Quote:
Originally Posted by Rupert
In both Roman and medieval times if you made it to early adulthood you had a decent chance of making it to old age. If you made it past child-bearing and military age, you had quite good odds of dying old.
Now, even with modern late-teens/young-adult death rates random bad luck will give a half-life of somewhere in the 150-200 year range (depending on the exact rate chosen), so multi-hundred year lifespans would be rare, but medieval unaging people would result in a fair number of people seeing their first century, though as they'd never leave young adulthood, death by childbirth and violence would stay high. On the other hand, unaging people would possibly be somewhat slower to resort to lethal violence.
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Sure, that's basically what I meant.
There will be a few really really old people, but there will also be a fair number of young people. And who knows when 'necromantic smallpox' or whatever will tear through the grand elven city kill most of the hide-away elders and most of the survivors end up being the ones who weren't near civilization. Perhaps most of the elves are 300 or less, as a result. And the one elf who remembers how they defeated the now-resurrected 'dark lord' 1000 years ago is a paranoid crazy hermit wizard who lives alone on a mountain-top with a bunch of goats.
The caution you mentioned might also explain why a bunch of high-elf soldiers age-300 are barely better than moderately renowned human mercenaries despite being 10-times older. The elves are risk-averse and don't do dangerous exercises. Perhaps they don't even have combat skills on their character sheets, but instead default their weapon skills from a few very impressively leveled Combat-Art skills.