Elves are biologically immortal but die just as easy to unnatural causes as humans...

Elves are biologically immortal but die just as easy to unnatural causes as humans, because of this the average lifespan is barely over 100 years. The rare elves that manages to avoid dying for much longer than this are pillars of their communities revered for their incredible knowledge and skill

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Because elves never die from old age they see death as unnatural and wrong and will go to great lengths to mourn their dead creating lavish crypts to house their corpses. Elves have a strange envy of the undead as while they see them as unnatural they wish for the true immortality that some of the stronger undead have and are sympathetic to the fear of death that can motivate someone to become undead

>die just as easy to unnatural causes

I thought that was why they primarily never left their forests; to always be the top of the food-chain, and live to a ripe old age

You still can't avoid hunting accidents, disease, and murder, the reason why they live in Forrest is probably because they can't sustain a large enough population for agriculture and are hunter gatherers instead

?

Unless your world is really excessively grimdark it'll take a lot more than 100 years on average for someone to die from things other than problems associated with old age.

I think you're overestimating how often people died of old age before the modern era

Pic related, assuming disease immunity, similar to present time violent deaths rate and magical AIDS being excessively rare.

Read The Burning Wheel despiction of elves is pretty much perfect.

OP mentioned disease as a possible cause of death and a fantasy setting is probably more dangerous than modern day

According to data from 2003 from the us the probability of death within a year for 30 year olds is around 1%, factoring in higher infant mortality rates and higher death rates in general due to a more dangerous world elves wouldn't live that long

If you assume elven causes of death stay at the 25-34 range, they can push 100 no problem though.

I think it turns out to 300 years old before get beneath 5% surviving, really OP needs to make a table for mortality rate by age, cap it at their prime and then calculate from there

Before you

Does anyone have some historical life tables that I could run some calculations from?

>55.3 million people die each year (Estimated 2011)
>Injuries account for 9.1% of deaths (The World Health Report 2004)
This table is exclusively for elves that won't die unless they are killed

That table doesn't factor in non age related diseases, it's setting specific but I thought we were assuming that elves weren't immune to diseases

nber.org/papers/h0059.pdf
I'm to lazy to run any calculations but if anyone wants to this is probably better data then modern death statistics

This. Even a very low annual probability of death due to accident/violence will result in a surprisingly short average lifespan for most Elves (200 to 500 years depending on what % annual mortality rate you choose), with a small subpopulation who are excellent at surviving either by avoiding peril or being able to handle themselves unusually well. These elves can live for millennia.

If you want elves to live longer, then you need to give your world's elves some kind of "fate control" power to help them re-roll their way out of getting hit by falling pianos, meteors, and other random shit-happens kinds of stuff. Then they all can live for a long time.

Keep in mind also that unaging elves also need gradual regeneration to handle broken teeth, scars, etc. or they'll all be hideous in short order.

Yeah, hiding from the world is an old elven theme and this explains why they do it.

A simple hazard model will show you how long elves can be expected to live. If p equals the probability of an elf dying of accident/violence in a given year, then (1-p) is the probability that they will live that year, (1-p)^n is the probability that they will survive n years. The median lifespan in years is therefore be log(.5), using base (1-p).

.....p%------------------median lifespan
1.00%------------------69
0.50%------------------138
0.20%------------------346
0.10%------------------693
0.05%------------------1,386
0.02%------------------3,465
0.01%------------------6,931

The hazard rate in developed countries is mostly >1.0% for adults (add 18 years if you want to account for human childhood to get a total lifespan; different settings have other maturation times for elves).

Magical healing (and magically derived sanitation) replaces modern medicine and then some... but you can add that % on too if you want. IMO elves should be resistant/immune. Lifespans are short even without it

Oh shit while I was typing that, everyone else had the same thought. :)

I'd use this for the p value instead, it might be too low fantasy / grim depending on your tastes though

q (x) is the probability of death per year in that age range by the way, since I'm guessing 20s is when your in your physical prime that's a p of around .05

I'd call those probabilities grossly inflated compared to elves living very play-it-safe lives in their posh sculpted forests and using magic to protect themselves from most threats. But otherwise this is fantastic analysis.

Obviously you build this in Excel and fine-tune the probabilities to get the age ranges you want, and then use the size of the probabilities to help you decide how protected/safe/paradisical their typical lifestyle is.

honestly I like the idea of really old elves being powerful but rare so I'll probably keep p relatively high

Elven forests are usually also home to some really dangerous beasts and magical threats. I can also see Elves frequently not making it home when they make their rare journeys out

Elves also probably get better at not dying as they age, what that translates to in lifespan is up to the setting though

But that's my point. Even with unrealistically low p-values (by human standards) you have comparatively short elf lifespans. And the cool thing about hazard models is the long tail on the right side of the curve. There will always be a very small number of elves who go into the millennia even as most elves last only a century or two.

Everyone is great at surviving until they die.

Some people are probably better than others and if you've managed to not die for 300 years in fantasy land you probably know more than the elf just starting into his late 30s

Do you think elven communities would be centered around these outliers then? I can imagine having someone with in peak shape and with centuries of experience on call would be a big boon

Yes.

Very Tolkienesque, right? A few very powerful main characters like Elrond who've been around for millennia. But then re-read the sections in the Hobbit and Fellowship where they stay at Rivendell-- most of the Elves come off as much younger and more carefree. Now Tolkien didn't intend them to be young (in his mythos, they're probably millennia old, too.) But for our purposes, that sounds right. A king and some top leaders who are truly incredibly old, but the average mainstream elf is only a few centuries old at most.

Most elves die of some silly and tragic accident or mishap. A few die in random crimes. Most die in wars/battles/raids that come every few decades. Even living in near-total isolation doesn't keep the elves from being immune to enemies whose numbers grow quickly and who occasionally attack in force. So lots die, especially young when they're not so cautious, and still trying to make a name for themselves and carve a place for themselves in a closed-off, highly stratified society.

Only the most competent/lucky/powerful can last many centuries. Once you've made it five hundred years, elves start to notice that you're one of the very few who will probably be around essentially forever. You become the social anchor, even if you're not powerful in political or game terms. Virtually no elves make it to their first thousand years old, but someone who does has a pretty good chance of making their second. Those people become the stuff of legend and the rest of elves align their lives around those elders.

How many of you all work in life insurance? As underwriters or actuaries or what? Just curious.

Using modern death rates doesn't really work well for medieval times, especially with fantasy elements like dragons and other monsters, as well as wars with orcs and such, though elves almost certainly have a higher standard of living than humans even beyond immunity to disease.

From an elven perspective, where life tends to be fairly stagnant, perhaps. But from a human perspective, basically all of human civilization has been the past 10,000 years. Someone millennia old would be very out of place with that short of a time frame.

The data I got was from an actuary paper but I'm not in the feild

Living to 70-80 has always been expected except during especially horrendous wars (both of them).

Low average lifespans were always caused by infant mortality rates. Survive the first couple of years and most people died of natural causes at a similar age to now.

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Also there's around a 4 percent difference in death rate per year between 1850 and now, it's not just infant mortality rate that's gotten better

I work in another field where I do statistics. Not usually hazard models, but the functional form isn't hard to do (the version I did was greatly simplified anyway).

>Someone millennia old would be very out of place with that short of a time frame.

From the human perspective, sure. But elven communities change only very very slowly, and to some extent are built around their ancients and their guidance. So I don't think they'd be foreigners in their own land as an immortal human might be.

If anything, all elves must grapple with the fact that the Outside World is a confusing and ever-changing chaos realm. You go out and the humans are speaking one language and bowing to one king, and just a few decades later, the king has changed (maybe even the dynasty), the culture is different, and even the language has noticeably drifted. And that's assuming that goblins/orcs/centaurs/whatever haven't conquered the land and re-made everything.

If anything, the really old ones are around long enough to see the ebb and flow of change and from that learn to see the underlying patterns of predictability in history. They lose the confusion and struggle to keep up, but suffer from the stasis and boredom. Not to mention the fact that even most ELVES around them is a newcomer likely to be replaced by someone else in a few centuries. An unlucky fall or orc-arrow away from that always-untimely death.

Humans probably only seem crazy to the elder elves, I would assume younger elves could understand human society well enough to get by

This is kind of stupid why pay so much attention to elf lifespans?

It's useful for worldbuilding, you can leave if you don't like it