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Aug 6, 2012 -- 8:06PM, Elemental_Elf wrote:

Depends on the edition, most of the time Elves can live for well into their 700's, most often longer.

Even in 4e, drow are stated to live much longer than other sorts of elves as long as nobody kills them. "Exceptional members of the race measure their ages in centuries."

Aug 10, 2012 -- 2:21AM, Elemental_Elf wrote:

Yeah, 4E really tapired back the ages in an effort to make them more realistc. I mean some elves in 1E could live to 1,600 years old.

Some 'elves' in 4e are functionally immortal. The Prince of Frost and the Summer Queen, for example. OK, they're immortal because they've become archfey, but they were born eladrin (i.e. the 'high elves'/'grey elves' of previous editions), and becoming an archfey seems to be a natural consequence of an eldarin just being powerful and long-lived enough, rather than any sort of outside agency (i.e. it's not analogous to becoming a lich/baelnorn). So 4e isn't completely incompatible with the sorts of lifespans given in earlier editions. The main change has been to get rid of the (frankly ridiculous) multi-decade childhoods that made it seem like elves all had serious learning disorders.

But my point was just that, no matter the edition, Drizzt is still pretty young for a drow. We're not going to get rid of him that easily.

ETA: I remember reading somewhere that, unless you were much, much physically tougher than a human (i.e. being able to regenerate lost limbs, flawlessly mend broken bones, perfect immune system, etc.), you could not expect to live much beyond three centuries even if you didn't have to worry about old age, because statistically you're almost guaranteed to have had a fatal accident by then.

In our homebrew, we decided to go with a Tolkienesque approach. The elves and eladrin, and similar races such as drow, hamadryads, dryads, and nymphs are effectively immortal. Only after many thousands of years do they begin to fade and become incorporated into nature. A hamadryad or a nymph becomes a tree, an eladrin might become a stream or a breeze in the woods, and so on.

We also made dragonborn and dwarves very long lived--up to 2000 years.

Dragons live for 10000 to 25000 years.

Of course, to accommodate this, the history of the rise and fall of empires stretches back a million or more years to the time of the great war between the gods and the primordials.

Because of the influence of the evil gods, the primordials, the demons and devils and so on, progress to modern civilization never occurs. Empires are destroyed and all their progress is lost and the world is returned to the dark ages and progress has to start all over again in a never ending cycle.

And that's all, folks! 2012 is officially done, D&D-wise.

If someone wants to pull the pin on this thread, I give you my permission.