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? I'm not replying to your post though. I was put on this tirade because I got confused by "Wait is amount of modern and medieval calories really relevant to this conversation?" Like... There are three layers of conversation. First was "do non thin elves exist?"(and it was confirmed that yes they exist then second is "Should we get more art of non thin elves?" (and answer was "it would kinda go against the branding and its easier to do diverse body types with humans") and then conversation seems to have now shifted to "Would it even be realistic to have fat people of modern scale in golarion?" which just confuses me.
Like, if we REALLY have to have this conversation, are we really trying to talk about how medieval people would see nowadays' body types without acknowledging things like that they interpreted body types differently anyway?
Like thin women were seen as holier because thinness implies to medieval people that they stay away from "sins of gluttony and lust" because people knew under certain point thin women would be less fertile and medieval people considered fertility as part of sexual appeal :P So in otherwords, thinness was sign of piety, more plumb was considered sexually desirable because medieval values valued motherhood a lot.
With men, they did kinda aim for lean muscular body because that was seen as martial and manly. Medical opinion wise differs from who you ask, but apparently generally they didn't really care unless overweight was hampering life or disfiguring. I kinda doubt most people would be super negative considering amount of overweight kings. Like because peasants rarely got to eat enough to be even chubby, it was associated with fortune and doing well. So while they thought that clergy and such got fat and rich on their work, they also aspired that kind of life themselves. If you combine that, you could argue ideal male body was "muscle under fat, you are living good well fed life and you can fight in war". Point is, there were lot of differing opinions on the subject and they had enough of frame of reference to develop those opinions.
So like... Was it really relevant to bring up how much rarer overweight people would be in real life medieval times considering that at least one king managed to eat raise his weight up to 240 kg /530 pounds apparently? (it was considered problem because he couldn't ride a horse anymore) In fantastical world people are what writers want them to be and we often follow uncommon group of people anyway rather than most median people possible. And even if Golarion wanted to be Medieval Earth(which it doesn't), Medieval people headspace is much more than just "They would see modern fat person as obese".
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We can assume that because the lore doesn't talk about that at all... there is no mass transportation for food goods described, industrial forms of refrigeration, any mention whatsoever of processed and enriched foods, nor many references to such things as those variables you mentioned being present on any major scale in the published works. There is no widely available easy and fast mode of transportation, practically no mechanically assisted labor, or even commonly available plumbing for clean fresh water which cuts down on hours of work every day for each and every household it is installed in.
Create Water and Purify Food and Drink are 1st-level spells, something any functional Golarion nation has ready access to. Enhance Victuals, a 2nd-level transmutation spell, presents ready proof of food-modifying magic. Plant Growth, a 4th-level ritual, boosts up to a mile of crops at once, its benefits lasting for a full year and the casting only taking a day.
One can imagine Unseen Servants (again, 1st-level magic) and constructs working in fields if you're truly eager to automate, or you could follow in the mold of Geb (a major food exporter in the Inner Sea region, feeding Absalom and much of the Golden Road) and use mindless undead for it. Trade speed is the one point I'll concede - it's still mostly sailing ships - but the rest of my point remains: the baseline of Golarion is significantly more fantastical than any ready historical parallel.
All this is before factoring in things like pacts to fey or nature spirits, Holomog-style celestial favor in the land itself, and anything else similarly beyond the realm of player-facing mechanics. Golarion isn't Dark Ages Europe, with dirty water and dubious agricultural knowledge, it's a place where any sensible government has low-level mages capable of producing superfarms, and would be wise to pay mid-level Druids to really juice things up.
The tangent now is the question of wether or not the magical society of pathfinder would have the same outcomes of an industrialized society on what people would be eating. As far as I can tell, sure, they have easy access to food but it's probably not the equivalent of modern highly processed carbs, soft drinks, and red meat.
In case you missed it, there was a thread about industrialization in Golarion recently which went into this very briefly (mostly from a tech perspective). You might even gave been in that thread already, but if not it might be worth reviving magico-industrial conversations because I would be delighted to drop in when I have a moment next
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I tend to think of it as an averages thing. The mean weight of elves is lower than that of humans and the mean height is higher, vice versa for dwarves, but the exact numbers will vary between individuals.
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Create Water and Purify Food and Drink are 1st-level spells, something any functional Golarion nation has ready access to.
There are a lot of assumptions being made in this thought experiment that don't work at scale. While magic is common in Pathfinder, it's not ubiquitous.
1. You're assuming that all parties with access to those spells
a. Share your goal of solving world hunger
b. Do not hate boredom
c. are of a similar alignment
d. and after all of this, are a high enough level to support doing so more than a couple times a day
2. Whether it's nutritious or not, most people do not enjoy eating nothing but the magic equivalent of soylent for days on end.
3. Assumes there is no opportunity cost to being trained in magic, when it's clearly treated like a career or calling.
or you could follow in the mold of Geb (a major food exporter in the Inner Sea region, feeding Absalom and much of the Golden Road) and use mindless undead for it.
That's silly. While we're discussing evil solutions, why not just make everyone undead? World hunger solved!
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Create Water and Purify Food and Drink are 1st-level spells, something any functional Golarion nation has ready access to.There are a lot of assumptions being made in this thought experiment that don't work at scale. While magic is common in Pathfinder, it's not ubiquitous.
1. You're assuming that all parties with access to those spells
a. Share your goal of solving world hunger
b. Do not hate boredom
c. are of a similar alignment
d. and after all of this, are a high enough level to support doing so more than a couple times a day2. Whether it's nutritious or not, most people do not enjoy eating nothing but the magic equivalent of soylent for days on end.
3. Assumes there is no opportunity cost to being trained in magic, when it's clearly treated like a career or calling.
or you could follow in the mold of Geb (a major food exporter in the Inner Sea region, feeding Absalom and much of the Golden Road) and use mindless undead for it.That's silly. While we're discussing evil solutions, why not just make everyone undead? World hunger solved!
Dis/interest in solving world hunger seems to be falling rather short of the point. It doesn't really matter if anyone has altruistic motivations for increasing the total yield of their country's fields (simple economics would be a good enough reason) but rather it seems keftiu was intending to illustrate that real-world limits on historical agriculture are sufficiently different from Golarion that the latter need not be shackled by the precedent of the former.
Golarion isn't a medieval planet, it doesn't stand to reason that the rules of medieval Europe are its universal reality
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I don't think it matters to the actual game the numbers regarding what most people are like or what the average person is like. It just matters what the limits are because those are what the players and the GM have to work within.
There are exactly as many of skinny or fat people as the story includes and I don't have to worry about everybody else that never shows up in the game.
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The hoops you're jumping through to justify your position are... bizarre to me, to say the least. I think that you're electing to ignore everything in favor of trying to use "soft words" in order to ensure you don't offend real-life overweight people which... is not what is being discussed.
Take care, or you may get disappeared too without any explanation.
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According to 1st Edition Pathfinder, the upper limits generally found among elves was about 148 pounds for a male and 126 pounds for a female.
For dwarven males, the limit was about 206 pounds. For dwarven females, about 176 pounds.
Creative Director
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According to 1st Edition Pathfinder, the upper limits generally found among elves was about 148 pounds for a male and 126 pounds for a female.
For dwarven males, the limit was about 206 pounds. For dwarven females, about 176 pounds.
The fact that we didn't retain those tables in 2nd edition is all the permission anyone needs to make their characters as heavy or light as they want. Same goes for age.
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Yeah, I prefer not having those tables. If people at our table think "normal dwarves regularly weigh like 300+ pounds because their bones are really dense like rhino bones and they have a lot of muscle density" I don't see any value in the book saying that's not the case. It's more valuable I think to have the discussion with each other about "what is dwarf biology like" than to have it in a book where I can look it up, because "we develop a shared understanding of an imaginary world" is a fundamental thing in a game like this.
Like regularly I had players who wanted to play a character outside of the height/weight limits in that table. Like an aasimar that the player wanted to be like 6'11" and weigh like 120lbs in order to look like a weird bird or a Dwarf woman that the player wanted to be just under 5' tall.
Yeah, I prefer not having those tables. If people at our table think "normal dwarves regularly weigh like 300+ pounds because their bones are really dense like rhino bones and they have a lot of muscle density" I don't see any value in the book saying that's not the case. It's more valuable I think to have the discussion with each other about "what is dwarf biology like" than to have it in a book where I can look it up, because "we develop a shared understanding of an imaginary world" is a fundamental thing in a game like this.
I wholeheartedly agree!
Complete tangent: several people mentioned that "chubby/overweight in our times would be seen as obese back then."
It might just be a definitional thing, but to me, "obese" implies negatively impacting your health. Yeah, 20 extra kilos back then would be a lot, but in most cases, that's still well within the safe zone. I don't think that statement holds any water. Yes, it would be more unusual, but it wouldn't be more dangerous back then than it does now.
Just something I wanted to throw in here to see if I'm just being weird or not.
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So another perspective occurred to me.
Folks (including myself) have argued Golarion would have lower rates of obesity that Earth because historical Earth had lower rates of obesity that modern Earth. Others have argued (and rightly so in my opinion) that this is a magical fantasy setting where we shouldn’t automatically apply our own history. I believe this is a valid and accurate point.
But another perspective is that, per the WHO and other major health organizations, obesity is a global health epidemic that has significant costs to the health and life expectancy of our people. So another question to ask, is do we believe Golarion has the same epidemic? Or have they figured out a way to cure it? Or do consequences of obesity (diabetes, heart disease) just not exist?
Or maybe we are all just really, reallly, realllllly overthinking this!
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According to Wikipedia, obesity is "sometimes considered a disease." That would imply that a Remove Disease could remove it, by the very literal reading of the text.
While I don't want to dispute whether obesity is a disease or not, most of the diseases Paizo has published come from exposure to something; basically an external force acting upon the body. I would say that Remove Disease would purge that foreign agent from the body. Since there's no foreign agent here, I don't think obesity would be affected by it. Then again, by that interpretation, a cancer is definitely a disease, but also doesn't have a "foreign agent," so there's a whole lot of grey area here.
(Or simply redefine "foreign agent" as "something attacking the body," and the whole discussion is moot.)
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All I'll say on the socio-political side if things is that yes, fat or muscular elves do most likely exist on Golarion, but honestly I'd imagine there's a significant overlap between these elves and player characters: PCs are usually already outliers in regards to societal norms, and tend to accumulate the kinds of disposable incomes that would allow such figures to form.
And on the other side, players are likely the people who'd want to explore these possibilities, as a GM will most likely resort to the average for most NPCs. An NPC with a significantly different body type than the majority if their ancestry will likely be a prominent character regardless, because the GM is putting more detail into them than just "They're an elf."
I myself have played a fat elven character before: Tessara the "Investigator". I put her class in quotation marks because the campaign she was in was exclusively NONcombat, all PCs being master chefs of different specialities recruited by a wealthy and eccentric noble to work in his newly-opened, very posh restaurant. Tessara was technically an Investigator, but that was solely because that class offered so many perks for boosting her skills, allowing her to have a very high modifier for the skill her entire character sheet was built to support: Profession (baker). Her weight was the result of centuries travelling Golarion to try and learn about breads, pastries and other baked goods from many different cultures and very exacting standards making her sample each batch, so it was ironically a point of pride for her: she was fat, yes, but for an elf that takes WORK, and it was a display of her commitment to her craft. She was also a firm believer in the power of shared meals and bread in specific to bring together families, communities and entire cultures! It's a shame that game didn't last very long, as it was really neat to play a campaign where your characters weren't expected to fight things at all!
On an unrelated note, we do now have at least one deity who treats size more positively: Balumbdar, from The Mwangi Expanse. His faithful endeavor to make themselves as big as possible in emulation of him, and that specifically includes getting fat as well in the text. An Ekujae worshipper of Balumbdar might be unusual, but then Balumbdar's cult is ironically small anyway, as the god himself focuses more on the animals under his protection than any mortal that might declare themselves his priest, so by default almost any Balumbdar worshipper will be unique...and most likely a player character!
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Or maybe we are all just really, reallly, realllllly overthinking this!
I say this one, the stories Paizo wants to tell aren't dependent on the body type of the characters. It's all "fluff".
They don't want to explore stories of obesity and how it affects people because this is a game about heroic fantasy stories.
I suppose one can explore the space of how the game world interacts with bodyweight but I think it's unimportant and misses the mark of what the game is about.
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The fact that we didn't retain those tables in 2nd edition is all the permission anyone needs to make their characters as heavy or light as they want. Same goes for age.According to 1st Edition Pathfinder, the upper limits generally found among elves was about 148 pounds for a male and 126 pounds for a female.
For dwarven males, the limit was about 206 pounds. For dwarven females, about 176 pounds.
Well, I will then ask that question which bothered me for some time.
Do elves in Golarion age? More specifically, are they 'ageless' for the Curse of Lost time spell?
This spell is a little of a headache for me, as I can't predict who it would work on and who wouldn't. Pure spiritual creatures like devils, demons and angels are excluded, a lot of common ancestries included, but apart from that it's pure speculation. Does it work on a random aberration? Fey? Any other kind of monster? And after that guessing I have to guess whether this would agree with the guess of my GM :)
They absolutely do still age. Part of not being human is that they have a more supernatural biology and don't outwardly show aging in the same way. The life expectancies for all the PC ancestries more or less remain the same as they were in 1st edition. You'll note that the effects of curse of lost time don't care about how many perspective years pass, only that a living target feels the crushing weight of that time on their body. It works just as well on any living creature that specifically isn't immortal, and if the text doesn't specifically say so for a creature, that decision is left in the GM's hands—but I would advise letting the spell work more often than not, since it's pretty unfair to the player to just arbitrarily decide a monster is immune because you've decided it's ageless. For me, the creatures we called "outsiders" in the previous edition would be immune since they're ageless, but beyond that pretty much every living creature (including aberrations and fey) would be affected by the spell.
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As another interesting note, there is 1e lore (in Second Darkness I believe?) that talks about drow elves using fleshwarp technology to enhance their beauty and reverse the effects of aging.
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According to 1st Edition Pathfinder, the upper limits generally found among elves was about 148 pounds for a male and 126 pounds for a female.
For dwarven males, the limit was about 206 pounds. For dwarven females, about 176 pounds.
You know I always saw this as a guideline for what is the average "normal" weight. Specially because it lists for human as being 125-220 for male and 90-185 for female.
Just like how the rollable height doesn't take into account specially short (below 4'7" for human) and specially tall (above 6'6" for human).
I always used to go with the premise that the rollable limits were for fit and healthy adventurers, not for the population as a whole. Of course, since PF2 generates stats in a different way from PF1, for the new edition I would use the old limits as the most probable ranges, with anyone outside those limits as notably big or little.
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According to Wikipedia, obesity is "sometimes considered a disease." That would imply that a Remove Disease could remove it, by the very literal reading of the text.
Its listed as a disease because of how things get tracked and get more attention. Also some disease can cause that type of problem (Ex: Tyroids). A great example is addiction which is often treated as a disease, but mostly a mental health issue.
I am not sure we should use socio-political definitions of "disease" for what can be removed with that spell. Doing otherwise is a recipe for disaster with certain people taking it way beyond what this conversation is about.
(I hope I don't have to explain what the issue is further).
Completely agree, you put it way better than I did.
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I always used to go with the premise that the rollable limits were for fit and healthy adventurers, not for the population as a whole. Of course, since PF2 generates stats in a different way from PF1, for the new edition I would use the old limits as the most probable ranges, with anyone outside those limits as notably big or little.
Same. I still use them today for that purpose myself.
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Okay so a lot of bunk in this thread.
First and namely , the idea that weight is solely dependent on diet and genetics and chance don't play a part, which is bunk.
Secondly, that the misinterpretation or taking a snippet out of context outside other factors (leading to more misinterpretation) of what someone thinks how things worked in Earth history and so they're making it up but is totally a valid and inscrutable reference to justify their stance and works as a perfect reflection of a fictional fantasy setting that has no bearing from Earth. Double bunk, bunk squared.
You listening to someone quickly reading something off a Wikipedia article or navel gazing "health" article from the google algorithms means absolutely nothing here.
"Realism" was dragged into an alley, beaten, and died of internal hemorrhaging with no one to care one early dreary morning the moment the word "elf" was uttered.
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XD
The answer is that if people are telling you no and are being jerks then leave. Life is too short to be arguing with people who refuse to engage with the cooperative aspect in role playing. Especially in a community where people can be far more welcoming. Anyone trying to engage in arguments about canon should be shot out of a cannon because it should be mutable for the table. I consider the setting like a soup base. You add in as a table the meat, vegetables, noodles and season to taste.
Also, assuming there arent two people asking about fat elves why do you want confirmation by lore so badly?
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The answer is that if people are telling you no and are being jerks then leave. Life is too short to be arguing with people who refuse to engage with the cooperative aspect in role playing. Especially in a community where people can be far more welcoming. Anyone trying to engage in arguments about canon should be shot out of a cannon because it should be mutable for the table. I consider the setting like a soup base. You add in as a table the meat, vegetables, noodles and season to taste.
Also, assuming there arent two people asking about fat elves why do you want confirmation by lore so badly?
For me mostly it's interesting to think about. As I said, a character like this is probably going to be unique and I like puttering around with how that uniqueness fits into the wider canon of the setting. Some people view canon as constricting, preventing the specific character concept they want to play, I view it more as a challenge: Where would such a character most likely come from? How would they have become how they are? How might the world react to them and how do they react to that reaction in turn? And it's not just the specific concept of a fat elf character that I think this way for, lately I've had dwarven half-elves (dwelves, if you will) on the brain, for example! I suppose "confirmation" isn't the quite word for what I'm describing. I just think it enhances the roleplay experience if you can configure an unusual character concept in such a way that it slots into the campaign setting almost seamlessly. Instead of saying "No!" saying "Okay, how?" and using it as a springboard for more creativity.
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Constraints are good since it means you have to think more about how to implement something. Its own of the corner stones of keeping things grounded in a story: Characters following the rules of the setting, and knowing when its best to break those rules.
Saying you should leave a table because the GM, the lore, or the rules placed a constraint to how you can build a character, specially when the constraint is as simple as "certain ancestries have specific looks", seems rather excessive.
It's simple. If the table refuses to treat you or your character respectfully, why would you want to stay. This isn't the same kind of constraint as a limit forcing you to focus your creativity into an interesting place, this is a limit keeping you from exploring an interesting place because someone's stereotype about the ways elves should look is more important to them than either realism or inclusivity.
If somebody told me that, for example, dwarves couldn't be trans because of their traditionalist society, or that goblins couldn't be good, it would be clear to me that their table is not willing to accept things outside their stereotype of what a fantasy setting "should" look like, neither for realism nor inclusion, and that I'm probably not going to enjoy my time at this table.
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Well I got one am glad OP asked their question. Yes, weight can be an uncomfortable and sensitive topic. But I think all of us are probably going to consider more body diversity in their games going forward.
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I think the implication was that leaving the table was the last step if you'd asked and discussed prior and the GM or other players weren't working with you to accommodate the idea. "Constraint" may not be the right word as much as "recommendation," but if the recommendation becomes an imposition, then the group likely doesn't have a healthy dynamic and thus you won't have fun. You hear RPG horror stories about toxic GMs who target specific PCs because of some hang-up they have about body-type or gender or sexual orientation to try and force the player to make their character conform to the GM's comfort zone all the time.
Not sure how anyone would have this information on an imaginary race. Make your elf look like you want to. I doubt anyone will care.
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According to 1st Edition Pathfinder, the upper limits generally found among elves was about 148 pounds for a male and 126 pounds for a female.
For dwarven males, the limit was about 206 pounds. For dwarven females, about 176 pounds.
I never used those tables. They are way off from real world analogues for weight and size. Not sure where the person writing those tables even came up with those ranges. They are crazy off from what real people weigh at given heights.
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I never used those tables. They are way off from real world analogues for weight and size. Not sure where the person writing those tables even came up with those ranges. They are crazy off from what real people weigh at given heights.Are the dwarves and elves height/weight tables just as bad as the people tables?
I base things off what I know of size and strength of humans, then modify a little bit based on fantasy tropes.
I never used those tables. They are way off from real world analogues for weight and size. Not sure where the person writing those tables even came up with those ranges. They are crazy off from what real people weigh at given heights.Are the dwarves and elves height/weight tables just as bad as the people tables?
Dwarves and elves (and those pretending to be dwarves and elves) are people too!
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Dwarves and elves (and those pretending to be dwarves and elves) are people too!
And they all weigh exactly 6 Bulk.
Edit: typo.