Hi,
For a campaign, I'm trying to rationalize how something that can live for a hundred+ years doesn't succumb to accidental fatalities long before they even reach 80 in a society without the means of making safety or fire equipment.
Is it just one of those things I should skim over as quickly as possible? I've seen some explanations that Elves have psychic powers, can see into the future, and can also talk to trees to know where forest fires or even light fires may be happening. But that sounds like retarded smurf garbage for idiots, and I don't want to introduce that to my campaign.
>>47439417
>without the means of making safety or fire equipment
I don't see why they don't have that capability. Are they pre-neolithic in your setting?
>>47439417
I'm with you, OP. Also, another weird setting detail I've seen, how can something that lives for 80+ years not die well before 40 in a setting where everyone drinks water that's carried through lead pipes?
"This is one of those things you should just accept as fact and move on about, k?"
really tho elves are cowards (mostly) so they've probably been hiding a bunch or w/e
>>47439435
Tree-dwellers
I pitched the idea some time back that they could also succumb to disease and parasites, living in the jungle and all. I was immediately bombarded with the "REEEE ELVES CAN DRINK PURE EBOLA REEEE LOOK AT MY FANON" idiot(s). I pretty much dropped that part of my campaign and am only coming back to it now.
>>47439495
Good point. Didn't even think about that.
>>47439417
ill add to the OP that they manage to live 800 years while having -2 con in a world with out medical knowledge. seems like they should die enmass to bacteria, bumps, common cold, falling out of their tree houses, malaria, orcish gang rape, etc
seems dumb
These questions could easily be answered by reading any literature on elves published by gaming companies.
Why are elf threads so shit? I mean jeez anon, this is elf 101.
Usually they are pretty resistance to all kinds of diseases since Tolkien did it. You can also just say it's because they have good healing magic, because magic and elves you know.
And why you think they never have accidents is beyond me. Maybe they additional DEX helps them a lot.
>>47439665
>>47439626
>Why are elf threads so shit? I mean jeez anon, this is elf 101.
The only way I could make that work is if I combined all the positive traits from all those different works together to make disease-resistant, fire-immune, psychic superbeings who are completely immune to any ill effects. I don't want to make retarded smurf races.
This is what happened last time I asked. Immediately, people started pulling the best traits from all the best depictions of elves. How do I make this balanced while rationalizing how they're able to live so long?
Again, it seems like the best answer is to ignore the question.
>>47439715
Tiresome. Just assume part of their longevity is, unsurprisingly, resistance to a lot of kinds of diseases that are not, in game terms, disease effects. There are no hard and fast rules of how a race's lifespan is defined.
The whole Elf idea came from beta fags whos mind needed a place to fantasize a reality where they would be better then Chad and Joe Shmo because they cant rationalize it even in a fantasy character of theirs. So, they created this new race with sexy aesthetics who are more graceful then "lowly humans" and can totally live forever and are the most expirenced and are the best at bowing because rasin brand crunch. Notable quotes include
>"Humans are like pets to the Elven race!"
>"Why would a elf ever love a human if they are sooooo much more intelligent."
>"Humans are just savages who can't understand the grace of elves"
>>47439809
>cont.
>I mean jeez, this is elf 101.
>Usually they are pretty resistance to all kinds of diseases since Tolkien did it. You can also just say it's because they have good healing magic, because magic and elves you know.
>>47439571
>a world with out medical knowledge.
Even in the most backwoods parts of Eastern Europe during the Dark Ages people had at least some medical knowledge. Treatments may have been crude by today's standards, but they seemed to work pretty well considering that if you lived past childhood you had a pretty good chance of living well into your 60s.
>>47439715
Why are you making this so difficult for yourself? What the fuck is a smurf race?
Let's consider they are typically wood elves, whatever this really means.
>some elves constantly roam the woods, spotting every fire quickly with their keen senses
>because they live there for centuries, they developed pretty good techniques for dealing with fires
>because they live there for centuries, they know about all the good healing remedies they can harvest in the woods
>pretty good hunters, so stupid shit like tripping over a root usually doesn't happen
>can still die to a dangerous beast, but you wouldn't call this a hunting accident
>the elves dying early are not there to tell you that they died early and are usually not worth talking about
Does this sound overpowered?
You know...
This thread makes me think about there being a society of elves, High Elves let's say, that are almost entirely incapable of surviving outside of their outside their mystical land or magical city. Centuries of arcane eugenics, terraforming and reliance on omnipresent domestic magic use have made the Elves and their environs heart-achingly beautiful and their realm an otherworldly paradise, but have left the population itself extremely fragile and more than a little lacking in common sense.
>>47439571
What is healing magic
>>47439841
>What the fuck is a smurf race?
Well, you know the tabletop definition of a smurf, right? Someone who basically rationalizes that their characters can do basically _anything_.
>Your suggestion
Not too bad, I might use it.
>>47439809
This is my thought, too. Generally, well-adjusted people almost never roll elves unless it's some kind of strange joke character.
Blame tolkien, he gave them all the plot armour.
>>47439809
The differences in races aren't too pronounced given cranial similarity.
>>47439846
Let's just be glad said elves understand isolating is a safe alternative to totalitarian Orc behavior.
>>47440422
That's right, well-adjusted people playdwarves
>>47439417
Elves actually have much higher birth rates than humans but decimate them selves through brutal maturity rituals that only leave the most quick witted and capable alive.
Gee, I don't know OP. Maybe the same fucking way humans can reach 80 years old without dying just by tripping or something like that?
Let's also not forget they also actually remain fit, healthy and young instead of becoming disposable tissues like human prone to dying to the slightest breeze like humans do as they age.
>>47439417
>D&D meme elves
STOP USING "GENERIC FANTASY SETTING", YOU RETARDED CUNT. GENERIC FANTASY SETTINGS ARE GOOD FOR ONE THINK - QUICK AND DIRTY MEMEVENTURES IF YOUR GROUP IS COMPOSED OF HASTILY BROUGHT TOGETHER DEGENERATES.
THINK WITH YOUR ATROPHIED NOGGIN, YOU KNOW, YOUR SECOND BUTT THAT, BECAUSE OF NATURE'S CRUEL JOKE, RESTS ON YOUR SHOULDERS. RETARDED HIPPIES THAT LIVE FOR 800 YEARS MAKE NO SENSE? OF-FUCKING-COURSE, BUT THE WAY TO FIX THAT SHIT IS NOT GIVE THEM VERY SITUATIONAL MAGIC THAT DISAPPEARS INTO NOWHERE WHEN A HUMAN PASSES BY, THE WAY TO FIX THAT SHIT IS
I'M GONNA BLOW YOUR FUCKING MIND HERE BOYO
IS TO MAKE THEM NOT RETARDED. THE PART OF IT IS TO NOT MAKE THEM ONE-ARCHETYPE MEME RACE THAT CAN DO ONLY ONE THING. STOP MAKING RIDICULOUSLY LOPSIDED RACES AND YOUR STUPID PROBLEMS WILL FIX THEMSELVES BY FUCKING MAGIC. MAGIC OF WORLDBUILDING AND NOT BEING A TWATBURGER.
FUCK YOU.
>>47439417
Only a fucking idiot doesn't run at the sight of a forest fire.
>>47440860
I like your style.
>>47439417
Funny, I had a setting where Elves could straight up live into their 10,000's.
Like, 4 ever made it that far because the odds of just simple accidents killing you means that no one really lives for more than one or two centuries.
>>47439417
is there magic in this world?
then you have an excuse for the minor bullshit that could kill them not killing them.
they live in a fire prone area, they have fire protection cloak gifted to them at birth that serves as a blanket for the baby till old enough to properly wear it.
this dude fell out a tree, minor medical treatment on the ground till taken to someone who can do better
oh shit this world is a hell hole of fighting
then the elves are very elusive, only the young typically mingle with the races who live less. their cities are protected by some of the best arters who ever lived, who have dedicated well over 80 years of their lives to getting good with a bow, if shit is going down, they have the drop on you backed up by some of the most powerful longest lived mages if you are a legit threat to the city.
not exactly hard to imagine legit ways to have old elves, at least in a setting where elves aren't a kill on sight kind of race.
you could also have elves be a long lived race who have small tribes of sub 20 people, that way they are hard to track down and find, so long as they don't stir up trouble it isn't hard to see them live for god damn ever.
>>47440422
>well-adjusted people
Why are you even here?
>>47439541
you can argue that through generations and long lived elves they grew immunities to many of the more natural diseases that are common and passed it on to their offspring as this is a thing that humans do too, to a lesser extent.
as for parasites, magic or have elves who are already fairly old deal with most of the food for people so they know what to look out for and how to deal with what could be a parasite/parasitic.
>>47440422
But elves can be played almost exactly like humans, just as elves. It's a good way to get used to playing non-humans for the first time without throwing yourself into the deep end of gnolls and kobolds.
>>47439571
you just made an argument for any elf that makes it passed a certain age is a supreme badass.
>>47440422
I dunno. The normiest guy in our group plays an elven gunslinger and does it pretty well. Then again, our group is well-adjusted in general, so there's no ridiculous nerd points contests.
>>47440860
A rage-filled post that still manages to give good advice? Where am I, this is not /tg/ - everyone should be perfectly friendly or condescendingly shitposting.
>>47439417
You done goofed. If you're running this setting using a D&D or Pathfinder system, it's fairly easy (and logical) to assume every elven settlement has at least one Druid, Cleric, and/or Wizard of at least 5th level, if not higher for cities. Consider the wide variety of healing spells, nature-attuned magic, and water magic that could be used to mend minor injuries and prevent forest fires.
Elves are used to fighting monsters stronger and more numerous than themselves. They know full well the value of spellcasters, and it would be stupid to not have a few of them everywhere elves live. It also ensures that elven children can be more easily 'scouted' for magical talent, leading to a society with a higher percentage of spellcasters than those of other races, despite not having any more natural magical aptitude than any other.
If this isn't enough to justify the gradual loss of people through accidental death and incurable illnesses, you can always make Elves very fertile with quicker pregnancies. Sure, they die off about as easily as humans, but there's so much more of them that statistically if only 5% of them reach 300 years old, that's still a large amount of people. Plus, because hit points exist, past a certain number of levels a creature becomes pretty much immune to any single accidental injury, such as falling off a cliff or being struck by lightning. It would pretty much take explicit murderous intent or incredibly bad luck for anyone with 60+ hit points to die.
>>47439417
In the SoS setting, an element of the Dinnic (elvish) races is that they sort of envy humans for being able to die naturally, because, as immortals, the Din all end up dying in really embarrassing ways, like falling down a flight of stairs or being stabbed to death by thieves. Humans usually die of natural causes, which is considered more dignified than slipping on the metaphorical banana peel and breaking your neck.
>>47439809
Wrong. Elves were, and remain, white people to white people. It was an early 20th century way of portraying a superior culture to a people who had never known such a thing.
>>47441163
But what aboutbrown elves
>Thought
Repeating a lie that someone else has said is not a "thought," it is a reflex in the spinal column. You have never had a thought in your life, nor have you ever shared anyone else's.
>>47441190
Superior Culture + Fetish. Common enough, where do you think the ears came from?
>>47439417
>elf
>succumb to accidental fatalities
no
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHQSmJq0nmQ
>>47439822
>cont.
>Wrong. Elves were, and remain, white people to white people. It was an early 20th century way of portraying a superior culture to a people who had never known such a thing.
>>47442588
>cont.
>Superior Culture + Fetish. Common enough, where do you think the ears came from?
>>47439417
I don't know, let's go ask the tortoise how he made it to a century.
Get comfy, this might take a while.
Real answer: most don't. Those that do employ the knowledge and skills they've accumulated to help the others. As for fire safety, just have them not use much fire. If they're standard "harmony with nature" elves have them be adapted to a primarily vegetarian diet that doesn't need much cooking. Have them use lightning bugs or glowing mushrooms for light instead of torches.
If you need them to use some manner of fire, make it a communal fire pit in a clearing, well ringed in by stones or packed earth so sparks can't catch.
The risk of deadly forest fires is actually minute in a healthy forest, because brush and dead leaves are regularly burnt off before they can build up, and green wood burns TERRIBLY. Hell, wood loses 40% of it's weight once it's dried and seasoned. That's all water. You can't burn down a living tree by lighting it on fire; you need to heap something that burns better around it, light THAT on fire, and keep it burning until the heat's baked enough water out of the tree for the wood to catch.
The reason we see so many devastating forest fires now is because for the last few decades we've been stomping out blazes left and right, and as a result there's a shitload of ancient leaves, dead brush, and downed limbs built up into a thousand square miles of dry kindling just waiting for some asshole to toss their cigarette butt out the window. Thanks to all that shit, the burn gets hot enough to catch the trees on fire, and once that happens it travels up the trunk into the canopy where the baked leaves catch like paper.
>>47439809
Er...
>Elves
>Not Chad
They are eternally young and dead sexy, they run around and shoot game animals in the wood all day, and the character of Legolas is one of the biggest reasons the fantasy genre is flourishing due to how many nerd girls he got interested. They are even more Chad-like in Tolkien's works, more explicitly strong.
Poul Anderson elves, the main inspiration of D&D elves, were instead a race of effete nerds who used magic for everything, but that were curb stomped by Chad. Quite directly so, it noted that although they're magical and immortally skillful and so forth, they're just too physically weak to stand up to a strong human 1v1.
>>47439846
Presumably this sort of thing is why -2 con. Also the original elves D&D ones were based off of, Poul Anderson elves, were indeed not so great at surviving outside their realms.
>>47440422
Elves are amongst the biggest normie bait races imaginable.
>>47441141
"Dying in a way where you shit yourself endlessly as you become more and more retarded" is not my idea of a dignified finale.
>>47441141
>>47439417
> without the means of making safety or fire equipment.
Really OP? All the problems with Elven lifespan and that's what you go with? Fucking safety and fire equipment?
Anyways, in MOST fiction, Elves are supernaturally graceful and that can be rationalized to prevent most of the plebeian deaths that plague other races.
But nothing explains why a 300 year old elf is only as skilled as a 16 year old human in most tabletop games.
>>47439665
Tolkien's elves weren't just resistant to disease, they didn't get sick at all. They could also heal from wounds that would kill Men. They're not super tough, not in the Third Age at least, but are generally more "healthy" and youthful than mortals. It helped that the lands they lived on eventually acquired a certain "magic" of its own, even on the wilderness, so it wasn't regular forests they lived on. Lothlórien in particular is a living remnant of the First Age of Middle-Earth, incredibly beautiful and almost completely free of the impurities that later came into the world, preserved by the power of Galadriel's ring,
>>47439809
The "whole Elf idea" comes from Norse mythology dumbass, and was distilled into its current form by one guy who everyone else ripped off
>>47440607
Not for that bro in Helm's Deep.
>>47439417
While I don't have it on hand- I recall reading a study somewhere on biological immortality that indicated that taking the average of all accidental and incidental causes of deaths in to account would still allow someone to live roughly 5-800 years before it became an INEVITABILITY that they die.
I'd assume between being super healthy, physically active, granola munchers most elves would avoid the worst health issues and the dexterity and conservative lifestyle probably reduces the risk of accidents.
They'd have a population pyramid like anyone else, with the majority of them being young to middle-aged with a slow decline to relatively few elders as wars, accidents, suicide, disease, and murder took their tolls.
>>47440607
They didn't have plot armor, there were pefectly fine in-universe justifications for pretty much everything you may think was plot armor. But if they're told by themselves without the full context of having read the Silmarillion and LotR on their entirety it comes off very badly.
Tolkien's elves are a good example of how you can get really, really close to writing a Mary Sue without it being awful. Again, it's really hard to explain without reading the Silmarillion, but here's a metal album that sums up a lot of it if you want
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMcBOvOuhoY
Particularly Nightfall, The Curse of Fëanor, Mirror Mirror, Noldor and The Eldar. I like Mirror Mirror, even if was just for the "true hope lies beyond the coast" line. Tolkien does a fantastical job of giving a mystical vibe to the sea and the West in LotR as the passageway from Middle Earth to the Undying Lands (and formerly Numenor as well), and it's captured perfectly
Fëanor would probably count as a canonical Marty Stu if he wasn't so fucking stupid
Kill yourselves. You know who you are.
>>47450510
If I'm not sure if you're referring to me, does that mean it's not?
I don't play it but I just use Pathfinder's Age/Weight/Height thingy.
>>47439417
Magic. They have magic.
>>47439417
The elves I run in most fantasy games tend to die of less-than-natural causes. Normally I have it to where it's generally frowned upon to actually live your full life span and die in bed. They think it looks like you did nothing with your life.
Older elves generally become fine artisans, younger elves explore and gather knowledge. Between all this, there's constant feuding on going between not just the houses, but the ideologies of the elven subraces. Wood elves think high elves are pansies, high elves think that stone elves are magicless idiots, stone elves think moon elves need to stop flagellating themselves over a particular event that happened a few thousand years ago, and moon elves think wood elves need elf jesus.
Just make elven lives, y'know, exciting. Don't just say they "do a bunch of magic-y bullshit and die". Of course there are accidental fatalities along the way, and anything that lives to a ripe old age and isn't a master craftsmen or tradesmen is a waste of space.
>>47439417
The same way dwarves do, but less "Take it on head on", and lack of magicky?
>>47450897
What does the 2d%, 4d% and 3d% mean?
>>47451992
A d% means you roll two d10's, one for each digit. Same as a D100. So 2d% would add 2d100.
>>47439715
You know who don't have to have your elves live for many centuries, right? You can easily have them live to a little over 200, like I do.
