What Do Really Long Lifespans Mean For a Setting?

What is an elf, anyway? In folklore, a goblin or gnome or troll was traditionally a malleable idea, and many such words would overlap or share a common definition of “magical creature living in the wilderness.” D&D was one of the first enterprises to create a systematic taxonomy, and to decide what exactly should differentiate, say, a hobgoblin from a bugbear.

While elves were still vague in the very earliest years of D&D (like the decidedly dwarf-like “bearded elf” pictured in the original D&D brown books), the game soon settled on an conception of elves familiar to Tolkien fans: human-sized creatures with pointy ears, famous for their grace and artistry, and imbued with magic. D&D makes its elves astonishingly long-lived, presumably drawing from the Tolkien example; but (to the best of knowledge, because I am not a lore person) the game does not copy Tolkien’s cosmological underpinning for that long lifespan, and usually ignores the societal implications of thousand-year-old sapient creatures mingling freely with humans living out conventional lifespans.

What if we don’t ignore this incongruity?

Elf Time Hits Different

Think about this – a 1st level elf fighter and a 1st level human fighter are only marginally different from each other in most editions of D&D. So how do we explain their comparable fighting skill, given the drastically different lives they must have led before taking up adventuring?

In D&D 3.5, for example, the starting age table for a human fighter suggests 15 + 1d6 years – that’s 18.5 years old on average. The recommended starting age for an elf fighter is 110 + 6d6, or 128 years old. Shouldn’t the venerable elf have vastly more martial skill than the pimply inexperienced human teen, even if they are both 1st level fighters?

A possible answer is that longer-lived creatures simply experience the passage of time differently. Elves, with so much time available to them, are just more deliberate and gradual in how they live their lives. An elven fighter spends years contemplating the art of swordcraft before ever picking up the blade. Their training and instruction is glacially slow. Hundreds of thousands of hours are spent just holding the blade, understanding its balance. Endless days of superficially irrelevant exercises to reinforce basic form, ala martial arts films. Doing it faster might technically be possible, but it would just seem… wrong to them. Thoughtless. Unnatural. Graceless. 

The human fighter, by comparison, learned to be a “fighter” during a breathless blur of weeks, days – maybe just hours. They grabbed a spear from a fallen warrior  and desperately attempted to defend their village from an attack. Or they were drafted by the emperor’s army and received only a few weeks training before they were thrown onto the front lines. Their martial education was impromptu, improvised, condensed, ramshackle; whatever it was, it was fast.

To an elf, everything about the human fighter looks sloppy, rushed, reckless, ramshackle. To the human, the elven fighter might as well be a sloth. This kind of contrast between fighting styles shows up all the time in fiction – think of the two contrasting swordsmen protagonists in the anime Samurai Champloo, or the broadsword/rapier battle at the end of the movie Rob Roy. Just extend that contrast to humans and elves writ large, and you start to answer the lifespan discrepancy.

Next week: Bizarre Life Cycle