Long-lived races would rule the world.

[dead]

Can someone please help me resolve some issues I'm having with elves (and other long-lived races)?

OK . . . in D&D 3E an elf starts off in the game at about 110 years of age yet has less skill points and feats than a human. Now, some say this is because elves mentally (and physically) develop slower. Granted, but if this were true then their progression from 1st level would advance at a snail's pace -- it would take them, maybe, four times longer to get to 2nd level than a human would. This is not the case, however. Elves advance just as quickly as their fellow human adventures within the same frame of time.

Someone might then reply: "Oh, they develop slower but when they get to 110 years of age their mental development is the same as a human's". Granted, but if this were the case then you'd have epic level elves all over the place. They'd still be in the prime of life while their fellow human adventures have succumbed to age. If a human is nearing the end of his life and has only attained 20th level, does this mean an elf who is reaching the end of his life is 40th, 50th or 60th level? Elves with their long lives, and with their level progression in no way slowed, are at a distinct advantage to humans from a campaign point-of-view -- they, and other long-lived races, would be ruling the world; their leaders all of epic-level magnitude.

Someone then might say: "Oh, but elves leave for the mystical elvish realms when they reach epic level". This could be a good explanation, perhaps.

What do other people think? How have you handled this issue in your campaigns?

I admit that capping non-human levels in previous editions was abitrary and stupid, but I still think there are issues to be resolved on a campaign scale.

 

[Glyfair]

Just because in theory a long-lived race would gain more levels, it doesn't mean it happens in practice. Races that are long lived rarely spend their entire lives involved in "level gaining" experiences. They tend to take the long view and take their time, which they have much of.

Even a race that could be argued to constantly be gaining experience doesn't mean they gain huge amounts of levels. Take a dwarven warrior. He might spend every week of his life fighting orcs and monsters. However, even if you take the D&D game literally for these things, he slows down fast. Most of the time he's fighting orcs, doing well, but his experience is decreasing as he gains "levels." Most dwarves don't go out finding high point monsters so they "gain levels faster."

 

[Alzrius]

Having long-lived creatures be of high-level opens the door for all sorts of abuse...most notably, why don't dragons and giants have uber-epic levels? They live longer than elves...and what about eternal creatures, like Outsiders, Fey, and Undead? Shouldn't they have an ungodly amount of levels?

It's just simpler and easier to set the human par across the board in terms of levels gained over a lifetime...no matter how long that lifetime is.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Well, not everyone has the urge to seek out the biggest, baddest trouble around, like the average adventurer does. Plenty of elves are probably all play and no work - and even those who fight all the time probably spend most of their time killing orcs and other weak opponents, like another poster has pointed out. Sure, it will keep your realms safe, but once you killed a couple of hundreds of them, you simply won't learn much more from these combats...

Plus, elves and dwarves don't tend to be as flexible like humans - they will spend a century or two in their home town until they have perfected a certain craft, instead of going out into the world and learning about new ways how to apply the knowledge they already have. And this is what humans do. Sure, the end result might not be as impressive in terms of sheer craftsmanship, but humans will ultimately learn more this way.

Plus, why should epic level elves or dwarves try to rule over humans? One day you make an agreement with a couple of honorable humans who agree to your enlightened leadership and everything seems to go well, and a few decades later their descendants call you a tyrant and make nothing but trouble for you! Trying to rule humans is like trying to keep sand in a sieve... Better to stick with your own kind.

Of course, if you really want to rule the world, there is another option - killing off all the other races. Which might just happen in some campaign worlds, but it isn't to everyone's style...

 

[s/LaSH]

I handle things by saying that heroes are special. They have some quirk that allows them to gain talent at meteoric speed by doing 'adventurery-type stuff'. Most people (in fact, everyone except plot-important people) don't have this ability; they gain ability by slow years of practice, being taught by others, learning from books etc. XP is, essentially, wasted on commoners and monsters alike.

Meanwhile, adventurers can gain power through crisis (so to speak), and as they're the key figures of the scenario, there's nothing particularly wrong with that.

Thus, the elves that gain mondo experience and attain high levels are key members of the story; all the other elves are part of a ridiculously conservative culture (assume that this enables them to stay sane; imagine if you'd lived through every European conflict from the Hundred Years War until today and then tell me a stable society isn't hugely desirable) and don't gain skill as fast as, say, humans.

It's a little handwavey, but it works for the purposes of telling a story, which is what I like doing... and heck, my XP policy reads 'Adventure done? Have a level!'. I'm not big on micromanagement.

 

[Sejs]

Nearly every description of elves notes their low, low birth rates. Supposed to be a point of balance with their long life spans - once you get one it sticks around for a bloody long time, so you only get new ones very rarely.

Against a quicker-lived opponent in your standard drag-out war type situation, elves just lose. Flat out. They can't keep up. Year one, both sides lose 10% of their total number. Year two, same again, both down 10%. Year three, both down another 10%, but the shorter lived, non-elves by this point have recovered one of those 10% losses. The elves havn't. The longer it goes, the worse off it gets for the keebs.


So yeah, the elves would rule the world... up until the point where someone challenged them for it.

 

[pawsplay]

I've pondered this, and came to the conclusion that as you break two centuries or life or so, the chance of death by freak accident approaches a certainty before you reach 1000. If you are actually an adventurer, you are unlikely to die of old age, period. Even for a canny player, making it from level 1 to level 40 is an accomplishment.... so much the worse for NPCs.

That said, I think elves would probably have one or two levels before they ever reached physical maturity. And level 1 or no, someone who is a hundred years old ought to at least have some extra Ranks in Crafts, Knowledges, and Professions.

 

[Snoweel]

I've pondered this, and came to the conclusion that as you break two centuries or life or so, the chance of death by freak accident approaches a certainty before you reach 1000. If you are actually an adventurer, you are unlikely to die of old age, period. Even for a canny player, making it from level 1 to level 40 is an accomplishment.... so much the worse for NPCs.

Yep.

The thing that separates the PCs from NPCs is the fact that the PCs will never be forced into a situation where the only outcome is their own death.

PCs tend to go on adventures designed around the CR system. NPCs, otoh, may truly be ambushed by a creature whose CR is 8 higher than the average party level, and who wants nothing more than to immediately kill and eat them, end of story.

It is for this reason, that when NPC adventurers hit a certain level of success and wealth, they retire - why risk your life (because that's what adventuring is) when you have all you need?

And on top of that, there's the whole thing about when you hit a certain level (8th iirc) that CR 1 encounters don't give you a single experience point anymore.

And just deciding that you'll seek out the easiest encounters that give you xp isn't a surefire methid either - how do you know a beholder doesn't live in that Orc den?

I mean, sure PCs can be fairly certain - they have a DM to complain to if they feel they've been dealt with unfairly, but NPCs have no such luxury.

That said, I think elves would probably have one or two levels before they ever reached physical maturity. And level 1 or no, someone who is a hundred years old ought to at least have some extra Ranks in Crafts, Knowledges, and Professions.

Another point on long-lived races, I think that the longer a race lives, the more it has to lose if it dies, the less likely it will be to risk its life.

Certainly not a tested theory, but it makes sense to me.

 

[MerricB]

Can someone please help me resolve some issues I'm having with elves (and other long-lived races)?

What do other people think? How have you handled this issue in your campaigns?

I admit that capping non-human levels in previous editions was abitrary and stupid, but I still think there are issues to be resolved on a campaign scale.

Indeed. And capping non-human levels in previous editions also didn't solve the problem! A good question to ask in 1E is "why aren't most elves at their maximum levels?" (They've certainly been around long enough!)

There are two things to be considered.

The first is that NPC level gain has always been at the DM's whim. There is no way that NPCs gain XP at the same rate as PCs. Even in 1E, a character could go from 1st to 9th level in the space of a year of adventuring. Why aren't elves at high levels? Because they aren't. The DM said so.

The second is that XP are not acquired easily by NPCs. They don't face the higher level challenges - which effectively caps their maximum XP and level.

Logically, an elvish or dwarven settlement should have more higher-level characters than a human settlement does; but the spread of those levels is different in each campaign.

Cheers!

 

[S'mon]

Unless you give XP just for hanging around being alive, there's no reason to expect "Epic Elves." If you want to be realistic, let them get extra skill points for 'life experience', not XP.
In fact the low reproductive rate, time to maturity, and (critically) time-between-generations greatly disadvantages longer-lived species competing w short lived rivals. If an elf generation is 10 orc generations and each orc has 10 times as many children, each elf has to kill 100 orcs just to keep parity.