[DF] How long do the different races live?

[maximara]

Originally Posted by Opellulo

Not DF specific but I was always fascinated by the age cycles of fantasy races. Let's go with a "vanilla high elf": if you put his old age at 650 years and then scale back all his age cycle by ten, then you have a lot of very funny scenarios:

- Baby Elf needs someone to change his/her diapers for more than 30 years... That's a nightmare scenario worst of any great horror out there.
- Child Elf will swing from seesaws for about 70 years, are there enough trees for that?
- Teenager elf is expected at sit for at least 70 years in high school (or its setting relative) and I let you sink in that nightmare.

Yeah I know that there was something like "early maturation" that was a band-aid to justify this concept, but that opens another can of worms on the feasibility of that kind of societies: your body is adult at 18 but nobody takes you seriously for another 200 years... That's a ready recipe for social disaster.

TL/DR version: fantasy species makes no sense, always blame Tolkien for that and the some more.

To be fair to Tolkien his races were heavily influenced by Faerie myths which had humans be the shorter lived beings. Heck, Gandalf may have looked human but he was actually an angel like being (Ainur) and effectively "got better" after being killed by the Belrog.

D&D took that ball and ran with it. For example, an Elf, gray wasn't considered "old" until the got to 1001 and could live up to 2000. Half-Orc were the shortest lived race back then hitting "old" at 46 while the Humans not considered "old" until 61.

In the D&D Cartoon (The Lost Children) when some alien children who look about 10 are actually in their 70s and 554 being middle aged. When Presto says "That sound's great" Epic quips "Are you kidding? They probably go to school for 360 years." At the end when told that it will take 15 years to repair their spaceship one of them asks "That soon?"

That last part shows something people often forget about long lived races. Their sense of time would be way different from that of a human.