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So I put together a chart for this, after enough discussions in my group of things like "why won't people romance my 16-year-old half-elf". It's not very thorough right now, I plan on expanding it to add more detailed comparisons and non-core races, but in the meantime I have it around, and it still is probably of some use for things like deciding on starting ages (or explaining why a 25-year-old human dating a 16-year-old half-elf would be getting a bit dubious).
Still trying to decide which calculation methods I like best, for now they're all listed but in the long term I'll probably focus on one or the other. Any opinions on this would be welcome.
The calculation I use to help players understand the maturity differences is to convert all other ages into the human equivalent.
So a 16 year old half-elf is approximately 8.4 years old in human maturity terms. A 16 year old elf would be 3.8 years.
I made a small spreadsheet that does the conversions back and forth. All I have to do is type in the non-human age, and it converts it to understandable terms. I also do the other direction: I can type in a human age, and the sheet converts that to the equivalent age for any other race.
Essentially I normalized the data for ages and then used those ratios for back and forth conversions.
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One thing, particularly with half orc and half elves which I do include in character back stories is how out of step aging effects characters.
In my head cannon, the need for friends who don't "age out" while growing up is why half elves make great summoners and I used it with one of my pfs PCs.
I reversed that with my other half elf, who is over 100, has a large mostly human family and leaves to go adventuring because being great great grandfather is more and more awkward.
Deal with this issue by describing it to players via NPCs half elves and half orcs aging is an issue. Make it part of the game. Have a human single parent who had his child when he was 40 offer to turn over the parental rights to their half elven kids as apprentices etc.
Maybe have a 16 year old half elf NPC being forced into marriage because their human family sees it as appropriate/a good way to get rid of the brat.
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Maybe have a 16 year old half elf NPC being forced into marriage because their human family sees it as appropriate/a good way to get rid of the brat.Given that the half-elf looks and acts like an 8 year old human, that's creepier than I'd want to get.
I get that, and included it in my examples because it illustrates on a deep emotional level just how wrong it is but just how plausible such situations are.
The point is different ageing rates can create some very awkward situations. You don't have to use the worst one to make the point, which is to illustrate the point to a gm who wanted to illustrate the point to his players.
I think it would work better than a chart.
There are a lot of references of elves growing fast but maturing slow, but the whole thing is a bit blurry.
I've got a half elven wizard who grew in a very small town among humans and felt a bit awkward for being such a slow learner. She wasn't completely aware of her elven heritage so she became frustrated quite often.
As a note, I think half elf and half orc ages were revised to be a lot closer to human ages.
Where do you get that a 16 year old half-elf is equivalent to an 8 year old human?
Humans have a base starting age of 15, while half-elves have a base starting age of 20. 15/20 works out to 3/4, so a 16 year old elf is equivalent to a 12 year old human.
It is still pretty creepy, but not quite as extreme.
The down side to this less extreme age equivalence is that the human parents of a half-elf are more likely to overestimate that child's maturity level.
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Could be worse. Geniekin kids are almost inevitably going to be orphaned. And aasimars/tieflings, according to the PRD, seem to have been only half errata'd; apparently they reach adulthood at 20, live to 72-90, and it still takes them 8d6 years to become a level 1 monk. I'm still not totally sure what to do about recording their official aging rates.
To be honest, I like the slight difference in half-elf/half-orc aging; it's a nice element of how even an accepting and caring family might have a little bit of trouble handling them well.
Humans have a base starting age of 15, while half-elves have a base starting age of 20. 15/20 works out to 3/4, so a 16 year old elf is equivalent to a 12 year old human.
I use more than just the starting age. I calculate active life-span.
So, a human is an adult at age 15 and becomes venerable at age 70. That's a 55-year-long period.
A half-elf is an adult at age 20 and becomes venerable at age 125. That's a 105-year-long period.
If you divide 105 by 55 you get 1.9. That means that 1.9 years in a half-elf's life is equivalent to 1 year in a human's life. Use that ratio to convert back and forth between half-elf and human ages.
I think the time required to reach maturity would be far more relevant. The various races are all over the place in terms of what multiple of their time to maturity is required to die of old age.
And if you are not going by the assumption that all starting player characters of minimum racial starting age are of equal maturity, you are bound to get ridiculous results. For example, it is quite possible for a half-elf to begin play at the age of 21. Would you seriously argue that such a character is as mature as a 10-11 years old human?
Would you seriously argue that such a character is as mature as a 10-11 years old human?
I'm not arguing anything. This is a thread about using arithmetic to figure out age equivalences in Pathfinder. I shared a mathematical formula for figuring out age equivalences.
There's no need for you to use my method. If you don't like it, don't use it.
Do you realize that with this way to calculate, a 21 year old half-elf rogue level 1 has, according to you, the maturity of a 11 year old human kid, despite the fact that he is supposed to be an adult ??
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despite the fact that he is supposed to be an adult ??
Ah, I think I see the problem. I need to add the "adult base age" into the formula.
You are going on an assumption that every race matures in the exact same way, only at different "speeds". Have you considered different models? Perhaps a shark model, where the race is mature in a combat ready sense long before they become reproductively mature. Maybe the reverse, something like goblins, but their reproductive phase is early, perhaps in a barely sentient phase, and only post-reproductive individuals are fully sentient. Perhaps only a small portion of the race ever mature reproductively, or become fully sentient, or whatever.
Alternately, every humanoid or humanoid equivalent is just a human with a different growth-rate limiter.
How about the Vulcan model? Not sexually mature until they endure a major physiological event (Vulcan's Pan-Far). And cannot reproduce unless they revisit that event and it only occurs at an interval that could be years in decades apart.
Or maybe they can only mate once in their lifetime and then they die? Like some insects.
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The closest thing I know of in the current rules is the Child Adventurers rules, which use half the starting age as the Child age for every race - applying the same modifiers and restrictions. This strongly suggests they all mature at the same relative rate - different growth rate limiter, as you say.
Well, it implies that they mature at the same relative rate up to their starting age.
There are a lot of references of elves growing fast but maturing slow, but the whole thing is a bit blurry.
Ultimate campaign's young character rules shows that they grow slow, not just mature slow.
The starting age table is a pitiful holdover from Gygax and 1st edition. Almost everything else from that time is dead and buried, so why not this? Perhaps they just didn't care to update it because that takes work.
Either way, it is a shining example of moron.
You can't just take a race that lives for centuries and divide by human lifespan, get a ratio and multiply that by human starting age. That is how that idiot table was first created.
I'd like to see a reload of the Pathfinder races that fixes some of these problems, yet doesn't hose established character backgrounds:
Dwarves, Elves, and Gnomes: Instead of maturing at a rate that is unconditionally extremely slow, they mature at a rate that depends upon how much food is available. Where a Human would grow sickly and weak with insufficient nourishment (including one vital nutrient being limited in an otherwise plentiful diet), a Dwarf, Elf, or Gnome instead just slows or even nearly stops growth and maturation until more food becomes available, thus leading to a wide range of maturation ages that range from approximately double that of Human (under optimal conditions, they are still notably slower, just not glacial) to several times longer (severely food limited). Some societies of these races purposefully make use of this in times of relative peace to extend overall lifespan (which in real life ACTUALLY WORKS to a small but noticeable extent for Humans and other Animals, and to a large extent for certain Vermin). Of course, this makes the cognitive dissonance between Elven long life and Constitution penalty even more extreme, so instead of giving them a Constitution penalty, they would have fine Constitutions, just a hit point penalty for being lightly built. (Likewise, non-Duergar Dwarves wouldn't have an actual Charisma penalty, just a penalty to Charisma-dependent skills when interacting with non-Dwarves, and the actual Charisma penalty for Duergar would be likewise reduced. Both Dwarves and Elves would have alternate racial traits that would get rid of these penalties in exchange for something else.)
Races that are planetouched/Witchblood/Necromantic-touched etc. (Aasimar, Tieflings, Changelings, Dhampirs, Fetchlings, Genie-kin, etc.) and maybe even Animal-folk (Catfolk, Kitsune, Ratfolk, etc.) would be made into Templates that could be applied to various races. These would usually age at the same rate as their parent races, in some case with a modifier being applied. Their characteristics would also depend strongly upon both parent races, not just the exotic one (no more of all Aasimar/Tieflings being strictly determined by their Outsider lineage apart from size, and otherwise being always a blend of Human with whatever Outsider).
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Here is the thing: It doesn't add up.
If elves mature too slowly, they do not exist. Remember, the average fantasy world has rampaging monsters, orc hordes and dangers galore. Survival is important.
If elves have to spend ninety more years than a human LEARNING THE SAME THINGS in ten or so years, they are all utter morons. We are talking a -10 Int penalty here. That is obviously not what is intended.
If elves learn more than humans do in those extra years, I want to see it. I don't care if it is history, poetry, flower arranging, or making perfect slam dunks. See, the game doesn't prevent anyone from, say, learning elven. And they get to do it in a hundredth of the time...
Maybe illustrating it with an example from swedish gaming history is better. In the 80s, we had a BRP version called Drakar och demoner. It had elves, and those elves were specifically said to be able to reach ages of tens of thousands of years. And in unison, all of us determined, separately, that the appropriate starting age for an elf was at least several millennia old. Which is obvious b+#%+~&&.
It is about as relevant as saying that since they live some ten times as long as humans, they should have 3' move.
The idea is that elves grow up like humans, maybe a bit slower, then once they hit maturity, they stop aging. If you want aged elves, tie it to something else: Emotional detachment from unending loss, the health of the forest they live in, the planetary movement on a grander scale, the ebb and flow of magic, life events, or whatever else, just not time.
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If elves mature too slowly, they do not exist. Remember, the average fantasy world has rampaging monsters, orc hordes and dangers galore.
My last elf character finished a campaign as a level 16 travel-domain cleric. If she retires at this point, she'll be a level 16 cleric for the next two hundred and fifty years.
During that time, any orc hordes within nine hundred miles of her who try to mess with elf villages are going to wind up very dead very fast.
On her own, she should be able to protect multiple generations of elves.
Personally, I don't think humans add up. How are they supposed to find the time to choose a career path, develop career skills, work their way up the career ladder, save up enough money to start a family and then raise that family to adulthood before they die or become senile? Especially in a world with rampaging monsters.
If elves have to spend ninety more years than a human LEARNING THE SAME THINGS in ten or so years, they are all utter morons.
Or, you know, a bit dumb for the first few decades of their life. Forgetful. Capable of NPC classes only. Then their physical brain development finishes and they can become PCs.
You can find tons of patches to save the starting ages table, if you want. Doing so invariably creates more problems. Do the sensible thing: Throw it out. It is just a stupid table. The emotional investment in that table is incomprehensible.
And it isn't "a bit dumb". It's "let's use him for a doorstop".
I had some issues when creating my Changeling witch. Her father was an elf. I was also playing Dragonlance where elves mature sooner.
So I had to make her old enough not to have the young template but not too much because her concept needed that she was still receiving the call from her hag mother.
Calculating her age was a pain. Also she had some strong urges regarding to her sexuality that were induced by her mother, so I couldn't make her too young because I didn't want it to be awkward.
All this thing regarding to elves and maturity has a lot of different versions and it's difficult to decide which one to take.
Which is not an argument. One aspect of the game being an illogical mess in no way excuses another area being so. Why would it? Setting details like this provide or conflict with setting verisimilitude. Some of us appreciate verisimilitude. Others see it as "who cares if the setting doesn't make sense, I just want to kill stuff and get better stats hurr hurr".
I like verisimilitude, even if I can accept some illogical stuff for the sake of game balance. When I find contradictions I usually decide which version fits better with my ideas or homebrew something.
But I'd rather have an official explanation even if I finally decide to make it different in my game.
who cares if the setting doesn't make sense, I just want to kill stuff and get better stats hurr hurr
That made me think of some specific poster. Not saying names.
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If so, I hope they enjoy playing as they wish. I just don't take their views on setting verisimilitude seriously. And honestly, who cares how old your character is if all you want to do with it is kill stuff?
Bottom line is: A sodding table is stupid to obey slavishly. At least if the table was just haphazardly put together.
There are many tropes in fantasy. The older one is the unaging elves. Different tastes.
If so, I hope they enjoy playing as they wish. I just don't take their views on setting verisimilitude seriously. And honestly, who cares how old your character is if all you want to do with it is kill stuff?
Bottom line is: A sodding table is stupid to obey slavishly. At least if the table was just haphazardly put together.
So basically, what you're saying is that you should never play a character more than 20 years old or so. At least at the start. After all, anyone older should have developed far more skills - they must have been doing something with that time.
Even an iconic like Ezren makes no sense, since he has no skills related to all the years before he decided to become a wizard.
Guess what, if I GM for an older character, I try to give said character more skills etc. Verisimilitude is important.
I don't think that's what Sissyl meant when she said that.
I guess she was speaking more of people who don't even want to bother about that specific things without mechanic consequences.
«who cares if I am 16 or 160 years old? My character will be the same»
That kind of people.
Everything else, making your own fixes so you enjoy the game is OK as it is ejoying playing it how it is.
But not even caring about your background and concept is what probably Sissyl is criticising.
Edit: ninja'ed a hundred times. I'm leaving my post as it is.
To answer your specific question, thejeff, if my players wanted to play older characters (whether unaging elves or not), I'd suggest starting them at lvl 3 or 4, and require some more in the way of backstory. I wouldn't have much of a problem with letting one player start at higher level than the others. Still, it is a convention we're talking about. Everyone must be lvl 1 to start and everyone must be equally powerful. Mileages vary.
I also tried putting together a FR campaign with elves only, that played out over episodes during some six hundred years. "Enough downtime" was a cornerstone.
If so, I hope they enjoy playing as they wish. I just don't take their views on setting verisimilitude seriously. And honestly, who cares how old your character is if all you want to do with it is kill stuff?
Bottom line is: A sodding table is stupid to obey slavishly. At least if the table was just haphazardly put together.
Okay, I don't see who if anyone here is "obeying it slavishly". I commented on the suggested starting ages being stupid because I don't use them that way myself but still wanted to acknowledge that Paizo wrote an official thing. As far as I can tell everyone else in this thread is perfectly happy to houserule everything that doesn't make sense to them and we're just discussing officially printed information as well. You're the one who started throwing around how idiotic and moronic it was.
I'd bring up my own interpretation of elf aging, but I'm really not sure it matters.
I'd like to hear it. I am always interested in reading another players' interpretations to help to improve my games. We had to think a lot about it to see how it fit better our game, so any insight would be nice.
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This is an interesting discussion, and one that I've chatted about with people in the past. There's a couple of points I think might be interesting to consider.
The age chart is poorly defined. Humans are not adults at 15. That's utter crap. Sure we reach sexual maturity somewhere in that vicinity (I personally grew 6 inches and put on ~60lbs in my 16th year), but sexual maturity and emotional maturity are not equivalent. The prefrontal cortex, the part of the human brain associated with what we would normally call "maturity," doesn't complete growth until around age 27. So there's a basic problem of what do we mean by maturity/adulthood? Are we saying that elves grow more slowly than humans, or that they reach sexual maturity later, or that they reach emotional maturity later? (Here I'm using elves to represent the long lived species). Do these species have the same stages of growth as humans do? Chimps don't. They reach brain and sexual maturity at roughly age 13 (which looks a lot like the orc pattern. Actually, a lot of orc stuff is very reminiscent of chimp society). Chimps don't have that "teen-ager" phase that humans do, where we are more or less physically mature, but not fully formed emotionally. I've seen this used to explain elves before. Elves have a much longer "teen-age" phase, where they are simply too flighty to acquire many skills (although they do acquire some skills, such as the weapon proficiencies). It might also be the case that, while fully grown, they aren't reproductively mature yet, that their fertility doesn't mature until after 100 or so. That would be interesting to explore, but without fertility data...
But what about dwarves? They live a long time and typically aren't described as flighty? Perhaps they simply take 40 years to acquire those racial bonuses? Perhaps it's not til 40 that they can tell the males from the females? It's the genie-kin/outsider-kin that really make no sense. For some of them, they look completely human (or almost) and yet it takes 60 years to reach adulthood?! I think that'd point to something being off pretty damn quick if we were referring to physical maturation.
I think there's another possibility here as well, and it may have been the original point of the chart. Adulthood is culturally defined. These basic ages are meant to be "the age at which members of community X allow their young to go off alone." From that perspective, elves (and other long lived races) do reach physical maturity on a commensurate time line, but take a long time before they're considered full adults. Elves simply see everyone as children before they've got a good century under their belt and DON'T LET their "young" go off on their own. In that case, elves or ifrits or whatever that are raised among communities of different races (like humans) WOULD be considered adults at the same age as everyone else. If that were the case, then an elf raised among humans would be considered an adult at 15 (or so) and off on their own. Since they were raised among a different community, they would loose those racial benefits/bonuses that we see them normally acquiring (things that their normal community would consider essential before letting anyone off on their own).
Of course, I've also had discussions with people arguing that the cause of the extended life spans has to do with magic affecting the rate at which telomeres decay... at which point I like to mention that these are fictional species.
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To answer your specific question, thejeff, if my players wanted to play older characters (whether unaging elves or not), I'd suggest starting them at lvl 3 or 4, and require some more in the way of backstory. I wouldn't have much of a problem with letting one player start at higher level than the others. Still, it is a convention we're talking about. Everyone must be lvl 1 to start and everyone must be equally powerful. Mileages vary.
I also tried putting together a FR campaign with elves only, that played out over episodes during some six hundred years. "Enough downtime" was a cornerstone.
I've often wondered at the number of NPCs who have very low levels despite age. But then, how much XP do you get for harvesting crops? :)
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Right, because the experience point system makes any more sense than the ridiculous aging system. How did you become the most powerful wizard on the planet? You went to Murderhobo University. Same with the cleric, rogue, or whatever. Years of training mean nothing. Killin' Mobs is the thing, man. So why is it that Orcs, Goblins and Hobgoblins, racial masters of Murderhobo-ry aren't all in double digit levels.
Because no one is allowed to be superior to humans.
Pretty much all this rampant stupidity goes back to that.