Are we really trying to make "elves live forever" make sense?

Quote from: Dumarest;971665Are we really trying to make "elves live forever" make sense?

No, we're trying to determine how "my elf is 400 years old," works with "my fighter went from level 1 to level 7  in 5 years of game time and not end up at "my elf is level 27."

Quote from: Willie the Duck;971669No, we're trying to determine how "my elf is 400 years old," works with "my fighter went from level 1 to level 7  in 5 years of game time and not end up at "my elf is level 27."

That's the same thing, really. Elf lifespans make zero sense and never will; essentially your DM just needs to make up whatever rationale he wants for his campaign world and it doesn't matter what it is. Maybe elves hibernate three seasons a year or they're just incredibly absentminded as a result of their longevity. Any explanation will do as all are equally silly.

Quote from: Willie the Duck;971669No, we're trying to determine how "my elf is 400 years old," works with "my fighter went from level 1 to level 7  in 5 years of game time and not end up at "my elf is level 27."

5 years? I'd think 5-months is more likely based on some campaigns people write about and the not uncommon situation where game time advances slower than real time.

I find game time often advances much slower than time in the real world. Having 1 day in the game world take one or two sessions in the real world to play out (where each session is held a week apart) is not at all unusual. So unless the game has explicit expectations (like Pendragon) about the passage of game time per adventure, has a heavy domain maintenance emphasis (again like Pendragon or the video game King of Dragon Pass), requires significant training times for most if not all advancement, the setting features time consuming long distance travel (like a Napoleonics naval setting or Traveller), or the setting mandates that "adventurer" be a part time job so that normal work, family, and social obligations fill in extensive time between "adventurers" my experience is that 5+ years of game time is something that I've almost never seen pass.

Quote from: Willie the DuckNo, we're trying to determine how "my elf is 400 years old," works with "my fighter went from level 1 to level 7 in 5 years of game time and not end up at "my elf is level 27."

Quote from: Dumarest;971678That's the same thing, really. Elf lifespans make zero sense and never will; essentially your DM just needs to make up whatever rationale he wants for his campaign world and it doesn't matter what it is. Maybe elves hibernate three seasons a year or they're just incredibly absentminded as a result of their longevity. Any explanation will do as all are equally silly.

Silly or not, it can make a significant difference to the campaign. For example, if elves hibernate for three seasons of the year, that could have an effect for elf PCs, and/or for when the PCs encounter elf communities. Even silly elements to the game world can change what play is like.

I don't agree that it all needs to be silly, though. For example, Middle Earth has long-lived elves and dwarves. As I've played in that setting, though, it hasn't been using D&D leveling - i.e. the PCs aren't arbitrary grunts who necessarily turn into powerhouses. The PCs were all of exceptional birth to begin with, and their inner qualities came out. So the pattern is that in general, all of dwarves, elves, and humans rise to a level of competence that reflects their birth.

Mostly, that was for genre reasons, but I think that's reasonably consistent with reality. In the real world, if we removed all effects of aging from an 80-year-old, I don't think that would necessarily mean that person will outperform everyone younger. They have a lot of experience, but that doesn't linearly translate into effectiveness.

It's certainly possible to not care and give up on anything making sense.

I'd rather try to have things make sense. I find it interesting and I don't think it's at all impossible. However I do think that some assumptions and/or rules may need to be revised in order for things to make sense.

My take on Tolkien's elves would be that most aren't as old as Elrond or Galadriel, and they are really powerful in magic and full or wisdom, understanding, knowledge, perception, etc. They're the kind of unique first-rate examples I like to detail for an RPG world to define what the top ability levels are like, and what it took to get there. As others mentioned, it seems like most elves don't focus of fighting and are more into tuning into nature and minor magic and crafts and stuff. They're why there are really impressive elven items and magic and lembas bread and stealth cloaks and hidden amazing elf towns and great music and stuff. And those that are into archery or some fighting do tend to have piles of skill. The limits to the magical power of Elrond and Galadriel suggest that they (as much as we know about them anyway) define the extent of magic power an elf can get at by centuries of study - that is, magic probably takes a long time to learn and/or has power limits or starts with weak versions and very slowly builds, and/or the magic system is just nice and subtle rather than flashy overt spells.

I think the implications might be less about coming up with excuses to limit elf abilities, and more about looking at how a game's experience power curve works. But in even a fairly mild experience-based advancement system, I think it's actually pretty interesting what the implications are for long-lived characters... and to me that calls for looking at what limits improvement, and what the power levels in the world should be like, which I think even without long-lived characters, is something worth thinking about.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;971614This had come to mind, but I didn't dwell on it. You are right, though. They should be dominating the setting with that much experience.

What amassed experience? They probably hit a plateau just like everyone else and have aptitudes and hobbies they focus on and get only so far and then level out. They probably level out higher than a human. But long life in no way = mastery. Its a fallacy that gets trotted out again and again.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;971615I always got the impression that humans were more populous than elves and dwarves, and they're also exposed to the same dangers. Really must be the reproductive cycle. Blackvulmea's link (thanks!) makes me think that maybe elves and dwarves are more like real life whales, with longer gestation and longer parental investment in their offspring. Longer than humans, anyway, which would be a lot.

On the other hand, there seem to be so many orcs and other low level critters around. It would be cool to think that they come from something like spontaneous generation , but they have been shown to have a sort of tribal family structure from what I remember.

A longer gestation period and a longer infancy makes for a much more vulnerable race. Probably more than could sustain against the sheer lethality of most D&D settings.

In BX Elves and Halflings have sizable kingdoms. Alfheim covers nearly as much area as Karameikos. Not sure on Dwarves, but likely they hold a chunk of the long mountain range.

In most D&D settings orcs and goblins are depicted as having a high birth rate maturity rate too. Which makes up for their general bent for getting themselves killed in droves. Adventurers are Orc population control. (When they arent slaughtering eachother. Which is also depicted as often.)

Well, beyond plateauing, for the very long lived, there's also skill retention and skill atrophy.  After a 20 year layoff, how many people can do X activity as well as they did at their peak skill level?  What about an elf who spent the last 50 years picnicking and making jewelry, just because he could?

Yeah, when you throw effective immortality into the mix it alters a shitload of stuff.  Anyways, I don't think that the OP question needs to be super-complicated: demi-humans just don't reproduce at the insanely fast rates humans do.

Quote from: Bren;971656Tolkien's Eldar Elves were tougher than all but the toughest human heroes and I seem to recall an implication in the Silmarillion that humans learned some things (fighting maybe) faster than did the elves. And then there seemed to be a waning of elven capability a feeling that (most of the time and with a few exceptions) elves in the Third Age are not now what they once were. Humans seemed more warlike by nature than did the elves who seemed like they'd be happy singing songs, telling stories, making rings, or whatever rather than spending hours a week practicing fighting.

One option is to assume that elves become bored after reaching a level of mastery in most disciplines (except the one that may truly fascinate them) that is not better than some humans. I think Moorcock in his Corum novels characterized Corums people, the Vadhagh, as pursuing many different interests over their longer than human lifespans.

Or perhaps they tend to become ridiculously skilled in extremely narrow subsets of skill areas the vast majority of which are not combat applicable. So you get elf who is really, really skilled at throwing Raku pottery, the jeweler who is super specialized in making rings, the gemologist who knows everything there is to know about garnets, the scribe who has mastered to an absurd level the art of calligraphy, the biologist who knows everything there is to know about the life-cycle and habits of the Umber Hulk.

Yeah fixing elves doesn't fix the zero to hero in just 90 days problem.

The Broken Sword has something similar. Skafloc (a human raised by elves) learns sorcery and the martial arts much faster than his elvish peers because of his short lifespan.

There's a huge overlap here between fantasy-elves and sci-fi Transhumans. Some of it is stuff we might have to consider, socially, in terms of our own futures: how will our society change when people can reasonably expect to live for hundreds of years, or maybe more?

Quote from: RPGPundit;972608There's a huge overlap here between fantasy-elves and sci-fi Transhumans. Some of it is stuff we might have to consider, socially, in terms of our own futures: how will our society change when people can reasonably expect to live for hundreds of years, or maybe more?

I don't know how popular webcomics are with this crowd. But there's a popular one called Shlock Mercenary set amongst a life-is-cheap style mercenary group in a society that just (as in, during the strip's run) discovered brain-mapping-backup+clone-bodies immortality, and coming to grips with what that means. I've been reading it and drawing parallels to a D&D world where Ressurections, Longevity potions, etc. change society.

I always enjoyed the story that dwarves are carved from stone or hatch from eggs carved from stone, and halflings hatch from cabbages.

Hobbits are the product of hobos and rabbits.