LogFAQs > #906529819

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Give a Dwarf or an Elf the lifespan of a Man, and they'll be a demigod before they die.

Ehh. If you fundamentally rewrote every aspect of their culture or upbringing - and even then, still probably not. When you're dealing with races that are pretty much designed to be eternal (dwarves less so, but they're still living a couple hundred years), they tend to lack the dynamic spark that makes humans so innovative/destructive. In most settings, it's kind of explicit that it's our own fleeting nature that makes us so desperate to strive for more, and take risks other races consider borderline insane.

In RP terms, it's why humans can hit max level in classes over a period of decades while it might take centuries for an elf to reach the same levels of skill. And the most skilled elves tend to be adventurers, who travel with humans, and thus start to adapt the human mindset while retaining their own longer lifespans and supernatural potential.

If you reduce it to classical elements, dwarves have the strength and durability of stone, but also possess the inflexible and unchangeable aspects of stone. Elves are more air - their biggest weakness being their inability to ever really focus on a single goal, or to commit to things wholeheartedly, as opposed to mostly drifting through life. Humans are like water - flexible enough to adapt to almost any container, and also able to slowly erode almost anything given enough time (and potentially able to become a raging torrent under the proper conditions).

(And to complete the metaphor, the race that fits fire is probably something like the orcs, who ravage and plunder like locusts rather than creating anything on their own, acting like a raging destructive force that sweeps across the land like a wildfire.)

In most fantasy settings, an elf with a human lifespan basically dies while still mentally and emotionally a child, and a dwarf with a human lifespan dies as the equivalent of a teenager or young adult. Neither achieves anything of note, and their peers only really see them as examples of lost potential.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

Give a Man the lifespan of a Dwarf or an Elf, and they'll waste 700 years trying to find the secret to immortality. I may be the outlier in that I don't subscribe to the tenacity of Men amongst the other usual fantasy races.

In most settings, the humans with extended lifespans either wind up being walking gods, or wind up being the sort of people who bemoan their immortality and regret that they didn't live a normal life and live, grow old, and die with a loved one.

Again, it's a question of keeping that same "never satisfied, always striving" mentality but giving the human centuries to master their craft. That master wizard who managed to reach the apex of their arts in a hundred years is going to go straight past archmastery and deep into shattering the fundamental nature of reality itself and winding up on a first-name basis with gods if they live to be a thousand.

And when you take non-magic humans and give them 400-year lifespans, you get the Numenoreans in Tolkien. Whose downfall was explicitly the fact that their lives kept getting shorter and shorter.

If we're assuming a setting where humans stay mostly young and vital for the majority of their extended lives, you're likely getting epic backstory and people focusing on perfecting their craft (or you get vampires obsessed with power and control, and constantly nostalgic about the past). You really only get an obsession with prolonging that already-prolonged life even more if there's a constant encroaching decrepitude, where the human can literally feel the inexorable approach of death with every second that passes.


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