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Why do dragons have long lives?

S

Stravickan Ovmahn

Lip-man of a hated god
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United States
What is the reason a creature like a dragon would have a long life, in terms of evolutionary benefit? It's been a bit difficult trying to research why it is some animals evolved to live longer, but I've boiled it down to two things. One is the ability to give birth to more of its kind over time, yet with dragons you hardly see dragons going around like rabbits with wings. Particularly because it seems that whenever it is brought up it takes decades from a dragon to reach the age a maturity, far longer than I imagine it should.
Another is that they can care for their children, giving their offspring more of a surviving chance. But that seems a little weak to me, considering I've seen a lot of fantasy books where dragons care very little for their offspring. Which is worse considering most dragons have sapience of some kind and being of complex thought like that would need much more time to learn from their parental figures.

Thoughts? Any evolutionary benefits you can think of for having a long life like a dragon? What about a dragon's ageing process, is it too slow? Other weird things?
 
For one thing they're huge; bigger creatures usually live longer. And intelligent; while we only have a sample size of one, intelligent creatures apparently tend to live longer than non-sapient ones of the same size.

Also, they are very hard to kill. As a rule, the lifespan of a species and the amount of time they'd be expected to last in a state of nature before accident or violence kills them tend to match up pretty closely. They may well live for centuries because they can live for centuries; if you think about it, that's more plausible in a way than multi-thousand year old elves that aren't any physically tougher than humans. After all, killing a dragon is hard, a job for heroes; an elf can die just by tripping on some stairs.
 
It really depends on the setting. Many of the early ones (Greek myth for example) were guardian beasts created by the gods, so they needed to live as long as there was the thing to guard.

In Dragonlance they are literally a species of demigods descended from the chief gods of good and evil.

Planescape has them as undergoing Hindu-style purification-via-reincarnation on the way to becoming godlike "pure anima"

Council of Wyrms has them as descendents of an actual Overgod (d&d's equivalent of a full monotheism strength God), who can become gods themselves if they last long enough and conduct the proper rituals.

In short, don't look for evolutionary benefits unless you know for a fact that they evolved, because in most settings where they exist, they didn't.

Edit: also, most dragons are really protective of their offspring until the reach an age where they become competition. Looking into the old 2e Draconomicon, even Green D&D Dragons, normally the backstabbiest backstabbers that ever stabbed a back, will gladly die to protect their eggs or young offspring. It even talks about how carefully they educate them.
 
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Avernus said:
"We were kind of surprised when we tried sacrificing a virgin to the dragon, and it called her high cholesterol before demanding a salad instead."
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Depends on the dragon I suppose. You'd get different responses based on color/subspecies even in D&D.
Red Dragon: *eats her then raids the town anyway*
Silver Dragon: *squishes town elder for doing something so cowardly and evil*
Steel Dragon (yes those were a thing in 2e): "don't you have any girls with a bit more experience? This one doesn't know what she's doing"
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
Depends on the dragon I suppose.
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I rather liked a short story in one of the old Sword and Sorceress books where in a village where the local priesthood regularly sacrificed virgins to a dragon, the dragon encountered the latest virgin beforehand. Who took the opportunity to inform him that as it happens priests have a lot more meat on their bones than a skinny young virgin...and it turns out that a bunch of fat priests really don't run away very well.
 
Avernus said:
I rather liked a short story in one of the old Sword and Sorceress books where in a village where the local priesthood regularly sacrificed virgins to a dragon, the dragon encountered the latest virgin beforehand. Who took the opportunity to inform him that as it happens priests have a lot more meat on their bones than a skinny young virgin...and it turns out that a bunch of fat priests really don't run away very well.
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I also recall a series from when I was a kid where the sacrifice isn't harmed but kept as a sort of status symbol. You know, "look at me, they sent their princess as a sacrifice just to buy me off"
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
I also recall a series from when I was a kid where the sacrifice isn't harmed but kept as a sort of status symbol. You know, "look at me, they sent their princess as a sacrifice just to buy me off"
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I've seen a couple stories with similar premises. In such things, of course, a well-educated princess makes for a much better sacrifice than a virgin or whatever. A sacrifice that knows how to play the lyre and keep up in riddle games and can hold her own in a bout of chess is so much better than just getting a random-ass girl/boy that just didn't ever get laid. If you're going to keep a human in a cage as a status symbol might as well make it a smart one that can do tricks, you know :p.
 
Drascin said:
I've seen a couple stories with similar premises. In such things, of course, a well-educated princess makes for a much better sacrifice than a virgin or whatever. A sacrifice that knows how to play the lyre and keep up in riddle games and can hold her own in a bout of chess is so much better than just getting a random-ass girl/boy that just didn't ever get laid. If you're going to keep a human in a cage as a status symbol might as well make it a smart one that can do tricks, you know :p.
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Or sort the treasure for you. Especially the library. (And the coins, can you imagine a dragon trying to stack coins?)
 
The benefits of intelligence increase with time. Also, the benefits of size requires you to live long enough to take advantage, if you grow big then croak a few years later you're still small most of your life.

There's so much to dragons in terms of defenses and adaptations, high energy ones, it suggests a 'high investment, high individual odds of survival' strategy.
 
That said, there is the *rare* thing with rapidly reproducing dragons, like Reign of Fire, who presumably have much shorter lifespans.

I mean, notably, that's a post-apocalyse-by-dragons, so yea.
 
The thematic associations of medieval dragons, as exemplars of sin and evil, mean that they must necessarily be long-lived, either not dying unless killed or not dying at all, sleeping and reawakening as needed. Tolkien specifically focuses his dragons around the idea of greed, and they are of the former type, because greed is not something that simply goes away and stops being a problem if you fail to confront it. Parallel to this, another tradition developed of dragons as exemplars of the fantastical, as in Lord Dunsany's short story "Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance", and in this case the dragon does not die because magic does not die.

These two traditions, with an occasional sprinkling of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean traditions, more or less define how dragons in contemporary fantasy function. Even examples which seem to treat the dragon as a natural creature, such as A Song of Ice and Fire, use this understanding of dragons as a dual-natured being between evil and the mystical. Dungeons and Dragons explicitly conceives of the dragon as a mirror or foil to the protagonists, who grows as they do and does similar kinds of things to what they do at different stages in their careers.

One of the few popular works of fantasy fiction to actually go ahead with dragons as a natural creature, Discworld, does so in part as commentary on these ideas of dragons. The naturalistic dragons are as improbable as you might expect, and they are kept as pets, often thoughtlessly, as a symbol of one's taste. And then there are the anaturalistic dragons, which are again, foils to ourselves.

There are of course lots of examples which simply understand dragons as inherently powerful, sublimating these ideas.

So the dragon is long-lived because the traditions backing fantasy had reasons for them to be long-lived which are consciously and unconsciously transmitted through modern fantasy fiction, and even dragons that are natural creatures are still engaging with these traditions.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
I also recall a series from when I was a kid where the sacrifice isn't harmed but kept as a sort of status symbol. You know, "look at me, they sent their princess as a sacrifice just to buy me off"
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The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, maybe? Notably, some of the princesses are volunteers, and the rest tend to regard it as just something that happens; if you're a princess sooner or later you'll spend some time with a dragon, that's just how things work.

It was a pretty funny series as I recall.
 
Avernus said:
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles, maybe? Notably, some of the princesses are volunteers, and the rest tend to regard it as just something that happens; if you're a princess sooner or later you'll spend some time with a dragon, that's just how things work.

It was a pretty funny series as I recall.
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Yes, that was it. It's been a while, hasn't it. Now I feel old. Because the first one was new when I read it.
 
Weren't D&D dragons were based around being like the various species on earth that pretty much keep growing until they die? Because real life has things like physics that often means square cube laws but dragons are all loldontcare.
 
firefossil said:
Weren't D&D dragons were based around being like the various species on earth that pretty much keep growing until they die? Because real life has things like physics that often means square cube laws but dragons are all loldontcare.
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Nope. They have a specific point where they start to get weaker and eventually die, it's called the Twilight. Once it starts they tend to either:
1. Go to a Dragon Graveyard and kill themselves
2. Get killed by a rival as they weaken
3. Merge with the land of their territory as a sort of genius loci to guide future dragons
4. Devour their hoard and ascend to immortality, then go travel the planes/sail the stars.
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
Nope. They have a specific point where they start to get weaker and eventually die, it's called the Twilight. Once it starts they tend to either:
1. Go to a Dragon Graveyard and kill themselves
2. Get killed by a rival as they weaken
3. Merge with the land of their territory as a sort of genius loci to guide future dragons
4. Devour their hoard and ascend to immortality, then go travel the planes/sail the stars.
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All of that except maybe #2 was thought of well after D&D dragons were originally written up, though.
 
Avernus said:
All of that except maybe #2 was thought of well after D&D dragons were originally written up, though.
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I can say that at least as far back as the very first Dragonlance module, dragons having an age where they decline was a thing. Flamestrike was a red dragon who was old, weakened by age, and actually senile.

Described as having claws gone blunt with age and having lost half her teeth. With fucking cataracts leaving her half blind

Edit: so that's since at least 1984.
 
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Arawn_Emrys said:
I can say that at least as far back as the very first Dragonlance module, dragons having an age where they decline was a thing.
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But that was well after D&D dragons were conceived and written down. When I was still playing was back when Dragonlance was still new; I still have that module somewhere I think.
 
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