Long-lived races would rule the world.

[Whisper72]

Well, I agree with some of the abovementioned issues about not being of a mindset to go out there and kill things and a low birthrate. I think the common thing here is the lack of this type of ambition.

Long lived races with low birthrates, taking a longer view on things are less likely to go out and kill and have less pressure to achieve stuff in a short period of time. They are less eager to take risks with their lives, as they have so much more to see and do.

As a consequence, in general terms, the longer lived races will progress slower. This does not mean that there will be exceptions (most notably the PC's), but he risk/reward calculation is a bit different if dying meant missing out on the next 800 years, or when it means missing out on the next 40 years...

 

[Zappo]

The vast majority of members of any race virtually never face challenges above maybe CR 1. Even CR 1s are probably relatively rare. Yes, the average elf will reasonably be higher level than the average human, but the disparity can't be more than a few levels, simply because gaining XP becomes exponentially more difficult (and, at some point, impossible) unless you actively seek tough challenges. Also, in the middle ages not many people died of old age anyway, and even in the much-softened D&D world I expect lots of members of long-lived races die from disease or accidents long before getting real old. For elves in particular, that -2 CON must be a killer.

That's why the world isn't teeming with epic elves. As for the conquering the world stuff, the slightly higher average elf level is more than compensated by their extremely low birth rate and everything that entails. To tell the truth, elves wouldn't stand a chance in a prolonged war, let alone conquer the world. It would take them centuries to recover from the first major defeat, and they can't win a war of attrition either.

Humans haven't yet been able to exterminate rats, mosquitoes and cockroaches, after all, despite being very successful at killing off relatively long-lived species...

 

[Crass]

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.

Well put, S'mon. Further, what motivation would elves - or gnomes, or dwarves, or whatever - have to continue to risk their lives? Ever get bored of your job? Ever want a change of scene?

Sure, there would be a proportion of "adrenalin junkies" who would need to continue adventuring. Of these, many would die as they faced ever-greater challenges. A - very - small few would make it to epic levels, some would retire, and so on.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I think - although it may have been a different author writing in a similar vein), you can only watch every movie ever made (or fight every foe to arise!) so many times before getting sick and tired of it. And once you've fought one type of foe a given number of times, you'd have no more to learn - in D&D terms, once you're a given number of levels higher than a particular foe, it would give you correspondingly less and less experience, until you gain no XP at all for a given encounter.

 

[Zappo]

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?"

Another interesting one is "why don't elves go insane at the prospect of having to follow the same profession for 800 years?"

 

[Thanee]

And don't forget, that elves are not humans and are not driven by their pursuit of power.

Why should they waste their time on such irrelevant matters?

Bye
Thanee

 

[GrumpyOldMan]

When I used to play DnD the Elves and dwarves in the Monster Manual were not heroes like PC’s they were all 1HD monsters and people who went up levels were special. This no longer seems to be the case (though I no longer play DnD and the last version I read was 3rd edition so I could well be wrong here). However, the basic problem you have is levels. If it’s too much of a problem, find a rules system which doesn’t use levels, there are plenty out there.

GOM

 

[Piratecat]

May I channel for Wulf?

Damn elves are too busy prancing about their flowered meadows and fa-la-la-la-ing to get anywhere in life. Hmmph.

I'll tell you, if compound interest existed in a D&D world, long-lived races like elves would be really dangerous.

 

[kengar]

And don't forget, that elves are not humans and are not driven by their pursuit of power.

Why should they waste their time on such irrelevant matters?

Bye
Thanee

Well said.

If you want to have a campaign setting where these things are treated "realistically", you need to have some other explanation for the behavior of elves & dwarfs etc. In Tolkien's Middle Earth, the elves weren't long-lived, they were IMMORTAL. Immune to extremes in climate (heat/cold), immune to diseases, etc. They obviously had a very different mind-set than humans. They were also leaving Middle Earth and few of them were left. The dwarfs of Middle Earth were never numerous and reclusive by nature.

I think it's important to realize that dwarfs & elves in those kinds of settings are not short and/or pointy-eared humans, the are -essentially- alien species. They don't think like humans, they won't necessarily react like a human and -if it's important to you that the races make sense in that context for your setting- I would be leery of even allowing a player to run a non-human character.

IMC, elves only live about 300 years (at most) and are tribal hunter/gatherers (like the Plains Indians). They spend most of their time competing for resources agains other elf tribes or orc tribes. Dwarfs only live about 200 years and were mostly wiped out several centuries ago by a magical war between the gods. Humans have only in the last few decades returned to the continent and are largely living in a "frontier" situation.

 

[Numion]

The level advancement rules in the Players Handbook are intended for only the 4 or so PCs currently in the campaign. They shouldn't be used for every NPC in the world.

 

[Will]

Personally, I think elves should have a human life-span except that they can become aasimar or tieflings or other outsider templates after a certain point, reflecting their evolution to elven heritage. At which point they become long-lived or immortal.

But that's me.