How the hell does something live for 500+ years without getting cancer?

...

This, cancer repression genes are a thing. The only reason that humans don't have more of them is because we didn't need them until relatively recently.
Other organisms that live longer in their natural habitat are more resistant to cancer. Because they do need those repression genes.

Think if I was ever stupid enough to run D&D (of any flavour) again, there's definitely room for a magic +5 elf slaying weapon called Cancer

Not the case. In thousands of mummies found in Egypt there were only two with cancer cells in them, and that wasn't even malicious cancer. First breast cancer was diagnosed in XVIII century IIRC.

I'm not saying that it didn't exist before, it certainly did, but it has become more and more common with growing industry.

How many were old enough to even get cancer? Even in Egypt, lives were short. Plus it's also just hard to find traces of cancer in remains so old. And there were certainly more than two.

>lives were short

Historical life expectancy seems really short because of the high degree of child mortality messes with the statistics. You had a significant chance of dying as a kid, but chances were that if you lived to be 10, you would probably live to be 60.

60 still isn't very long.

What kind of writer would include cancer in his wonderful magical world?

This, cancer is something you give the audience not the characters.

>Forgetting about Necrotic Cysts
>Implying Orcus doesn't cook something nasty up on ocassion
>Implying early elf death isn't always attributed to their stupid-curious nature, sexual experimentation stage, or chaotic stupid nature when it comes to exploration, or the fact that elves are an anathema to nature and have no natural predators to contest them next to their piss poor understanding of the RULES OF NATURE and the fact that there are a number of horrible monstrocities dedicated to killing off large swathes of their species by D&D canon, like an Elf Eating giant thing D&D's equivalent of Hircine pops in to the material plane every so often.

user, life expectancy in Ancient Egypt, with child mortality removed, was still only around 40 years.

I appreciate that you took your time to dig through the Ancient Egyptian birth and death registry archives.

It was just so nice of them to keep records, I just had to give it a look, you know?

Kind of like how it was claimed in that is was all due to childhood mortality.

Both sides need proofs.

>Trees manage to do it somehow
Wrong. Trees get lots of cancer, but the cancer can't often metastasize because tree cells don't have a lot moving parts.

Any time there's a weird lump on a tree, that's a cancer growth.

Naked mole rats don't get cancer. And they live 3 times longer than mice which get cancer.

*10 times longer.

>that's a cancer growth
Caused by agrobacterium tumefaciens.

Because seeing that elvea obvioisly have a diferent evolutional history they might have ways of dealing with IT you fuck. There are species which are compleatly resistent to cancer

Healing magic restores telomeres.

That means eternal youth not cancer free.

What about magic cancer? Elves are made of magic stuff, right?

It means less potential for naturally occurring genetic fuck-ups resulting in cancer.

Disease: Disease effects give the target a disease, which may be an invading organism such as a bacteria or virus, an abnormal internal condition (such as a cancer or mental disorder), or a recurring magical effect that acts like one of the former.
>an abnormal internal condition (such as a cancer

Periapt of Health
The simple periapt usually appears as a blue gemstone fastened to a silver chain designed to be worn around the neck.
The wearer is immune to all disease, including supernatural diseases.
Price 7,500 gp

Immunity to cancer is a pretty good thing to have in a magical item

Remove Disease is also a spell, and thus removes cancer.

geneticist here, all you need is a higher copynumber of cancer regulating genes. Thats pretty much all it comes down to. Thats how elephants and whales do it. That, or you could figure out what makes the ribosomes in a naked mole rat so much better...

>implying cancer can't be caused by microorganisms

hope you get EBV

Not exactly
The major thing in the past was infant mortality - due to bad water and general hygiene
If you survived that you probably lived to 50 odd or even 70s in the more civilised areas if you were well off - but life was brutal and the quality of food etc meant you'd be in pain especially in cold climates where you'd have endured crap winters

quatr.us/people/lifeexpectancy.htm
Dysentery etc due to poor hygiene was the main cause of death attacking infants and those over 40
- but if you were in let's say a monastery or other privileged place you'd be okay

A reminder that if you live long enough and nothing else would cause your death, cancer will eventually do it on account of your gradually weakening immune system which gets weaker as you age (considering no other illness kills you)

If someone was to never age then the odds of him getting cancer "naturally" are very small and rare.

Then again magic ain't gotta explain shit nigga

Dragons and other similar creatures should get bigger, bigger, and bigger until they cant support their own weight, their hearts give up and they can no longer breath.

I believe only mammals decay as they get older. The rest just get bigger until the heart says no more.

Cure Disease. :^)

>Disease: Disease effects give the target a disease
Well, would you look at that.

not everything is D&D mate
plenty of settings where healing magic wouldn't help against cancer or actively make it worse because technically its still a part of your body

This is pretty much what happens to dragons, according to Draconomicon. They eventually hit an upper limit at which they stop growing, and then their body just gradually starts to shut down a little at a time. Which can take centuries before the dragon actually kicks it of old age.

Cancer is not a disease.

It' s an uprising followed by a declaration of independence.

>declaration of independence
>keeps using your resources
>just doesn't contribute

fuck that shit, cancer's your cells forming a union and going on strike

Who knew that cancer could be so fascinating.

Zeon is literal cancer then

Its from a section on spell types. PF likes to be absolutely clear on certain things. Sometimes that means a bit of redundancy.

Disease spell type: creates disease effect, here's what constitutes a disease
Is basically what the sentence fragment means.

While you were reading this comment around 20 cancer celss formed in your tongue alone. How aren't you getting cancer? Because your immune system recognized them as damaged cells and destroyed them all. Long-living creatures just need to have better immune system, or at least better at fighting cancer.

Incorrect, certain animals are extra resistant to cancer, but there have been I believe 1 (maybe 2 ) documented cases of cancer in naked mole rats, but it is super rare for them

>healing magic wouldn't help against cancer or actively make it worse because technically its still a part of your body

magic doesn't care that it's a part of your body. magic cares about how your body should be. and it knows the cancer is wrong, so it fixes it.

how does it know this? it's magic, bitch. ain't gotta explain shit.

...

Cancer is a cell that goes haywire thinking it's serving its exact purpose. Magical healing probably CAUSES cancer.

yes, the cancer thinks it's doing its exact purpose, because it's a cell. magic realizes it isn't, because magic is intelligent.

The most significant risk factor for getting cancer is still your age.

in D&D sure
but not in every single setting

there are plenty of settings where magic is more subtle and requires additional knowledge to properly use

take a setting where healing spells work by accelerating the body's metabolism and cellular growth. Casting one of those onto a cancer would make things oh so much worse.

Or a spell that removes foreign objects/organisms from your body: it simply fails to work on cancer.

Magic does not need to automatically solve every god damn problem just because god damn D&D does it that way, and don't you dare try to argue "BUT IT HAS EEEEEEELVES", because Tolkien's magic was a HELL of a lot more subtle and didn't automatically fix every problem.

In D&D healing magic is just application of positive energy, same way wound spells are just slapping someone in the face with negative
If you sit in the positive energy plane and soak it up, you explode into a tumor ridden mess when you hit double max HP

...

nah in at least one version of D&D as pointed out a general remove disease spell also removes cancer and that's fine for D&D (well it would be if its settings actually took how easy and powerful magic is into account but that's a whole other can of worms). However people need to stop trying to think of D&D as anything other than a set of rules which apply to a select few settings and absolutely nothing else. Its not the fantasy dictionary.

>take a setting where healing spells work by accelerating the body's metabolism and cellular growth. Casting one of those onto a cancer would make things oh so much worse.

Doesn't sound like very useful healing magic. All it does it let someone already healthy get out of a little bed-rest. How much I guess depends on how fast the spell is. If its instantaneous, like most healing magic, then, uh, It'd have to also feed energy and nutrients directly into whatever it's accelerating the growth of, to keep it from simply instantly disintegrating as its accelerated growth causes it to consume all available resources and then itself.

So now your spell not just accelerates growth and metabolism, but creates for all the accelerated cells all the resources necessary for them to sustain healthy growth in exactly the location that they require it. Which means that your magic now has to know exactly how all the cells it interacts with functions, never mind all the other minor stuff like their exact positions and the exact positions of everything around them so not as to generate said resources inside something it would cause harm to, and the exact positions of everything INSIDE the cell so not to destroy the cell if it materializes something inside of it.

Seems like it'd be less complex to just have it know how to fix the body.

>Or a spell that removes foreign objects/organisms from your body: it simply fails to work on cancer.

How can your magic be smart enough to accurately identify what a foreign object is, but not smart enough to identify what cancer is? Right, magic. Ain't gotta explain shit. But at that point the argument isn't that the magic isn't able to solve the problem because of something inherent to the setting, but because you've decided it doesn't get to do that just to make the setting harsher.

Grimdark for the sake of grimdark doesn't strike me as very subtle or requiring any additional knowledge either.

>It'd have to also feed energy and nutrients directly into whatever it's accelerating the growth of
Like, say, positive energy?

>How can your magic be smart enough to accurately identify what a foreign object is, but not smart enough to identify what cancer is?
Flesh has spirit. A knife blade doesn't have spirit.

>In D&D healing magic is just application of positive energy,

What is with Veeky Forums always assuming its 3e?

cuz 3e is bestest dnd

Why doesn't it doesn't cure ageing then?.

Because your soul has a time limit

If healing magic can cure all diseases and is cheap and easy to perform, why isn't the world super-urbanized and overpopulated? Do nations starve because they don't have the resources to feed all the population dure their backwards societies?

Even monsters, a way to control the population, could be systematically hunted down to extinction by well-organised armies of hunters.

Then why does reincarnating as an elf give an extra 500 years to humans?

Because reincarnation changes the barcode on your soul

What, you're just blasting enough energy AND matter into them to sort of serve as a general all-purpose mixture of everything anyone would need?

I don't even know what would kill you at that point. The random matter appearing inside critical parts of your body to destroy them? Or if that doesn't happen, all your internal organs shutting down from how you pumped so much shit into them that they can't handle it and you die from... some kind of poisoning? Or the cancer you're 100% getting from the crazy energy blasted straight into you destroying all your shit?

Unless of course your positive energy know how NOT to give people cancer or do any of that other stuff. And we're back to magic being intelligent enough to know not to do that shit.

In other words you're saying it isn't actually removing foreign objects at all, just spiritless objects. I can't immediately think of any massive problems with that though, I'll give you that.

Not that that matters, I suppose. If you can't heal diseases anyway then I will just dip my weapons in crap and you'll die no matter how much magic you cast on yourself.

Does healing magic cause abortions?

it probably isn't cheap and easy to perform unless you're the player characters, for whom it's readily accessible to make the game easier to play

god says you're not allowed to

The humans who were created by God didn't get cancer either.

Healing magic only exist so that the player will never hear: "sorry, your character died of tuberculosis"

>In D&D healing magic is just application of positive energy,
>What is with Veeky Forums always assuming its 3e?

AD&Dfag here, it was the same in 2E. Clam your butt.

Diseases are caused by the invasion of foreign spirits. Crap attracts disease spirits because it is bears a trace of life, which is what truly attracts them, but is absent/rejected by it's host spirit, thus easier to claim as a vessel.
>Applying 21 century scientific knowledge to magic
This is why your settings don't make sense

So healing magic is just exorcisms?

Very good DNA repair mechanisms.

"You see, devil foreigner, you must boil water. Boil water so you dispel the evil spirits from the water."

It really comes down to eugenics/superior breeding.

it's magic, I ain't gonna explain shit

I wonder what sort of desperation drove our ancestors to eat shit they found off the ground.
Bulbous growths that come from the ground?
An animal's tits?
Coloured herbs?
Really, how many died to see which ones could be eaten and which couldn't?
Oncologists, I suppose.
Do we know anything about them?

What I'd like to know is who the fuck figured out cheese. Who, after ages of people puking up spoiled milk, said "yeh I think I could do something with this" How many dismissed him as a madman I wonder

And then there's honey and bread.

Well everything loves honey. Just need to stare at a hive long enough and you'll see something trying to break into it

You just throw someone crazy and brave enough to get some honey. Then sell it to the nobility. Africa keep doing it, and got killer bees, the rest of the world domesticated bees and tamed them.

Human curiosity: the leading source of food related innovations (and deaths).

This is the true reason we've thrived; because only mankind after getting disgusted/poisoned/stung by a strange, discolored blob of matter would say "I'm going to keep shoving this thing in my mouth until I figure out a way to eat it"

And if it's not good, then somebody'll fit it in their ass.

i actually don't know on tortoises, everything else tends to have cancer suppressing genes, or suffer cancer regularly except naked mole rats, which are apparantly magical as almighty shit.

Triple helix DNA-analogue.

Don't ask me how half-elves happen.
They probably get cancer, though.