[DF] How long do the different races live?

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by RedMattis

If humans in a medieval setting were unaging you probably wouldn't see most people live terribly long. There might be the rare ruler who ruled for 300 years, immediately followed by a dozen guys who ruled for less than a decade before getting poisoned, executed, or just dying to smallpox along with most of the population.

In that situation you'd still see the normal age-groups, except that you'd have a rare few scholars, craftsmen, wizards, or elven rulers hiding in marble palaces. But the regular people generally aren't incredibly old.

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.