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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8695081" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Yeah, that's pretty much where I see them as well. They dream big, shoot for the moon. Sometimes that means they make it. Sometimes, that means they land amongst the stars. And sometimes it means they crash-land and set an entire forest on fire by accident....or even on purpose.Mostly I present it here as an alternative to the more typical choice of elves as the "better than humans" option. Because elves have a LOT of weaknesses that their long lifespans have to make up for. Being a teensy bit magical and having good eyesight don't make up for their reproductive sensitivity. Elves are ludicrously over-specialized as what biologists might call "K-strategists."* Basically, in the logistic map for population growth, you have two constants that matter: r, the maximum potential growth rate, and K, the maximum carrying capacity of a region. Species that display more r-strategist reproduction produce lots and lots and lots of offspring, but any individual child is unlikely to survive. Collectively they will almost certainly produce several healthy adults by the end, but a large number (or even a majority) of the offspring will die. Rats are an example of a mostly r-strategist species, as they tend to have large litters of babies; crocodiles, frogs, and many other species use this strategy. Their focus is to maximize the maximum reproductive rate, thereby increasing the maximum population that will exist at any given time.By comparison, K-strategist types favor having a few offspring that are carefully cared-for and nurtured by their parents. Each individual child has a much higher chance to survive, but there are fewer of them. Humans, elephants, and indeed many (though not all) apex predators lean in a K-strategist direction. Such species maximize K, the maximum population that their environment can support. As a general rule, this strategy is usually (though not always) found in species where their population generally hugs close to the maximum it can be to begin with, so increasing K is more useful than increasing r. An r-strategist species, by comparison, is generally in the low to middle part of their logistic curve most of the time, so having a larger maximum r value is much more useful.Elves, then, are ludicrously overspecialized to K-strategist methods. Their children take a full century to reach maturity! That means every childhood death is literally multiple decades of effort lost and every adult death is at least a century before you can replace them.  That's just...not a viable long-term strategy for survival. Humans can very, very easily win a war of attrition against that development time: in the time it takes elves to grow just one generation (so, in theory, doubling their population), humans can complete five generations, having 32 times the population. I just don't buy that elves could consistently kill off more than 32 humans for every elf killed in warfare or by disease or whatever. It's just not plausible. Dwarves aren't quite in as bad a situation, as they apparently reach physical maturity at the same age humans do (so around 18-20), but they aren't really considered "adults" proper until age 50. Again, human generational turnover is just going to mean they outcompete dwarves and elves purely in terms of claiming territory--humanity will grow fast enough to fill all the other spaces before the elves can even get people out to found a colony, let alone grow one!So...yeah. I won't at all hide that a portion of it is simply that I love dragonborn. But if you really take seriously the implications of dragonborn physiology and development, they actually are VERY scary. IRL humans would have either had to make peace with them and integrate into their societies (collaborating since humans aren't as dependent on high-protein diets) in order to secure a peaceful future, or they would have to treat the arrival of dragonborn wanderers as a clear existential threat to be exterminated or driven off immediately before they can put down roots and spread.*It's worth noting, this overall theory is no longer used in biology today. It has been superseded by much more complicated theories, though not in a pure "disproof" sort of way, more in a "r/K theory was incomplete, and has been absorbed into a grander, more complete theory" sort of way. This means it's still useful as a heuristic but shouldn't be held as absolute objective fact.</blockquote>

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