Race life expectancy issues

[KoshPWNZYou]

Well great, if they all die before they turn 100 they don't a life expectancy beyond that anyway, so we should cut it.

Oh, I think it serves its purpose. The whole 'long view' thing is part of what distinguishes them (the Galadriel-esque wood-dwellers, at least).

But you're picking out a couple of unorthodox examples of elves. The D&D elf (my Eberron knowledge is not expansive) usually keeps a distance from cities. The city-dweller is going to be a rare example, and needs to be treated more as if he/she is a human. And if elves are -constantly- fighting and have been for centuries how are they going to have time to establish an 'elven identity' as opposed to a 'battle-hardened identity?'

A more common scenario is a prototypical elven society with some border skirmishing against monsters and a few wars scattered over the course of a few centuries. They might have a general or two who managed to survive all of them, but those few wars weren't enough experience for 20 levels of Fighter. You'll always have an ideal amount of fighting to limit experience -- too much limits survivability while too little limits practice.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I read an article that studies have shown that youths who play video games, particularly shooters, where pinpoint accuracy is important, develop exceptional hand-eye coordination and motor skills, which are *highly* important for certain professions.......like brain surgeon .

Just because the media wants us to believe there's no value in some of these things, doesn't mean they're right.

Banshee

In Korea playing video games is a lucrative career path. The best gamers (almost always playing Starcraft) can make a fortune in corporate sponsorships. They recruit them in their early teens, and retire them around age 18 or so, when the reflexes start to slow down. After that, they're usually scooped up by brokerages in order to train them to trade stocks. Having the kind of brain that's used to the kind of quick integration of multiple strings of data in real-time that professional gamers have is apparently a real advantage when you need to make educated judgments about stock trades in the short time you have before the window of opportunity has closed.

 

[Winterthorn]

Excellent topic! Let me share my recent brainstorm...

I think this topic actually touches on many levels of the game and speaks of many solutions:
1) DM's camapign interpretations/DM's worldbuilding,
2) house rules,
3) in-game explanations,
4) alternative game design/game mechanics,

and combinations of the above.

I too have felt there was damage to my suspension of disbelief whenever the question of a non-human race's age was compared to "experience" and knowledge. And I think the principle cause of this effect was the gradual diminishment of mechanical and conceptual distinctions between humans and other races. Look at the 3E rules that separate humans from elves: a couple of +2 racial bonuses, bilingual but less diversity in bonus languages, low-light vision, and a few weapon proficiencies, and some rarely used racial special abilities. These differences are mechnically trivial, especially as one gains levels, in the sense that advantages only occur under a few specific circumstances - mostly when dungeon delving as low level adventurers - and otherwise they are just humans with pointy ears. Dwarves and the other classic "demi-humans" are no better mechanically speaking. (That's been my expereince in many games as DM or as a player.)

This problem of weak distinctions between races is underscored by the nature of this thread's topic. While one can adequtely argue that elves are very different from humans in their development - as the tables on racial ages strongly suggest - my experience tells me the differences are effectively feeble in practice. 1st level elves can adventure with 1st level humans who are 1/5th their age, but the in-game explanations can look like trite, convenient excuses - very unsatisfying to me. I know some of this in 3E is designed to protect game balance between players, but there's a lack of luster and logic. It just shows that endless choices in a game system actually risks a loss of distinction and undermines flavour. The bigger the buffet of combinations the bigger the mess.

So all we are left with to explain this is to invent some deeper convoluted reasoning or create our own interpretations in our campign worlds. Or something more radical: start seriously tweaking the rules on races.

My preference: look back at earlier editions to re-examine what made races more distinct then than now. (I expect going forward 4E will be even worse on racial distinctions; I bet we'll just have funky looks, very weak racial rules, and racial backgrounds of low relevence while in actual play). Earlier editions don't offer precise answers (and have their own logic problems) but many players and DMs definitely felt that elves then were really different than humans.

Since 3E gave us a whole host of fully detailed game rules that we can more easily tinker with, I'm on the path to creating more profound changes to races to account for differences - so elves are no longer humans with pointy ears. Not only that, but as we are dealing with the genre of fantasy, we can more easily justify racial differences in rules built from ideas stemming from fantasy. (The trick to making fantasy logic "work", IMHO, is to make it consistent!)

I'll have to post my details on this later (and in the HR forum), but I'm all for reintroducing limits upon alignments*, classes, and even levels in classes, predicated upon racial physiological, psychological, and cultural differences! For starters we can easily double almost all the race-based skill modifiers so the mechanics are genuinely and continuously relevent in-game. Give long-lived races, especially elves, lots of racial skill modifiers (mostly bonuses, but penalties could be a good idea too - e.g. if elves are typically aloof, give them a racial penalty on diplomacy skill rolls, that way half-elves can play a more significant social role considering they have a bonus to that skill).

So why not re-introduce limitations and also award bonuses predicated on the fantasy race one chooses to play. Those limitatation and bonuses, if planned well, can expain a great many things about age vs knowledge/experience. If these changes are logical and wholely playable, then maybe the distinctions that make an elf very different from a human can become very relevent to the in-game experience. Grant a racial bonus to elves for their decades of study of Spellcraft (and a penalty for dwarves for their many years of lack of interest in Spellcraft). Give elves a racial bonus for Use Magic Device. Give some sub-races of elves a racial bonus to Knowledge (arcana). These, and other potential changes, are not game breaking bonuses, but more defined advantages that can be countered by "realistic" limits on class options, etc.

Then there's the question of overall game balance itself: well, if need be, I'd favour implementing Level Adjustments (for ECL) where it would be most effective and fair. 3E has given us the rule set that allows us to make effective and playable changes borrowed upon ideas from past editions. Now "ancient" elves in a low-level adventuring party can be made to "work" without contrived explanations. Race limits can add to fun and be logical, and can therefore enrich the flavour of the game. The details are up to our creative imaginations. What will happen in 4E relating to this topic? I really don't know.

-W

*example: if alignment really matters as a game concept, I'm having it that elves absolutely cannot be Evil but not immune to "falling", and drow are absolutely always Evil but still redemable. How? Elves of any sub-race who "fall from grace", actually transform into drow! (Although the idea is that such an occurance is very rare and the stuff of legendary tragedy.) And a drow who, through some incredible act of heroism, redeems herself/himself, actual tranforms into an elf (sub-race dependent on campaign conditions and DM's guidance). That's an example of fantasy logic that can work. It has a lot of interesting potential relating to both magic and divine influence/campaign world history. Lots of symbolism at work. (The same fantasy logic can be employed on dwarves vs duergar.)
Humans, in comparison, are allowed to be any alignment (but a DM can say "no Evil in the PC party please"), and thus retain the realism of the trials of being human that we all know so well from real life.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

Because in humans, our prolonged childhood is because we're born incomplete. The brain isn't fully developed/matured yet....but we've evolved that way, because physiologically, the head size of human babies would be too large, if it contained a fully developed brain, and consequently couldn't pass through the birth canal of the mother, without killing her. We've simply adapted biologically to the best way possibly, at this point in the evolution of our species, to create children who can survive upon birth, without killing the mother.

Elves in the game don't really have larger brains. If they did, they'd likely have several edges that humans don't, and would have an ECL as a result.

of course not, that's OUR reason.

My point is that in another species there no particular reason for them to have the same length of infancy/adolecence/maturity as humans. If you want them to, fine, but there is nothing SoD blowing in principle about a species with a 100 year adolescence. Green sea turtles are thought to reach sexual adolescence at 25 years. Egg layers, no head issue, they are just different.

I guess it just seems strange to me because I constantly read complaints of fantasy races being just "humans with funny ears" etc, so to see complaints that having something actually significantly different about them is bad for SoD seems so far to the other direction....

 

[Clavis]

I figure elves spend most of their childhood (and most of their lives) taking drugs, having sex, listening to music, and making art. When death is a thousand years away, and you live off of the bounty of the forest, what's the need to do anything else?

That's great for those elves who live in secluded forests, like in Tolkien. Not so great for elves who live in human cities, or constantly battle orcs. Like ... uh ... the elves of the Forgotten Realms, or the Elves of Eberron.

Actually, I figure the city elves have even MORE reason to live that way. After all, there's a lot of money to be made selling entertainment, drugs, and sex to humans! I see elven neighborhoods in human cities as similar to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. And I also see human clerics condemning the elves as examples of laziness and immorality.

 

[Anthtriel]

@Winterthorn: If you give elves all kind of racial abilities, you risk giving them too many abilities that never actually come up. And those are bad design. The ideal ability is one that is relevant as often as possible, yet still isn't broken.
Also, contrary to what designers may want you to believe, ECL doesn't work. Maybe sometimes for warrior characters, if the race doesn't have any particularily problematic ability, but otherwise, LA just sucks. Especially for casters. Which are very common among elves. Also, people hate racial limits. You won't get much support for reintroducing them.
You are right that there is currently some disconnect, elves have that huge difference to humans in their life expectancy, yet 3E lacks the rules and flavor to make it work (that 2E arguably had to a greater extent). But given that the 2E rules very extremely unpopular, and everyone rejoiced when level limits got the axe (and elves stopped sailing away, but I'm not as sure of the reactions), I think just cutting the elf life expectancy is the easier way out.


For the purpose of this thread (well, being able to decently reply), I actually just re-read all the racial entries in the Races of Eberron and Races of Faerun books.

And what I found out was thus:
In Eberron, most of the elves are NOT reclusive and do NOT spend most of their time singing and jumping around. There is one reclusive elven nation, but also one that is very aggressive and expansionist. Most of the other elves, making up about 8% of the entire population of most "human" nations are explicitly mostly defined by the values by their nations and explicitly have much more in common with the humans of those nations than with other elves.

In the Forgotten Realms, the issue is less severe. In Races of Faerun, there even is a paragraph asking what elves would accomplish if they had human zeal. Nevertheless, it is explicitly stated that moon elves, the most numerous elf subrace outside of Evermeet, are just as likely to live among humans as among elves. There even is a notable example in the Silver Marshes.
Sun Elves are sufficiently reclusive, but then it is explicitly stated that they are not lazy at all, but study very hard. Though, similar to the point raised in this thread, they are described as perfectionists, so it is imagineable that sun elf wizards will research less effectively than his human counterpart. Their wizards still have four hours per day, +2 intelligence and a few hundred years over their human colleagues, but then the Forgotten Realms are so ridiculosly high magic that any decent wizard makes himself immortal anyway.
Wood Elves and Wild Elves are very reclusive, so they should be unproblematic.


So my beef is mainly with Forgotten Realms moon elves (the iconic elves) and practially all Eberron elves. Those live very similar and very close to humans in all ways, except that they live way, way longer. And somehow it makes no difference at all. Which doesn't make any sense no matter how you slice or look at it. The settings don't even address it.

Oh, I think it serves its purpose. The whole 'long view' thing is part of what distinguishes them (the Galadriel-esque wood-dwellers, at least).

The FR has been moving away from Tolkien elves and the Eberron did something completely different. So the elves of D&D's two main settings already don't have much of the flavor that has been described throughout this thread anymore.

And without that flavor, the life expectancy becomes very problematic. If your elf tries to accomplish as much as a human does (and modern elves do) and is not all that rare anymore (about 10% of the population in Eberron, increasing population in the FR), then they either need to live not much longer than humans (about 200 years sounds good), or you need a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Actually, I figure the city elves have even MORE reason to live that way. After all, there's a lot of money to be made selling entertainment, drugs, and sex to humans! I see elven neighborhoods in human cities as similar to Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love. And I also see human clerics condemning the elves as examples of laziness and immorality.

Not bad. But then all your elves need to be part of the entertainment industry (otherwise they would need to get an actual job sooner or later). I don't know if you really want all your elves in a setting stereotyped that heavily, but the idea has much potential if you apply it to a single town or so.

 

[kasin]

One thing that always bothered me about D&D is the assumption that elves live at least ten times as long as humans do, yet still usually accomplish less in their life.

The common level 1 human adventurer at level 1, about 18 years old knows more (has more skills and a feat) than the elvish adventurer at over a hundred years. What exactly do elves do all the time anyway?

Remember that levels are gained through risk. No risk, no xp. The lifespan of an elven adventurer is the same as that of a human adventurer (probably months).

Also NPCs don't have the nice progression of CR appropriate encounters, they just fight what they encounter. Today a group of orcs, tomorrow a group of stone giants. Whoop, TPK.

 

[HeinorNY]

The relation between Elves and men regarding age and knowledge is the same as men and dogs.
A five years* old street dog knows a LOT about survival, but a five years human is a defenseless kid.
So when I play an elf that is 110 years old and knows the same as a 20 years old human, I just consider men to be dogs

*I'm not a dog person so have no idea how old is an adult dog, but you got my idea.

 

[Banshee16]

@Winterthorn: If you give elves all kind of racial abilities, you risk giving them too many abilities that never actually come up. And those are bad design. The ideal ability is one that is relevant as often as possible, yet still isn't broken.
Also, contrary to what designers may want you to believe, ECL doesn't work. Maybe sometimes for warrior characters, if the race doesn't have any particularily problematic ability, but otherwise, LA just sucks. Especially for casters. Which are very common among elves. Also, people hate racial limits. You won't get much support for reintroducing them.
You are right that there is currently some disconnect, elves have that huge difference to humans in their life expectancy, yet 3E lacks the rules and flavor to make it work (that 2E arguably had to a greater extent). But given that the 2E rules very extremely unpopular, and everyone rejoiced when level limits got the axe (and elves stopped sailing away, but I'm not as sure of the reactions), I think just cutting the elf life expectancy is the easier way out.


For the purpose of this thread (well, being able to decently reply), I actually just re-read all the racial entries in the Races of Eberron and Races of Faerun books.

And what I found out was thus:
In Eberron, most of the elves are NOT reclusive and do NOT spend most of their time singing and jumping around. There is one reclusive elven nation, but also one that is very aggressive and expansionist. Most of the other elves, making up about 8% of the entire population of most "human" nations are explicitly mostly defined by the values by their nations and explicitly have much more in common with the humans of those nations than with other elves.

In the Forgotten Realms, the issue is less severe. In Races of Faerun, there even is a paragraph asking what elves would accomplish if they had human zeal. Nevertheless, it is explicitly stated that moon elves, the most numerous elf subrace outside of Evermeet, are just as likely to live among humans as among elves. There even is a notable example in the Silver Marshes.
Sun Elves are sufficiently reclusive, but then it is explicitly stated that they are not lazy at all, but study very hard. Though, similar to the point raised in this thread, they are described as perfectionists, so it is imagineable that sun elf wizards will research less effectively than his human counterpart. Their wizards still have four hours per day, +2 intelligence and a few hundred years over their human colleagues, but then the Forgotten Realms are so ridiculosly high magic that any decent wizard makes himself immortal anyway.
Wood Elves and Wild Elves are very reclusive, so they should be unproblematic.


So my beef is mainly with Forgotten Realms moon elves (the iconic elves) and practially all Eberron elves. Those live very similar and very close to humans in all ways, except that they live way, way longer. And somehow it makes no difference at all. Which doesn't make any sense no matter how you slice or look at it. The settings don't even address it.

The FR has been moving away from Tolkien elves and the Eberron did something completely different. So the elves of D&D's two main settings already don't have much of the flavor that has been described throughout this thread anymore.

And without that flavor, the life expectancy becomes very problematic. If your elf tries to accomplish as much as a human does (and modern elves do) and is not all that rare anymore (about 10% of the population in Eberron, increasing population in the FR), then they either need to live not much longer than humans (about 200 years sounds good), or you need a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Not bad. But then all your elves need to be part of the entertainment industry (otherwise they would need to get an actual job sooner or later). I don't know if you really want all your elves in a setting stereotyped that heavily, but the idea has much potential if you apply it to a single town or so.

I'd prefer they actually extend the lifespans....put them back around 1200 years or so....and balance out the spread, so the "adult" stage lasts longer. Something I've never liked in the 2E/3E lifespan is that the elf spends 100 years growing up, 75 years as an adult, and then 175 to 575 years as an old person...

Banshee

 

[Ahglock]

That's better, sure, but then unless you do something drastic, there are (or should be), a couple of extremely wise and powerful Elves around, and you have the LotR problem where being something other than a elf, or someone with elf blood or elf connections basically means that you suck.

It's hard (though not impossible) to imagine a world in which 1000 year old elves, who are sometimes more intelligent than humans to start with, somehow get pushed to the side by some upstart humans. How can a human wizard compete with his elven colleague who has done the same thing for a couple of centuries?
The existing campaign worlds do a very poor job at it (as far as I'm concerned, I suppose the majority disagrees)

I just assume all races have access to life extending magics. I never removed them form my game like 3e did. If you can have long lived elves and the universe doesn't crash down you can have long lived humans so I saw no need to remove it.

Basically if you have enough wealth or power in my game world old age isn't going to kill you. Heck in the largest Human country they got so sick of "Elven" craftsmanship they started a program where any human who displayed certain levels of skills in any craft or profession would get access to life extending magics. Not everyone would take it or at least take it forever but there are a multitude of Tralin(yes I suck at names) citizens who are 1000+ years old.