I don't know why everyone in this thread equates intellect with maturity. Maybe Elves are like genius children, but they're still "children" until they mature. So they might be able to pull A Beautiful Mind on you in a math class, but they still act like children.
They're allowed to advance in NPC classes, though, so it's not that they can't do anything.
Mind you, I'm not saying the aging rules model the differences between races that take 14 years to come to maturity and races that take 110 years to do so. But then, there aren't any races that take that long to reach adolescence in the real world, so we'll never know.
Still and all, Otto of the Silver hand was pretty good kid's book, and that's a good enough reason to play a young character for me.
More generally, for my money, actually growing up slowly makes more sense than growing up at the same rate as humans and then not being allowed to do anything for another 90+ years.Well, no, the 1st level character wouldn't be 100 years old, he'd be more like 20. Just a few years older than the human base.Not in the "elves grow up fast but don't start adventuring for cultural reasons until 110" interpretation of the aging rules.
Or, I suppose they hit 1st level and still aren't allowed to do anything for another 90 years. Which is back to my point.
Well, yes, but I would simply ignore that because I think it's stupid.
I dunno. The aging rules for Elves have been that way in D&D for years now, like, since 1st or 2nd edition (never really looked at the first edition elves). In the 2nd edition elf handbook, it was pretty clear that elves didn't reach full physical maturity until around 85 years old, so 55 is even faster than normal for D&D.I don't think they did. I don't have the book, but there seems to be conflict between some statements in this thread.
If I'm reading correctly 55 isn't full physical maturity, it's the age at which the playing as a child rules kick in: equivalent to a human 8 year old.
I do have the book, and I'm looking at it right now. According to the Complete Book of Elves, the official TSR AD&D book, elves reach physical maturity at right around 85-95 years of age.
As far as the rules for the Complete Campaign, I was unaware of that. Haven't bought the book yet.
In any case, if you don't like it, don't use it. I don't have a problem with it, so I will use it.
Yeah, I was questioning the Campaign book. I believed you on the AD&D one. That's where the 55 number that's being thrown around in this thread comes from.I dunno. The aging rules for Elves have been that way in D&D for years now, like, since 1st or 2nd edition (never really looked at the first edition elves). In the 2nd edition elf handbook, it was pretty clear that elves didn't reach full physical maturity until around 85 years old, so 55 is even faster than normal for D&D.I don't think they did. I don't have the book, but there seems to be conflict between some statements in this thread.
If I'm reading correctly 55 isn't full physical maturity, it's the age at which the playing as a child rules kick in: equivalent to a human 8 year old.
I do have the book, and I'm looking at it right now. According to the Complete Book of Elves, the official TSR AD&D book, elves reach physical maturity at right around 85-95 years of age.
As far as the rules for the Complete Campaign, I was unaware of that. Haven't bought the book yet.
In any case, if you don't like it, don't use it. I don't have a problem with it, so I will use it.
Ah. Gotcha.
The elves grow to physical maturity at about 20, but then spend the next 90 years sitting on their parents' treehouse couch, playing ElfBox 360 (or FeyStation 3).
Is that platform available at BestBuy? :P
The elves grow to physical maturity at about 20, but then spend the next 90 years sitting on their parents' treehouse couch, playing ElfBox 360 (or FeyStation 3).
That does sound kind of awesome. I want to be a "teenage" elf.
D&D elves, really are a strange lot, when there long life spans. Some worlds there immortal, some they live for 1000 of years, other they life for 250-500.
What every starting age pathfinder starts them out with is fine, as you will still have a longer life, than what your character will life throw with most Adventures death rates, as they are.
...................
How i work the elves in my home-brew worlds.
The EL-men (Elves, Vulcan's, the lay-fay, Blue bloods)
Generically engineered race of humans. Pointed ears, light green to light blue to dark blue skin. I do not allow infravision, darkvision, or low-light vision on playable races.
1-25 years of age = Age normally as humans. But can not have children at this time.
26-225 year of age = Do not age at all. But can have up to 1 child per year. Can Bio-regenerate 1 hp every 8 hours of sleep. This allows them to heal lost finger, limbs, eyes, even internal organs, over a period of weeks or months, provided they are keep alive and/or life support for internal organs, and do not die. Injuries suffered before the age of 25 or after the age of 226 are not effected by this.
226-250 year of age = Appear to age at 4 times normal human rates. Can no longer have children. Rapped aging, at 226 = 30 year old human appearances, 230 = 42 year old human, 235 = 62 year old human, 240 = 82 year old human, 245 = 102 year old human appearance.
245 to 250 = Death from old age.
a lot of non-humans age pretty darn slow, in fact, a lot of them possess traits many of us modern humans wish we had. because they are idealized fantasy races based on traits some human crowd has found desirable, whether a physical or personality trait, or the influence of fiction.
as an example, elves are modeled after the idealized and romanticized desire to be tall, lithe, and pretty yet exotic and charming.
Castrovel actually has shorter years, but that explanation doesn't make a lot of sense anyways. However long the planet takes to go around the sun, there's still the same amount of living time in what we call a year. You still learn and experience just as much in the same amount of time, however long the units you measure it in are.First of all, elf aging doesn't make any sense. I like the idea that it's because they're aliens, and maybe their home planet has much longer years.
Darn, foiled again. Well, I have no idea why the elves evolved to live hundreds of years.
I still think they just spend a really long time mastering each step of doing everything, and that's why it takes them decades to become adventure-ready. Although the 90+ years of being a teenager idea has appeal, too.
I'm still not sure on dhampirs.
On a related note Lobsters are biologically immortal. It's not far fetched for fantasy/genetically created races to be the same way.
Humans spend nearly every moment of their lives mastering a skill or set of skills, with relatively very little time for leisure or just sitting, meditating, doing absolutely nothing. Elves, on the other hand, spend days feasting and celebrating, days weeks or months meditating and enjoying simple things, years wandering the world aimlessly, etc...elves take their lives at a much slower pace. They aren't stupid, they just don't spend the kind of time humans do on 'practical' skills.
From another perspective...it takes roughly 10,000 hours to achieve mastery of a given skill(aka The 10,000 Hour Rule). Playing guitar, picking locks, mastering swordplay, etc, takes about 10,000 hours to achieve virtuoso level mastery. A human would do this by grinding out many hours a day over a short period of years. An elf would achieve it by spending a few hours a week dabbling, and the rest of his time lounging about, feasting, wandering, etc.
And there is probably an element of explaining why elves don't have large number of high level druids and wizards, and why dwarves don't have large number of high level fighters and clerics. If elf and dwarf adventurers began at age 18 and had 100+ years of adventuring they would probably reach very high levels.Given that it's easy enough for humans to reach high levels in the course of months or a couple years, I don't think it really matters. An AP usually takes you to around 16th in a year or so.
Sure, you need an explanation for why there aren't tons of high level elves out there, but you really also need one for why there aren't tons of high level humans around.
Once you've got that, the same thing can apply to elves.
Adventurers inevitably die. Adventuring is the #1 cause of death for adventurers.
Just so everyone knows what started this thread -- Ultimate Campaign has given us additional data points for humanoid ages. Young characters have a base age of half the adult base age (rounded up for races with an odd base age). This gives us the following equivalencies for elf and human ages:
Human 15 = Elf 110
Human 8 = Elf 55That second set of data points shoots down some common ideas about how elf children mature. It definitely pushes the age correspondences in a more linear direction, despite the absurdities that can result.
Really?! Three immediate thoughts then:
1) How many dang years are elves (and dwarves) in diapers?
2) Wouldn't that spur every elf and dwarf parent to know prestidigitation as an at will ability?
and c) Bags of devouring aren't cursed or mistakes... they're what elves and dwarves call magical bags for diapers? Sorry about your avatar, Gorbacz.
Just so everyone knows what started this thread -- Ultimate Campaign has given us additional data points for humanoid ages. Young characters have a base age of half the adult base age (rounded up for races with an odd base age). This gives us the following equivalencies for elf and human ages:
Human 15 = Elf 110
Human 8 = Elf 55That second set of data points shoots down some common ideas about how elf children mature. It definitely pushes the age correspondences in a more linear direction, despite the absurdities that can result.
Really?! Three immediate thoughts then:
1) How many dang years are elves (and dwarves) in diapers?
2) Wouldn't that spur every elf and dwarf parent to know prestidigitation as an at will ability?
and c) Bags of devouring aren't cursed or mistakes... they're what elves and dwarves call magical bags for diapers? Sorry about your avatar, Gorbacz.
1, don't know about dwarves, but elves are in diapers for 20 years or so. better than some of the Disgaea characters who spend 300 years in diapers.
2, it would, but not all of them have to time to devote to arcane study when they have an infant to care for. an infant literally eats up 90% of your time. and elven parents spend 20 years raising an infant, cutting the number of bread winners in half for 2 decades. elven mothers would love to learn that spell, but cannot devote the time.
3. definitely true in this case.
Elves are also described as capricious and even flighty at times. This would make sense if elven children remain children for 30 or 40 years. Those kinds of traits will stick more if you're allowed to have them for decades rather than years.
1) Dwarves are basically in the opposite direction of all the cultural tendencies you list, yet have similar aging characteristics, less extreme than elves, but vastly more long-lived/slow developing than humans. So cultural explanations about flighty, chaotic elves don't seem to hold much (and there happens to be Lawful Elves in Paizo's Core Setting in Tian).
2) The problem as I see it is not that Elves remain children too long, it is that they don't remain children long enough. If they remained children for a long time, and finally had a non-linear 'maturation process' that happened in a relatively short period, that would make more sense to me. But as pointed out, the new data has pushed us in a MORE linear correlation between aging rates, not less.
And there is probably an element of explaining why elves don't have large number of high level druids and wizards, and why dwarves don't have large number of high level fighters and clerics. If elf and dwarf adventurers began at age 18 and had 100+ years of adventuring they would probably reach very high levels.
How does that even get close to explaining away the vastly longer lives after you subtract that 100 year period?
IMHO, Elves and Dwarves SHOULD have a higher level skewing than Humans, even if at the very top end the difference is minimal.
Humans spend nearly every moment of their lives mastering a skill or set of skills, with relatively very little time for leisure or just sitting, meditating, doing absolutely nothing. Elves, on the other hand, spend days feasting and celebrating, days weeks or months meditating and enjoying simple things, years wandering the world aimlessly, etc...elves take their lives at a much slower pace. They aren't stupid, they just don't spend the kind of time humans do on 'practical' skills
But Humans can put skill ranks into 'useless' skills and Feats as well.
Why would Elves/Dwarves just have bonus ranks/feats in specific things like flower arranging and mining?
BTW, is there any canon mentioning of Elves doing things like mining, anywhere?
BTW, is there any canon mentioning of Elves doing things like mining, anywhere?
I recall somewhere it said that elves usually traded with dwarves for metal goods. I imagine I'd elves did mine they'd do so with magic and not much else.
Why are people treating this as a new thing? In classic D+D the average starting age for a full blooded elf was 100+ depending on class. They're elves, not Humans, I've never understood why people insisted on having kittens about the difference.After checking back in on the Ultimate Campaign thread and seeing that Mr. Reynolds asked that this topic should be taken to another thread and not seeing one created yet I decided to start it and see what people think.
So for those coming into this topic for the first time apparently there is a bit of cognitive dissonance brewing after the release of Ultimate campaign and the reveal of base children ages within the pathfinder or at least the golarion universe with one of the biggest ones being that an elf doesn't start hitting biological adulthood till about age 55.
Just because it's been around a while doesn't make it immune to criticism or alteration. It doesn't make any sense to a lot of us, as you can see from this thread.
Well with the rules for young characters taking NPC classes that decide to adventure, it wouldn't be too far fetched for them to be a level 5 warrior or adept. Not to mention with retraining once they hit adulthood, they could make it to the big leagues of actual PC class! That said, the Adventure Paths and adventures we see are fairly rare happenings and adventurers leveling up past a certain point become rare.
Because at that point is when their significant story starts. They've become heroes of their own novels. It's actually a pretty standard trope, many heroes of Campbellian type stores, i.e. the Luke Skywalker type start out as nearly totally useless on the first chapter and are forged into powerful heroes over a short period of time because they've been tossed into the forge of destiny, either to be remade as the hero they were meant to be, or to be smashed into oblivion. It's also why NPC's remain stuck at a fixed level plateau, if they're not doing anything challenging, they don't progress beyond their personal level of incompetence or retirement. So you're either a Joe Campbell hero making a meteoric rise, or a Peter Principle who's remaining in his comfortable rut.
But we know that this isn't the case with every single person in the world, both from looking at other media and even from looking at the real world. No matter how long-lived a race is, the idea that it sits around and gains no significant skills for an entire century is pretty silly. This is made doubly silly because elves have always been described as being more intelligent than humans. If the current aging paradigm were to be true, then elves aren't really smarter than humans; they've just been alive for much, much longer. But we also know that can't be true, because the newly printed Young Character rules tell us two things; 1) that Intelligence is not penalized for being young and 2) a Young Character has its racial ability modifiers. That means (on average) the Human Youth has an Intelligence of 10 and the Elf Youth has an Intelligence of 12. And yet it doesn't really feel like the Elven Youth is any smarter if he's taking 55 years to learn and accomplish what the Human Youth does in 5. Even if you use the, "Elves take their time mastering skills" excuse, 50 years to gain one skill rank is pushing my suspension of disbelief, especially for someone who is passionate about their craft.
As to what people have as "levels" prior to adventurer, it's most likely commoner or something simmilar who never get above first level until their background or training rebuilds them.
The Young Character rules confirm this; you gain NPC class levels until you retrain them into PC class levels.
Do you have simmilar hair-wringing fits on the "class" of a five or ten year-old Human?
It is something of a gaming tradition that humans are "The Mario" of the RPG world. If you're not familiar with this trope, it comes from Super Smash Bros., in which Mario has average stats in every statistic. Because of this, both Mario and humans in their respective games tend to be the ruler used to measure up all other options. This tradition is reflected in the rules as well, where low-light vision specifically says, "You can see two times as far as a human ..." instead of "You can see two times as far as a character without low-light vision ...." To summarize a long answer, no. People do not get into hair-wringing fits over young humans because they are thought of as the baseline; what you measure all other races by. In addition to my explanation above, humans are also (surprisingly) not fictitious; everyone knows the physical capabilities of a 5 year old human because at some point, they were once a 5 year old human. Because argue about other races because they're fantasy, and as you've seen everyone's fantasies are different.
It's not really a big issue, because young elves, generally reside in communities that are elf only, and because of the relative rarity of elf births, are given the most secure and safe backgrounds that can be managed, even if you're a Snowcaster elf in the Great White North.
Actually, I would argue that it is a big deal for several of the reasons you've listed. Most settings refer to a time, "Before the Elves and Dwarves made their first settlements," or whatever. In Pathfinder, I believe its called the Age or Serpents or something similar; the age of the serpentfolk. If we're to believe that elves, at one point, did not have cushy settlements and homes and were as primitive as ancient humans at one point, then how the heck did they beat evolution and make it to the point where they could build settlements in the first place? Disease would have been rampant, and elves have a Constitution penalty. An elf taking 110 years to mature would have been a nightmare for their pre-society population; considering Young Character elves would have suffered a –4 penalty to Constitution, how the heck did that race survive before magic and civilization?
Don't forget Forlorn Elves that live amongst people.