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I had brought this up back in the age of Beta but with that having come and gone and never really receiving an answer, I'm curious if there is now one out there yet.
At what rate do elves age? When they are 20 do they look 20? Or do they look 5 or 10? Also if it's the former, can elves be of a younger age then the book states when they start adventuring? Like say a 40 year old?
What's Pathfinder's take on this as I have seen it different ways it different campaign settings.
Alot of that is up to the setting however other races do not show there age as humans do. There is a good change a 400 year old elf will not look the same age as a 90 year old human, but a 300 year old drawf might.
All in if elves of your world keep the "ageless" look of most worlds
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Alot of that is up to the setting however other races do not show there age as humans do. There is a good change a 400 year old elf will not look the same age as a 90 year old human, but a 300 year old drawf might.
All in if elves of your world keep the "ageless" look of most worlds
Guess I should have been more specific. I didn't expect a 400 year old elf to look like a 90 year old human. I'm more interested in the EARLIER years. Like at what age does an elf appear to look like they are in their early twenties or late teens or whatever?
And this is all talking about Golarion itself, not a homebrew.
Elves of Golarion seemed to go out of it's way to not talk about this T_T
well mostly as people can not agree. I think they age about like a human does till they get walking but slower after that Maybe slower from the start. But the thing is a 50 or 60 year old elf could pass for a 15 or 16 year old...but the mind is that of a child like 10 or 12. Elves spends years mental learning how to be elves and so while they may age a bit slower then humans they are not mentally ready for adult hood till much later.
Look at the forlorn who have not learned what it is to be an elf,they are not"right" as most elves see it. They are not adjusted and really a bit odd
But really I do not think your see anything official
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This kind of thing is really setting specific rather than inherent in the Pathfinder rules themselves as far as I know.
Though in Golarion it appears that elves mature more slowly than other races. If you look at Merisiel's profile it indicates that humans will grow up and become adults while elves still remain children. Of course this also explains why elves don't have a high birth rate. If the race had children at the same rate as humans they'd have far too many dependents around.
I've see that before but Merisiel's profile (I think) was written before they really got on heavy about everything in specific, which is also why all the first iconic's histories were so short compared to the later ones.
I know it's setting specific but an official answer one day would be awesome. It's the Holiday Season after all ... a time of giving :D
This kind of argument has gone on since the first days of D&D and the ageless elves of Tolkien are sort of to blame. What always seemed to be decided on was that it was a cultural thing and not that elves, or other demi-humans, had slow mental or physical growth. In other words, an elf at 20 is just as mentally and physically developed as a human of 20. It is just that they have so much more to be taught and sooooo much time to do that in, that their society does not declare an elf to be an adult til they are 80 or 100 or whatever the setting says is an adult elf.
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I don't think any official has been said beyond in the core book listing the starting age. Which can be taken with a grain of salt.
Personally i could see long lived races aging more slowly as children. Not to the extent of exactly the same precentage as they live longer though. I mean look at animals in RL they live a lot less than we do, but typically within a year they are a young adult. While the rule of thumb for say a dog is 7 to 1, yet will be fully grown in 18 to 24 months typically.
So for me I general go by a rule of thumb of something like this. If a race lives 5 times longer than a human then it takes them twice as long to become adults.(by adult I mean 18) At which point they start aging by the race age charts.
Unless I am making something specific for a game I am doing. Yeah i know this is of no help at all since the OP is looking for a official answer.
I don't think any official has been said beyond in the core book listing the starting age. Which can be taken with a grain of salt.
Personally i could see long lived races aging more slowly as children. Not to the extent of exactly the same precentage as they live longer though. I mean look at animals in RL they live a lot less than we do, but typically within a year they are a young adult. While the rule of thumb for say a dog is 7 to 1, yet will be fully grown in 18 to 24 months typically.
So for me I general go by a rule of thumb of something like this. If a race lives 5 times longer than a human then it takes them twice as long to become adults.(by adult I mean 18) At which point they start aging by the race age charts.
Unless I am making something specific for a game I am doing. Yeah i know this is of no help at all since the OP is looking for a official answer.
That's pretty much how I do it too. Elves are "children" for 1.5 - 2 times as long, and then their teen and twentysomething years last a Lonnnnnng time.
Creative Director
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We haven't said much official... other than listing the "starting" ages for all races. Elves "start" (as in take their first level in a PC class) at a much higher age than humans, which would indicate that they have a slower development to adulthood, though. Certainly, we've got the Forlorn elves, who spend their century-long childhood amid non-elves, which kind of makes them a bit unhinged and a little crazy (seeing your childhood friends grow old and die before you become an adult can do that).
I imagine ages 1-5 happen at about the same speed as a human. If elf kids took any longer than humans to get through the toddler years, they'd never be allowed to survive. Maybe they keep that same pace up until they're 10 or so.
From then to adulthood (human age 15, elf age 110), the pace eases way, way back, and you have a 'tweenager' for most of a century. The elf takes 100 years to mature in the ways a human does in 5, so call it 1/20th speed.
From adulthood, it's shown in the Core Rulebook, page 169. If you figure that each age mark (adult, middle-age, old, venerable, max) is equivalent, then elf's aging speeds up to 1/3rd human speed for the period from adulthood to middle age, slows to about 1/5 from then through old and on to venerable, then slows down even further to about 1/10th speed until he returns to the [insert death euphemism here].
I have always assumed that an elf matures physically and mentally at an equally slowed rate. My 124 year old elf is roughly in his late teens in body and in mind. If the mind aged slowly but the body at a normal pace, then he should have an active mind in the body of a 124 year old human, which is to say, he's dead. If the body aged slowly but the mind at a normal pace, then my 124 year old elf should have the body of a 19 year old human and an epic-level Wisdom score. :)
At least, that's how I imagine it. I think the real answer is whatever you and your DM decide it is... :)
This is why I tend to nerf the max ages in my campaigns. It's clever to have some Elrond-type uberelf NPC to be a billion years old, but it's just too much for me or my players to get our heads around really. I can't imagine fifty too well, let alone four hundred and the actual geo-political cultural effects of having a whole species of actual sentient creatures living for centuries involves a few more logical gymnastics than just turning the number down.
The way I see it, age of adulthood is as much a cultural thing as it is about physical maturity or even mental maturity - it's about taking part in the culture. On the one side, you have ceremonies like the Bar and Bat Mitzvah, in which an adolescent that isn't mentally or physically adult (in most cases) is symbolically welcomed to the society of adults. After that, they are generally introduced to increasing responsibilities that adulthood brings. You also have the Amish 'Freispringen' (I think that's the word) which is essentially the wild stage of adolescence, in which the youth are not officially part of the society: not children, but not adult members of the culture, either. You aren't an adult in Amish culture until you decide to join the church and the society, regardless of your age. For some, this happens quickly; for others, the wild years go on for quite a while. Some fall away from the culture entirely.
How does this relate to the subject? The way I usually run it, elves, in their youth, age at about 2/3 the rate of humans. A 10 year old elf would look like a 6 or 7 year old, a 15 year old elf would look 10, a 20 year old elf would look 14, and one that's 30 would look 20. After about age 30 or 40, though, they'd age much slower, almost imperceptibly so. But being an "adult" elf may have little to do with physical growth, and indeed the state of adulthood may not begin until they're a few-score years old. Giving an "adolescent" elf of 40 to 80 years old a few decades to get their bearings and experience the world might be considered an important part of growing up, in their culture.
But that's just my thoughts on it.
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The way I see it, age of adulthood is as much a cultural thing as it is about physical maturity or even mental maturity - it's about taking part in the culture. On the one side, you have ceremonies like the Bar and Bat Mitzvah, in which an adolescent that isn't mentally or physically adult (in most cases) is symbolically welcomed to the society of adults. After that, they are generally introduced to increasing responsibilities that adulthood brings. You also have the Amish 'Freispringen' (I think that's the word) which is essentially the wild stage of adolescence, in which the youth are not officially part of the society: not children, but not adult members of the culture, either. You aren't an adult in Amish culture until you decide to join the church and the society, regardless of your age. For some, this happens quickly; for others, the wild years go on for quite a while. Some fall away from the culture entirely.
How does this relate to the subject? The way I usually run it, elves, in their youth, age at about 2/3 the rate of humans. A 10 year old elf would look like a 6 or 7 year old, a 15 year old elf would look 10, a 20 year old elf would look 14, and one that's 30 would look 20. After about age 30 or 40, though, they'd age much slower, almost imperceptibly so. But being an "adult" elf may have little to do with physical growth, and indeed the state of adulthood may not begin until they're a few-score years old. Giving an "adolescent" elf of 40 to 80 years old a few decades to get their bearings and experience the world might be considered an important part of growing up, in their culture.
But that's just my thoughts on it.
This is pretty much how I've always seen it and played it myself. A part of it though is no doubt from reading books and such from Forgotten Realms as that was the campaign setting I had played before Golarion. There were elves in literature that looked full of age at close to the same time as humans did (Drizzt comes to mind along with another elf who's name does not quite come to mind that he saved and then later fought).
The forlorn I can, to an extent, see how watching your friends die over and over again might affect you in a negative way but it's also hard for me to see that the elf wouldn't have found a way to cope with loss by then as they had seen so much of it after their first batch of friends have died off.
I've always looked at and dealt with elven age when being around humans/in a human adventuring party as it being one of multiple lives they live where they come to take on the human perception of things (the passing of time) without being overwhelmed with the death that follows such a long life.
Anyway, for now I'll keep playing it as I have and likely still will even if something official does come out and says a 60 year old elf is still being put in the corner and grounded from going outside. That's just never settled well with me *shrug*
Thanks for all the posts though ^_^