You’re right that I’ve never read the 2e and 3e sourcebooks, just 5e and some OSR stuff, but nothing in between.

Most of my experience playing DnD comes from playing in homebrew settings. Maybe the real problem in that case comes from trying to use a roleplaying system that has a bunch of cosmology and mysticism baked into it in a setting that either lacks that or has metaphysics that actively clash with it.

But if so I think that’s probably a pretty common experience with how 5e is played.

I’m gonna respond to your points a little bit out of order, because it’s more expedient for me to set up the topics I’m going to talk about that way.

Yes, you can just get rid of long-lived species if you like. You can also modify the world to match the fact near-immortals exist and I don’t think it’s that hard. It’s your decision, ultimately, but there’s a lot of ways to solve it.

I agree with this. One of my favorite settings, World of Darkness (specifically the Vampire versions of OWoD), is completely defined by the fact that immortal beings are present in the world, and their machinations dominate everything about it. And one of my favorite DnD-like settings, Arcanum, deals pretty heavily with how humanity interacts with longer lived races, and major parts of its backstory are defined by the actions of the longer-lived elves and dwarves.

The thing is neither of my DM friends that I mentioned in my original comment wanted to deal with the elven illuminati and they didn’t want to make elves senile. Their world was also not very Tolkien-esque, so “elves spend most of their lives doing nothing” didn’t fit the vibe they they were going for.

And a fourth point, Elves may not care/notice at all. If the Elves are insular and live in the woods they’re extremely unlikely to bother remembering the Human king, after all he only lives like a scant 100 years at most so why even know his name?

This is what my friends originally did with elves before they got rid of them, but they had another issue. Very often they would like to end one campaign, do a 100 year timeskip, then start another one in the same setting. If a player character was an elf that meant that they should still be around, and in good health. This was problematic because these campaigns were generally fairly low level, and they didn’t want to have a high level NPC running around.

I’m sure there are ways to deal with that too, but with all of the other issues elves created I gather they decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

Depending on your depiction of Elves the effect is the same (provided the group is Elves) because they’re often predicted as just slower/more leisurely in their approach to life (although I’m not sure what you mean by the statement in the first place, because something being older than you intended doesn’t sound like an actual problem).

So, I should have made this more clear in my original comment, but there are no non-human races in the world that I am building (it’s not even for a DnD campaign). That anecdote was just about me finding out the hard way how long 15,000 years is.

As to why it’s a problem if the knowledge keepers ended up being older than I had originally intended it’s because it’s really hard to keep a cohesive organization with the same goal around for thousands of years. The core of the Jewish religion is probably the most successful at this, and it’s extremely impressive. Some native American and Australian Aboriginal cultures kept accurate oral records for even longer, but that was within a completely different social context.

So I didn’t want my fictional group to do a 2x or 3x better job than real life people. Likewise I didn’t want massive empires lasting way longer than real life empires.

I can go into more detail about my world if you’re interested, but I didn’t want to make this comment any longer lol

Not like I’m going to blow my brains out, whatever happens. And you won’t either.

Plenty of people blow their brains out. 1 in every 12 autistic people attempt it anyway.

Not directly related but something I found while looking that stat up: a full 18% of 8-year-old autistic kids apparently have a suicide plan.

If you want something truly ancient and out-of-touch, you can easily just set it 15,000 years ago instead of 1,500 and no player will bat an eye or even notice

I am currently doing world building for a ttrpg campaign, and recently I did try to set an ancient empire 15,000 years in the past.

The basic idea was that empire A existed 15,000 years ago (them existing while the world was still covered in ice was important to the aesthetic), then they would be wiped out by empire B some time later, only for empire B to be destroyed by a great calamity. I wanted for there to be remnants of empire B still hanging around in the form of people who still worship a few of its god-kings and groups of people who still try to preserve its knowledge and maintain its infrastructure without fully understanding most of it.

The latter group was based partially on the Catholic Church preserving records after the fall of the Roman empire and partially on how the core of the Jewish religion was able to maintain a continuity of information and tradition over vast stretches of time even in the face of mass migration and social upheavals.

The problem was that I underestimated just what a vast gulf of time 15,000 years is. For one I was struggling to fill in all that time with events, and for two I realized that this knowledge preserving group would have had to existed for way longer than I was originally envisioning. Not only would they be older than the Jewish religion, they would be older than ancient Sumer. In fact you could take the entire history of the beginning of the Sumerian empire to the present day and fit it into that span of time twice over.

In the end I had to invent empire C, which refurbished some of empire B’s infrastructure before collapsing themselves, as the actual origin for the knowledge keepers. And even with that I still had to move the timeline up by thousands of years.

It’s also not any less awe-inspiring to have people who lived in an important time period. We still have living veterans of WW2, and WW2 is no less important or intriguing

The problem with that is that it would really change the dynamic of how non-elf civilizations would develop. Unless the elves are extremely insular, and even then. How do you have a plotline involving the player characters needing to delve into an ancient tomb in order to discover whether or not the current ruling family are the legitimate heirs of the kingdom when you can just ask an elf? How does the world get into that situation in the first place when you can just ask an elf?

I have two friends who take turns running DnD 5e campaigns in a shared setting who have made elves entirely extinct for that reason.

While the “elves spend most of their long lives in leisure” explanation is kinda nice and Tolkien-esque, it doesn’t solve everything to do with their lifespan.

Imagine you have an event in your setting that took place 1500 years ago. That’s as far back in time as the fall of the Roman empire is from the modern day. In real life that’s a long enough time for multiple empires to rise and fall, for language to evolve to the point that speakers can no longer understand the previous tongue, and for people to change their religion and forget they were ever pagan to begin with.

Elves in DnD live 750 years. A 200 year old elf PC could reasonably say “wait what if my grandpa was there? DM do I remember my grandpa ever talking about this?”

This is a result of taking something that should be awe inspiring and making it mundane (letting people play as elves). And it’s not the only instance of that in DnD.

But the fact that even just a single rail car holds 360 commuters, equivalent to 180 cars or more on the highway changes the math completely.

Absolutely. The fact that 3 million people pass through Shinjuku station every day is a testament to that.

If all of those people lived in a city in the US it would be the country’s third largest, behind NY and LA. (If we’re going by the entire urban area instead of just within city limits it would be the 20th, just ahead of the Baltimore-Columbia-Towson metropolitan statistical area.)

All in a space that’s smaller than most highway interchanges.

And that’s not even using two-level train cars (which is where your figure for 360 people per train car comes from I think?).

While things like merging movements and so on is part of the story, it’s not the whole story.

You see, by saying “traffic jams are caused by merging mistakes and so on” it kinda implies that if everyone drove perfectly a highway lane could carry infinitely many cars. In actually a highway lane has a finite capacity determined by the length of the vehicles traveling on it, the length of the gap between them (indirectly determined by how fast they can start and stop), and the speed they’re moving.

There are finite limits for gap widths and speed determined by physics and geometry. As the system approaches these limits it becomes less and less able to deal with small disruptions. In other words, as more cars move on a freeway a traffic jam becomes more and more likely. The small disruption which is perceived as the cause was really just the nucleation point for a phase change that the system was already poised to transition through. If it wasn’t that event then something else would trigger it.

It is interesting to note that once a highway has transitioned from smooth flow to traffic jam its capacity is massively reduced, which you can see in the graphs in the above link. Another interesting thing to note is that the speed vs volume graph, if you flip it upside down, resembles a cost / demand curve from economics, where volume is the demand and time spent commuting (the inverse of speed) is cost. If you do this you see something quite odd, which is that the curve curls up around itself and goes backwards.

This is less like a normal economic situation (the more people use a resource the more they have to pay, the less people use it the less they have to pay) and more like a massively multiplayer version of the prisoner’s dilemma. For awhile the cost increases only slightly with growing demand, until a certain threshold where each additional actor making a transaction has a chance to massively increase the cost for everyone, even if consumption is reduced. Actors can choose to voluntarily pay a higher time cost (wait before getting on the freeway) to avoid this, but again, it’s the prisoners dilemma. People can just go, trigger a traffic jam anyway, and you’ll still have to sit through it + all the time you waited trying to prevent it.

Self driving cars are often described as a way to eliminate traffic jams, but they don’t change this fundamental property of how roadways work. It’s true that capacity could potentially be increased somewhat by decreasing the gap between cars, since machines have faster reflexes than humans (though I’m skeptical of how much the gap can really be decreased; is every car going to weigh the same at all times? Is every car going to have tires and brakes in identical conditions? Is the condition of the asphalt going to be identical at all times and across every part of the roadway? All of these things imply a great deal of variability in stopping distance, which implies a wide safety gap.), but the prisoner’s dilemma problem remains. The biggest thing that self driving cars could actually do to alleviate traffic jams would be to not enter a highway until traffic volumes were at a safe level. This can also be accomplished with a traffic volume sensor and a stop light on highway on-ramps.

Of course trains, on top of having a way higher capacity than a highway lane, don’t suffer from any of this prisoner’s dilemma stuff. If a train car is full and you have to wait for the next one that’s equivalent to being stopped at a highway on ramp. People can’t force their way into a train and make it run slower for everyone (well, unless they do something really crazy like stand in the door and stop the train from leaving).

lol, because that’s definitely the shut-in stereotype.

“Honey I’m really worried about our son, not only has he not left the house for weeks, this morning I found a bag of coffee beans in his room that was produced by a worker owned coop in Honduras!”

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The SSN system is one of the more moronic things the US does, which is really saying something.