I think taking a difficult premise and making it work is a great creative tool. In this particular case, though, I think the numbers get in the way of stories people would like to explore.
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I don't mind the elven numbers so much. Elves have a society to shelter their younglings. It's the extremely high starting ages for tieflings that bother me; tieflings often don't have anyone else to fall back on, so how did they survive that long before getting a useful class level?
Someone said they were going to change that?
Apparently, it is not a question of judging whether one figure is reasonable or stone bonkers crazy, from this discussion. Even elves who are orphaned can't start adventuring before 115. Ergo, tiefling starting age is and must be what you see in the table. Now to explain it, right?
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@Sissyl: I was referring to this:
TProbably 1 out of 1000, or fewer, elves are adopted and raised by humans. Every dhampir, tiefling, aasimar, ifrit, undine, sylph, and oread is born to human parents. Yet these races use the same Age table as the elf.And at least quite a few of us consider this a grave mistake as far as the asismar and tiefling are concerned. (I do believe the elemental plane touched are of a more human scale). And the Creative Director seems to share that opinion to the point where it may be fixed in ARG errata.
Of course we can just find some rationalization for the weird ages for tieflings... but so far I haven't had any good ideas yet.
;)
I know you people don't like it but...
This is what happens when gamism mixes with simulationism; you get weird situations where due to long life a long lived race realistically should start far more skilled than a human does BUT since this is a game and all things must balance you have this weird situation where long lived races are somewhat retarded in their ability to learn for decades then suddenly at level 1 POW they learn just as fast as everyone else does...
If Golarion wants to fix that to match non-humans coming of age far more in step with human coming of age then I doubt anyone would cry foul.
Found it.
Well, in fairness, he also said
That's my current thinking, yeah...
So now its start at he human rate but can go to 250+6d100?
Which is cool with me, I like long lived planetouched.
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I think taking a difficult premise and making it work is a great creative tool. In this particular case, though, I think the numbers get in the way of stories people would like to explore.
Here's my attempt at imagining a non-stupid elf child raised by humans who nevertheless takes a hundred years to mature, in the form of a short story.
Dear Diary,
Today I start my new job. I'm excited. While I'm very fond of my old class, they could be frustrating at times. The gifted children at Lord Umber's Academy will be a much more interesting challenge. Some of them aren't even human. I hope they were joking about the goblin.
…
They weren't joking. I knew Lord Umber was an optimist, but surely everyone knows goblins are innately evil? Still, I shall do my best. If I can civilize a goblin, then my reputation will be sealed. He is only three years old, so it probably isn't too late for him.
…
I have been reading the notes of my predecessor. Of Toothy the goblin, he theorized that if you can teach one to read, it completely changes their personality. Let's hope so. I'm keeping a dagger under my robe, just in case.
Oddly, he was most dismissive of the girl Kattrina. He simply writes 'unteachable'. What a horrible thing to say of a child! I am going to work from the assumption that he is blaming her for his own shortcomings.
…
I mistook Kattrina for a half-elf. In fact she is a pure-blood and already forty years old. It's a little off-putting to have a pupil who is one's own age, but in most respects she seems like a perfectly normal eight-year old child. She's quick to learn and popular with the other children.
…
The trick for a class like this is to allow the children to work at their own pace. The one I thought stupidest, Rogar the dwarf boy, is actually quite intelligent in his own way. When I gave them each a poem to memorize, Kattrina got it first time. (I really don't know why Mr Janus thought her a bad pupil – I can only assume it was a personal grudge.) Rogar, on the other hand, could only recite the first four or five words before trailing off. I told him to keep trying. As far as I can tell, he spent most of the night reading it diligently, over and over. This morning he managed to get through the whole thing. He's a slow learner, but a steady one. Toothy managed it too – he turned it into a song. An annoying song, but it's still stuck in my head.
…
I'm beginning to doubt Kattrina's honesty. We were studying musical instruments, and she started playing a harp. By the end of the day, she had produced a passable tune – better than I could have done with weeks of effort. I asked her where she had studied the harp. She said that she didn't think she'd ever seen one before.
…
Today we studied archery. Blunted arrows, of course. I wouldn't trust Toothy with anything sharp. Of course, this gave him the excuse to shoot me in the backside as soon as I took my eyes off him. The class clown role he has chosen for himself makes the other children a little less afraid and I was not too harsh on him.
Kattrina, of course, took to the bow with ease and was soon hitting her mark reliably.
…
During history class today, I was speaking of the apocryphal figure Jathal, the elf spy who supposedly helped the founder of our city prevent a war four centuries ago. “My grandfather was friends with her,” said Kattrina. Her father told her about this before he died, she claimed. There is no way to confirm or deny this. Ridiculous though it sounds, when I add up the years, I find it must be theoretically possible.
…
I decided to give Kattrina a chance to come clean. She is old enough that she has probably heard and done everything before. I asked her about the poem, the one she had recited from memory soon after reading it for the 'first time'. I suggested she had, in fact, learned it previously but pretended otherwise in order to impress me. She asked me what poem I was talking about. “It was only six months ago!” I said. I showed her it in my book. She read it and said, “Oh, what a lovely poem.” No trace of deceit in her face.
…
An elf noble visited our school today, for reasons I didn't entirely understand. He looked at Toothy with suspicion. I mentioned Kattrina to him and suggested that maybe she would be better off adopted into an elf family. “I just spent a hundred years raising my own three children to adulthood,” he said. “Now I have my freedom again. Why would I give that up?”
In a not so subtle bid to change his mind, I asked Kattrina to play the harp piece she wrote last year. But she looked at the harp as though she had never seen one before. Apparently she has not been practicing.
…
Toothy is dead. He honestly did better than I expected, but once he had graduated, he had to look for a place outside the safety of the academy, and there is no good world out there for a goblin with a bad temper buried under a veneer of civilization. If other people had treated him well, he would probably have made it, but where are you going to find people like that?
He fled back here when they started chasing him. There was blood on his knife. We were doing another archery class. I can't bear to write about the details. It seems that no charges will be pressed. Why would they be? He was only a goblin.
…
Of the pupils who were here when I began my job, only two remain. Rogar continues his sluggish progress. He's about thirty now, and seems wiser than most humans of that age. What has he accomplished over the last few years? He speaks Terran pretty fluently now – certainly better than I do – and has finally mastered quadratic equations. Also, his beard is no longer looking so scrawny. As for Kattrina... I found her crying because one of the new boys had broken her porcelain doll.
I suppose she must look different from when I first met her, but any change is so gradual that she seems ageless.
…
I asked Kattrina what she wanted to do when (if?) she grows up. She now says she wants to be a bard or a priestess of Desna or “one of the other fun gods” or a wizard or “something like that”. She used to want to be a forest ranger but no longer trains with the bow. I didn't ask why.
…
For Kattrina's poetry homework, she appears to have inadvertently plagiarized a poem she read a decade ago. I showed her the original. She was surprised, but defended her version as being slightly better. Maybe it was.
…
I've been letting Kattrina do what she wants for the last few years. She seems to pick things up quicker if she's done them in the past. At any one time she's a prodigy in three or four things. Everything else slips out of her mind.
…
Rogar's graduation will make a fitting capstone for my career. Ideally I would like to have stayed long enough to see Kattrina's education through, but I'm not going to live that long.
I took her to the pub to have a serious talk with her. The barman objected, seeing her as a twelve-year old girl. I explained that she was sixty, and gave him a silver piece.
She ordered a sweet ginger tonic, and said she wished I could stay. She's starting to go through puberty, and is unsettled by the changes to her body. Then her mind wandered, as is her wont, and she commented on what a lovely tune the violinist was playing. “That's your tune,” I said, irritated. “You wrote that eight years ago when I persuaded you to really focus on your music for an extended period of time. It caught on around the town.”
She just said, “Oh, I thought it seemed familiar.”
I tried to reminisce with her, but when I mentioned Toothy she cut me off. “I remember something real sad happening,” she said. “I think there was a guard with a bitten face and some arrows. I don't want to know.”
Apparently she doesn't even recall that she was the one who had killed him. She's lucky, in a way.
“How can you forget so much?” I said.
“There's a difference between 'forgotten' and 'not remembered',” she said. “Anyway, my brain isn't fully developed yet. There's only so much stuff that can fit into my memory at one time. Could you remember sixty years of stuff when you were my age?”
“I am your age!” I snapped.
She patted me on the arm in a motherly way. “You know what they say. It takes a village to raise a child. You've done your part. I won't forget you.”
“When you're a powerful wizard or whatever... will you keep an eye on my grandson?”
She shrugged. “He'll already be middle-aged by the time I'm grown up.”
…
I visited the academy again. This will probably be the last time. The children were playing in the yard. Kattrina was skipping. I don't think she saw me. I didn't recognize any of the others.
When I look back upon my own childhood now, it seems like a never-ending summer. A lifetime in itself. Are we really so different?
<curmudgeon>If her brain were changing that quickly, that old information becomes inaccessible, I would expect her to be extremely mature. In humans, we experience an amnesia of sorts with regard to our earliest memories, which usually becomes very apparent by the time we are four, and signals the beginning of some astonishing development.</curmudgeon>
I think taking a difficult premise and making it work is a great creative tool. In this particular case, though, I think the numbers get in the way of stories people would like to explore.
Maybe, but I think it opens as many avenues as it closes. either way you have some possibilities and not others.
Does the chart which states such and such race is an adult at such and such years...are they based off that races culture or is everything comparing to a humans culture?
It would make alot of sense if the age is based off that races culture and would explain the elves reason why they are considered adults at a hundred years old.
Like with humans, 20+ is considered an adult because since they live maybe to 80 20 yrs is enough time to experience life enough to be considered an adult.
now an elf that can live 300+ years, at 20 yrs old compared to what elves can experience they havent even touched the tip of the iceburg compared to most elves so they are considered adults at 100 because compared to most elves thats enough time to experience enough life to be considered an adult.
the elf at 20 could have the same experience as the human and know as much but while the human is considered and adult and would consider the elf an adult compared to their race, that same elf when viewed by other elves would view that elf as such like a young teenager.
Hopefully that makes sense and tbh seems a better way to look at things than think an elf at 20 is the size and mindframe of a 4 yr old human.
But that also means that an elf raised among humans would be ready to start adventuring at 20.
To the elves, apparently nothing is more important than every child being left to be a moron until they are at least a century old, so the human baby would die of old age before getting its first skill rank.
... which people are actually arguing for. Go figure.
I imagine elves as having some form of ADHD, elves are fully grown by 50 but it takes them at least another 50 years to overcome it. If someone at my table wants to play an elf between the ages of 50 and 100, I give them a -2 to WIS, -2 to all distracting actions and -2 to concentration checks.
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People argue for it because, from our perspective, it's much more interesting than every race thinking and behaving in the same biological senses. It helps define elves and other long-lived races as something more than "humans, but a little different."
It's an alien element that creates a new divide, and raises new questions. Why do the elves take this long to mature? How can a race survive this way? For some people, such gaps in logic are flaws that shatter the path to a good story or background. For others, such questions raise the possibility for new and fascinating answers.
Neither methodology is inherently wrong, and I am rather surprised at some of the hostility in this thread.
Erm, i dont know if it have been mentioned yet... but the "Rogue" iconic in the corebook is one such elf that were brought up by humans.