Immortal Society

I like this one

I like that everyone agrees that the Elves would be attacked, but nobody considers the possibility they'd want to fight back

In time, they transcend mortal plane in one form or another. Or, if they do not manage it, they get like this: . And with time grow more and more passive and set in their routine, in the end becoming effectively zombies or petrifyng into stone or both same time.

They would die and be conquered if they're stupid, but people who can live for a 10000 years are rarely stupid. I guess you can play it Elric-style, with a society of decadent fucks, just instead of hedonism you'd get extreme formality in all forms of social interactions, disdain for """"feelings"""" and impulsive behavior and so on.

If the elves are smart, they would probably pull the strings of younger races from behind the scenes, destabilizing their ways of life, provoking constant border conflicts, diplomatic incidents and the like, and basically making sure that elves are always at the top of food chain. If we're talking about fantasy settings where you can learn magic, they would have all the tools for being the most powerful wizards in existence, and the whole "younger races would conquer them" thing would probably be out of question when your most talented 88 year wizard is opposed by a 1999 year murdersorcerer of doom who knows spells that were invented before your great ancestors even lived.

They sound like a servant race of some powerful entity so I think their culture would developed based on the purpose tasked by their master or whatever they can come up with in their spare time if they have any at all.

Imagine if every Israeli had actually been in the camps.

>we outnumber the elves 200 to 1, surely we will defeat them

>elves in Veeky Forums's fanfiction
>having any kind of agency
They are just there to prove inferior to whatever Veeky Forums likes at the moment.

Unless their forgetting curve is logarithmic, then they will on time forget almost everything, but the older a memory the more likely they won't forget that one on thousands, or tens of thousands of years.

"I, Anfhaimix, son of Arthursix, leader of the Verstz have come to claim your lands. 10,000 men stand at my side. Do you surrender"

"Ah, a hammer and mace formation. Haven't seen that one on a while. You are even using the aulmenti rock to coordinate the battle- Are those copper trumpets?"

"Cursed elf, flattering me won't serve you well. I've come for land and gold, not the pleasantries of your ki-"

"Yeah, yeah, you will attack at dawn if we do not surrender. Never head that one before...

"Let me tell you something, friend. We know this forest as the palm of our hand, most of us. Your strategy is good, really. Ifigenadoro tried something similar 2 centuries ago, it almost got us by surprise. He was using chairots, wich we believed had dissapeared a thousand years ago. Were it not for Umvalae's memory, we would have lost that battle

"Speaking of a thousand years ago, Ambirsatapor used the very same rock you stand to direct his troops, in almost the same formation, if lighter on horses. His grandfather, Arjehsitadur did that too. And some bandit called Uzah decades before.

"You won't win, I assure you. I've seen your troops, your weapons, your strategy. We know what you will do, and how to counter it. Even the great genius Ugh Grog Bunti couldn't defeat us, and he set the forest on fire back when the winters were dry and the elephants roamed this land.

"So if you please would return to your elders and tell them not to bother us, you and your men will spare yourselves to taste our metal. Maybe you can even convince your grandson not to try us. But if you don't, know that there is no strategy you can conceive that we haven't seen in one form or another, and that your men can't live long enough to even apreciate the proper use of knifes and swords.

"Oh, and the Leriath hill looks like good harasser's ground, but it's quite slippery in the Autum mornings.

> Abnormally long lived
> Low birthrate

Japan.

>They cannot get sick from normal disease, only magical ailments can harm them, and of course they will die if an injury is too great for them to heal from before natural healing repairs the damage.
Injuries are accountable for less than 10% of deaths currently, and probably not drastically higher in a stable fantasy society. Unless magical AIDS are common, they might as well be 99% of intelligent population. Not having sex drive won't necessary stop them from popping out a kid every other year for the greater good / sense of duty / order or conventions of the community.

Or maybe they just want a kid. I mean, novadays we* have sex because we like it, and have babies because we want them, but the 2 are not all that linked.

Elves would just lose the recreational activity, not necessarily the motivation. Imagine having 300 grand...mas asking for nieces.

*Sobs in the loneliest corner.

You're and idiot
Biological immortality says nothing about their reproductive capacities
They would out-compete every other intelligent species because the #1 cause of death among humans is disease and age.

Bump, just in case.

Would such a species even form a society?

Why wouldn't they? All the benefits of society (the family that stays together stays strong) are still open to them.

Dementia is a vascular disease, my man.

The reason most people believe this is because almost all "what if...." have a clause where only you are immortal and to the average human loosing everyone they know and love would be a hard thing to endure.

It would probably lack any innovation. Humans roll the dice all the fucking time and come up with some new generation with a handful of geniuses in it. Elves would stagnate and be stuck with the same mind-sets forever. No real fresh blood, meaning no change, meaning a culture that only ever tries to hone what is already there, not start from scratch.

Why? What would make them incapable of innovation? Why wouldn't they have fresh blood? OP didn't say they're less fertile, after all, only that they have sex solely for procreation.

Frankly, their population would fucking boom way harder than ours. Even if they have less kids per capita on a yearly basis, the primary causes for infant mortality and death in general do not apply to them, and their standing population is literally immortal. They would have to innovate just to deal with how insane their population would get.

>Why? What would make them incapable of innovation? Why wouldn't they have fresh blood? OP didn't say they're less fertile, after all, only that they have sex solely for procreation.

In a population of immortals, procreation is neither desirable nor necessary. Organisms reproduce to keep the population going. Replication is literally our form of immortality. But if there is a population that doesn't die naturally, they don't need to use reproduction to keep going. Otherwise they'd end up flooding the entire world at an exponential rate.

>Frankly...

See, you answered your own question.

GOY'D

>Organisms reproduce to keep the population going.

We humans are proof that intelligent lifeforms don't reproduce solely for this reason. Once you get sapience into the mix, shit changes quite a bit.

Sapient creatures have kids for all kinds of reasons. They have kids because to help them out with work. They have kids because they want to; for the sake of happiness. They have kids out of civic duty. They have kids out of obligation; the social structure they find themselves in may require an heir or two. They have kids in order to claim legal rights. They have kids because they're lonely. They have kids because they want someone that is dependent on them and loves them mostly unconditionally.

But all of those examples involve those kids dying after a little under a century. That is the biggest difference, and cannot be applied to a society in which individuals live forever.

education would be like crafting a jewel.each child would have several teacher that could dedicate decades to teach them.

there could be an acting king, and a counsel of the retired king. it should be understood that assuming the crown is a responsibility that one shoulder only for as long as one can. after all it's not as if competent people were scarce.

in the same way, weeding might be seen as temporary thing, or at least divorce wouldn't be a rarity.

the other day there was a thread on middle east, there people (perhaps the Uzbeks? I don't remember) that recite their entire ancestry when they meet. the closer they are, the stronger the obligation to each other they have. that seems super fitting (also a good way to not accidentally fuck a cousin)

Elves will have kids for economic and social reasons. Having a kid and raising it is a novelty, and immortals crave distractions. Whatsmore, having a big family means personal power, because all those kids are part of your clan.

They might not breed as fast as humans, but with their lifespans Elves would rival us in numbers. Tolkein's elves were not fading due to infertility, they were leaving the world because the gods had forgiven them for past sins and they had the chance to go live in eternal awesomeness. Only the stubborn stayed behind long enough to be around for LOTR.

There is always a first child. And when those grow up, they will have the needs that made their parents bring them to life in the first place.

Besides, they face neither age nor disease, and that's it. Kinstrife, catastrophes, hunger and war can still take a toll on them, those are incentives to raise the new generations and change mindsets.

Even under those clauses it's hard to believe. Mortals too loose everyone they know and love and carry on.

Because a young elf at the start of a war would fight against lines of pikemen and by the time he's a grizzled veteran, humans will be setting the fucking skies on fire, with nowhere left for the outgunned, out-manned, out-fucking-smarted elves to hide. You elf-loving sack of shit.
That's all good and well until they stop giving a shit about magic and turn the wizard's tower into a crater from beyond the horizon.

>pic related: End of the Human/Elf Race Wars, 1950 (Colorized)

>Because a young elf at the start of a war would fight against lines of pikemen and by the time he's a grizzled veteran

Why would he accrue knowledge and experience so slowly? Elves seem to have the same or better cognitive abilities compared to humans.

>humans will be setting the fucking skies on fire, with nowhere left for the outgunned, out-manned, out-fucking-smarted elves to hide

Why wouldn't elves advance faster, albeit perhaps not in the same way? After all, they're generally presented as having a a bonus to intelligence, and have the benefit of perfect minds that never deteriorate over thousands of years, allowing elves to become truly incredible masters of the sciences. Also, there's no reason why they wouldn't have kids, and as they have an immortal population, their population should expand much more explosively than ours even if they have less children per elf. We'd be the ones outnumbered.

Additionally, elves usually have 20,000+ years of sapience on humans, reaching upper medieval levels of tech before mankind gains the intelligence necessary for civilization to flourish. So they have a massive headstart, and in a setting where technology advances like in ours would inevitably be far more advanced (and they usually are: for example in IK, where humans have just mastered coal and steam power, elves have figured out gravity manipulation and electromagnetism).

>That's all good and well until they stop giving a shit about magic and turn the wizard's tower into a crater from beyond the horizon.

By the time humans have out planes and nukes, elves should have spacecraft and black hole bombs.

Given the traits of elves, there's no scenario where you could place them on Earth in keeping with their usual tropes (i.e. have medieval tech before mankind exists, are smarter than humans, are magical, are immortal) in which mankind could become the dominant species. We'd live in on an elvish Earth as dependents.

Sorry if that makes your HFY hurt.

Except in this scenario, humans reach maturity in half a year and know how to make nukes from birth, because I might as well throw some bullshit in there, too.
And what makes you think an elf could actually survive 20,000 years without any serious accidents or magical disease? Thousands of people die every single day purely from accidents. There's a reason there are more women than men despite the fact that 104 boys are born for every 100 girls, it's because men are born to be risk-takers. If your elves don't take risks, they'd end up submissive and complacent just like medieval women and even your average modern one. Which is actually a pretty popular use for elves, quite possibly the only use.

Death is actually a pretty important component of natural selection, to the point where species with set lifespans have better evolutionary advantages over species that don't die.

Dying reduces the propagation of redundant genes, and lets their successors take over with what may be better advantages. WIth a population of sexually mature adults that can reproduce any time, their offspring aren't going to bring anything new to the genepool, and only serve to hold the successor generations back through cross-breeding with the same genes over and over again.

>humans reach maturity in half a year and know how to make nukes from birth
Just butting in, but humans are real, so this is bullocks.

>Except in this scenario, humans reach maturity in half a year and know how to make nukes from birth, because I might as well throw some bullshit in there, too.

Except we have the actual abilities of humans, and we've been given the abilities of these hypothetical elves by the thread. Hush nigga.

>And what makes you think an elf could actually survive 20,000 years

Personally, I think they'd be unlikely to. But their life expectancy would be way, way higher than whatever a human's is at their level of development, especially when you have the presence of natural magical talent making healers abundant. Healing magic is like the first thing a culture with widespread access to magic would master.

>Thousands of people die every single day purely from accidents.

Yes, because there are seven billion of us. The actual percentage of people that die to accidents compared to old age or disease is fucking marginal, and gets steadily lower as medicine advances.

>If your elves don't take risks

Who says they won't? Even if the same number of them die to accidents as humans at the same level of development, despite elves being more dexterous, having better access to healing magic, etc, then why would this matter? They're still smarter, they still have a several thousand year headstart on us, and they still live longer and therefore will have better transmission and retention of knowledge.

There is literally no scenario where we could catch up that doesn't involve the elves bombing themselves back to the same level as us.

>reach maturity in half a year and know how to make nukes from birth
A race of nuclear suicide bombers? I can dig it.

Sorry, but you still aren't getting it. These are immortals. They aren't going to be thinking or behaving like humans. They definitely aren't going to be breeding at anything like the rate of humans, so that immediately takes out the possibility of an ever-changing society with new mind-sets. Ours can occur because the old generations die off and the new ones take over. This will not happen in an immortal society.

>Humans can't do that
Well see user, in my setting...
You guys are essentially trying to just say humans 2.0, so why even bother calling them elves at that point? I might as well make orcs short and live in mountains and make halflings the size of giants. You can call it HFY all you like, but I dislike elves specifically. If an elf in a setting doesn't actually match anything that people would consider to be "elfish" behavior, then at that point, it's just an "elf". That sort of thing goes back to Plato and his stuff about what makes an X an X. So, let's examine the stereotypical potrayal of the different Elf variations.
We have the sort of "high" elf, the main cliche of elves, the oh so graceful and equally arrogant elf you'd see in Rivendell, or TES, a sort of pompous race, that is generally ineffectual, being themselves too absorbed in simply doing nothing, letting the world slip them by as they watch in inaction, very similar to what's being discussed in this thread. They live longer, they shoot faster, they think faster, and in all these settings, what have they done with it? They hide in their glades and valleys and look down their noses at everyone else, that's what.
So, let's take a look at another common subtype of elves: The tree-loving "wood" elf. What makes these ones stand out, you say? Well, for one, they tend to be literal eco-terrorists, but it's justified because "lol, they're elves, and like, it was their land and stuff!" It's essentially a self-insert for people who think the root of all evil is people who have more nice stuff than them. It's a childish notion on par with murder-hoboing. Imagine if you had an elf player that just decided to kill everyone in a village that had a log house because they killed trees to make it.
Cont. in next post

>you need a constant flood of young people to advance!

Eh. Most of our scientific and philosophical advances have come from older people.

CULTURE would probably change slower, but elf culture would be drastically different from ours by default.

Any true immortals would only form temporary attachments. Marriages wouldn't exist, they'd simply mate pair for as long as it takes to raise the kid(s), if that. More likely to have a society that sees raising kids as the village's job.

Inevitably they're going to have odd hobbies, and past lives like a random village farmer also being a legendary smith in the past. Why is he farming? Smithing got dull.

They'd probably have fewer gender-based restrictions given that losing a year to carry a baby isn't a huge deal in the grand scheme of millennia.

They'd find humans fun, like we do dogs.

They'd find dwarves irritating, like we do cats.

I imagine there's some sort of societal stigma against being maimed. After all, it would be an enormous handicap for an immortal.

>You guys are essentially trying to just say humans 2.0, so why even bother calling them elves at that point?

Elves have always been humans but better in certain ways. If you can't handle that, that's really your problem.

>I might as well make orcs short and live in mountains and make halflings the size of giants.

What exactly is not elvish about being immortal, being dexterous, being an older race than everyone else, being wise, and being magical? These are the primary attributes of elves.

Are you complaining about the idea that they're capable of progress? Elves being incapable of advancing is not a staple of fantasy. Far from it, in fact - in most settings elves are more advanced than humans. Even in settings like WHFB, where humans have black powder and such, elves have a more advanced but differently angled level of development.

You want humans portrayed realistically, in that they should develop consistently and advance beyond medieval tech. But if someone says alright, let's apply the rules of realism to the whole setting and that happens to include elves, you have a spastic fit. You're the worst kind of fantasy fan - one who enjoys fantasy in a purely narcissistic, ego-stroking manner.

Your views on wood elves are retarded and out of touch with how they generally are in fiction, by the way. I don't think I've ever heard of elves that just kill villages due to one loghouse existing. You see them as self-insert for selfish people, but they're actually just an idealization of the idea that people shouldn't over-consume. The fact that you get this so wrong says more about you than it does about elves.

cont. from
Let's move on, shall we? The Drow. If Anita Sarkeesian played TTRPGs, this would be her character's race. It's literally an evil race of ripped off from spiders about systematic slavery and spousal abuse, but it's okay because it's men. Would you like it if some guy into BDSM made a rule 63'd version of the drow? It's just unnecessary edginess and I'm willing to bet the original creator was some sort of /d/egenerate.
So, you might say: But user! Lots of fantasy races are just extreme outliers of humanity made into an entire species!
And to that, I concede it as truth, but I present to you this question: Is not a person who is hard-working and gruff, yet loyal and affable once you earn it -as slow to trust as they may be, a lot more likeable than some pointy-eared poof looking down their nose at you because they can do trick shots with a bow?
Would not a race of short little green pests simply be another thorn in your side rather than a personal insult? While I have the fortune to not have to deal with either currently, I much more dislike a neighbor's disruptive dog than a measly rat. You simply lay a trap and the rat problem is solved, you simply destroy the goblin lair and no more shall they trouble the village (unless you let the kids live, because you gotta smite ALL the evil)
The fact that you're taking the obviously flawed philosophy of the elves and suddenly declaring that it's not a problem for them. There's a reason they hide in valleys and use bows rather than engaging in industry. If you're too much of a hippie to cut down a tree, you're never gonna make it to the industrial age.

No, but they WILL crave novelty and innovation.

Every elf is constantly on the lookout for something new. Trying to make something new and better and worthy of recognition in the eyes of their jaded peers.

This is why Elvish blacksmiths learned to smith SO FUCKING GOOD their blades glow in the dark. This is why their poens are so fucking good they can bring even a stonehearted man to tears inside 6 words.

Its why their artificers will invent guns first, and when they do most elves will pick up the hobby for fun. And get absurdly good at it.

Because its something to do thats new and different, and they are super bored.

This post made me almost wish I read the whole exchange. Good job.

They're not a self-insert for selfish people, they're a self-insert for people who falsely believe themselves to not be selfish and attempt to look down on others for it. The problem with elves is that they are what many people wish themselves to be, they're the narcissistic ego-stroking of everyone with a superiority complex. They're the ones that try to shoot people who so much as walk into their forest, and go to war because their precious little trees are getting cut down in their "territory" despite thinking themselves above the politics of the realm and above boundaries and territories.

>There's a reason they hide in valleys and use bows rather than engaging in industry.

Except they do engage in industry. They just don't do so in the same way.

And wood elves are rarely depicted as too 'hippie' to cut down trees. They just don't over-consume.

>but I present to you this question: Is not a person who is hard-working and gruff, yet loyal and affable once you earn it -as slow to trust as they may be, a lot more likeable than some pointy-eared poof looking down their nose at you because they can do trick shots with a bow?

You seem to mostly have an idea of elves that exists solely in Veeky Forums headcanon, where they're all literally the same person who spends 50% of their time sneering at humans and the rest of their time doing nothing. Meanwhile, you forget that dwarves can be spiteful and thuggish, quick to anger, and petty to an insane degree.

Again, you're the worst type of fantasy fan.

And now comes the part where you explain what elves exactly you are talking about.

>They're not a self-insert for selfish people, they're a self-insert for people who falsely believe themselves to not be selfish and attempt to look down on others for it.

Let me translate than into a more truthful phrasing:

>I hate it when people are depicted as wiser than ME, and when something I don't approve of is depicted as good, and I CAN'T HANDLE IT SO ALL INSTANCES OF IT and things related to it in fiction must be killed by the fantasy SS because that makes me feel better

>The problem with elves is that they are what many people wish themselves to be, they're the narcissistic ego-stroking of everyone with a superiority complex.

Further translation:

>I feel that everyone of a certain mindset and/or education is looking down on me, and it makes me feel angry. Therefore, I want them to have stand-ins that I can genocide in my fantasy games

>They're the ones that try to shoot people who so much as walk into their forest

I'm pretty sure only Asrai from WHFB do this, and they do it because Athel Loren itself has turned them into creepy territorial monsters. They're not typical wood elves.

Yes, and goblins are pests, like I said. But real people rightfully disdain raider goblins and thuggish dwarves, yet snobby elves get a pass because they exemplify the self-gratifying thought process of the type of little shit who thinks they're a "better fantasy fan" than somebody else. You don't like elves for how they're written, you like elves for how they appeal to your own values and beliefs.
>Elf-lovers literally cannot go one thread without implying that everyone who disagrees with them is an evil nazi.
They would be killed by humans because that's what humans do. One day we shall sail amongst the stars and kill shit in space that doesn't look like us, and it will be glorious. And fuck it if you don't wanna make some extra-terrestrial Charlies shit their three-legged pants.

A very old sci-fi book I once read had a time travel segment where the author went so far into the future that humanity had lost all interest in the universe. Machines did manual work and computers did advanced calculations. They were all dull as fuck and just sat around most of the time because they were not curious about anything anymore as the heat in the universe was fading. This was derived from an ancient Greek (i think) legend of immortality.

So I imagine a society of these Elves would be similar. Low density population of beings that didn't care for anything outside of their borders. Unless they planned a war a century in advanced and bolstered their population accordingly, they wouldnt go to war either. Just kind of sit around and keep on keeping on.

As another user mentioned they'd be overrun by a war-oriented tribe of goblins that bred little savages like rabbits

At some point or another, the elves decide to have a bunch of kids. Probably because some uppity mortal species looks like they might start a war in a few decades and it would be better to have extra bodies and not need them than need extra bodies and not have them.

There is now an entire generation of elflets around, trying - like every other sapient - to obtain power and wealth. Some will do it to keep score, some to gain enough of a lead to lord it over their peers. Others will do it to protect themselves from those who seek to be raised above their fellows. Yet more will do it because it's simply more rewarding than endlessly gathering skills.

And they will all discover that the previous generation has a gigantic head start, and most of those ancient gits have zero intention of letting a bunch of uppity brats beat them at the wealth accumulation game.

The countdown to the old generation being slaughtered by the new has now been set. Is your main character a bad enough dude to rise to the top of the upheaval and craft an elf society that won't repeat these mistakes?

>They would be killed by humans because that's what humans do. One day we shall sail amongst the stars

And when we get there we will find out that the Elves got there first, have better FTL than us, founded a galactic government with hundreds of other alien races, and are offering us a very generous trade deal because they have fond memories of fighting orcs with us back in the good old days.

Bonus points: the elves literally sail among the stars, having figured out how to sail so fucking good you go off the horizon and into space. The whole rocketry thing is "cool, I guess" but we wouldnt have taken so long to get here if we just got better at boats.

I think the problem with elves is that they don't have flaws. Dwarves have positive and negative traits. Humans have positive and negative traits. Goblins have positive and negative traits.

Elves have positive traits.

>But real people rightfully disdain raider goblins and thuggish dwarves, yet snobby elves get a pass

Clearly they don't. You've get to point out elves that are actually snobby though, rather than having a lifestyle you don't like or being portrayed as smarter/wiser than you.

>you like elves for how they appeal to your own values and beliefs

My favourite elves are probably Asur and Druchii, who don't have any of my values and beliefs. Druchii have YOUR values, actually.

>One day we shall sail amongst the stars and kill etc etc etc HFY

I don't need to imply that you're a nazi, you've done it yourself by glorifying genocide as humanity's primary achievement and pastime.

Jesus you're stupid as hell.

Yeah, that's some retarded HFY-faggot right here.
>yet snobby elves get a pass
Yes, because there are no elf-hate memes and autistic people constantly butthurt about a fictional race.

High elves from lotr would be a good template

From our perspective sure.

I would say the main notable trait of such a society is that it would be incredibly static. That isn't necessarily a bad thing but it does mean their society would likely look quite alien to outside observers. After all imagine if the oldest human was 20,000 years old and average human was 2,500 years old. Belief systems thousands of years old would be seen as the norm, hell it might be that new ideas are almost never adopted by society at large simply due to the fact that having such ancient elders walking around means they might push against new ideas. Do you think Atheism would become a popular belief anywhere if the median age if over 2,000 years old and your king who decides what is and isn't law has been around for 6,500 years? Hell odds are Europeans would still be old fashioned pagans because anyone who came to them with the idea of Christianity would be shouted down by all of their elders.

On possible effect of such a static society is that new ideas (at least ones more important than how much cumin to use in a certain recipe) are always shouted down and society must be forced to accept them. In other words Elves have a civil war every time a social movement or idea pops up. Anti-Slavery? Species wide civil war. Gay rights? Species wide civil war. New religion? Species wide civil war. Move from tribes and city states into actual countries? Species wide civil war. The concept of nationalism? Species wide civil war.

Elves and dwarves both have pride, though it comes across in different ways. Where dwarves have greed, elves have perfectionism. Where dwarves have pettiness, elves have disengagement from such things that can come across as disdainful.

The pre-fall Eldar from 40K

Dwarves, humans and elves all have flaws that rarely really matter. Elves have their arrogance, disdain for things they deem lower than them, being stuck in their ways and a certain detachement from worldly things. Of course this may heavily depend on the setting. The only real flaw that dwarves have that is able to really fuck them over is their greed, something that is rarely played straight these days. The rest can be interpreted as something positive. The only real flaw elves have is a somewhat passive state that would be able to fuck them over.

Goblins are most of the time not a traditional playable race, so no idea why you would bring them up.

I think also one of the things that people forget is that elves are often prone to obsessions and high passions. People get to wrapped up in the mostly headcanon notion of the distant, jeering elf noble that they forget elves like Tyrion, or Feanor, or Malekith, or Aenarion.

Or even Fingolfin, who while more levelheaded than his brother, went straight to his death on the first word he heard of overall defeat, determined to have a good end that made a statement (i.e fuck you Morgoth, you ain't shit) rather than to conserve his forces for a more fortunate day.

There's this.

I think you also need for Elves/imortals to be slightly retarded.

Otherwise there's no reason why they haven't advanced well beyond humans and everyone else, technologically.

>flaws that rarely really matter
If character flaws don't matter, you're running a very shitty game.

War is the defining characteristic of civilization. Go ahead and take a fucking look at the advancement of cultures. It was in the places where the most brutal, total wars took place that humans innovated the most. Necessity is the mother of Invention, and War is the mother of Necessity. Did you see Australian Aborigines constructing fortresses of stone? Did the American Indian develop the means to break free of Earth's gravity? Did the African discover the means to create explosives?
No, none of them did and before you start calling me /pol/ I say to you this: It is not their race, it is their philosophy. For in both sides of Eurasia, wars were fought over what resources there was, and that made them strong. Steel is strong for it knows the fire and anvil, so too were the descendants of warriors the strongest foundations for civilization. If you were weak in one of those places, you froze or starved to death, or your neighbor/a neighboring town/kingdom would take what they will by force. Meanwhile in Central America, the Aztecs played at war simply to make sacrifices to their god. In North America, the American Indian played at war for the sake of determining who is the most valorous. And both those civilizations stagnated until they met their battle-hardened counterparts and were inevitably conquered.
That is why the elves will lose. All but the most crazed of humans know they will die, and all but the most cowardly accept the fact.Why would an elf risk eternity for his neighbor? And even if he would, I'd like to give props to this user , It's a pretty fun-sounding spin on it, and it's entirely plausible. An eternity of life is an eternity of time to hold grudges.
Elves have flaws, the issue is that far too many people personally consider such flaws to be non-issues and don't recognize them as such. They're the go-to Mary Sue race

Well, we are not talking about my games, but general fiction and lore. Or else we need to present each other our shitty homebrew settings.

OP said that they can reproduce. Every time they reproduce, they are 'rolling the dice' with the chance to get another genius. Why is stagnation so assured?

Again with the stagnation. Why is it always so assured that they would simply not be able to innovate or otherwise do new things? When I'm bored with what I have, I look for new things to do, new stimulation. When I find something that is outright better or superior to what I am doing, I adopt it to replace what I was doing. When something clearly isn't working, I study it, think about why it's failing, and try something else that is informed by my previous failings.

If they are being wiped out or overrun or are seriously failing in some way and can see that what they are doing isn't working, why would they just sit there continue to fail or die? Why wouldn't they innovate or try something else?

If they are incredibly bored and depressed with their routine lives, why wouldn't they seek to mix it up? Why would they just sit there and be bored for the rest of their immortal lives?

Why would they just drain the resources from the area around them and have to move from place to place all the time over and over again? I would think that with an indefinite lifespan, they would eventually learn very efficient and effective long term resource management. True, some kinds of resources are finite, but there are many that are renewable.

>The older you get the more your sense of time gets distorted

The older I've gotten, the faster time seems to go by; but if anything, that just gives me a sense of urgency, because I realize I don't have all the time in the world to do things.

>War is the defining characteristic of civilization
Good thing that the Noldor were the first to forge weapons, that warhammer elves are described as some of the best warriors and have some of the mightiest heroes, that the faerun elves main god is also a god of war. Or what elves are we talking about again? I didn't bother to read the rest of your post

Stagnation has to be assured, or they warp the setting into something very different.
>Immortal elves invented steam locomotion when your ancestors were just starting to experiment with sharp sticks
>Immortal elves are a space faring post scarcity StarTrek society, by the time your species develops writing

At a certain point they just no longer fit the rest of the setting.

>Otherwise there's no reason why they haven't advanced well beyond humans and everyone else, technologically.
Why would they? Even if being older allows more time to master skills it doesn't inherently improve creativity. Combine that with extremely ingrained social conservatism and you can easily have elves essentially behaving like Amish.
>Be elf
>Invent gunpowder
>Show friends
>They scoff and think it is just a fancy toy for both the children in our town
>Make a cannon
>Show friends
>They scoff, a trebuchet is just as effective, and twice as reliable
>Sell my idea to those wipper snappers with the dull ears two forests over

However I don't think truly immortal elves can be a player race simply because for it to work you would need elves to be retarded (8,500 year old elf is as skilled a wizard as a 25 year old human). Truly immortal elves should be like a bunch of aloof sages you go to for help. They refuse to help you directly because the conflict isn't their fight and they've survived worse but they can still offer immense aid if you can prove yourself. For example a party of adventurers go to an elf city/village asking for help in defeating the dark lord, the Elves refuse to kill the dark lord themselves but tell the party that if they can prove that they are good people they will give them immense power to aid them on their quest. The party goes on some mini quests and as aid the village elder uses his immense magic skill to turn any items the players want into +3 magical versions of themselves.

Necessity and circumstance are the mothers of invention, user. If you think Africa didn't have brutal-ass wars you're retarded, they just ALSO didn't have the loadbearing animals that make huge structures possible for a developing society. The presence of the correct climate and animals has always been far more important for pushing a culture forward than the amount of fighting it does.

Even military innovation doesn't always come from war. The Chinese invented gunpowder way ahead of everyone else... as loud, bright tools for scaring away evil spirits.

>the Aztecs played at war simply to make sacrifices to their god

Where do you get your history from. Mesoamericans fought each other for a whole load of reasons. EVERYONE in history has fought each other, making the idea that war is the only source of progression idiotic.

WE, our generation, are currently advancing faster than ever before, and only accelerating, and we have zero fucking urgency in regard to war to prompt us.

The "If the elves are smart" scenario is the best one.

All you have to do is add a cataclysm that fucks the elves to the point that they don't rule the world anymore and are dependent on younger races (humans) to maintain their society.

Perhaps that's the difference between high, wood, and dark elves.

High elves use humans to maintain society

Wood elves use goblins/beastfolk

Dark elves use orcs

>Where do you get your history from.
Memes. In this case, their silly obsidian club memes for wounding poeple and dragging them back to their blood pyramids. Also, I'd make the argument that a good portion of our current advancement speed is simply inertia and previous advancements making it easier. We are but men on the shoulders of giants in comparison. Each does their part, but no longer do we have our Teslas, our Mendels, our Einsteins, or our Oppenheimers.
Anyway, back on topic: The only good elf would be the one that never comes out of his stinking forest.

this.

beast of burden is no different from combustion engine in the right age/time

True enough.

Though that does assume that they get a head start on other races. If all the races start at the same point (all created by the gods at the same time, or whatever), I don't see why they wouldn't advance roughly as fast as humans do.

At that point they could team up with other races and become super valuable knowledge storage. Elidnerialathingoladin's memory could serve very well to help replace lost knowledge caused by events like the fall of the roman empire or the destruction of the Library at Alexandria.

>We are but men on the shoulders of giants in comparison. Each does their part, but no longer do we have our Teslas, our Mendels, our Einsteins, or our Oppenheimers.

Counter argument: we now have so much scientific knowledge, and every field of science is so complex and requires so much dedication and knowhow, that our Einsteins and our Oppenheimers can no longer realistically make as large waves as they once could. Making huge progress in one field that would have been hyper-specialized in Einstein's day now requires knowing more about your pursuit than there was to know about physics as a whole.

It's also harder to really publicize and big up these people because their discoveries are so incredibly arcane to the average person now. Science has gotten to the point where everything on the bleeding edge of invention is now impossible to really understand, and often uninteresting to, the layman.

On the other hand, science is globalized, and every major discovery is a joint venture of one or multiple scientific institutes. CERN has a lot of people behind it. Every little bit helps, and even laymen are doing their part.

I think the difference is perception. This race of reproductive immortals will be viewed by mortal races in a particular manner that is not neccasarily accurate. That's for at least two reasons. The mortals are incapable of comprehending their true caliber. Also, the elves don't want the mortals knowing about the troves of knowledge beyond their ability to grasp.

>However I don't think truly immortal elves can be a player race simply because for it to work you would need elves to be retarded (8,500 year old elf is as skilled a wizard as a 25 year old human)

I know this breaks a rule of OP's question, but maybe the elves only have enough "space" in their brains for around ~100 years worth of memories, give or take. So when an elf inevitably gets bored of his current profession, he goes and does something else, and eventually forgets about it. Imagine looting a masterwork weapon, only to discover your personal sigil on it, realizing /you/ were the one who made it back when you were really into blacksmithing.

That's true. Science is definitely more of an industry with more people contributing than ever before.

It's almost difficult to imagine at this point that the scientific pursuit was once basically a bunch of well-off blokes in their studies poking stuff and funding everything mostly by themselves, or occasionally with donations.

In fact, our general impression these days of science a huge group effort and the result of a community's work may be another factor in why there's less fame involved.

For even optimistic annual risks of death by accident or violence, "unaging" equates to a lifespan of a few hundred years. So you don't need to fall all over yourself justifying a stable setting. The math is actually a little tragic.

Immortal races in a setting that has magic would surely be crazy powerful but also manipulative operating on a higher level than humans, they would view humans like we view ape bonobo warfare.

Another nice, if a bit grim-derp twist is to make them completely batshit insane due to their immortality , the Nonmen from Prince of Nothing series are exactly that, immensely powerful, but sterile crazy hermits.

If it's like OP describes, elves don't need (?) healthcare and don't die in car crashes. So maybe the math should be better than you think. What IS the math, by the way? Do you have an actual formula, or is it just a random number you came up with to impress everyone on an anonymous imageboard?

>They'd find dwarves irritating, like we do cats.
So, elves do the bidding of dwarves, because they can't resist their eyes?

>Organisms reproduce to keep the population going
Reproduction is a mutation with no real benefit to the organism itself, it only stuck because copied genes means multiple of the same combination. A mishap that's exceedingly strong but with no real reason or meaning behind it.

And even worse, they're immortal. You stab one and it wont even bother to flinch, just keep on killing your very mortal guys.

They'd be full of deadly berzerkers not afraid of death.

Like this kinda.
sbnation.com/a/17776-football/

Yeah but if it's the only cause of death the annual rate even in a modern Western country is enough that total lifespan won't exceed 3 digits. Do a Monte Carlo simulation in excel if you don't know how to calculate the hazard function. I was surprised too

Not him, but isn't this the story of Nargothrond after Finrod was forced out?

>>pic related: End of the Human/Elf Race Wars, 1950 (Colorized)

>pic related: Elfin fighter-bombers deploying nuclear weapons on the last free Human island states, circa 350 bc

Ftfy

My experience is that people tend to plateau in their abilities. Yeah they grow wiser, mostly, but rarely smarter or wildly more skilled. I realize that breaks all the rules or RPG character enhancement, but those rules are meant to be fun not realistic.

I did this a few years ago for exactly this reason. The CDC publishes regular reports on morbidity and mortality. From that you can get the average annual risk of death by accident or violence (p). Assume magic and elven caution reduce that if you like, or that the baseline should be higher in a fantasy setting.

So the annual survival rate is 1-p. The survival rate after n years is ((1-p)^n). Or do a Monte Carlo simulation and have each row be a year and work down from 100 initial population. n=50 is an elf's half-life, or you could say when he has a 50% of living that long or less.

I'll try to find the numbers before the thread 404s, but it's easy to do yourself. I was surprised how short the lives resolved at. You get a very very few elders who clock in past a few thousand, and the rest are mere centuries. Pretty thematic.