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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 3571714" data-attributes="member: 7240">Two points: 1. Where in the rules does it say that elves' birth rates are low? Page numbers please.2. When high birth rate societies come into conflict with low birth rate societies in the real world, what tends to happen? Today, the most powerful nations on earth have amongst the lowest birth rates: Russia, China, the US, the UK, France, Japan and Germany whereas the poorest and least powerful nations have some of the highest birth rates.Even if I accepted, which I don't, that the rules mandate elves having low birth rates, I see no evidence that high birth rates are a formula for military, economic and social success and low birth rates, a formula for disaster. If that were true, wouldn't everything in the world be different?So, what happens in our world when societies with low birth rates to go war with societies with high birth rates? In our world, they tend to win. They also tend to have short-term post-war booms in birth rate. Now, I think there is a host of reasons that low-birth rate, long-lived societies tend to succeed in conflicts with high-birth rate, short-lived societies. But I'll just mention one here because I think it is especially relevant for D&D: education and experience are worth a whole lot. This basic fact about human societies is something that D&D hugely magnifies.Again, my answer has two parts: 1. Where do the rules say that elvish forests lack resources? 2. Even if I accepted that elvish forests lacked resources, which I do not, let's examine the rates of diamond ownership in diamond-producing societies versus the rates of diamond ownership in wealthy trading nations that produce no diamonds. What you will find is that when it comes to rare, specialized commodities, (a) no society produces all of these or even most of them (b) end-users acquire them through trade not extraction.Huh? If they had shorter lifespans, wouldn't their reproductive rate go even lower!? If it takes elves a 700-year reproductive life to produce the number of children they do, wouldn't they produce even fewer if you chopped the length of that reproductive life?So, is the plan here just to say something over and over again with no supporting evidence whatsoever or is somebody going to be produce a statement in the RAW about elvish birth rates?</blockquote>

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