As a general rules, the more advanced a race is the more it competes. Algae and Plankton do not compete, while primates and great cats compete. The more capable a race is in terms of hunting and travelling distances, the more the race competes with other races and the more conflict the race becomes involved with.
In fantasy gaming, some races do not follow this general rules (most notably elves). Does anyone have any thoughts on this? (Other than the observation Tolkien's elves mostly avoided conflict, and most fantasy elves are influenced by Tolkien).
Rules of biology fly out the door with the dragon and his horde of magical items in fantasy role playing, but if you want a different take it could also be that even though they are advanced they do no require the same resources. Fey can live off of sunlight and dew drops.
some other ideas:
I think that if your race evolved though the usual brutal natural processes (e.g. real-world animals), you're necessarily aggressive and nasty. But if it was created through some kind of supernatural creation myth process (like Elves), then all bets are off. There's no reason to think that you'd be like any other kind of animal.
Humans are descended from predators and carnivores. Maybe elves are descended from herbivores or something. So still sorta-competitive, but without that same level of bloodthirstiness.
The species evolves to compete in its environment. Maybe the environment was less competitive when elves were a young or developing race. Fewer predators around, more plentiful fruits lying around in the garden of eden, whatever. Something like that. And then later on the world sort of grew to suck more, be more competitive, such that humans had to be nastier to survive when they were developing.
What does "advanced" mean? There really is no evolutionary hierarchy where X species is more advanced than Y. A Jellyfish might lack a complex organ system, but Cnidarians have existed far longer than most more "complex" life, and still do well in ecosystems. And competition occurs on all levels...you can bet that different plankton species and algae species are competing against one another, it just generally is not the stuff of National Geographic specials.
And, any sort of biological order we know and recognize can be thrown right out due to divine and magical influence.
I think its implied that the elves as a race are from somewhere else entirely, accessed through a relic called the Sovyrian Stone (this is all from memory). We've been treating them in our campaign as somewhat aloof travellers from another world that are considering earth as a possible place to live. They don't seem particularly competitive because they're already in possession of a home base in Sovyrian.
Elves are aliens from the planet Castrovel. They came to Golarion from Castrovel using teleportation stones. This is absolutely cannon. Just before the Age of Darkness Elves returned to Castrovel only to return to Golarion again after a few thousand years or so.
Algae and Plankton don't compete? Have you ever heard of an Algae bloom or "Red Tide"? Conflict and Competition will only get you so far, evolutionarily speaking. Humans are at the point where we're conflicting and competing the whole world into global ecological collapse. Once your agriculture gets to a point of viable sustainability where you don't need all the people spending all their time tending to it, it's important to make the shift to non-competitive advancement and start transitioning into a more cooperative, efficient, and (above all) sustainable subsistence. In a fantasy world with multiple intelligent races in greater or lesser stages of advancement as well as aberrant lifeforms and lifeform-equivalents (such as undead) which are "destructive competitors" in that they compete not for personal viability but simply to be an obstacle for the viability of others, the natural process will be thrown even more out-of-whack, but most societies will be largely stuck in the societal stage where most of their time is taken up by agriculture and personal subsistence so they don't really advance to this exploitative stage that we've reached in the real world that damages the ecology. If any one race ever ended up with sufficient dominance over the others and were able to apply themselves technologically and fail to get themselves into a mutual cooperative stage rather than an exploitative stage like we're in, Golaron is pretty much screwed.
Kazaan wrote: Algae and Plankton don't compete? Have you ever heard of an Algae bloom or "Red Tide"? Conflict and Competition will only get you so far, evolutionarily speaking. Humans are at the point where we're conflicting and competing the whole world into global ecological collapse. Once your agriculture gets to a point of viable sustainability where you don't need all the people spending all their time tending to it, it's important to make the shift to non-competitive advancement and start transitioning into a more cooperative, efficient, and (above all) sustainable subsistence. In a fantasy world with multiple intelligent races in greater or lesser stages of advancement as well as aberrant lifeforms and lifeform-equivalents (such as undead) which are "destructive competitors" in that they compete not for personal viability but simply to be an obstacle for the viability of others, the natural process will be thrown even more out-of-whack, but most societies will be largely stuck in the societal stage where most of their time is taken up by agriculture and personal subsistence so they don't really advance to this exploitative stage that we've reached in the real world that damages the ecology. If any one race ever ended up with sufficient dominance over the others and were able to apply themselves technologically and fail to get themselves into a mutual cooperative stage rather than an exploitative stage like we're in, Golaron is pretty much screwed. Thanks for everyone's observations. I guess several fantasy races are destructive competitors, and the PC races are portrayed as non-competitve advancement races, or headed in that direction.
Sustainable resource management is its own topic, and implications for fantasy settings could be interesting. On a sidenote, about a year ago I presented at a graduate research conference. One of the presenters provided a well-researched discussion on how bad plastic is for the environment and the island of plastic in the Pacific Ocean, then took a sip from the plastic water bottle provided by the conference she had been drinking from and said "I guess I shouldn't be drinking this." Every company markets itself as environmentally responsible, and the scholarship on sustainable research management at this point is mostly about how bad plastic and manufacturing are for the environment with no attempt being made to bridge the two ends of the spectrum.
Golarion is not likely to head to disaster caused by conflict from what I've seen. There is a minimum of conflict between races, gods, and nations with the primary source of conflict being between PFS and the Aspis Consortium. This creates an ideal setting for publishing adventures on a regular basis (which is necessary to maintain a gaming company without releasing a new edition every few years). Forgotten Realms was a conflict-heavy setting, with maybe four times as many gods as were needed and constant conflict between gods, nations, races, and organizations. The level of conflict in Forgotten Realms worked to keep any faction from getting too powerful.
Forgotten Realms, and really any D@D product, had many years and authors in its development. The Inner Sea World Guide is full of conflict to be had. Your original post seemed to be coming from a biological prospective of apex predators ect... I really have no idea on where you are going or coming from with the water comment.
How can you talk about conflict or competition without talking about the reason for conflict or competition. Historically conflict is over resources of some sort, be it water, gold, food. They maybe justified for other reasons, but in the end someone loses and someone gains.
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