VirgilCaine
First Post
kigmatzomat said:This bugged me too until I stopped and did the math. The "eternal" races stay away from humanity because the side-effects of humanity slaughter them. Wars and plagues screw with the long-lived races far more than it does the humans.
The only way the elves and halflings can survive is to pull back. Dwarves and gnomes are tougher than humans (high con, bonus to saves) so they probably fare better in mixed communities, though war is equally devastating since humans will have 2+ generations for every long-lived generation to repopulate.
Overall, the long-lived races will have boom/bust type populations where it slowly swells, suffers a plague/war, then swells again. Elves and dwarves probably rely heavily on long-running mystical defenses of their territories to make their borders seem more fordible than their population could justify. (golems, summonings, area effect mind-affecting enchantments, permanent symbols, etc) Elven skirmishers with bows can harry much larger forces in their forests while the shoulder-to-shoulder dwarves can generally defeat opponents due to superior tactics and competence.
The one advantage the elder races possess is superior historical information. Old elves and dwarves have more exposure to wars than any human so even an elven commoner will be a more than competent tactician.
But this means the long-lived races are in a holding action, waiting to gain territory when humans are weak and expecting to lose it when a nasty bug gets through their borders.
The baelnorn starts looking like a very logical maneuver since it creates a plague-proof continuum of knowledge that can help the long-term survival of the race vs. the high-speed breeders.
So this equates to halflings and elves being the reclusive sylvan types, Dwarves and Gnomes being somewhat mixed with humans, and half-orcs probably being the most common non-human PCs.