I have been developing the Lore of my own world and I was thinking about Half-Elves.  Half-Elves live about 150 years, so that has implications on their outlook on relationships with both Elves and Humans.  And then I started thinking about how just having a long life such as an elf or a dwarf would impact your societal structure.

Has anyone else developed this into something for the game?

As another project, I am developing the history of a dwarven mining settlement.  So understanding how Dwarven societies would behave and the impact on long life is my primary question, since the dwarven project is more immediate.

Every time your campaign lands on a culture with some extreme asymmetry between its average lifespan and the lifespan of a party member, you gotta have a doomed romance and play the bard Mercury, ideally on a boombox:

But seriously, if you have, say Warforged in your game and your game world has occasional rogue Warforged who go against whatever regime subjugates them, a rebellion in effort to overcome some sort of Pinnochio clock ticking limitations, you need another age asymmetrical romance that gets critiqued by a snarky character of the more longer lived and subjugating race dropping this quip:

And that will cause the PC to question whether they may have been Warforged themself....

I wrote absurd lifespans out of my conworld for the most part. I do have dragons--well, there's really only the one that matters if you're a player... On the other hand I do have immortal humans masquerading as Angels, Demons, and Faeries, so take your pick...

The longer the average lifespan of a population, the higher the risk of overpopulation and all the problems that come with it. If there is a natural element in the creation of a long lifespan, there's usually something to balance it like a low birth rate or low survivability.

Then, there's the whole psychological issue. It's difficult to imagine what living for centuries will do to a mind of higher comprehension when we cannot do it. A long-lived society that is rather alien to us is a likely possibility as our reasoning could be incompatible with such longevity. That's assuming the society isn't turning on itself out of overpopulation combined with old survivalist ways of thinking.

What does a mind do when it doesn't worry about dying?

Does it lose the sense of self-preservation and take risks? That would be a means of introducing low survivability.

Does it occupy its time with noble pursuits? While the survivalists in us shorter-lived people see limited effects of our efforts in our lifetimes, a long-lived mind might evolve to move away from inward-focused survival instincts to mitigate some of the problems that come with overpopulation.

How far are you willing to go to create these creatures? At some point, you will need to start hand-waving away some things and let people just accept thing without full knowledge as to why. As one who was there when we counted clock cycles on CPUs to do things faster, I see so many people now with a barely-applicable, vague idea just how their technology works, but they accept it all the same. For D&D, simplifying things and just accepting it keeps people focused on the important parts of the story.

There are pretty interesting works that explore some of these issues. Arcanum was a pretty fantastic game that is, essentially, about the Elves of a world struggling over hundreds of years to come to grips with the advance of technology in the hands of species who live much shorter lives-- thereby never truly seeing the consequences of their own actions.

I think one of the downsides to Elven longevity is that they would be unlikely to develop much technology at all. Innovation in a nearly immortal species would be rare. Humans, who have a fraction of their lifespans have proven to adapt poorly to technology over time and I have a hard time seeing elves not being okay with stone tools and wood because "we got by fine with this when I was a kid." Mix this with a natural magical aptitude, and I have a hard time believing they would develop metal working at all, let alone more sophisticated technologies. In a way, this was the picture that Tolkien was painting when he conceptualised the popular elf: they were a bygone people. Their time was over.

This theme is reoccurring when encountering Elves in fiction and I think it's pretty powerful. They aren't able to adapt to a world of man and technology. They're not creative as we understand it. Their works are derivative copies of the same achievements of a distant age: a pale shadow of a pale shadow of a pale shadow. Only rarely are elves shaken free of this. This is why you can have a 120 year old level 1 fighter. They don't have the drive and ambition of humans, spurred on by the spectre of death, like was suggested above in another post.

I've been wondering about elven longevity.

I've played in games where another player ran a very young elf assuming they grew up as fast as humans until reaching adulthood and then their aging slowed dramatically.

For one character I played I planned on revealing they had been born during their tribe's flight from a dragon via the Feywild.

Usually such a birth is a momentous one, but in her case she was born with what they considered horrific disfigurement and by that I mean she was born with the appearance of a plain human child.

Her tribe wanted to abandon her, but one of her grandparents refused escaping with her once it became clear they wasn't going to accept him going into exile with her as a compromise.

He barely escaped with the aid of a Lantern Archon leading them to the dubious safety of a portal to a prime material world.

Once there he raised the child until he died from extreme old age when she was 97 years old.

However her aging was drastically slowed so by the time he passed she had the appearance of a 13 year old child thus only aging 1 year for every 7.5 years that passed.

The DM in my game never bothered paying attention to details like that sadly.

But this thread reminded me about that and was wondering how you handled aging in such characters from longer lived races?

I'd consider any character who lives under 200 years to be comparable to humans - I doubt it would have too much of an impact. They might master a few more skills, or specialise, but it won't affect too much.

Elves and vampires and lich's and so forth, however, would probably drift toward extremes. one might become exceedingly reclusive and obsessed with a single project, thinking nothng of spending 100 years without seeing anyone else in orde rto complete it. They will spend altogether much longer with any given thing, and struggle to comprehend ugency in anything not life-threatening. Spending 2 years at an Inn so they can get to know the innkeeper and learn their stories might seem a waste to a human, but to an elven bard who's lving to 850+, it's nothing.

I also expect that they would not see the benefits of inventions as they won't see spending 5 months in the fields picking vegetables to feed them for 2 years as a waste. They just wouldn't consider time to be a reason not to do things.

So eveything you think "I'd love to do that but it's likely to be 10 years of my life I'd not get back", elves would do. They'll all be artists and doctors and so on. An elf might start healing you and say "I spent 25 years serving as a light cleric in the church of holy healing", in the same way as a human might say "I spent 6 months studying healing", but obviously with far greater effect.

I would also expect them to mistake people often. They say that there are only so many faces in the world, and they just keep going around. an immortal would see people that died centuries prior in the crowds. It's likely to make them somewhat detached from the mortals.

Quote from CaileynRothenel >>

I've been wondering about elven longevity.

I've played in games where another player ran a very young elf assuming they grew up as fast as humans until reaching adulthood and then their aging slowed dramatically.

For one character I played I planned on revealing they had been born during their tribe's flight from a dragon via the Feywild.

Usually such a birth is a momentous one, but in her case she was born with what they considered horrific disfigurement and by that I mean she was born with the appearance of a plain human child.

Her tribe wanted to abandon her, but one of her grandparents refused escaping with her once it became clear they wasn't going to accept him going into exile with her as a compromise.

He barely escaped with the aid of a Lantern Archon leading them to the dubious safety of a portal to a prime material world.

Once there he raised the child until he died from extreme old age when she was 97 years old.

However her aging was drastically slowed so by the time he passed she had the appearance of a 13 year old child thus only aging 1 year for every 7.5 years that passed.

The DM in my game never bothered paying attention to details like that sadly.

But this thread reminded me about that and was wondering how you handled aging in such characters from longer lived races?

 I like to think that outside of a particular species, it's difficult to guess age. So, to an elf, a 50 year old elf would be as distinct as a 12 year-old is to us. To humans and the like, they would just seem like an adult elf.

Quote from ThorukDuckSlayer >>

I'd consider any character who lives under 200 years to be comparable to humans - I doubt it would have too much of an impact. They might master a few more skills, or specialise, but it won't affect too much.

Elves and vampires and lich's and so forth, however, would probably drift toward extremes. one might become exceedingly reclusive and obsessed with a single project, thinking nothng of spending 100 years without seeing anyone else in orde rto complete it. They will spend altogether much longer with any given thing, and struggle to comprehend ugency in anything not life-threatening. Spending 2 years at an Inn so they can get to know the innkeeper and learn their stories might seem a waste to a human, but to an elven bard who's lving to 850+, it's nothing.

I also expect that they would not see the benefits of inventions as they won't see spending 5 months in the fields picking vegetables to feed them for 2 years as a waste. They just wouldn't consider time to be a reason not to do things.

So eveything you think "I'd love to do that but it's likely to be 10 years of my life I'd not get back", elves would do. They'll all be artists and doctors and so on. An elf might start healing you and say "I spent 25 years serving as a light cleric in the church of holy healing", in the same way as a human might say "I spent 6 months studying healing", but obviously with far greater effect.

 

I would also expect them to mistake people often. They say that there are only so many faces in the world, and they just keep going around. an immortal would see people that died centuries prior in the crowds. It's likely to make them somewhat detached from the mortals.

 There are species in the game that only (or there were) live about 30 years.  That said, I think if you said to a race that lived to 200 versus a normal human "It would only take 20 years", you'd likely get a very different reaction to how reasonable that would be. I honestly think if people lived for 200 years, it would dramatically change how we perceived time and the world around us. I think the perspectives of a 150 year longevity and a 200 year would be similar but a dwarf (who can live to 350) can hypothetically live to see 11 generations of humans go by. Which means a dwarf that adventures with a human in the youth, can realistically go adventuring with that same human's great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchild-- presuming a dwarf can still adventure at 300 years old. I'm not sure I would know how I would react if someone said they knew my ancestor from 1722.

It would have a big impact on how the races talked with one another when one was going to outlast the other by more than a lifetime.

It would also have societal impacts.  I believe Dwarves are not considered adults until around age 50, and elves at around age 100.  So a dwarf that lives to 400 could see seven or eight generations of his family born.  An elf should expect to see seven generations of his family.  Humans, in contrast, would only see the second generation beyond their own, and this is not assured.  Now consider a half-elf that should live to 150 and might reach 200.  They are an adult at age 20.  By age 40, one of their two parents will be dead or feeble due to age.  The other parent should be in the prime of their life.  This half-elf will grow old and watch the regret on their parents faces while they experience the decline of their child, and observe the decline of other generations of their children.  How will this have an impact on half-elves looking for a mate themselves?

A second tier implication is family size.  Going back to humans, they are known for being prolific.  It is not wild for a human to marry and have six to eight children, expecting more than half of them to survive childhood.  A dwarf could marry in their 50s and produce their children.  If those children married in their 50s and had their children and so on, Dwarves could be in jeopardy of having a population crisis.  So to curtail that, culturally they may expect families to limit themselves through social custom to three children.  After Seven generations, one typical dwarven lifespan, they could have 6561 G-G-G-G-G-G-Grandchildren, which would double the population of their culture about every other generation, unless they had a significant problem with child mortality, in which case they would have more children to make up for it.  This means each settlement would have to be working toward doubling their food production rate every 100 years.  This is manageable while there is fertile land to bring into production, but if there isn't, then the settlement has to split off significant slices to go find a future for themselves.  If dwarves had more than 3 children per generation as a normal occurrence, then the problem becomes much worse.

Of course, there will be competing forces reducing the effective rate of expansion, such as war and raids by monsters and bandits, but bandits don't have a good track record against the insular dwarves and elves.

So these are some of the things I want to understand as I develop my own lore for the longer lived races.

R.A. Salvatore wrote about this. Basically, an elf has two choices when it comes to dealing with humans.

Stay away from humans and keep to elves. This is the easiest and most common approach. Relations with humans are kept business-like.

An elf that chooses to befriend humans must learn to accept that any relationship with them is temporary. An elf must approach it as living multiple lives and resetting every generation.

This is easier for elves who are comfortable with the knowledge that even upon death, elves and humans have different fates. Humans move on; Elves come back (or move to other worlds).

For an elfs perspective of living with humans, imagine that dogs can talk. Fully human minds, but dog bodies.

You live in a village which is all dogs except you. You find their enthiusiasm nice to be around, and enjoy it there. But you know that you will outlive each and everyon oe of them, and their children, and their grandchildren.

There will always be that balance which each elf has t odecide between - enjoying their company but taking their loss, or isolating themselves so that they never feel that hurt again.

Exactly the same decision as people make when they are deciding whether to get another dog after their first passed away.

One very interesting concept of long lived species is the retention of knowledge. The human idiom that history repeats itself might not actually apply! 

Short lived creatures will have to attempt to transfer as much knowledge as possible between generations to maintain progress and development, both culturally, and technologically. We invent books - but even with as much advancement as possible, there is leakage all over the place, and people end up repeating certain mistakes, and marvel at things that were commonly considered normal a few generations ago. 

I know elves are often portrayed as reotrgrade and cold, not wanting to partake in human society. But how much do we hang out with locusts? Not a perfect example - but there are some clear undertone in many stories as well that elves struggle with the uncontrolled breeding and spreading of e.g. humans. I think its fair to say that there is a degree of conservatism, but quite possibly because they have already observed the impact of certain technologies on shorter lived species (e.g. the remote observer that studies the ants scuttling about to try and understand their behavioural dynamics can still be impressed by their strength and organisation without starting to build an anthive for his next house).

So in my view the struggle is between defining what is enlightened and long-lived learning and observation that it repeatedly lost/ignored/rewritten in other civilisations, and what is actually recluse and isolationist tendencies. I'm leaning more towards the first one - but yet, they are often interpreted as the latter. 

I have been looking through a lot of different threads like this one to try and find stuff out about this exact topic. there are a lot of different people that have said a lot of different things that have made me rethink my perspective on things like time and age.

i was trying to find out elves perspectives on marrying humans because I'm writing a book and in it, one of the characters, an elf, falls for the main character, a human. the main character does eventually become a god an live forever, but they don't know this when the elf falls for them, so the elf is like, "omg, I never realized how hot he was, but he's a human, so i'll only get to spend a few decades with him." It kind of makes me laugh now

If you live for 300 years, and have kids around the age of 30, you have 10 generations - that you can meet, that likely live under the same roof (if you're dwarf, at least). My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather is so long ago, not only do I have no idea who he was or where he lived, in ~1690 he would quite possibly be entirely untraceable. For a dwarf, it might be as simple as asking him over dinner 'how were things when you were young?'

I have a lore for Dwarves where they live for about 400 years and have generations about 50 years apart.

When a dwarf is born, their family makes them a tapestry showing their genealogy back to the years before their oldest living relative was born.  This is given to them at a specific birthday, like 20 years old, and they keep it for the rest of their lives.  It hangs in the entryway to their dwelling, and when they get married the two tapestries hang facing each other.  These tapestries are used to verify the degree of inbreeding is not violated when two dwarves become married.  With clan based cultures, guarding against inbreeding is very important.

But living a long life as a dwarf or elf is not a problem so long as they remain in their own culture.  Living as a human, half-elf or elf in a mixed breed culture with differing lifespans does lead to certain other problems.  So I want to figure out a coherent lore to allow that to make sense.