this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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While the "elves spend most of their long lives in leisure" explanation is kinda nice and Tolkien-esque, it doesn't solve everything to do with their lifespan.
Imagine you have an event in your setting that took place 1500 years ago. That's as far back in time as the fall of the Roman empire is from the modern day. In real life that's a long enough time for multiple empires to rise and fall, for language to evolve to the point that speakers can no longer understand the previous tongue, and for people to change their religion and forget they were ever pagan to begin with.
Elves in DnD live 750 years. A 200 year old elf PC could reasonably say "wait what if my grandpa was there? DM do I remember my grandpa ever talking about this?"
This is a result of taking something that should be awe inspiring and making it mundane (letting people play as elves). And it's not the only instance of that in DnD.
I don't think that necessarily takes away from the grandeur of something. If you want something truly ancient and out-of-touch, you can easily just set it 15,000 years ago instead of 1,500 and no player will bat an eye or even notice, and the elves' lifespan gives an easy 'this is why they remember and are still more knowledgeable with this ancient civilization than other races'.
It's also not any less awe-inspiring to have people who lived in an important time period. We still have living veterans of WW2, and WW2 is no less important or intriguing (as evidenced by the number of historian hobbyists who love to talk about all the details of WW2).
I am currently doing world building for a ttrpg campaign, and recently I did try to set an ancient empire 15,000 years in the past.
The basic idea was that empire A existed 15,000 years ago (them existing while the world was still covered in ice was important to the aesthetic), then they would be wiped out by empire B some time later, only for empire B to be destroyed by a great calamity. I wanted for there to be remnants of empire B still hanging around in the form of people who still worship a few of its god-kings and groups of people who still try to preserve its knowledge and maintain its infrastructure without fully understanding most of it.
The latter group was based partially on the Catholic Church preserving records after the fall of the Roman empire and partially on how the core of the Jewish religion was able to maintain a continuity of information and tradition over vast stretches of time even in the face of mass migration and social upheavals.
The problem was that I underestimated just what a vast gulf of time 15,000 years is. For one I was struggling to fill in all that time with events, and for two I realized that this knowledge preserving group would have had to existed for way longer than I was originally envisioning. Not only would they be older than the Jewish religion, they would be older than ancient Sumer. In fact you could take the entire history of the beginning of the Sumerian empire to the present day and fit it into that span of time twice over.
In the end I had to invent empire C, which refurbished some of empire B's infrastructure before collapsing themselves, as the actual origin for the knowledge keepers. And even with that I still had to move the timeline up by thousands of years.
The problem with that is that it would really change the dynamic of how non-elf civilizations would develop. Unless the elves are extremely insular, and even then. How do you have a plotline involving the player characters needing to delve into an ancient tomb in order to discover whether or not the current ruling family are the legitimate heirs of the kingdom when you can just ask an elf? How does the world get into that situation in the first place when you can just ask an elf?
I have two friends who take turns running DnD 5e campaigns in a shared setting who have made elves entirely extinct for that reason.
Then don't fill in all that time? You can leave periods open or unmentioned, you don't need details everywhere.
Depending on your depiction of Elves the effect is the same (provided the group is Elves) because they're often predicted as just slower/more leisurely in their approach to life (although I'm not sure what you mean by the statement in the first place, because something being older than you intended doesn't sound like an actual problem).
You could, yes. Here's the thing: history doesn't have to happen. You are the worldbuilder, you can easily say there was a long period of nothing at times, or a period where record-keeping gets mixed-up/distorted/unreliable (but earlier periods still manage to maintain their connection more readily, this has happened several times in real life if you care a lot about realism).
That seems entirely like a 'you' decision. There's nothing here that sounds like a problem long-lived species caused. You could've easily just said empire B lasted longer or managed to revitalize itself temporarily (as the Roman empire did and the Byzantine empire did many, many times) or any other number of solutions like a golden age, a period of upheaval and warfare with another empire that empire B ultimately wins, or you could just leave the entire extra period of time unmentioned/undetailed. None of this seems relevant to long-lived species though, since as a long-lived species you can just drag out their periods of history (a good ruler will be a good ruler for a lot more years and their nation is more resistant to change just because people with the ability to change (or not change) things stick around longer). That would even be very realistic for a long-lived species.
Do you trust any old man you meet on the street? If an old WW2 veteran suddenly starts yelling about how he met Hitler and totally knows the names of every member of his administration (thereby potentially allowing you to hunt down some war criminals), do you just believe him at his word? For one, senility can affect Elves just as easily as any other race, and the effect would possibly be way worse given they can be senile for much, much longer. For two, Elves don't necessarily have a better memory than Humans. As time marches on, their memories can distort, be forgotten, and fade. For three, hostility and lies exist. Even if your kingdom is egalitarian and mixed races, individuals have their agendas. The word of a person is extremely tenuous, and you could easily have Elves saying opposite things. One Elf says the hero is the heir to the kingdom, but also this Elf happens to be a close family friend and has been for generations. Another Elf says the hero is not the heir, but also this Elf happens to be the godfather of the person who would be king otherwise. You can include any number of Elves and just split them into factions because popularity is fallacious and not real evidence.
And, as an alternative point to your earlier point, Elves being around and supportive would mean the empire lasts longer. The conditions for major upheaval like a succession crisis would be rarer specifically because an Elf could be around to make sure there's no issues, thus solving your issue of needing an empire C... or on the other hand an Elf could make things a lot worse if they liked and people trusted them. Elves don't have to be good-intentioned.
And a fourth point, Elves may not care/notice at all. If the Elves are insular and live in the woods they're extremely unlikely to bother remembering the Human king, after all he only lives like a scant 100 years at most so why even know his name? Barely an associate. Even if there's good relations, Elves could easily see Humans as 'all the same' i.e. it doesn't matter who's in charge and they'll just support the least-likely to cause problems (even if that happens to be the wrong heir or someone who would be bad for the humans).
I could probably think of a lot of other ways to solve these issues, but point is when worldbuilding you can solve a lot of problems with a lot of different solutions. Yes, you can just get rid of long-lived species if you like. You can also modify the world to match the fact near-immortals exist and I don't think it's that hard. It's your decision, ultimately, but there's a lot of ways to solve it.
I'm gonna respond to your points a little bit out of order, because it's more expedient for me to set up the topics I'm going to talk about that way.
I agree with this. One of my favorite settings, World of Darkness (specifically the Vampire versions of OWoD), is completely defined by the fact that immortal beings are present in the world, and their machinations dominate everything about it. And one of my favorite DnD-like settings, Arcanum, deals pretty heavily with how humanity interacts with longer lived races, and major parts of its backstory are defined by the actions of the longer-lived elves and dwarves.
The thing is neither of my DM friends that I mentioned in my original comment wanted to deal with the elven illuminati and they didn't want to make elves senile. Their world was also not very Tolkien-esque, so "elves spend most of their lives doing nothing" didn't fit the vibe they they were going for.
This is what my friends originally did with elves before they got rid of them, but they had another issue. Very often they would like to end one campaign, do a 100 year timeskip, then start another one in the same setting. If a player character was an elf that meant that they should still be around, and in good health. This was problematic because these campaigns were generally fairly low level, and they didn't want to have a high level NPC running around.
I'm sure there are ways to deal with that too, but with all of the other issues elves created I gather they decided it wasn't worth the effort.
So, I should have made this more clear in my original comment, but there are no non-human races in the world that I am building (it's not even for a DnD campaign). That anecdote was just about me finding out the hard way how long 15,000 years is.
As to why it's a problem if the knowledge keepers ended up being older than I had originally intended it's because it's really hard to keep a cohesive organization with the same goal around for thousands of years. The core of the Jewish religion is probably the most successful at this, and it's extremely impressive. Some native American and Australian Aboriginal cultures kept accurate oral records for even longer, but that was within a completely different social context.
So I didn't want my fictional group to do a 2x or 3x better job than real life people. Likewise I didn't want massive empires lasting way longer than real life empires.
I can go into more detail about my world if you're interested, but I didn't want to make this comment any longer lol
"You go to ask your Grandpa about it. He tries to explain but is so fucking racist you can't even tell if he's still speaking common. In between gibberish that's probably old-timey slurs, you pick out something like 'follow the quest hook' and 'the dm already told you where to go'"
While it does mess with things when you're trying to get that kind of feeling it does open up new opportunities. Such as in a setting I was making there was an empire that collapsed around 100 years ago. That's long enough there aren't really any humans or other normal life span races people around to remember what it was like outside of stories. But the elves and other long lived races do remember and that can create very different attitudes between people about how they think about the empire and if they miss it's stability or are happy to be free of it on top of the differences that exist naturally between the different cultures.
You're right that I've never read the 2e and 3e sourcebooks, just 5e and some OSR stuff, but nothing in between.
Most of my experience playing DnD comes from playing in homebrew settings. Maybe the real problem in that case comes from trying to use a roleplaying system that has a bunch of cosmology and mysticism baked into it in a setting that either lacks that or has metaphysics that actively clash with it.
But if so I think that's probably a pretty common experience with how 5e is played.