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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 1719134" data-attributes="member: 9254">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.  Let's look at pretty much any period in earth history.  There's been a significant plague every 2-3 human generations (50-60years) for virtually ever.  Every 1-2 human generations (20-50years) you have a war (or worse, a multigenerational war like the Hundred Years War or the War of the Roses).    The magic we've seen at the commoner level may help them survive individual infections, but plagues will overwhelm the available magics in no time flat.  In the century it takes elves to reach maturity there have been 2 plagues and 2-5 wars (we'll say 3).  With a 10% mortality rate for each event, an elven child raised in close proximity to humans will only have a 60% chance of reaching adulthood, which ignores the rigors of childbirth.  Assuming elves take 50 years on average before they have their first child, and only 43% of elves reach child-rearing age.  This ignores the elven frailty and the fact the elves are more susceptible to diseases and have few hps than 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.</blockquote>

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