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First, Pathfinder is not a simulation of the real-world. The same goes for notions of what each of the abilities mean, to include how it applies to fantastical races that don't have a real-world counterpart.
With that said, wisdom, IMO, includes maturity, which has something to do with cultural aspects as well. This would include how such fantastical beings are raised, and what they are exposed to and when they are exposed to it.
Also, there's the aspect of rules consistency and balance that need to be considered. If certain races had benefits that other races did not, the other races would never get played. Sometimes, you end up with quirky applications of rules just so they are consistent across all instances of whatever the rule applies to.
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Personal case- I have a young aasimar character. Aasimars reach adulthood at age 60, and mine is 40 years old (about 12 in human years). This would make her a child by any personal consideration (I couldn't find any official age ranges on non-core races). However, wisdom by most definitions is the accumulation of life experience, and considering she's older than any other character is my party, despite being a "child", wouldn't she realistically have as much, if not MORE wisdom than the other characters?
This applies to other races with late adulthoods as well, such as elves and, if you want to stretch it, gnomes and dwarves.
Not necessarily. It isn't just about having those experiences. IT is about learning from those experiences. Something which your aasimar is not as good at as a human. That is why, after 40 years, he only has the maturity of a 12 year old human. The aasimar has experiences a lot more, but the human has learned from those experiences faster.
Likewise with the other long-lived races. They experience a lot, but don't learn much from it. The longer lived races all have a harder time learning from their experiences than humans do, as evidenced by how long it takes to reach adulthood, and the time it takes to learn your first class level). Plus the mental ability score adjustments for getting older accumulate faster for humans than the longer lived races.
If instead all races matured at the same rate (roughly at the same time as a human - all races take roughly the same time to reach maturity, but then aging slows down after that for the longer lived races) then you would have a point. But the longer lived races take much longer to mature, so would have to have a harder time learning from their experiences for that to make sense.
(Note - this all falls apart when you consider that experience points are gained the same for all races.)
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Maturity comes from both experience and biology. At least one recent study suggests that, biologically speaking, the brain doesn't fully mature until "well into the 20s", and possibly even longer than that:
The frontal lobes, home to key components of the neural circuitry underlying “executive functions” such as planning, working memory, and impulse control, are among the last areas of the brain to mature; they may not be fully developed until halfway through the third decade of life.
Poor executive functioning leads to difficulty with planning, attention, using feedback, and mental inflexibility, all of which could undermine judgment and decision making.
I'm no expert on biology, let alone Aasimar biology, but it seems to me that if the brain's physiological development lags behind the rest of the body in humans (and in Pathfinder's other fantasy races according to the Young Characters page), then it's reasonable to say the same thing happens in Aasimar.
D&D ability scores are an abstracted mashup of many different things. Some of the above could be used to argue that an INT penalty would be more appropriate, but some justify a WIS penalty:
- Poor impulse control may translate into a lowered Will save
- Difficulty with attention and working memory may translate into diminished Perception
- Difficulty with using feedback, and mental inflexibility together might suggest that a 40-year-old Aasimar hasn't learned as effectively from his life experience as a 40-year-old human
However, it must also be mentioned that:
Although such research is currently underway, many neuroscientists argue that empirical support for a causal relationship between neuromaturational processes and real-world behavior is currently lacking.
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In Pathfinder, Wisdom Score doesn't represent only life experience.
Wisdom describes a character’s willpower, common sense, awareness, and intuition.
It makes sense to me that children are more eassily influenced, and more distractable that adults (which means lesser willpower and awareness). And no matter the race they do have less life experience that adults of the same race, so -2 decrease to Wisdom if they are not mature makes sense.
Also, Aasimars do get +2 bonus to Wisdom. You can interpret it as Aasimar actualy having more common sense and intuition than their age catgory suggest - an average young aasimar has about the same Wisdom as an adult human. Seems legit.
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With that said, wisdom, IMO, includes maturity, which has something to do with cultural aspects as well. This would include how such fantastical beings are raised, and what they are exposed to and when they are exposed to it.
... and biological aspects as well. The child or adolescent brain is literally constructed differently than the adult brain. That's one reason that children are able to learn languages much more easily than adults, but that's also a reason that adolescents have poor decision-making skills; their brains literally don't work the way adults expect them too. They don't learn the way adults do, and they don't act on what they have learned the way adults do.
There are even some very cool new results coming out that suggest that we can return adult brains to a more youthful state using drugs. The side effects associated with that particular drug are fairly serious, though -- and would you really want to return to the mood swings and emotional roller-coaster that was your fifteen-year-old self?
From a Pathfinder perspective, I have no particular issue with aasimar being "eighteen and stupid" well into their fifties, on the grounds that their brains takes longer to develop adult properties, just as their bodies do.
I think what you are running into, at present is a set of weird rules inconsistencies, and also you are running afoul of a retcon. At present, in Pathfinder, aasimar and Tiefling life span categories have been adjusted to match that of humans. There are still some published works that referred to the older longer categories, however they have technically been errata'd.
The second thing you're running up against is the assumption that Alien psychologies work the same way as human ones. There have been very many different threads discussing this topic, however one of the most interesting and compelling versions of a thread that discusses some more things, with elves, was one in which a poster crafted a scenario that utilized the extreme plasticity, but also repeated purging, that children's minds go through, on an extreme extended basis for very long live the creatures, such as elves. This actually fits in extremely well with a very great deal of lore, and explains why such long live the races would be prone to having similar, or even the same, ability scores as humans with their shorter lives.
Using that method, or concept, that is the repeated sort of loss of conscious memories, or at least loss of easy access to them, means that it creates a very interesting, and dynamic situation for those long live the races. A situation in which they have memories, and can probably even recall stories for the from the last century or so, but ultimately, much like humans, if enough time passes between an event and now, and those events are unrelated to each other, then they will probably just forget about them. Even important things - faces of friends, loved ones, or even the names there of, could all say the way, over time.
As a more personal example, related to me, in real life, is my aunt, who is very significant to me in years before high school; I didn't spend very much time with her, but she was very important to my mother, and I did spend some time with her, even helping her when she was sick. Now, only a decade-point-five later, I can barely remember her face, if at all, and sometimes can't remember her name. I still have flashes of memory - moments with her that I remember, and that hold strong emotions for me - and yet I struggle to recall her, at times, beyond those snippets. I would suggest that similar circumstances or effects may plague long-lived races; this helps settle things "in" from a game-world fluff/rule agreement perspective, but also helps from a balance perspective.
That said, you're choosing to play an aasimar character who is, by default, young for that race. The simple template is not the only method of adjusting young (or age effects old) characters; you may simply want to take the PFS approach and say. "Age is mostly irrelevant: here are your totally normal stats, after all you're a super-exception to many rules just by being you." and make yourself a small-sized aasimar (with the benefits and penalties that implies).
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Also what those four ninja, above me, said. XD
EDIT: I was ninja'd way more than I thought!
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Bunch of agists on these boards. Who are you to say that children's brains are inherently inferior to that of an adult's brains?
;)
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And also thanks for reminding me about sizes, Tacticslion! I think wondering if age imposes a size penalty/bonus was one of the reasons I looked up the young characters page. It's funny they don't have any mention of size penalties on that page, but I think 4'0" 70 lbs would qualify as small. (I came up with her height and weight myself since the random rolling for them wouldn't have made much sense given her age level.
4'0" and 70 lbs actually does fall into the Medium size category. I don't know if Pathfider ever reproduced the whole table, but you can find it here (scroll down a bit to "Big and Little Creatures in Combat"). Medium-size covers from 4 to 8 feet and from 60 to 500 pounds.
Bunch of agists on these boards. Who are you to say that children's brains are inherently inferior to that of an adult's brains?
;)
We don't have to. Science does for us. ;D
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When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
—attributed to Mark Twain
And also thanks for reminding me about sizes, Tacticslion! I think wondering if age imposes a size penalty/bonus was one of the reasons I looked up the young characters page. It's funny they don't have any mention of size penalties on that page, but I think 4'0" 70 lbs would qualify as small. (I came up with her height and weight myself since the random rolling for them wouldn't have made much sense given her age level.
Also I got the aasimar maturity age from d20pfsrd. I assumed that site's always up to date but who knows, maybe they aren't. My whole campaign's using that site, so I'm sticking to it for consistency.
No problem!
Normally that site is pretty awesome, but there are a few Golairoon-specific things they can't reproduce - the altered ages may well be Golarion-specififc; besides, the ages you're using go all the way back to third edition, and were also published by Paizo. I imagine a lot of people make use of them.
That said, the site is in transition right now - it's migrating from one host to another - so that might cause delays in updating its information.
Also, talking, and typing, on the phone is hard. :-) Except every time I say :-), another :-) appears so that's cool. :-)
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Oh, I figured since this was a question of rules and ages of the race of Aasimar, for the last few years, Aasimar age the same rate as humans. Some of the tables on this (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advancedRaceGuide/ageHeightWeight.html) page are wrong, but the Aasimar only live to be about 91 years old.
They hit adulthood at 20 years of age, thus making a 40 year old Aasimar a Middle-aged Aasimar, not a young Aasimar. If you want additional reading material on this aspect of the topic, read this (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2kud3&page=2?AasimarTiefling-Age-Categorie s).
Overall though, that doesn't impact your character too much, just a number change is all.
Oh, I figured since this was a question of rules and ages of the race of Aasimar, for the last few years, Aasimar age the same rate as humans. Some of the tables on this (http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advancedRaceGuide/ageHeightWeight.html) page are wrong, but the Aasimar only live to be about 91 years old.
They hit adulthood at 20 years of age, thus making a 40 year old Aasimar a Middle-aged Aasimar, not a young Aasimar. If you want additional reading material on this aspect of the topic, read this (http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2kud3&page=2?AasimarTiefling-Age-Categorie s).
Overall though, that doesn't impact your character too much, just a number change is all.
Over-all, I'd say not, "wrong" so much as a victim of (very awkward) ret-conning.
(Note: it's not that ret-conning is wrong or even awkward, but this one, I feel, wasn't handled as smoothly or justifiably as it could be. I would suggest that the "short" aasimar ages may well be a quirk of Golarion, leaving a grand total of zero ret-cons needed, rather than the, "Nope, in PF they've all got human lifespans." it currently stands as of relatively recent and ill-publicized change, especially compared to how so very many players for so very long have figured it. I don't think it is necessarily wrong to change it, but it feels like a hurried patch that creates awkward questions, rather than a host of other options mentioned over the years. That said, it may be that the developers don't want to give credence to the idea that they got their ideas from someone else - as they don't want to open them to lawsuit - but I suspect that anyone attempting to claim this would be handily dismissed as frivolous, at best, and wrongful claim, at worst. But that's just me. Paizo needs to do what they need to do for themselves. :D)
Hello, I was reading the Young Characters page in reference to a character I have just to see if Paizo Pathfinder had any specific rules regarding young characters. This line in particular is significant.
"A young character has a +2 bonus to Dexterity and a —2 penalty to Strength, Constitution, and Wisdom. (A young character's potential inexperience and awkwardness are represented by having only the skill ranks of a 1st-level character rather than taking a penalty to Intelligence or Charisma.)"
Young people are quick but also not fully developed physically, so the DEX, STR, and CON adjustments makes sense. But the WIS penalty to me doesn't.
If I were to rewrite things - from a simulationist (not realist) point of view - I would just do a -2 to all abilty scores for yunf characters.
It is all an abstraction.
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Didn't they change the age categories on human-outsider hybrids so that they don't outlive their parents by a few decades?
That argument would make little logical sense, since humans often outlive their parents by a few decades.
Have kid at 25, life expectancy is 75, your kid is 50 when you die. They then die at 75, 2.5 decades after your death. As such, I never had much issue with planetouched living to be 120-150. Their celestial/fiendish (i.e., immortal) heritage extends their lives by a bit. No big deal.
But it would be a problem if you had a plane-touched kid when being 40, and it would take 60 years for the kid to mature.