How do elves age?
Gracefully.
Seriously, the idea of spreading out the aging process for a long-lived race like elves is rather silly. We've had threads here before asking how many years elves spent in diapers, how long they were teenagers, etc.
The starting age for elves, 110 years +x yields a starting age between 114 and 170 years. Presumably, the 114 years figure is meant to be the equivalent of a young adult (human, around 17 or 18).
How long did such an elf take to learn to become a wizard? Probably no longer than a human, really. It's just that this elf spent so much time doing other things like admiring poetry, hunting in the forest, attending elaborate ceremonies, watching the sun rise and so on.
PF doesn't really attempt to deal with this age discrepancy. Logically, an adventuring elf who is 114 to 170 years of age has been doing lots of other things with his time, and really ought to get a slew of obscure or eclectic skill ranks like profession (birdwatching) or craft (treehouse weaving). The Unchained background skills system could easily be modified to work with this.
So there is no real answer to your question other than whetever you and your DM want to decide. Could a 15-year-old elven child learn to become a druid after a few years, just like a human? Probably. No reason why not. Work out your backstory with your DM.
AFAIK, it is only in PFS that you are restricted to taking an age from the appropriate bracket for your race.
The character's race and class influence these statistics. Consult your GM before making a character that does not conform to these statistics.
That leaves things pretty wide open. Consult with your DM and write up your backstory as you see fit.
A fifty five year old elf is the same "physical age" as an eight year old human. So those humans will probably have to be training that elf child for a while.
Nobody really goes into detail. You could either try to equate their age to a human by taking the aging process in the same linear fashion, making a 50 year old elf basically a human child, or you could take it the way Wheldrake says it, kind of like elves in the Eragon series. Personally I prefer the latter because it makes much more sense to me and seems to fit a lot more thematically with elves.
Nobody really goes into detail. You could either try to equate their age to a human by taking the aging process in the same linear fashion, making a 50 year old elf basically a human child
According to Ultimate Campaign, that is exactly how it is in Pathfinder.
I just say they age the same physically up to about age 17 or 18 then have the elves age really slowly. That makes the most sense to me personally. The rules don't really speak on it from anything I have seen.
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The rules don't really speak on it from anything I have seen.
pg 194 Ultimate Campaign
The rules don't really speak on it from anything I have seen.pg 194 Ultimate Campaign
Well it seems we have an official rule now. I never saw that.
I guess that means house rule time for my games.
I dunno Wraith, is that PFS legal... :-D
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I dunno Wraith, is that PFS legal... :-D
LOL
Sure it is. :) <----- might not be true, but I don't play PFS.
Nobody really goes into detail. You could either try to equate their age to a human by taking the aging process in the same linear fashion, making a 50 year old elf basically a human childAccording to Ultimate Campaign, that is exactly how it is in Pathfinder.
pg 194 Ultimate Campaign
I'm just here to provide a link for what Milo v3 said. Good day everyone.
I stand corrected. And thank you for the link.
I have always found the aging thing to be hard to deal with as well. Wizardry academies would love elves because their decades-long youths would spell a massive windfall of tuition dollars, haha! Basically any kind of schooling that combined classes of different races would be impossible.
We've generally never had to deal with it until my latest campaign where someone wanted to play a younger half-elf right around high school age. I decided to house rule it. I decided at that point, just to make things simple, that all races grew up and became adults in the same time frame that humans do. They just lived way longer.
Why races that live for hundreds of years instead of tens of years wouldn't be easily hitting god-like class levels over the centuries is a question we'll answer if I ever run a game that lasts hundreds of game years (yeah, right).
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Why races that live for hundreds of years instead of tens of years wouldn't be easily hitting god-like class levels over the centuries is a question we'll answer if I ever run a game that lasts hundreds of game years (yeah, right).
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The trouble with the "young characters" section from UC is that the author made the horribly illogical assumption that the number of years spent at younger ages (infancy, childhood and youth) is proportionate to the total lifespan of a given race.
This results in absurd conclusions for "young" members of the longer-lived races, and gives traction to assertions like having a 60-year-old elf be just as physically, intellectually and emotionally developed as a 9-year-old human.
However, since this is the rules forum, those are the RAW.
IMHO, it makes a lot more sense to suppose that elves pass through the stages of infancy, childhood and youth at about the same rate as humans, but that differences in aging begin in the teenage years, when most elves spend many years or decades just enjoying the wonderful and amazing beauty of the earth and nature. Ed Greenwood portrays young adult elves as willful, immature, petty and impulsive, and that works fine too, helping to explain why they take decades to settle down to something we might see as an adventuring "norm".
But really, all this nonsense with age categories is an attempt to explain away differences between lifespans and actual age, in order to have all player characters start out at 1st level being essentially the same, regardless of race. It all comes down to a question of flavor and fluff.
When talking about age and adulthood, there are several factors to consider. There is biological adulthood which is based on puberty. Puberty begins at 10-11 for girls and 11-12 for boys and completes at 15-17 for girls and 16-17 for boys. So, by 17, a person is considered, reproductively at least, fully adult. But then there is mental development. Neuroscience has shown that, while most of your body is fully adult by 17, your brain doesn't fully "click" into an adult way of thinking until about 25. In that span between finishing puberty at about 16-17 and complete mental development at 25, you are, literally, a child in an adult's body. Lastly, there are socio-political ages like age of consent and age of majority. In the US, age of majority is 18; at 18, you are legally considered an adult. Age of consent varies from 16-18 depending on the state in which you live. Other countries slide both values up or down based on their cultures and politics.
In antiquity, a person was typically considered an adult at about 16, bringing age of majority in line, roughly, with biological adulthood. Sometimes, it was based in ritual; a boy didn't become a man until he performed a "rite of passage".
So, now with the background layed out, age ranges in Pathfinder are not very proportional. If you compare the average starting age for an intuitive class (arguably, the closest line to biological age) to average max lifespan, you find that some races are "children" for a greater portion of their life compared to others. I did the calculations a while back and found the following:
Estimated proportion of biological childhood:minimum lifespan
Human: 21%
Dwarf: 16%
Elf: 31%
Gnome: 20%
Half-Elf: 16%
Half-Orc: 23%
Halfling: 19%Elves spend over 30% of their total age as children while Half-Elves and Dwarves have half the proportional childhood. But you also need to consider mental age. Completion of a studied class would probably, roughly, correspond with complete adult mental development. If we...
I've read that bit about brain changes at 25 too. In one article I read they referred to it as not maturing but enter a stage of old age. A developing brain doesn't mean child like though we treat as such in our culture. My ancestors were young and considered adults but back then the average life span was 36, so 25+ would be considered and old man. If you were married at 16 and had kid they would 20 by the time you were on you death bed.
Honestly OP i wouldnt think too hard on the details , because the need to be fair and balanced made such issues completely illogical.
An elf with 110 would for sure have tons and tons of skill points even at level 1 , since he would have done a crap ton of things during all this time dont matter how you want to see this , but ofc this would clash with a human or other short lived races , thus the rules wont give it to them.
For a human taking care of a being such as a elf wont be just like having their own kids , it will be a life long task to me atleast , so in my games you could by the end probably say your parents literally died of old age by the time you went adventuring.
Yes, let us talk about the "real" biology of elves and dwarves and whatnot.
Reminds me of the time my friend argued that "magic doesn't work like that in the real world".
RAW is RAW, it's an interesting take on it, and if I was writing a series of novels I would have it work differently but I don't particularly care about it since I can't imagine it impacting my games much.
I've never understood people who don't get how an elf ages slower than a human. After all, humans age slower than animals. We take years to learn to walk, where as numerous animals can do so almost right away.
Because biology is messy and unpredictable. How does your "everything ages at the same rate" stack up against tortoises? Red sea urchins, whales, mussels? The list of organisms that don't age anything like humans goes on and on.
Plus...magic. It's a fantasy world. It doesn't have to follow our rules of biology.
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I've never understood people who don't get how an elf ages slower than a human. After all, humans age slower than animals. We take years to learn to walk, where as numerous animals can do so almost right away.Because biology is messy and unpredictable. How does your "everything ages at the same rate" stack up against tortoises? Red sea urchins, whales, mussels? The list of organisms that don't age anything like humans goes on and on.
Plus...magic. It's a fantasy world. It doesn't have to follow our rules of biology.
I think you're confused on what I was saying. I was agreeing that elves should age slower and referenced the walking example of how different species age at different rates.
I've never understood people who don't get how an elf ages slower than a human. After all, humans age slower than animals. We take years to learn to walk, where as numerous animals can do so almost right away.That's because Humans are all born relatively premature. We're born before our cranial bones fully fuse because the skull needs to be flexible to fit through the birth canal, as a result of our brains being so large. Other animals can wait to be born until they are fully developed so they can walk just shortly after being born. It's not that we learn "more slowly" than other animals, it's that we start so far behind, it takes us a while to catch up to where they started from.
Maybe elves are like kangaroos, they're born as little jellybean sized red things.
I suggested in an earlier run of this argument that elven children didn't do the rapid learning/language acquisition thing human kids do. They have to learn everything the slower and more painful way adults do.Maybe elves are like kangaroos, they're born as little jellybean sized red things.I've never understood people who don't get how an elf ages slower than a human. After all, humans age slower than animals. We take years to learn to walk, where as numerous animals can do so almost right away.That's because Humans are all born relatively premature. We're born before our cranial bones fully fuse because the skull needs to be flexible to fit through the birth canal, as a result of our brains being so large. Other animals can wait to be born until they are fully developed so they can walk just shortly after being born. It's not that we learn "more slowly" than other animals, it's that we start so far behind, it takes us a while to catch up to where they started from.
I just think it's awesome so long as they're marsupial humanoids. :)
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I've always assumed that the way Elven children are raised is much less directed than the way our children are. Oh, do you want to go pick wildflowers for a week? Sure! Oh, do you want to go hunting? Sure! You want to read this silly book about a mouse and a cookie 683 times in a row? Of course!
Plus the time it takes to train each and every one of them to fight at least half-way competently with a sword and use a bow (both skills that actually take quite a bit of time to learn).
As a House Rule, I've strongly considered replacing either the aforementioned Weapon Familiarity or Elven Magic (player's choice) with the Breadth of Experience Feat, to represent this undirected but extensive education.
The other thing to bear in mind is that age doesn't equate to level very well in Golarion or most other settings. Sure, most adults are 2nd-5th level or so, but there's not much of a correlation between where in that spread they fall and their age. There are 20th level people in their teens and 3rd level people in their 70s, even among humans.
Option one: Elves have a lot of learning disabilities. They are really bad at learning things unless they're an adventurer.
They don't actually get that racial intelligence bonus until after the first century. They instead get a -6 intelligence and -4 wisdom.
Option 2: Elves have bad memories. They forget everything longer than about two decades ago.
Option 3: Elves sleep for 23 hours a day for the first century.
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It simply doesn't make sense that you don't pick up any extra skills with extra decades. Even if they aren't mature, you'd pick up something over that long. Just look at the skills that extremely driven children pick up in our time. Give a couple extra decades to practice and we'd get lots of elven prodigies.
The "They spend lots of time doing X" argument fails because they don't have any skills in poetry, herbalism, etc. It fails when you have an elf whose background is that they weren't raised with other elves. It fails when you have a character that grew up obsessed with being the best X in the world.
I personally rule that elves take about 20% more time to grow up. This is enough to feel different without being too different in terms of what they could learn. Other long-lived races are similar.
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As a House Rule, I've strongly considered replacing either the aforementioned Weapon Familiarity or Elven Magic (player's choice) with the Breadth of Experience Feat, to represent this undirected but extensive education.
There is an Alternate Racial Trait that trades both of those for Skill Focus, so trading both for BoE is probably a fairer option.
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Different mental wiring can account for a lot.
Elves may be more perfectionistic and less ambitious than humans. If you really want everything to be just right, and don't have a need to finish anything, you can drag on with quite some time concerned with unimportant details and ultimately not improve your skills as much as someone who experiments with many variations in a shorter time. There is some evidence that exploratory behavior is partly genetic in humans, so these differences could be largely innate rather than just cultural.
Elves may also have less variation in mental traits such that they don't have the kinds of outlier prodigies that humans have.
And certain complex skills rely heavily on higher mental functions like critical thinking which might not be fully developed in young elves. Trained magic might be even more so, relying on mental discipline that elves just don't develop until after their first century, so they can't even start their real magical training until they are over 110 despite early exposure making their eventual understanding somewhat stronger (elven magic).
In my current setting, I've adjusted the starting ages such that elves are physically mature at 60, and can be competent in an intuitive class shortly thereafter (typical starting ages 64-80). They take a little longer to develop more complex self-taught skills but usually master the basics by their cultural maturity (starting ages 80-110). Trained magic relies on late-developing mental processes (starting age 110-150). The bigger gaps between different types of skills better represent in my mind the effect of mental development on starting age. A character like the OP's might with some pressure and talent complete druidic training around 100.
Another option is to adjust your expectations for what levels mean for elves. A 1st level human wizard is fairly uncommon, a talented expert who has devoted a significant portion of their life to wizardry. A 1st level elven wizard may have just coasted through their magical education, or naturally picked it up casually. There would exist dedicated elves who were really focused and driven and reached level 4 by the time they graduated wizard school at the top of their class, but in a game starting from level 1 you wouldn't play one of these any more than you'd play a veteran dragonslayer. You might, with GM permission, be able to play an elven "child prodigy" as a level 1 wizard, instead of a level 1 adept as suggested in Ultimate Campaign.
That's actually what bothers me most about elven aging: It's not proportionate and it's not proportionate in the wrong way. Elves spend more of their time both as children and at venerable, when the typical view of them is of ever youthful adults.
I agree, though it's possible that the typical human view is inaccurate. If elves are isolated, humans might not see many human children. And even old elves could appear very youthful if they compensate for physical infirmity with advanced skill.
I've read that bit about brain changes at 25 too. In one article I read they referred to it as not maturing but enter a stage of old age. A developing brain doesn't mean child like though we treat as such in our culture. My ancestors were young and considered adults but back then the average life span was 36, so 25+ would be considered and old man. If you were married at 16 and had kid they would 20 by the time you were on you death bed.
That average is brought way down by high rates of child mortality. If you lived to 20 in those times, you had a decent chance to make it to 60 or 70.
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It's 'complicated' but I have an 'age drag coefficient' so to speak. At the beginning, they age the equivalent of one to one up to say age twelve, then they start slowing down relative to humans and aging less year to year so the elf is functionally, say, fifteen when the human is 20, twenty when the human is thirty - then the curve keeps increasing to match the aging effects landmarks.
So when on the young end the aging is roughly similar but diverges rapidly the older they get.
So you avoid the long helpless period, but what you do have is an extended 'flighty adolescence'
This is exactly how I do it too. You are not alone!
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I didn't mean the typical in-world human view of them, but the typical expectations a player will have - the way they're typically portrayed in fiction or other media.
And to be honest, how I've always actually seen them used in game. It wasn't until I crunched the numbers that I realized how high a percentage of their lives was at Venerable and how short a time was as adults.
Nothing wrong with tweaking the tropes, but if they're going to do so, it should be clearer. A new take is cool. A new take the players don't notice even when they're playing elves isn't really a new take.
Fair enough. On the other hand, elves are also often portrayed as immensely wise due to their advanced age - see Elrond and Galadriel as examples. The way aging works now, if elves spend most of their time in their physical prime they also spend most of their time without the mental stat bonuses for aging. That would be a reason to have them spend more time in old age, but without visible aging.
I'm not sure much effort was put into age categories, though.