roleplaying in dull, safe situations.


Does that not mean that basically the only people in the world who will get above first level (and thus achieve any level of competance) are adventurers (or effectively adventurers)?

No, it just means that a statement about adventurers only applies to adventurers.


By that metric, how would one ever get a genius in their field without actually being an adventurer? (Ad hoc bonus granted by the DM would be the only way, one feels.)

By study and research, without ever gaining levels, of course.


I just find it hard to grasp any world where Stephan Hawking or Shakespeare or [insert record-breaking athlete] could be easily outdone by a mid-level adventurer just because they've fought Some Goblins. (In 4E it gets worse, as it means ANY mid-level adventurer...!)

Stephen Hawking and William Shakespeare are first level. They don't have extra hit points, higher BAB, or better saving throws.

Athletes are in risky situations. The Dallas Cowboys had over a dozen players miss some playing time due to injuries, and several more who have been questionable. And some (fortunately extremely few) athletes have died.

But the comparison is meaningless. Our world does not work by D&D rules.

In any event, my statement was about adventurers, and why there aren't lots of high-level elves. You're trying to apply my statements to a context I didn't apply it to, in a way that has no bearing on my point.

With thousands of years to study, learning things without gaining adventuring levels shouldn't be too hard, and I've made no statement about non-adventurers. Note that every group of elves we see in Middle-Earth has at least one extremely old, extremely knowledgeable elf (Elrond, Thranduil, Galadriel, Cirdan, Gildor), but none of them have warriors who can outfight the top humans.

LongVin
2016-10-17, 10:59 AM
I don't really like the disparity between the races when it comes to maturation. For elves it is way too extreme. 100 years of childhood. I prefer to think that elves mature by 25 to 30 years of age, but aren't considered full members of society until a later date say 50. And, that could be after they complete their apprenticeship in whatever trade they chose to follow.

Also, I would say at a certain point a persons skill can't increase anymore because for all intents and purposes they are doing it the best way they know how given the information available to them whatever social, physical or traditional constraints are placed on the practice. For example lets take a blacksmith and use 10,000 hours to become a master of the craft. That's almost a decade if you consider they are learning 4 hours a day during that time and for practical purposes lets use a decade as the metric. Whether you are a human, elf, or dwarf(and obviously possess the necessary skills and conviction) you will be a master blacksmith in a decade. Now, maybe after doing this the blacksmith will devote his time to learning different and exotic techniques within his craft.

Considering that humans are shorter lived and don't have the familial and social networks of dwarves and elves to flit about learning different techniques most will jump right into their work. Others might experiment on the job rather than seeking out teachers and going through apprenticeships again. Whereas most elves or dwarves would probably seek out these teachers before getting into their career proper.

Max_Killjoy
2016-10-17, 12:19 PM
I've never really bought into the "childhood is proportional to lifespan" thing with D&D elves, dwarves, etc. I can't think of it being the case in any fiction I've read (that wasn't itself derived from D&D); it doesn't make much evolutionary sense; I can't think of any reason that a "created" species would have 100+ year maturation processes other than "cause the gods said so"; etc.

Tanarii
2016-10-17, 12:20 PM
Even to confine this to (D&D) game-XP as opposed to experience in a general sense... No-one gains anything for completed quests or goals or for roleplaying? Does that not mean that basically the only people in the world who will get above first level (and thus achieve any level of competance) are adventurers (or effectively adventurers)?

By that metric, how would one ever get a genius in their field without actually being an adventurer? (Ad hoc bonus granted by the DM would be the only way, one feels.)

I just find it hard to grasp any world where Stephan Hawking or Shakespeare or [insert record-breaking athlete] could be easily outdone by a mid-level adventurer just because they've fought Some Goblins. (In 4E it gets worse, as it means ANY mid-level adventurer...!)Before I posted this comment, this thread was right above the D&D is not a world simulator thread. Which makes your comment particularly ironic, because it's all about trying to use the D&D rules as a world simulation.

(For reference http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?501306-D-amp-D-is-not-a-world-simulator )

Bohandas
2016-10-18, 08:09 PM
Stephen Hawking and William Shakespeare are first level. They don't have extra hit points, higher BAB, or better saving throws.

But they've got more than 4 ranks in knowledge

Bohandas
2016-10-18, 10:13 PM
Maybe you could have an ecl+1 "ancient" template that's basically 2 class levels with the bab, hd, and saves stripped off

Segev
2016-10-18, 11:38 PM
I've mentioned this before (possibly in this very thread), but I like to tie the elven reverie to why they have such slow learning curves until they hit "adventuring age." Sleep is when most creatures transform the day's memories into long-term memories. It's when we sort, make connections, and internalize. (This is one reason it's considered a good idea to study just before bed the night before a test, rather than the morning thereof...aside from the time-to-study reasons.) Elves don't sleep. It's viewed as this great advantage, and to an extent, they've made it into one. But it starts as a crippling mental handicap: they can't LEARN properly.

Teaching an elven child to meditate is a long, painstaking process, starting with some basic, basic lessons and games that can be played with the mind without requiring focus for too long, and which can be remembered with easy reminders. They learn to sort a couple of things, focus on remembering one concept, and then they go back to running around and being kids. With years of training, an elven infant grows into a toddler who can be made to focus for a few minutes at a time to remember important things Mommy and Daddy tell him, or to calm down when he's too wound up. (Consider the issue of babies and toddlers who NEVER SLEEP.)

After decades, the elven child finally can meditate through a night. In fact, he may meditate for up to 10 hours, just trying to reach reverie and sort his thoughts properly. It takes longer still to work it down to the efficiency of 4 hours of trance. He's only really learning at a comparable rate to humans for about 5-10 years by the time he's an "adult." In fact, he might still be learning slower just due to cultural tendencies to view speed of learning as less important, due to the long lifespans.

This is also why elves have both a reputation for being aloof, above-it-all serious types who know more than you and don't care to spare your feelings about it, as well as chaotic mischief-makers who play in the trees and don't take anything seriously. It's the equivalent of the human tendency to get grumpy when tired and be a poor morning person. When they've finished reverie, their thoughts are in order, they've just compartmentalized and refreshed their memories of the previous day with those of long past, and they have access to a perspective that's ancient by any human standard with a sense of it as if it was "just yesterday." As they progress through the day, they get more and more "stuff" in the forefront of their minds, just like we do as we immerse ourselves in our days. And it's not getting sorted and associated, and it gets in the way of the orderly, older memories. Associations jump hither and yon as they get more and more clutter (where a human would be getting more and more tired), and so they become creatures of the moment with impulsive attitudes as their equivalent of being "tired."



Dwarves are something else I've toyed with. In an effort to both explain their stereotypical clannishness and obsession with wealth and mining and building underground monuments, I considered how to make their mindset just a little more alien. Dwarves have less sense of self than other races, identifying far more with their group - clan, adventuring party, family, whatever. They have two major external facets to their sense of identity and even, to an extent, memory: the clan to which they belong, and the visible trappings of the life they've lived.

The wealth, the monuments, the creations... these are things they surround themselves with to give a sense of history to the clan. So much so that inheriting items can cause dwarves to take on traits they associated with the one from whom they came. It's a psychological effect, not a magical one, but their memories really are stronger with the external reminders, and they can learn a lesson very quickly if an item is associated...though the risk is that the lesson will be forgotten by its teacher if the item is truly given away. Fortunately, showing them off within the clan while passing clanlore down doesn't erase it. And visiting the clan trove can actively remind a dwarf of truly useful knowledge.

Their reputation for a highly lawful bent comes in part from their devotion to clan. They're viewed as extremely loyal...but that's a slight misperception. The group, the clan, is the other half of their identity and sense of self. They are not foolishly self-sacrificing, and fear their own mortality to an extent, but the psychological sense that they continue in the clan and in their wealth/creations means that they are more likely to die for their group than other races. To sacrifice of themselves. Not to sacrifice of their goods - to a degree, to do that is to betray the group. Their property, their goods and wealth and creations and heirlooms, are the legacy of the group to which they belong, and to the dwarf a part of the group's identity.

So the "value wealth over life" reputation some dwarves have stems, too, from their notion that the wealth and the clan are their identity, and the two go together. To give up their wealth to save themselves is to rob their clan of its history.

arrowed
2016-10-19, 03:41 AM
I've mentioned this before (possibly in this very thread), but I like to tie the elven reverie to why they have such slow learning curves until they hit "adventuring age." Sleep is when most creatures transform the day's memories into long-term memories. It's when we sort, make connections, and internalize. (This is one reason it's considered a good idea to study just before bed the night before a test, rather than the morning thereof...aside from the time-to-study reasons.) Elves don't sleep. It's viewed as this great advantage, and to an extent, they've made it into one. But it starts as a crippling mental handicap: they can't LEARN properly.

Teaching an elven child to meditate is a long, painstaking process, starting with some basic, basic lessons and games that can be played with the mind without requiring focus for too long, and which can be remembered with easy reminders. They learn to sort a couple of things, focus on remembering one concept, and then they go back to running around and being kids. With years of training, an elven infant grows into a toddler who can be made to focus for a few minutes at a time to remember important things Mommy and Daddy tell him, or to calm down when he's too wound up. (Consider the issue of babies and toddlers who NEVER SLEEP.)

After decades, the elven child finally can meditate through a night. In fact, he may meditate for up to 10 hours, just trying to reach reverie and sort his thoughts properly. It takes longer still to work it down to the efficiency of 4 hours of trance. He's only really learning at a comparable rate to humans for about 5-10 years by the time he's an "adult." In fact, he might still be learning slower just due to cultural tendencies to view speed of learning as less important, due to the long lifespans.

This is also why elves have both a reputation for being aloof, above-it-all serious types who know more than you and don't care to spare your feelings about it, as well as chaotic mischief-makers who play in the trees and don't take anything seriously. It's the equivalent of the human tendency to get grumpy when tired and be a poor morning person. When they've finished reverie, their thoughts are in order, they've just compartmentalized and refreshed their memories of the previous day with those of long past, and they have access to a perspective that's ancient by any human standard with a sense of it as if it was "just yesterday." As they progress through the day, they get more and more "stuff" in the forefront of their minds, just like we do as we immerse ourselves in our days. And it's not getting sorted and associated, and it gets in the way of the orderly, older memories. Associations jump hither and yon as they get more and more clutter (where a human would be getting more and more tired), and so they become creatures of the moment with impulsive attitudes as their equivalent of being "tired."



Dwarves are something else I've toyed with. In an effort to both explain their stereotypical clannishness and obsession with wealth and mining and building underground monuments, I considered how to make their mindset just a little more alien. Dwarves have less sense of self than other races, identifying far more with their group - clan, adventuring party, family, whatever. They have two major external facets to their sense of identity and even, to an extent, memory: the clan to which they belong, and the visible trappings of the life they've lived.

The wealth, the monuments, the creations... these are things they surround themselves with to give a sense of history to the clan. So much so that inheriting items can cause dwarves to take on traits they associated with the one from whom they came. It's a psychological effect, not a magical one, but their memories really are stronger with the external reminders, and they can learn a lesson very quickly if an item is associated...though the risk is that the lesson will be forgotten by its teacher if the item is truly given away. Fortunately, showing them off within the clan while passing clanlore down doesn't erase it. And visiting the clan trove can actively remind a dwarf of truly useful knowledge.

Their reputation for a highly lawful bent comes in part from their devotion to clan. They're viewed as extremely loyal...but that's a slight misperception. The group, the clan, is the other half of their identity and sense of self. They are not foolishly self-sacrificing, and fear their own mortality to an extent, but the psychological sense that they continue in the clan and in their wealth/creations means that they are more likely to die for their group than other races. To sacrifice of themselves. Not to sacrifice of their goods - to a degree, to do that is to betray the group. Their property, their goods and wealth and creations and heirlooms, are the legacy of the group to which they belong, and to the dwarf a part of the group's identity.

So the "value wealth over life" reputation some dwarves have stems, too, from their notion that the wealth and the clan are their identity, and the two go together. To give up their wealth to save themselves is to rob their clan of its history.

This is amazing in it's insightfulness. I love it.

Madeiner
2016-10-19, 05:32 AM
I have yet to meet any player that mooks his age to gain some Wis or Int bonuses .

Also your average one year campaign is about say 1 month of the players life . I dont think lifespan is much of an issue .

This is curious :)
Last time a few of the characters in my world knew they had 3 months to do something, they said it wasn't enough time to accomplish anything of significance.

My 10-year real time campaign was actually some 25 years in game. The young paladin at the beginning was almost an old man by the end.

hamishspence
2016-10-19, 06:09 AM
But they've got more than 4 ranks in knowledge

Even if you gave them the Prodigy template from DMG2 (+4 bonus to all checks for the stat one is a Prodigy of, and +2 to one stat) you'd probably need a level or 3 in Human Paragon and a starting stat of 18,

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/races/racialParagonClasses.htm#humanParagon

to get the kind of Int needed for top-of-the-line Knowledge checks, or the sort of Str needed to compete with the world records.

I figure Saves and HP are abstractions that can be glossed over in these cases.
I've never really bought into the "childhood is proportional to lifespan" thing with D&D elves, dwarves, etc. I can't think of it being the case in any fiction I've read (that wasn't itself derived from D&D);
As I recall, D&D fiction tends to portray elves as maturing only slightly slower than humans, too - it's simply that they don't tend to leave their homes and go off on adventures till quite late.


This is why I tend to spread "normal (human) people" levels over 1-4, rather than just "everyone but a PC or antagonist is 0th level." Deals with this issue a little bit and allows for a few more outliers, without necessarily going overboard.
That sounds to me pretty consistent with 3rd ed/3.5 ed (DMG, DMG2, Cityscape). It does sometimes go a bit further with high level commoners and experts in every city - but it's true that there's a reasonable amount of level spread.

Max_Killjoy
2016-10-19, 12:03 PM
As I recall, D&D fiction tends to portray elves as maturing only slightly slower than humans, too - it's simply that they don't tend to leave their homes and go off on adventures till quite late.


Maybe it varies depending on the edition, reference, or fiction in question.

Beneath
2016-10-19, 05:09 PM
It's specifically a conceit of D&D (at least, through D&D3) that ability to do stuff has more to do with the strength of your soul, which you strengthen by completing adventures, than your expertise. Older D&D had some exceptions where a master blacksmith or learned sage might just be a master blacksmith or learned sage but 3e brought everything onto the level system, so a strong-souled wizard who dabbles in physics can be a better physicist than a weaker-souled physicist who spends their entire life as a professor. It's not about realism, it's a conceit of the world designed to make players of high-level characters feel cool.

We know level is the strength of your soul because soul-ripping undead steal levels from you. So the description of Eberron elves can be totally accurate in that view; they spend their hundred years mastering things that don't require that they strengthen their soul (because you can master techniques without risking death and you cannot strengthen your soul without the risk), and then lose fights to people with a tenth the technique and twice the soul, because technique doesn't matter and the power of your soul does. That explanation works; I don't 100% rely on it, but it works.

That having been said, I tend to solve this problem by aiming to keep parties mostly human, halfling, and similar, when it matters. Elder elves are NPCs (and in my worldbuilding their basic soldiers are equivalent to human knights, because they have that training), and are generally inaccessible. This means I can keep my histories a reasonable length and still have ancients who lived through them without having to worry about PCs having access to those ancients.

eta: Also, re:elven maturity, maturity doesn't just come with age and experience; you mature when you have to. The social expectation that elves can spend 50-80 years living like modern-day college students whose parents pay for everything means that many will, because they're not expected to be more mature than that. Seconding that most half-elves come from this. This might also justify lowering the starting age of elven adventurers.

Max_Killjoy
2016-10-19, 05:26 PM
eta: Also, re:elven maturity, maturity doesn't just come with age and experience; you mature when you have to. The social expectation that elves can spend 50-80 years living like modern-day college students whose parents pay for everything means that many will, because they're not expected to be more mature than that. Seconding that most half-elves come from this. This might also justify lowering the starting age of elven adventurers.



I don't think that's the sort of maturity being discussed, though, and I think history would indicate that it's not a prerequisite to run off doing stuff we could call "being an adventurer".

Beneath
2016-10-19, 06:33 PM
I don't think that's the sort of maturity being discussed, though, and I think history would indicate that it's not a prerequisite to run off doing stuff we could call "being an adventurer".

Oh, yeah, definitely. Honestly, elven adventurers should probably mostly be children (by elven standards) who think themselves more mature than they are. So in that 50-80 years where they aren't expected to take care of themselves.

Incidentally, that nicely solves the "I was there" problem and the "if I've been studying magic for 60 years why am I not better at it than the slightly precocious 18 yo human?" problem. Your elf, if they gave up the adventuring life, would have several good centuries ahead of them, but they don't have that much life experience 'cause they instead have the kind of immaturity that leads to seeking adventure in human lands.

This also solves the problem where an elf risking their life is wagering more years than a human: they aren't mature enough to think that way 'cause they've never been expected to take care of themselves before, and they do dangerous and ill-advised stuff (like adventuring) because they don't calculate out the number of years of life they're risking; odds are they don't have the kind of life experience that makes the risks they're looking at even feel real. and if they distance themselves from humans emotionally, which would be taught, even seeing their human comrades die might not make them think their life is at risk. It's the same reason as why teenage boys do all sorts of risky **** and old people generally don't, IRL.

Tanarii
2016-10-19, 09:06 PM
That's why I generally encourage 5e elf, dwarf, and gnome players to start their characters at 20. They are physically and mentally the equivalent of a 20 year old human at that point, but afterwards slow down considerably in aging. They aren't considered 'adults' for some time. But society considering you a grown Elf, and more importantly ready to settle down, when you're the equivalent of a human 30 year old (Elf @ 100), just means your time to adventure is the intervening 80 years.

Grytorm
2016-10-19, 10:01 PM
Nobody gains experience for completing the quest to do the laundry, or find your missing wallet, or cook dinner, or any other goal that carries no risk, or for roleplaying in dull, safe situations.

What about, saving your little sister from a flood, falling out with your best friend over a girl, then daringly move stones around in the night to snag some of his land before winning her back and marrying the love of your life, or raising a child. Yes mundane tasks don't deserve experience, but what about major life events and experiences?


For my own thoughts, I like the idea of Elves forming emotional bonds in a weird way compared to humans. They live in a tumultuous world and need to be able to adapt to major changes. So they don't really develop deeper emotional connections to something until it is gone. That explains why they always view themselves as in decline. To them all that they have lost is worth so much more than what they have. An explanation I came up for this is that is to help families to reunite. Elven children grow slowly and typically free roam with minimal interference. So if an Elven community is driven out the children with the aid of the fair folk live on, eventually as they age going to seek their parents.

Also, I like the idea of a group of Elves still mad at an old human realm which collapsed as a unified polity about 180 years ago because they blame the humans for the collapse of their society 240 years ago.

Tvtyrant
2016-10-19, 10:15 PM
I tend to just assume that life span is inverse to population growth. An Elven couple averages 2 children, and so their population declines except in idyllic environments where the possibility of disease, accidents and violence is minimized. In order to assure their success Dwarves and Elves create crafted, isolated communities which maximize the chances of survival.

On the other side of this is Bullywugs, who produce 20,000 offspring a year and live to the ripe old age of 10. They make primitive kingdoms and fight constant and ferocious wars as the largest limitation on their population is food.

The truly long lived have a different situation, because untold generations can live at the same time. Aboleths in my setting live an average of 50,000 years and can live forever. They each only reproduce once in their life, but this is not problematic because they might live at the same time as 1,000 of their descendants.

VoxRationis
2016-10-20, 02:10 AM
I tend to just assume that life span is inverse to population growth. An Elven couple averages 2 children, and so their population declines except in idyllic environments where the possibility of disease, accidents and violence is minimized. In order to assure their success Dwarves and Elves create crafted, isolated communities which maximize the chances of survival.

On the other side of this is Bullywugs, who produce 20,000 offspring a year and live to the ripe old age of 10. They make primitive kingdoms and fight constant and ferocious wars as the largest limitation on their population is food.

The truly long lived have a different situation, because untold generations can live at the same time. Aboleths in my setting live an average of 50,000 years and can live forever. They each only reproduce once in their life, but this is not problematic because they might live at the same time as 1,000 of their descendants.

Do aboleths reproduce asexually? Do they always reproduce long before leaving safe brooding pools or something? If one of the answers is "no," I think it's still problematic.

Strigon
2016-10-20, 08:18 AM
Do aboleths reproduce asexually? Do they always reproduce long before leaving safe brooding pools or something? If one of the answers is "no," I think it's still problematic.

Yeah, doesn't this literally mean there's a fixed population?
Assuming 1,000 aboleths in a population, the number of possible descendants is basically another 1,000 - that population can never exceed 2,000 total - including the dead.
Granted, this is fixed somewhat if they reproduce asexually, but even then every time they lose someone who hasn't reproduced yet, their numbers have gone down permanently.

Sometime down the line, aboleths in your world are doomed. Not that that matters in any way to your current game, but for world-building's sake, I'd invent another way to do it. Rituals, bringing them in from the Far Realms, the possibilities are intriguing!

Max_Killjoy
2016-10-20, 08:20 AM
Does "only reproduce once" mean "produce a multiple offspring one time" or "produce one offspring in their life"?

Replacement rate reproduction is always higher than one child per adult. Exactly one child per adult is, in the long term, inevitable doom for a species that is not truly immortal and invulnerable.

Bohandas
2016-10-20, 08:27 AM
Yeah, doesn't this literally mean there's a fixed population?
Assuming 1,000 aboleths in a population, the number of possible descendants is basically another 1,000 - that population can never exceed 2,000 total - including the dead.
Granted, this is fixed somewhat if they reproduce asexually, but even then every time they lose someone who hasn't reproduced yet, their numbers have gone down permanently.

Sometime down the line, aboleths in your world are doomed. Not that that matters in any way to your current game, but for world-building's sake, I'd invent another way to do it. Rituals, bringing them in from the Far Realms, the possibilities are intriguing!


Number of first degree descendents is 1000. That's not including grandchildren etc.

The number of reproductively capable aboleths can only shrink but the population itself can grow arbitrarily as long as at least one reproductively capable aboleth remains.

Max_Killjoy
2016-10-20, 09:25 AM
Number of first degree descendents is 1000. That's not including grandchildren etc.

The number of reproductively capable aboleths can only shrink but the population itself can grow arbitrarily as long as at least one reproductively capable aboleth remains.

How does that take into account the "only reproduce once" factor?

If that means that each aboleth only produces one offspring ever, then only those who have not yet reproduced are still reproductively capable.

If there's one aboleth left who has not reproduced, and that aboleth dies, there will never be another aboleth offspring created.

With no ongoing deaths, there will still never be more than one reproductively capable aboleth, and a new aboleth will only be added to the population as fast as each new aboleth can reach reproductive maturity.

Strigon
2016-10-20, 09:46 AM
Number of first degree descendents is 1000. That's not including grandchildren etc.

The number of reproductively capable aboleths can only shrink but the population itself can grow arbitrarily as long as at least one reproductively capable aboleth remains.

That's not true, unless they reproduce asexually or each mating results in more than one child - neither are impossible, but they're also not implied anywhere.
If it takes 2 aboleths to make one child, then the number of first degree descendants is 500. Then all of the original 1,000 will be infertile, leading to 500 potential new partners, who can provide 250 new offspring - the total population will trend towards 2,000, assuming no deaths.

Tvtyrant
2016-10-20, 04:01 PM
Yes, Aboleth's reproduce asexually. In fact their offspring is literally them, since they have a racial memory system and perfect memory. That is canon as of Lords of Madness.

Say we have one aboleth, at age 100 it has a kid.
year 200: additional aboleth
300: additional aboleth
.
.
.
Year 50,000 Original dies to a Beholder, leaving behind 500 descendants. But since Aboleth's can be immortal, you can get NI descendants alive at the same time.

Now it might be better if an Aboleth has twins, so if one dies mysteriously the line doesn't die out, but then the incredible rarity of Aboleths becomes puzzling. Part of what makes them appealing is that they are doomed, but their incredible intelligence and physical/magical power allows them to draw out their extinction for billions of years.

Katrina
2016-10-22, 05:22 AM
And so a thread on livespan disparity turned into Mating habits of tentacle monsters. :smalltongue:

The biggest offender in this department I see are the "Planelings" from Pathfinder. Tieflings, Aasimar, Fetchlings and the lot. They are considered adults around 60+. But they are descended from humans who have a little bit of elemental or what have you blood. This results in strange stories like the 70 year old human who has been raising his big sister all his life.

Zale
2016-10-22, 09:56 AM
Oh, yay, LotR Elves! Fun topic:

They're an excellent example of a god's plan going exactly as desired.

See, in the world of Arda, the creator god Eru had a plan for how things would go. Humans would live a span of years and die of natural, or unnatural, causes and then their souls would leave Arda to go somewhere else. The humans don't know where. Elves don't know, nor do the Valar (God-things created by Eru). It's a mystery.

Elves, in contrast, don't. They're mean to remain in Arda until the end of creation itself, whenever that may be. This is why elves weren't made to age or die of disease- they're meant to stick around, not die off. While a human's soul can exist independent of a body, it's unnatural for an elf's spirit to be disembodied. They're meant to remain in their bodies until the end of time, not exist as discorporate spirits. This is why they're kind of hard to kill- things that might kill a human from trauma, or diseases that could lay a man low, these are things elves can literally tough out. Their souls are loathe to leave their bodies, so it takes awful mutilation or incredible trauma to force their bodies to become inhospitable to their souls.

If they somehow die, it's wrong for them to exist without bodies, so Eru mandated that they'd receive new ones. Full-formed and identical to the ones they had, just ready for them to inhabit and all. It's just, they can't go back to Middle Earth proper with them. Part of the enigmatic plan for the world involved humans gaining influence, which isn't possible with immortal elves stalking around- so the elves would live in a bunch of islands far, far to the west of Middle Earth. Eventually, there was an order handed down that all Elves should leave their homes and migrate to the west (It wasn't very popular).

See, for elves there's no mystery in death. They know what happens to them when they die. They know that they're stuck here until the end of the world. Because of that, they devote huge amounts of time into the world itself.

Imagine: You're an elfish ranger. You've wandered the breadth and width of your range for eons. You know it better than anyone or anything in creation. You've seen each tree grow, from seed to sprout to tree to death. You know exactly when the seasons begin to turn, you know where the animals forage and where they hide. You love this place like nowhere else in the world, you've devoted an immortal life to it. You love the bird-song in the first day of spring, the way the sunlight trickles through the leaves every dawn. The dappled shadows of the noon-time, the crisp air of autumn. Your love for this place predates human history, before the dawn of human kingdom and life. A hundred mortal generations you have watched over this place. It is your home.

But.. you're doomed to lose it, in the end. Eventually you will be forced to leave, to never return. Who will watch over the land, see the flight of the birds each fall? Who will care for the trees, pruning them of death limbs and singing the song of life to them as they rise as saplings? Who will hear the bird-song in the spring and watch the glorious dawn through the dew-soaked branches?

Because eventually, you will lose this place. You may be struck down by a poisoned orcish arrow, or slaughtered by the swords of men, hungry for the lumber and game of your range. If not that, then you will fade- day will fade into day into day, weariness and regret will burn your body from the inside out until you remain as nothing but a shadowy specter.

Then you will be faced with the choice. Remain as something unnatural haunting a place you once loved, unable to touch any of it, unable to sprint with the deer or feel the sunlight on your skin-

-or to move on, abandoning this place you devoted your existence to.

This quandary is the source of most of the plot of LotR. It's why the elves worked with Sauron to forge the rings of power. Remember the two halfling bearers of the ring; how their lives were extended, their time was stretched. The other rings write this effect on large: They jam the gears of time, stretching the alloted span given to the elves. It strengthens them from the weariness of time, from fading away.

So they can enjoy one more spring filled with bird-song, one more dawn through the branches.

This is the melancholy of the elves.

SimonMoon6
2016-10-24, 08:53 AM
But.. you're doomed to lose it, in the end. Eventually you will be forced to leave, to never return. Who will watch over the land, see the flight of the birds each fall? Who will care for the trees, pruning them of death limbs and singing the song of life to them as they rise as saplings? Who will hear the bird-song in the spring and watch the glorious dawn through the dew-soaked branches?

I am reminded of several of Michael Moorcock's worlds where the elf-like races are in decline while the human races are ascending. But the elf-like races are cultured and civilized while the human races are often savage and primitive.

From the Corum series:

"It seemed a dreadful injustice that these wise races should perish at the hands of creatures who were still little more than animals. It was as if vultures feasted on and squabbled over the paralyzed body of the youthful poet who could only stare at them with puzzled eyes as they slowly robbed him of an exquisite existence they would never appreciate, never know they were taking. 'If they valued what they stole, if they knew what they were destroying...then I would be consoled.'"
-Michael Moorcock

Max_Killjoy
2016-10-24, 10:25 AM
I was going to post something here, but after those two excellent posts I need to go and ponder the lives of ageless peoples.


E: while they're separated in time by decades, Moorcock seems to somewhat share Howard's view that civilizations are doomed to rarefied and sophisticated decline, to inevitably fall each in turn to the rougher and cruder people's coming up behind them to take their place, advance, decline, and fall in their own time.

PairO'Dice Lost
2016-10-25, 12:33 AM
Hey guys, no need to wonder about elven lifespans, I already figured out why elves age at the rate they do in 3e a few years back:


It's really quite simple. Elves are perfectionists, and the 3e rules bear out the aging discrepancies.

In 3e, anything you can do is a skill or ability check. "Notice something large in plain sight" is a DC 0 Spot check, for instance--a check that cannot be failed by anyone with at least 10 Wis and no distractions, even if they're untrained, but a skill check nonetheless. Most of the time, you can ignore those checks, because they're impossible to fail, so humans and halflings and dwarves and all the rest simply take 10 on them. However, elves cannot abide doing anything less than perfectly, so they take 20 on every single check, which takes 20 times as long as making the check normally.

Every. Single. Check. Walking? DC 0 Balance check. Talking? DC 0 Diplomacy check. Eating? DC 0 Dex check. Using the bathroom? Er, you get the idea. That's why everyone sees elves as being the most beautiful, most awesome, etc. beings out there. Eating a sandwich will take them an hour where it would take a human 3 minutes, but by Corellon it'll be the most-gracefully-eaten sandwich you ever did see!

Now, this only applies when actually taking actions, so while elves trance they're taking no actions and therefore acting at "normal" speed. As well, it's very impolite to interrupt others while they're being awesome, and elves are very fair and equal-minded people, so they spend half their time patiently watching other elves be awesome at things. So for 1/6 of any given day they're trancing, and for 3/6 of any given day they're not taking any actions, and for the remaining 2/6 of any given day they're taking normal actions but taking 20 times as long to do them. (15 years to reach adulthood * 2/6 of the time taking actions * 20 "take 20" penalty) + (15 years to reach adulthood * 4/6 of the time not taking actions * 1 normal time) = 110 years on the dot.

When an elf leaves home, of course, he realizes that the terribly uncouth and uncultured non-elves don't tolerate such a thing or appreciate his awesomeness, so he has to get by with taking 10 on everything, and essentially starts living life on a human scale. This explains why non-adventuring elves are the mythically beautiful and graceful and awesome elves of legends, while adventuring elves are much more down-to-earth and seem a lot more like humans with pointy ears. The only chance they have to really indulge themselves is while they're out on an adventure--elves trance for 4 hours while his companions sleep for 8, so an elf has 4 hours per day to be the elfiest elf he can possibly be while no non-elves are there to watch and judge him.

According to the DMG, we can assume that there is a 10% chance of having a wandering monster/random encounter per hour. This means that there is a (1 - .9^4) chance that a random encounter happens while an elf is being elfy during the 4 hours he has to himself, or a 30% chance rounding to one significant figure. So he has roughly a 70% chance to be elfy for 1/6 of the day without interruption (sometimes much less, sometimes much more, depending on when he's interrupted, but we can assume it balances out), meaning he acts elfy roughly 1/8.5 of the time. Thus, while humans take 20 years to get from adulthood to middle age, elves take (20 years to reach middle age * 1/8.5 of the time taking elfy actions * 20 "take 20" penalty) + (20 years to reach adulthood * 7.5/8.5 of the time taking human-y actions * 1 normal time) = ~65 years to do so, which puts them at middle age at ~175 years, exactly what it says on the chart.
Conclusion: Given 3e RAW, elves must age at the given rates. So there. :smallcool: Yes, I put way too much thought into this. I was very bored.

:smallwink:


More seriously, I handle long-lived races in my games the same way Aotrs Commander does:


At the same time, I don't buy the idea that longer-lived races would be effectively mentally handicapped compared to humans because it would require them four times as long (e.g. Dragonlance) to reach the same mental age as a human. So longer-lived (humanoid) races mentally and physically mature at roughly the same rate as humans do.

I also work on the basis that simply living will eventualy accrue you experience (because it, y'know, does) and thus it is impossible to get really old without getting said experience.

(I will grant you, the problem of "out of living memory" does provide some problems, especially because I use as close as I can real timescales not the usual fantasy "and hundreds of years passed and nothing changed" sort of thing.)

One of the ways I handle Tolkien's "elves are better" is a natural extension that long life => experience. If the average human will reach level 2-4 (as they are expected to do in my campaign world) in the course of their life, the average level of the average elf is (conservatively) assumed to be 6-8. (So, they're not harder than you just because they're super-better than you, they're harder than you because they're just higher-level than you.)

What this DOES mean is that if the PCs are starting at low level... They are effectively capped in age to a reasonable appropriateness; and this applies unilaterally across all sets of rules and all campaigns.

That means, if my PCs says "can I play a 2000-year old [anything]" the answer is "no, because a character that age that is not basically suffering from very severe health issues (and thus unplayable) is just not going to be level one."

Specifically, all longer-lived races' starting ages are brought down to within a few years of humans' (no higher than mid-20s), and level-wise "normal" people are in the 1-5 range, "elite" people in the 6-10 range, and people beyond that are superhuman; we usually start PCs off at 3rd level instead of 1st, with 1st and 2nd level being reserved for "plucky teenage farm boy"-style characters.

To support this, and to quickly judge how powerful a random NPC should be based on their age and lifestyle, the rule of thumb I use is that in addition to the normal XP rewards for adventure-y stuff, you gain 1 XP for every day spent pushing yourself and actively pursuing a goal (e.g. wizards doing magical research, soldiers being deployed, diplomats handling difficult negotiations), 1 XP for every 2 days spent in relative comfort and routine (e.g. clerics studying theology, children playing around, nobles going to fancy dinner parties), and 1 XP per week spent doing not much of anything (e.g. being a hermit, being elfy in the woods, lying around having servants feed you peeled grapes).

This fits with the random starting age tables, where the "go out and do stuff" classes start earlier than the "sit around and study" classes. A 16-year-old fighter and a 27-year-old monk would both start at 3rd level, since 365*16 = 5,840 XP and 365*27/2 = 4,927 XP and both put them between 3rd and 4th level. (Not that I give PCs more XP based on age, obviously, this is just justifying the ages they do pick.) By this metric, the oldest possible human (110 years old) who spent every day of their life being a proactive go-getter would just about top off the "elite" level range with 40,150 XP, or halfway to 10th level.

In contrast, the laziest and most tree-hugging-hippie elf will hit that level by the time they reach 690 years old, even a rather meticulous elf will get to 8th level shortly before reaching middle age (which is at 31,937 XP) and just make it to 17th level (875 XP past it, actually) by the time he hits his maximum age of 750, and a really kickass elf will top out at low epic (23rd level) while spending several decades at high levels, thus explaining all the fancy elven high magic, legendary elven heroes, and such that lots of settings are chock full of while allowing elves and humans to start off on even footing.

Excession
2016-10-25, 05:16 AM
No, but that's because my Dwarves have weird biology, being asexual and literally carving their offspring from the living stone beneath their mountain homes.

I've been rolling a similar idea around in my head for a while.

In the beginning, Moradin crafted the first dwarves from fine stone, rare metals, and precious stones, then imbued them with life. That's how Moradin did it, that's how the dwarves do it... and it's worked out pretty well so far.

The dwarves don't just like gold, silver, gems and such. They need them to make more dwarves. There exists the option to have dwarves crafting golems, titans, stone war machines, and more, all at varying degrees of blasphemy as they move further from Moradin's original design.

Strigon
2016-10-25, 07:39 AM
I've been rolling a similar idea around in my head for a while.

In the beginning, Moradin crafted the first dwarves from fine stone, rare metals, and precious stones, then imbued them with life. That's how Moradin did it, that's how the dwarves do it... and it's worked out pretty well so far.

The dwarves don't just like gold, silver, gems and such. They need them to make more dwarves. There exists the option to have dwarves crafting golems, titans, stone war machines, and more, all at varying degrees of blasphemy as they move further from Moradin's original design.

Does that mean the dwarves who create automata are technically necromancers?

Segev
2016-10-25, 08:51 AM
Does that mean the dwarves who create automata are technically necromancers?

Or maybe warforged are actually a breed of dwarf.

Edit: Tangentially, this reminds me of a thought I had for a concept for a dwarven necromancer who also specialized in earth and fire/lava magic. He works with "the bones of the earth."

Straybow
2016-10-25, 03:07 PM
Nobody gains experience for completing the quest to do the laundry, or find your missing wallet, or cook dinner, or any other goal that carries no risk, or for roleplaying in dull, safe situations. So, Muhammed Ali or Mike Tyson were just first level? They were never truly at risk of life or limb. No, training is what gets you some form of advancement. The risk is what crystallizes the lessons of training in a hurry. With training you get the same thing, only much slower. D&D doesn't allow it because they don't want characters "leveling up" for a year of "out of play" training, the game is about play.


Athletes are in risky situations. The Dallas Cowboys had over a dozen players miss some playing time due to injuries, and several more who have been questionable. And some (fortunately extremely few) athletes have died. Yes, but at that only the quarterback and the prime receivers and running backs get any experience that has risk of note. Nobody else risks anything, so after a long career could scarcely be a single level higher than they were as rookies.

But really, nobody risks enough to justify one level-up. They compete once a week, for three months. And during most of the weekly events they do almost nothing before the whistle blows on the play. The rules of the game prevent 95% or more of potential risk. We don't have half a dozen players per game carried out on stretchers. Construction workers face greater risk of death and injury.


But the comparison is meaningless. Our world does not work by D&D rules. Except we are always comparing everything we see, read, experience, etc. to the real world. When we say, "this armor weighs 35 lb, that greatsword weighs 8 lb and you can't wield it one-handed," we're making a direct comparison to the real world. And whenever we encounter something that fails in comparison we either try to fix it, or come up with rationalizations.


With thousands of years to study, learning things without gaining adventuring levels shouldn't be too hard, and I've made no statement about non-adventurers. Note that every group of elves we see in Middle-Earth has at least one extremely old, extremely knowledgeable elf (Elrond, Thranduil, Galadriel, Cirdan, Gildor), but none of them have warriors who can outfight the top humans. Legolas (a young whipper-snapper among elves) could easily best any of the humans. Didn't see anybody else taking out a Mumakil single-handed...

Tolkien's world does not work by D&D rules, either. The elves are "dying" in a sense, being forced to choose either becoming mortal or returning to Valinor. I infer that in order to commit to fighting Sauron, they would likewise have to commit to becoming mortal (as Arwen did) and none are willing. The mission of the Fellowship was not to directly fight Sauron's forces, and thus did not require such commitment from Legolas.

Only Gil-Galad (king of Noldor Elves) and Elendil (king of Numenor) were powerful enough to face off against Sauron at the end of the second age. The Numenorians correspond better to D&D elves rather than men, living hundreds of years. Tolkien's Noldor are more like D&D celestials of some sort. Some of the Noldor greats actually faced Melkor and lived.

Khi'Khi
2016-10-25, 04:03 PM
Legolas (a young whipper-snapper among elves) could easily best any of the humans. Didn't see anybody else taking out a Mumakil single-handed...



*ahem*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrQsjKIo8KU

The new King of Rohan begs to differ

Zale
2016-10-25, 05:12 PM
Tolkien's world does not work by D&D rules, either. The elves are "dying" in a sense, being forced to choose either becoming mortal or returning to Valinor. I infer that in order to commit to fighting Sauron, they would likewise have to commit to becoming mortal (as Arwen did) and none are willing. The mission of the Fellowship was not to directly fight Sauron's forces, and thus did not require such commitment from Legolas.

Arwen was a half-elf; and, a special care besides. She got to choose, but most elves can choose to be mortal anymore than a human could choose immortality.

Tvtyrant
2016-10-25, 05:53 PM
Arwen was a half-elf; and, a special care besides. She got to choose, but most elves can choose to be mortal anymore than a human could choose immortality.

To be fair all half-elves get to choose. Aragorn is descended from Elrond's brother who chose to be a human instead of an elf.

On Tolkien and human life spans, how long did humans live before getting Elven blood? Hurin is the greatest human of all time, but I am fairly sure he lived a normal life span of less then a century without being murdered. His kids die after finding out they were siblings, so we never find out how long Turin would have lived.

Aeson
2016-10-25, 07:41 PM
To be fair all half-elves get to choose. Aragorn is descended from Elrond's brother who chose to be a human instead of an elf.

On Tolkien and human life spans, how long did humans live before getting Elven blood? Hurin is the greatest human of all time, but I am fairly sure he lived a normal life span of less then a century without being murdered. His kids die after finding out they were siblings, so we never find out how long Turin would have lived.
Based on the birth and death dates given in the appendices at the back of The Return of the King for the kings of Rohan, I'd say the life expectancy of a human of non-Numenorean descent was about what you'd expect for a real world human, though possibly closer to what you'd see in the modern period than in the medieval period if commoners live for about as long as royalty (royalty and other upper-class people tend to have access to better medical care and food, though).

I'm pretty sure that there's too little elven blood in the Numenorean population to account for the extended lifespans of the Numenoreans. There's only supposed to have been three elf-human pairings to begin with (Luthien-Beren, Idril-Tuor, and Arwen-Aragorn), so there aren't that many half-elf half-humans running around to spread elven blood into the human population, and even with the extended lifespan of the Numenorean populace there's still something like 24 generations between the founding and the fall of Numenor, at least going by the number of reigning monarchs of Numenor listed in the appendices of The Return of the King, which is plenty of time for the part-elves to become more or less fully human. My impression is that the extended lifespan of the Numenoreans is more in the line of a gift from the Valar for their ancestors' service against Morgoth, or perhaps a side-effect of living close to the Undying Lands (though I'd consider this less likely, as, if I recall what I read in The Silmarillion correctly, the lifespans of the Numenoreans began to decline when the Numenoreans began to turn against the Valar, not when they began traveling away from Numenor or after Numenor was destroyed), than a result of all of them somehow having enough elven blood in them to have greatly-extended lives.

Tvtyrant
2016-10-25, 08:16 PM
Based on the birth and death dates given in the appendices at the back of The Return of the King for the kings of Rohan, I'd say the life expectancy of a human of non-Numenorean descent was about what you'd expect for a real world human, though possibly closer to what you'd see in the modern period than in the medieval period if commoners live for about as long as royalty (royalty and other upper-class people tend to have access to better medical care and food, though).

I'm pretty sure that there's too little elven blood in the Numenorean population to account for the extended lifespans of the Numenoreans. There's only supposed to have been three elf-human pairings to begin with (Luthien-Beren, Idril-Tuor, and Arwen-Aragorn), so there aren't that many half-elf half-humans running around to spread elven blood into the human population, and even with the extended lifespan of the Numenorean populace there's still something like 24 generations between the founding and the fall of Numenor, at least going by the number of reigning monarchs of Numenor listed in the appendices of The Return of the King, which is plenty of time for the part-elves to become more or less fully human. My impression is that the extended lifespan of the Numenoreans is more in the line of a gift from the Valar for their ancestors' service against Morgoth, or perhaps a side-effect of living close to the Undying Lands (though I'd consider this less likely, as, if I recall what I read in The Silmarillion correctly, the lifespans of the Numenoreans began to decline when the Numenoreans began to turn against the Valar, not when they began traveling away from Numenor or after Numenor was destroyed), than a result of all of them somehow having enough elven blood in them to have greatly-extended lives.

That could be, I think Elven blood is more of a 1 drop in. It is magical, not genetic. Aragorn is still elfy despite being 99.99% human after all.

Straybow
2016-10-29, 02:03 PM
Legolas (a young whipper-snapper among elves) could easily best any of the humans. Didn't see anybody else taking out a Mumakil single-handed...


*ahem*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrQsjKIo8KU

The new King of Rohan begs to differ M-kill, and not single-handed...

Khi'Khi
2016-10-30, 04:44 PM
M-kill, and not single-handed...

May as well have been. Plus it was a one hit double kill, far more effective than all that fancy elven footwork ;)

Max_Killjoy
2016-10-31, 10:12 AM
In one setting I'm working on (the 400 BCE thread), there aren't any species/races with ultralong lifespans. I'm thinking nothing over 200 years without serious steps being taken -- and most of those secret methods will involve something... regrettable.

In the other setting, there's one species that's ageless. Barring violence or major injury, they don't die. They're also effectively non-interfertile with other species (letting the air out of a fantasy gaming trope) and not very fertile themselves -- a small town might go a decade without a child being born. Even though a member of the species could technically have an older sibling and a younger sibling, they're almost always so far apart that every child is an "only child". Mentally and emotionally, they tend to grow up fast, largely because the only other people around are adults (and also for some inherent reasons). Their children tend to seem creepily calm, erudite, and insightful to humans and other "normal" species -- by age 7 or 8, they have almost nothing in common with a human child other than size.

(The second one is the same species that had me thinking about "alchemical wombs" in the woridbuilding talk thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?299236-Worldbuilding-Talk-Thread&p=21333855#post21333855).)

Straybow
2016-10-31, 02:38 PM
"Interfertile" would mean they can interbreed with other races, and by "letting the air out of a fantasy gaming trope" I guess you intend to say infertile or genetically incompatible.

What you describe is fairly common these days, when a second/third/etc marriage comes after the kids from "starter marriage" are all grown.

Max_Killjoy
2016-10-31, 02:47 PM
"Interfertile" would mean they can interbreed with other races, and by "letting the air out of a fantasy gaming trope" I guess you intend to say infertile or genetically incompatible.


There's a missing "non", I edited that phrasing multiple times and goofed at the end -- will edit that part to be accurate. Thank you for pointing that out.




What you describe is fairly common these days, when a second/third/etc marriage comes after the kids from "starter marriage" are all grown.


True enough, but what I'm describing is a more extreme version of that... a child's older sibling might not be just 20 years old, but rather 200+ years older. And in a smaller town, there may or may not be any other children born for years, so they're not just an "only child" in the family, but the only child in the entire town for all or part of their own childhood.

VoxRationis
2016-10-31, 05:13 PM
Now, I think some people are missing on a major advantage to long lifespans. Some projects are technically possible, but require too much time commitment for people to work on because they'll likely be dead before the project even gets off the ground. A race that lives for a thousand years, however, might start work on such projects. The big example I can think of is the domestication of long-lived plants and animals. Elephants have many traits which make them suitable for domestication—intelligence and communication skills, a social hierarchy—but have a generational time too long to breed selectively. Elves or dwarves could do it, however; an elf could live long enough to see some sort of elephant-breeding project come to fruition. The same thing goes for selective breeding of trees for purposes such as having wood of more useful properties, more useful growth patterns in roots and branches, or larger seeds and fruit. Similarly, large building projects could benefit from being under the guidance of the individual who first designed them—urban planning in particular.

Straybow
2016-10-31, 11:38 PM
May as well have been. Plus it was a one hit double kill, far more effective than all that fancy elven footwork ;) Not kills because both mumakil would likely have gotten back up. Unless the second mumakil's driver was also taken out he'd get the beast back in action. In any case, either one or two wayward mumakil almost as dangerous as controlled mumakil.

The rest is cinematic schlock: Obviously, the driver would be a prime target and would be armored.
Armor that doesn't seem to stop anything is schlock.
Throwing a spear at a figure 30' or more above the thrower wouldn't have penetrated any armor that a soldier would reasonably be wearing.
The driver is hurled back like he'd been hit with a ballista rather than a hand-thrown spear. His reins are separate and he drops one but not the other, which may be reasonable, but...
He's tied on to the one rein so firmly that it supports not just his weight, but his momentum after a ten-foot fall.
There's no back-up driver for maintaining control of a huge investment that is likely to be targeted in this way. One could go on.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-01, 12:51 PM
Now, I think some people are missing on a major advantage to long lifespans. Some projects are technically possible, but require too much time commitment for people to work on because they'll likely be dead before the project even gets off the ground. A race that lives for a thousand years, however, might start work on such projects. The big example I can think of is the domestication of long-lived plants and animals. Elephants have many traits which make them suitable for domestication—intelligence and communication skills, a social hierarchy—but have a generational time too long to breed selectively. Elves or dwarves could do it, however; an elf could live long enough to see some sort of elephant-breeding project come to fruition. The same thing goes for selective breeding of trees for purposes such as having wood of more useful properties, more useful growth patterns in roots and branches, or larger seeds and fruit. Similarly, large building projects could benefit from being under the guidance of the individual who first designed them—urban planning in particular.

The same crew could work on a decades-long monumental building project from start to finish.

Rockphed
2016-11-01, 12:57 PM
The same crew could work on a decades-long monumental building project from start to finish.

So, on the one hand, the artisans are personally very skilled and know all the ins and outs of the project, but on the other hand innovation happens slowly (because you do not need new people very often) and knowledge can be very fragile (if everyone knows everything about the project, then nobody needs to write anything down.)

Khi'Khi
2016-11-01, 01:14 PM
Not kills because both mumakil would likely have gotten back up. Unless the second mumakil's driver was also taken out he'd get the beast back in action. In any case, either one or two wayward mumakil almost as dangerous as controlled mumakil.

The rest is cinematic schlock: Obviously, the driver would be a prime target and would be armored.
Armor that doesn't seem to stop anything is schlock.
Throwing a spear at a figure 30' or more above the thrower wouldn't have penetrated any armor that a soldier would reasonably be wearing.
The driver is hurled back like he'd been hit with a ballista rather than a hand-thrown spear. His reins are separate and he drops one but not the other, which may be reasonable, but...
He's tied on to the one rein so firmly that it supports not just his weight, but his momentum after a ten-foot fall.
There's no back-up driver for maintaining control of a huge investment that is likely to be targeted in this way. One could go on.


And Legolas shooting down every single rider before they can even react? And the mumakil not panicking and shaking him off because of the commotion on his back? And the thing going down thanks to ONE arrow to the back of the head like it was a shotgun shell? And Legolas surfing down his trunk as the beast goes down? That's not cinematic schlock? Things like that are a big reason why Tolkien's kids hated the films. The heroes were way too overpowered and invincible rather than vulnerable and in actual danger.

Returning to the question at hand, I think the point of innovation that Killjoy brought up is a good one. Not only do ideas not get written down, but they very rarely change. Humans get a new and refreshed perspective every few decades or so, whereas the longer-lived races are more prone to becoming stuck in their ways, and more resistant to innovation.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-01, 01:34 PM
Returning to the question at hand, I think the point of innovation that Killjoy brought up is a good one. Not only do ideas not get written down, but they very rarely change. Humans get a new and refreshed perspective every few decades or so, whereas the longer-lived races are more prone to becoming stuck in their ways, and more resistant to innovation.


In think that's always been the assumption, at least, when this sort of thing comes up -- "short human lifespans allow for innovation".



So, on the one hand, the artisans are personally very skilled and know all the ins and outs of the project, but on the other hand innovation happens slowly (because you do not need new people very often) and knowledge can be very fragile (if everyone knows everything about the project, then nobody needs to write anything down.)

On the flip side, people who are used to thinking about and planning for 100 years in the future, rather than 100 days or 100 hours, might be more likely to write things down and keep good records.

PersonMan
2016-11-01, 05:45 PM
So, on the one hand, the artisans are personally very skilled and know all the ins and outs of the project, but on the other hand innovation happens slowly (because you do not need new people very often) and knowledge can be very fragile (if everyone knows everything about the project, then nobody needs to write anything down.)

I think one result would be unique 'twists' to entire regions - similarly to how in our world, the beliefs and personal interests of a monarch (especially later when their states were more centralized) would have great impact on their realm or even beyond. If each monarch or similar figure ruled for centuries, their preferences and goals would have a much more permanent effect.

One elven kingdom might host the largest libraries on the continent, due to its centuries-old policy of "acquire any book we do not have, and archive everything carefully to ensure our knowledge is ever-growing", which came from the king's fascination with the written word from a young age.

Another region may be influenced by a handful of successful military campaigns that led to the dominance of a clique opposed to 'quickdeath culture', which they define as anything "too orcish" or "too human" for their tastes, leading to the slow falling behind of their realm as others advance further.

Rather than looking at a massive cathedral dedicated to the Lord of the Sun and hearing that it took so long to build that the king who ordered it made was replaced by the time it was complete, and it was his son that finished the monument to his father's victory over the Evil Monster Horde, you'd see grand temples in various cities with similar dedications, as the promise of "eleven decades of gratitude" to the deity who saved the elven kingdom from peril is slowly fulfilled.

---

Something I often use for my longer-lived races is a culture of seniority-based authority. The idea that the older, wiser members of the community should make its decisions, often intensified by both the long lifespan and entrenching of influential figures. Often this creates a tendency towards slow, conservative decision making - rather than risk losing centuries of progress to keeping power, an elven ruler may prefer to simply wait another few years to see if this new development is worth pursuing after all.

Occasionally I mix this with the idea of a cyclical dynastic idea, similar to some simplified versions of the Mandate of Heaven idea. A group comes to power, reforms, reorganizes, works with the fervor of youth and those new to power. Over time they slow down, having accomplished their goals, dealing with internal threats and growing comfortable. Eventually they become too set in their ways and the next generation (possibly literally the children of the generation that took over) watches their rulers begin to fail in their duties until the need for a new beginning is too great to deny.

Bohandas
2016-11-02, 01:07 AM
At the same time, I don't buy the idea that longer-lived races would be effectively mentally handicapped compared to humans because it would require them four times as long (e.g. Dragonlance) to reach the same mental age as a human. So longer-lived (humanoid) races mentally and physically mature at roughly the same rate as humans do.


Why do they need to physically mature at the same rate? What does that have to do with it? I'd have them learn at the same rate and be the same mental age as a human counterpart but be physically and emotionally immature.

And I'd have them have a lot of boy detective, and boy genius, and boy adventurer type characters running around because all those tropez become more plausible when they've been doing it for 20 years

Segev
2016-11-02, 09:15 AM
Why do they need to physically mature at the same rate? What does that have to do with it? I'd have them learn at the same rate and be the same mental age as a human counterpart but be physically and emotionally immature.

And I'd have them have a lot of boy detective, and boy genius, and boy adventurer type characters running around because all those tropez become more plausible when they've been doing it for 20 years

I'd play it.

In point of fact, in the one 5e game I'm in right now, I'm playing an elf who was orphaned at approximately 55 years of age (which, if you assume they physically age relative to their lifespans the way humans do, puts him about 10-11 years equivalent physical maturity) and was adopted by a human family. His adopted human brother was just a little younger than him in apparent physical maturity at the time. Since he spent the next 7-10 years surrounded by humans with his brother and friends all growing from "kids" to "adults," he was pushed to mentally mature (at least in terms of learning and interests) to keep up with them. So he did. It really kind-of bugs him to be the "kid" in the group, when he's OLDER THAN ALL OF THEM and he's just as smart.

Being physically 11-12ish (human-equivalence), he often pretends to be a Halfling so people don't treat him like a kid. (In truth, he's actually quite tall for a Halfling, as if you take the word of the game, Halflings are closer in height to human 4-year-olds.) But he has bouts of childish emotional outbursts (both positive enthusiasm and negative sulking), despite trying VERY HARD to act mature, and having the knowledge and experience to back acting that way if he concentrates on it.


But yeah, I'd get behind a world of "boy detectives" and the like because elven and dwarven children are as old and experienced as orc and human adults.

Khi'Khi
2016-11-02, 11:18 AM
Why do they need to physically mature at the same rate? What does that have to do with it? I'd have them learn at the same rate and be the same mental age as a human counterpart but be physically and emotionally immature.



While I love the idea, can you imagine the poor elven mothers who have to care for an infant for upwards of 10 years? Forget the terrible twos, elves have terrible 20's! No wonder the species might have such a low birth rate

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-02, 11:35 AM
While I love the idea, can you imagine the poor elven mothers who have to care for an infant for upwards of 10 years? Forget the terrible twos, elves have terrible 20's! No wonder the species might have such a low birth rate

That's part of why I find the whole "proportional maturation" thing so fundamentally silly.

Segev
2016-11-02, 12:01 PM
While I love the idea, can you imagine the poor elven mothers who have to care for an infant for upwards of 10 years? Forget the terrible twos, elves have terrible 20's! No wonder the species might have such a low birth rateAnd imagine the pregnancies, lasting up to 90 months (assuming the not-quite-accurate over-estimation of elves living 10x as long as humans).


That's part of why I find the whole "proportional maturation" thing so fundamentally silly.
Meh, a race of sapient horses would find the notion of a fantasy race of bipedal tool-using creatures that have to raise their young for years before they can even walk equally silly.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-02, 12:06 PM
And imagine the pregnancies, lasting up to 90 months (assuming the not-quite-accurate over-estimation of elves living 10x as long as humans).


If elves evolved, highly unlikely.

If elves were created, those are some sadistic and warped as heck creator-gods.




Meh, a race of sapient horses would find the notion of a fantasy race of bipedal tool-using creatures that have to raise their young for years before they can even walk equally silly.


Apples and hammers.

Segev
2016-11-02, 12:11 PM
If elves evolved, highly unlikely.

If elves were created, those are some sadistic and warped as heck creator-gods. Proof that humans didn't evolve, but were created by warped as heck creator-gods! What kind of insane design calls for years of total dependence on the parent, rather than immediate self-sufficiency in basic areas like walking and swift protection from predators and starvation by learning to forage or hunt within a few months?


Apples and hammers.Declaring things to be unanalogous when the analogy's parallels have been spelled out requires actually demonstrating where the analogy breaks down, lest your declaration be rejected as unfounded.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-02, 12:37 PM
Proof that humans didn't evolve, but were created by warped as heck creator-gods! What kind of insane design calls for years of total dependence on the parent, rather than immediate self-sufficiency in basic areas like walking and swift protection from predators and starvation by learning to forage or hunt within a few months?


There are a series of tradeoffs involved in the exact nature and timespan of human gestation and maturation, the result of millions of years of complex evolutionary pressures and feedback. Those years of infant/childhood dependence are in a complex relationship with brain size at birth AND maximum size of head and body that the mother is going to survive (and that's pushed right to the very limit as it is, as evidenced by the risks of childbirth for human mothers).

There might be something to be gained by a longer pregnancy, but the tradeoff is a longer span of increased vulnerability and dependence on others and physical stress for the mother. And at the maximum size for a baby at birth being what it is, there's not necessarily a need for a longer gestation.

What underlying reason would there be for a 90 month gestation, with 30 months of "third trimester" vulnerability and stress for the mother?

Why would a pretty-much human-sized elven baby require 90 months to reach maximum birth size?





Declaring things to be unanalogous when the analogy's parallels have been spelled out requires actually demonstrating where the analogy breaks down, lest your declaration be rejected as unfounded.


Horses, sentient or not, are not humanoid, and are adapted to a different set of evolutionary pressures -- and the tradeoffs inherent in their adaptations actually make human-level intelligence a very unlikely prospect.

Segev
2016-11-02, 12:55 PM
There are a series of tradeoffs involved in the exact nature and timespan of human gestation and maturation, the result of millions of years of complex evolutionary pressures and feedback. Those years of infant/childhood dependence are in a complex relationship with brain size at birth AND maximum size of head and body that the mother is going to survive (and that's pushed right to the very limit as it is, as evidenced by the risks of childbirth for human mothers).

There might be something to be gained by a longer pregnancy, but the tradeoff is a longer span of increased vulnerability and dependence on others and physical stress for the mother. And at the maximum size for a baby at birth being what it is, there's not necessarily a need for a longer gestation.

What underlying reason would there be for a 90 month gestation, with 30 months of "third trimester" vulnerability and stress for the mother?

Why would a pretty-much human-sized elven baby require 90 months to reach maximum birth size? Because, despite similarities, the settings are different, and there are different forces and influences. Perhaps the reason an elf or dwarf takes longer to grow to baby human size is the same reason it takes them longer to grow from infant to toddler size and from toddler to young adult size, etc.

When you have to start delving into things well outside normal experience - learned knowledge of deeply intricate processes that we still don't fully understand and which certainly are not intuitively obvious - you are beyond the point of "protecting verisimilitude" and into the point of "I refuse to believe anything but Earth as modern learning understands it right now down to every detail could possibly be how anything works."

Verisimilitude, by your own signature, is not about perfect simulation. It's about things making sufficient sense in their own context that you don't hit obvious paradoxes. And while you can make all these learned claims about why things are as they are IRL, they don't hit inherent paradoxes if they're not so.

Put another way: you're attempting to apply a model we've developed to explain what we observe in reality to a fictional setting as if it were a governing law. It isn't a governing law here in reality, either; it's a model we use to try to understand what we observe. There isn't a mathematical law of physics nor of biology that dictates that model.

A more useful exercise than "bah, that couldn't happen, so anything that says it does is nonsense that's totally unbelievable and 100% badwrongfun" would be "Hm, what does our understanding of these pressures suggest would be necessary to make this work out?"

From that latter exercise, I developed my theory of elven "learning disabilities" into a tie-in with their lack of sleep and their need for trancing. I imagine similarly interesting and fun things could be devised from resolving your objections, and in the process make elves just slightly more alien than "pointy-eared skinny humans."



Horses, sentient or not, are not humanoid, and are adapted to a different set of evolutionary pressures -- and the tradeoffs inherent in their adaptations actually make human-level intelligence a very unlikely prospect.Okay, fine, replace "horses" with "goblins."

Or I could simply scoff and say elves are adapted to a different set of evolutionary pressures, as well, with different trade-offs. And then the exercise would be in inventing those trade-offs and pressures.

VoxRationis
2016-11-02, 01:15 PM
Because, despite similarities, the settings are different, and there are different forces and influences. Perhaps the reason an elf or dwarf takes longer to grow to baby human size is the same reason it takes them longer to grow from infant to toddler size and from toddler to young adult size, etc.

When you have to start delving into things well outside normal experience - learned knowledge of deeply intricate processes that we still don't fully understand and which certainly are not intuitively obvious - you are beyond the point of "protecting verisimilitude" and into the point of "I refuse to believe anything but Earth as modern learning understands it right now down to every detail could possibly be how anything works."

Put another way: you're attempting to apply a model we've developed to explain what we observe in reality to a fictional setting as if it were a governing law. It isn't a governing law here in reality, either; it's a model we use to try to understand what we observe. There isn't a mathematical law of physics nor of biology that dictates that model.

A more useful exercise than "bah, that couldn't happen, so anything that says it does is nonsense that's totally unbelievable and 100% badwrongfun" would be "Hm, what does our understanding of these pressures suggest would be necessary to make this work out?"

But what kind of trade-off makes it reasonable to have a humanoid of similar physique and intelligence to a human but which takes far longer to mature, including a tripled gestation period? Humans have longer-than-normal gestation periods for our size because it allows greater mental development. Unless one assumes that elves have massive intelligence bonuses, they're not really getting anything out of this enormous liability in their life cycle. No pressure makes trancing, your given explanation for these phenomena, so great an advantage that it's worth spending years in such a vulnerable state.
What you're really doing is jumping through hoops to try to make a fictional (and thus malleable) quantity self-consistent against the weight of how we know things work, rather than just alter the malleable quantity to make sense in and of itself.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-02, 01:25 PM
Because, despite similarities, the settings are different, and there are different forces and influences. Perhaps the reason an elf or dwarf takes longer to grow to baby human size is the same reason it takes them longer to grow from infant to toddler size and from toddler to young adult size, etc.

When you have to start delving into things well outside normal experience - learned knowledge of deeply intricate processes that we still don't fully understand and which certainly are not intuitively obvious - you are beyond the point of "protecting verisimilitude" and into the point of "I refuse to believe anything but Earth as modern learning understands it right now down to every detail could possibly be how anything works."

Verisimilitude, by your own signature, is not about perfect simulation. It's about things making sufficient sense in their own context that you don't hit obvious paradoxes. And while you can make all these learned claims about why things are as they are IRL, they don't hit inherent paradoxes if they're not so.

Put another way: you're attempting to apply a model we've developed to explain what we observe in reality to a fictional setting as if it were a governing law. It isn't a governing law here in reality, either; it's a model we use to try to understand what we observe. There isn't a mathematical law of physics nor of biology that dictates that model.

A more useful exercise than "bah, that couldn't happen, so anything that says it does is nonsense that's totally unbelievable and 100% badwrongfun" would be "Hm, what does our understanding of these pressures suggest would be necessary to make this work out?"

From that latter exercise, I developed my theory of elven "learning disabilities" into a tie-in with their lack of sleep and their need for trancing. I imagine similarly interesting and fun things could be devised from resolving your objections, and in the process make elves just slightly more alien than "pointy-eared skinny humans."


Okay, fine, replace "horses" with "goblins."

Or I could simply scoff and say elves are adapted to a different set of evolutionary pressures, as well, with different trade-offs. And then the exercise would be in inventing those trade-offs and pressures.


I prefer to extrapolate from the known, it involves less applied phlebotinum and less risk of self-contradiction.


And to be accurate, it is something like a "law" -- we see that creatures facing similar situations tend to develop in similar directions. Legs, eyes, wings, poison, grabbing appendages, biting parts, etc, have appeared independently over and over again in the history of life on earth. Not sure where you're getting this idea that not understanding something perfectly is the same as not understanding it well enough.

Also not sure how you jump from what I said to "I refuse to believe anything but Earth as modern learning understands it right now down to every detail could possibly be how anything works."




But what kind of trade-off makes it reasonable to have a humanoid of similar physique and intelligence to a human but which takes far longer to mature, including a tripled gestation period? Humans have longer-than-normal gestation periods for our size because it allows greater mental development. Unless one assumes that elves have massive intelligence bonuses, they're not really getting anything out of this enormous liability in their life cycle. No pressure makes trancing, your given explanation for these phenomena, so great an advantage that it's worth spending years in such a vulnerable state.

What you're really doing is jumping through hoops to try to make a fictional (and thus malleable) quantity self-consistent against the weight of how we know things work, rather than just alter the malleable quantity to make sense in and of itself.



Well said.

Segev
2016-11-02, 02:29 PM
But what kind of trade-off makes it reasonable to have a humanoid of similar physique and intelligence to a human but which takes far longer to mature, including a tripled gestation period? Humans have longer-than-normal gestation periods for our size because it allows greater mental development. Unless one assumes that elves have massive intelligence bonuses, they're not really getting anything out of this enormous liability in their life cycle. No pressure makes trancing, your given explanation for these phenomena, so great an advantage that it's worth spending years in such a vulnerable state.It could be that elves don't require quite so much nutrition. Or that their lengthier lives simulate greater intelligence overall (as discussed earlier in this thread with the kinds of advancements which would be open to them for having longer relative life-spans to the work that needs doing to complete it).

The "trancing advantage" you talk about, though, isn't the justification for longer gestation. The longer lifespan might be (and makes a certain amount of apparent sense, since the narrative source for it is the notion that all aspects of the elven growth cycle take longer than for humans). While D&D mechanics don't support it, elves being particularly immune to disease (often in spite of being less hearty overall than humans) is not an uncommon trope; perhaps the longer gestation involves greater controlled exposure to the maternal library of diseases, in addition to other aspects of their "superiority."

Heck, if you go with the notion that elves predate humans by millennia or more, it could be that their "evolution" has extended greatly all the time of their growth periods because the pressures they faced for a vast period of time were entirely different from those which drive evolution of primitive species. With greater wealth and less scarcity, with more security and support from magic and medicine, the lengthier gestations wouldn't be nearly so great a risk, nor would the burden of raising children through interminable stages of helplessness be so out of reach, particularly with the promise of so long a life thereafter.

"Grace" and "Beauty" may also be refinements of motor skills honed over significantly longer growth patterns, preventing the "gawky teenager" problem that humans face in no small part due to our limbs being constantly different lengths from what we remember just last week. (Seriously, a bit part of that problem is that growth spurts make us have to re-learn how far to reach for things and how high to lift our feet, and teens undergo it constantly.) With a slower maturation rate, the growth would be nigh imperceptible and thus adaptation would be within the normal error bounds at all times, leading to greater grace and precision of motion.

If the exchange for the slower growth rate is a longer gestation - which, again, their high-magic society managed to make a nuisance rather than a survival problem - then it could have still come about that way.


What you're really doing is jumping through hoops to try to make a fictional (and thus malleable) quantity self-consistent against the weight of how we know things work, rather than just alter the malleable quantity to make sense in and of itself.
I never suggested otherwise; I find the exercise entertaining and that the resulting differences from humans makes elves more interesting to me.

Bohandas
2016-11-03, 09:51 AM
But what kind of trade-off makes it reasonable to have a humanoid of similar physique and intelligence to a human but which takes far longer to mature

It might make mindflayers less likely to bother them. You can't rely on hunting them because you'll just depopulate them and you can't conveniently breed them in captivity and the illithids are clever enough to realize that.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-03, 10:00 AM
It might make mindflayers less likely to bother them. You can't rely on hunting them because you'll just depopulate them and you can't conveniently breed them in captivity and the illithids are clever enough to realize that.

Is predation by illithids actually that much of a species-wide threat?

Segev
2016-11-03, 11:20 AM
For totally unrelated reasons, I was looking into Torpedo Rays...and discovered that they have longer gestation than humans do, and give live births. So "humans only barely justify long gestation periods because of their huge brains" isn't quite so persuasive an argument, I think. Unless Torpedo Rays are human-level intellects?

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-03, 11:32 AM
For totally unrelated reasons, I was looking into Torpedo Rays...and discovered that they have longer gestation than humans do, and give live births. So "humans only barely justify long gestation periods because of their huge brains" isn't quite so persuasive an argument, I think. Unless Torpedo Rays are human-level intellects?

Are baby torpedo rays born with the largest possible brain (and thus head) size versus risk of life-threatening injury to the mother?

Does being pregnant put the mother in a far more vulnerable state than normal for the last third or more of the gestation?

Or... does the long gestation of the torpedo ray result from a different set of factors than for humans?

And... related to the elf discussion upthread... does the torpedo ray remain pregnant for 90 months? :smallconfused:



(Looking up the torpedo ray on various websites, I'm seeing gestation periods listed of up to 8 months... and it turns out that the reason it takes so long is because they have a poorly developed internal gestation system that doesn't provide the young with enough nutrients to grow quickly.)

Khi'Khi
2016-11-03, 11:36 AM
For totally unrelated reasons, I was looking into Torpedo Rays...and discovered that they have longer gestation than humans do, and give live births. So "humans only barely justify long gestation periods because of their huge brains" isn't quite so persuasive an argument, I think. Unless Torpedo Rays are human-level intellects?

I do believe gestation period is irrelevant, as elephants have far longer pregnancies than humans (roughly 21 months!) I think that has more to do with physical size than mental capacity.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-03, 12:02 PM
I do believe gestation period is irrelevant, as elephants have far longer pregnancies than humans (roughly 21 months!) I think that has more to do with physical size than mental capacity.

Even at its massive size, the elephant has a gestation period under 2 years, and takes 6 to 8 years after birth to reach maturity.

There's an issue of scale here that's being missed -- the topic of gestation time came up not because of torpedo rays at 6-8 months, or elephants at 18-22 months. Rather, it came up because of a suggestion that elves would be at NINETY months.

That's seven and a half years.

When it was suggested that this was unlikely for either an evolved or created species... the response was that humans were just as ridiculous from a non-human perspective, which lead to some of us trying to explain the evolutionary tradeoffs involved and why it's not really a matter of subjective perception, and asking for some sort of evolutionary situation that would lead to elven mothers carrying for seven and a half years.

Segev
2016-11-03, 01:01 PM
Are baby torpedo rays born with the largest possible brain (and thus head) size versus risk of life-threatening injury to the mother?

Does being pregnant put the mother in a far more vulnerable state than normal for the last third or more of the gestation?

Or... does the long gestation of the torpedo ray result from a different set of factors than for humans?

And... related to the elf discussion upthread... does the torpedo ray remain pregnant for 90 months? :smallconfused:All I'm saying is that the "well humans have the longest justifiable gestation for their size" argument isn't very strong.


(Looking up the torpedo ray on various websites, I'm seeing gestation periods listed of up to 8 months... and it turns out that the reason it takes so long is because they have a poorly developed internal gestation system that doesn't provide the young with enough nutrients to grow quickly.)And the fact remains that this obvious deficiency has not made them an unviable species. So even a lengthy gestation period that doesn't confer advantage in return for its duration in any direct sense is not a game-ender.


Yes, 7.5 years of pregnancy is a bit much. But it's hardly outside the realm of possibility. Especially if it gives some reason why elven birth rate might be a touch low compared to other races.

VoxRationis
2016-11-03, 02:02 PM
All I'm saying is that the "well humans have the longest justifiable gestation for their size" argument isn't very strong.

And the fact remains that this obvious deficiency has not made them an unviable species. So even a lengthy gestation period that doesn't confer advantage in return for its duration in any direct sense is not a game-ender.


Yes, 7.5 years of pregnancy is a bit much. But it's hardly outside the realm of possibility. Especially if it gives some reason why elven birth rate might be a touch low compared to other races.

Torpedo rays are not placental mammals with a plethora of closely related species with dramatically shorter gestation periods to compete with for the same niche. If one species of torpedo ray lived nearby rays of similar performance in other respects, but with a tenth of the gestation time, they would almost certainly be driven extinct in the areas of shared habitat. Indeed, it would be unlikely that the slow-gestating ray population would ever become a full species at all.

On another note, it's ridiculous to think that a race which in game terms is accorded a Constitution penalty would be able to suffer through a seven-year pregnancy. Indeed, I would posit that an elven pregnancy would be shorter than a human one, since with slender hips and a delicate physique, elven women would have a lower maximum survivable fetus size. The customary increase in maturation period elven children have would be explained by this shorter gestation, since growth is fastest in utero. I'm not quite sure how much of an increase in maturation is explained; a ten-fold increase in childhood length for a loss of a month or two of gestation might be a little much.

etrpgb
2016-11-03, 02:03 PM
I did not read the whole thread, so sorry if I am repeating something already stated.

Disclaimer, there is not "right" or "wrong" in this stuff. It's only fantasy, so here is my vision that is also shared by the players I play with.


In our planet the length of pregnancy has nothing to do with life expectancy, but only to the size of the child; we also find ridiculous that long lived races need so much time to grow up.

So we homebrew something we find more verisimilar; pregnancy duration is proportional to the size of the child so Elves need a bit LESS because children are smaller than Humans, and Orcs a bit longer because child are larger; we are speaking of few weeks of difference from the 40 weeks of Humans.

All races, reach puberty more or less at the same time and the intelligence mature at similar speed, perhaps if you grow up together a baby Orc, a baby Elf, and a baby Human born the same day you will see the Orc becoming clever faster than the other two, but they will catch up quickly.
There is no reason to think that Elves need years to learn to clap hands, few months/weeks of difference are enough.

The real difference kicks in when races reach adulthood, long lived races pretty much have the phases between young adult and venerable extended by decades or centuries. So, the three kids we spoke about will become adult pretty much together, perhaps the Orc when he is 16, the Human when he is 18, and the Elf when he is 21 but we are there. Still, when all of them will be 60 the Orc will really fill the weight of age, the Human a bit less, while the Elf will fell young like a 25 years old human.

Segev
2016-11-03, 04:06 PM
Torpedo rays are not placental mammals with a plethora of closely related species with dramatically shorter gestation periods to compete with for the same niche. If one species of torpedo ray lived nearby rays of similar performance in other respects, but with a tenth of the gestation time, they would almost certainly be driven extinct in the areas of shared habitat. Indeed, it would be unlikely that the slow-gestating ray population would ever become a full species at all.Given elven ancientness, perhaps they came about when there were similarly few competitors, and by the time competition arose, they had their mighty civilization and all its amenities which provide protection for the nascent mothers.

Or, alternatively, we're watching what you describe happening: the elves ARE going extinct, pushed out by the shorter-gestation humans and goblinoids.


On another note, it's ridiculous to think that a race which in game terms is accorded a Constitution penalty would be able to suffer through a seven-year pregnancy. Indeed, I would posit that an elven pregnancy would be shorter than a human one, since with slender hips and a delicate physique, elven women would have a lower maximum survivable fetus size. The customary increase in maturation period elven children have would be explained by this shorter gestation, since growth is fastest in utero. I'm not quite sure how much of an increase in maturation is explained; a ten-fold increase in childhood length for a loss of a month or two of gestation might be a little much.Perhaps. Or perhaps the gestation is actually less stressful. Or maybe they have longer gestations, but not 90 months, because elven babies are born in a state that would be considered "premature" for humans. They're smaller, relative to their mothers, and their lower constitution is reflected in their delicate nature even as infants.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-03, 04:19 PM
Perhaps. Or perhaps the gestation is actually less stressful. Or maybe they have longer gestations, but not 90 months, because elven babies are born in a state that would be considered "premature" for humans. They're smaller, relative to their mothers, and their lower constitution is reflected in their delicate nature even as infants.


Which would be the opposite of what happens in humans, where earlier birth is usually associated lower birth weight/size.

Segev
2016-11-03, 04:52 PM
Which would be the opposite of what happens in humans, where earlier birth is usually associated lower birth weight/size.

Note that I said "less than 7.5 years," indicating that it would be (proportionally) earlier compared to humans with 9 months but 1/10 lifespans.

The postulate here is that, as the elves grow more slowly throughout childhood, so, too, do they grow more slowly in the womb. At the same 1/10 human rate. If they're gestating for less than 90 months, then, they'd be smaller when they came out of the womb than a human who gestated for 9 months.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-03, 05:14 PM
Note that I said "less than 7.5 years," indicating that it would be (proportionally) earlier compared to humans with 9 months but 1/10 lifespans.

The postulate here is that, as the elves grow more slowly throughout childhood, so, too, do they grow more slowly in the womb. At the same 1/10 human rate. If they're gestating for less than 90 months, then, they'd be smaller when they came out of the womb than a human who gestated for 9 months.

OK, yes, I see how your math works out there, when the two ideas are combined.

Excession
2016-11-03, 05:46 PM
My pet crazy theory is that elves are actually marsupials. They're born small, so elven women don't need wide hips, and finish growing in a pouch.

Forum Explorer
2016-11-03, 10:48 PM
I've been rolling a similar idea around in my head for a while.

In the beginning, Moradin crafted the first dwarves from fine stone, rare metals, and precious stones, then imbued them with life. That's how Moradin did it, that's how the dwarves do it... and it's worked out pretty well so far.

The dwarves don't just like gold, silver, gems and such. They need them to make more dwarves. There exists the option to have dwarves crafting golems, titans, stone war machines, and more, all at varying degrees of blasphemy as they move further from Moradin's original design.

I could see golems and the like as a couple different things:

1. The Dwarf equivalent to breeding dogs. Sure it's another mammal, but it's not an equal to humans and never would be. But you can get a lot of use, affection, and joy out of a dog.

2. They are the dwarf equivalent to necromancy, and are seen as blasphemy like you said.

3. Comparing them to Dwarves in any way is actually really insulting because they are controlled/powered by an enslaved elemental, while Dwarves have proper souls. Golems and the like are no more Dwarves then a windmill would be.

CrazyPenguin
2016-11-04, 06:22 AM
My pet crazy theory is that elves are actually marsupials. They're born small, so elven women don't need wide hips, and finish growing in a pouch.

So male elves have bifurcated penises and female elves have 3 vaginas?

Segev
2016-11-04, 08:07 AM
Would that mean half-elves have three human fathers?




Giving dwarves domesticated animals with long life cycles would be an interesting twist on their longer lifespans. The big reason elephants and the like aren't domesticated - bred selectively until they're more amenable to human use and less naturally wild animals - is because it takes too long, so it would be a multi-generational project where no member of the breeders' club would actually see the results to any significant degree in our lifetime. Whereas faster-breeding species can show (some) results over a dozen or so generations in a human lifetime.

That isn't the ONLY reason, obviously, but it is part of it, and with longer lifespans that particular reason would be curtailed.

Of course, why dwarves would go for elephants when they can't fit them underground is a valid question, but I'm sure there are other animals out there that could be domesticated through selective breeding but currently are not.

CrazyPenguin
2016-11-04, 09:37 AM
Would that mean half-elves have three human fathers?

Most species of marsupial have two vaginas, each of which leads to a separate uterus, and a third canal which is used for birth.

Segev
2016-11-04, 09:51 AM
Most species of marsupial have two vaginas, each of which leads to a separate uterus, and a third canal which is used for birth.

I caught that. I was making a joke. And a heavily-veiled Gilgamesh reference.

I do wonder if this makes them more prone to twin-births, or if they still typically ovulate only one at a time (making multiple uteri kind of an odd redundancy).

VoxRationis
2016-11-04, 12:28 PM
Giving dwarves domesticated animals with long life cycles would be an interesting twist on their longer lifespans. The big reason elephants and the like aren't domesticated - bred selectively until they're more amenable to human use and less naturally wild animals - is because it takes too long, so it would be a multi-generational project where no member of the breeders' club would actually see the results to any significant degree in our lifetime. Whereas faster-breeding species can show (some) results over a dozen or so generations in a human lifetime.

I said that already. It also means that elves can breed trees for useful purposes.



Of course, why dwarves would go for elephants when they can't fit them underground is a valid question, but I'm sure there are other animals out there that could be domesticated through selective breeding but currently are not.

Why do dwarves go for axes and hammers and other weapons that need lots of room if they're just going to fight in the tunnels? It seems to me like dwarves should use hoplite armaments as their go-to gear

Straybow
2016-11-04, 07:03 PM
Now, I think some people are missing on a major advantage to long lifespans. ... The big example I can think of is the domestication of long-lived plants and animals. Elephants have many traits which make them suitable for domestication—intelligence and communication skills, a social hierarchy—but have a generational time too long to breed selectively.
I believe the real issue of elephant breeding is 1) the cost of housing/feeding and 2) the rutting of the males.

It is far cheaper to go out in the jungles and capture young elephants than to build enclosures big enough and strong enough to hold them, grow food for them that more easily bred animals could use more efficiently, wait a decade or so to determine the personality traits of the mature elephant to choose mating partners, and so on.

Then there is the rutting male, whom even the female elephants cannot control. Males are essentially driven from the herd at maturity to form their own small groups. The females in heat leave the herd to mate with the males from the bull groups.

In a society with magic, wherein animal handlers could charm them or quell the rutting destructiveness, humans could more easily domesticate them. True, the generations would be long, but that's what record-keeping is for.

Straybow
2016-11-04, 07:54 PM
And Legolas shooting down every single rider before they can even react? And the mumakil not panicking and shaking him off because of the commotion on his back? And the thing going down thanks to ONE arrow to the back of the head like it was a shotgun shell? And Legolas surfing down his trunk as the beast goes down? That's not cinematic schlock? Things like that are a big reason why Tolkien's kids hated the films. The heroes were way too overpowered and invincible rather than vulnerable and in actual danger. The feeble motions of the tiny people in the howdah do not panic the mumakil, just as the scores of arrows that fail to fully penetrate the hide are mere irritants. Legolas only kills one rider before he's noticed, and he only kills about half a dozen after that (one by just dodging the leaping man, who then falls off). Most perish when he cuts the cinch and the howdah falls off. Not that schlocky.

True, it is less believable that the relatively light bow would be able to shoot an arrow with enough momentum to penetrate deeply enough to hit the brain stem. If the howdah had a ballista, and he'd turned it on the beast after vanquishing the riders, that might be believable. After dumping the howdah he only has what he carries. Maybe if he'd borrowed Glamdring for the fight, and jammed that deep enough to hit the brain stem... I don't think his longknife could reach even with elfy magic. And he'd probably have to run down the trunk, 'cuz I doubt it would be smooth enough to slide on.

Jackson made it into an action film, instead of an adventure/storytelling film. Compromises abound. But back to the topic, long-lived folk can only start at 1st level if they are war orphans or otherwise cut off from the normal upbringing. The elves have time to develop fantasy acrobatic balance and precision shooting. Aragorn, who was almost 100 years old with the vitality of a thirtysomething, would likewise have trained to a level of performance rarely seen in short-lived men. The movie has too much sword-chopping-through-armor schlock, because it would seem repetitive if he kept killing the orcs by "realistically" hitting the neck/face, or occasionally getting an angle to thrust through the armpit. I suppose lopping off limbs to render them hors de combat without a kill would also break up the monotony.

Straybow
2016-11-04, 07:58 PM
Why do dwarves go for axes and hammers and other weapons that need lots of room if they're just going to fight in the tunnels? It seems to me like dwarves should use hoplite armaments as their go-to gear Two handed weapons can typically be used in short swings that utilize the strength and momentum of hips and shoulders through the long moment arm between the grips for power, rather than sweeps.

5ColouredWalker
2016-11-05, 04:59 AM
Reading this thread, I've suddenly got the idea th that elves aren't not numerous due to infrequent breeding, but because Elves prevent each other from breeding until they've proven they can do it.

"Sorry Tam, but until you go through Archmage Dorwan's test I can't let you stop taking the tea. It wouldn't do for you to disembowl yourself in a fit like Missus Fulqin did during her 3rd year of pregnancy."

Komatik
2016-11-05, 12:46 PM
Elves, in contrast, don't. They're mean to remain in Arda until the end of creation itself, whenever that may be. This is why elves weren't made to age or die of disease- they're meant to stick around, not die off. While a human's soul can exist independent of a body, it's unnatural for an elf's spirit to be disembodied. They're meant to remain in their bodies until the end of time, not exist as discorporate spirits. This is why they're kind of hard to kill- things that might kill a human from trauma, or diseases that could lay a man low, these are things elves can literally tough out. Their souls are loathe to leave their bodies, so it takes awful mutilation or incredible trauma to force their bodies to become inhospitable to their souls.

If they somehow die, it's wrong for them to exist without bodies, so Eru mandated that they'd receive new ones. Full-formed and identical to the ones they had, just ready for them to inhabit and all. It's just, they can't go back to Middle Earth proper with them. Part of the enigmatic plan for the world involved humans gaining influence, which isn't possible with immortal elves stalking around- so the elves would live in a bunch of islands far, far to the west of Middle Earth. Eventually, there was an order handed down that all Elves should leave their homes and migrate to the west (It wasn't very popular).

See, for elves there's no mystery in death. They know what happens to them when they die. They know that they're stuck here until the end of the world. Because of that, they devote huge amounts of time into the world itself.

This is remarkably similar to how vampires work in the Warhammer World - most people, when they die, pass on to the care of their gods (Most gods in the setting live in an alternate dimension called the Realm of Chaos, and are personified reflections of living creatures' basic urges or fervent beliefs - two gods have been created by the sheer power of people's belief in relatively recent times, namely the deified founder of the Empire, Sigmar, and the snake god Sotek who's worshipped by the Lizardmen). A vampire's soul, however, is bound to the land and can be brought back by ritual or in rarer cases (of a powerful vampire or a place with a ton of dark magic) spontaneously. They are never truly gone unless another vampire drinks them to death and claims their power for themselves. Vampires are born by the magic of Chaos but are, in some ways, the most anti-Chaos beings in the setting.

Segev
2016-11-05, 12:52 PM
I said that already. It also means that elves can breed trees for useful purposes.Ooh, good point.


Why do dwarves go for axes and hammers and other weapons that need lots of room if they're just going to fight in the tunnels? It seems to me like dwarves should use hoplite armaments as their go-to gear

Axes and pickaxes use similar motions, and pickaxes are mining implements. I imagine the former was adapted from the latter for warfare.

Max_Killjoy
2016-11-05, 02:44 PM
Axes and pickaxes use similar motions, and pickaxes are mining implements. I imagine the former was adapted from the latter for warfare.


I'd imagine that for classic "fantasy RPG" dwarves, a very common weapon would be a combo-head with a hammer on one side and a pick on the other.

Segev
2016-11-05, 03:04 PM
I'd imagine that for classic "fantasy RPG" dwarves, a very common weapon would be a combo-head with a hammer on one side and a pick on the other.

Sounds quite reasonable. Could even be a useful tool outside of combat, used as a pick in mining and used to smash in pitons for climbing down dangerous shafts, for example.