Cheers folks.

As all of you know, fantasy settings generally have tables showing when the different races reach maturity, such as when they hit middle age, and when they are considered old or venerable. But one thing I don't ever recall seeing in these setting books is the physical growth rate of different races. For example, if elves are considered adults at 110 years old, would that mean that a 20 year old elf physically and mentally resembles a 3 year old human (who would be "mature" at 16)?

Or would that 20 year old elf have the physical form of a 20 yo human, but lack the mental (and sexual) maturity, essentially operating as a 3 year old?
Or would an elf mature in all ways similar to a human, but have societal conscrictions placed on them until they achieve "adulthood?"

I know most of this is going to vary depending on the particular setting, but I was just curious what others thought of this (admittedly bizarre) topic.

Specifically for elves, and dwarves I think, the most common way I've seen it presented is that they physically mature at around the same rate as humans. The big difference is cultural. On a social level, a sub-100 year elf does not have enough life experience to be considered an adult within their society. As far as physical stature, mental faculties, sexual maturity, it's pretty similar to humans, give or take a few years.

That said, I have seen a recent trend towards having elves mature physically slower as well. So a 15 year old elf might look like a 7 year old human relative to their species.

I'm split on my opinion for this. The extended development is interesting from a writing and world building perspective, but I haven't seen it make much of a meaningful difference at the table.

Quote from: Hzilong on August 09, 2022, 11:47:56 PM
Specifically for elves, and dwarves I think, the most common way I've seen it presented is that they physically mature at around the same rate as humans. The big difference is cultural. On a social level, a sub-100 year elf does not have enough life experience to be considered an adult within their society. As far as physical stature, mental faculties, sexual maturity, it's pretty similar to humans, give or take a few years.

That said, I have seen a recent trend towards having elves mature physically slower as well. So a 15 year old elf might look like a 7 year old human relative to their species.

I'm split on my opinion for this. The extended development is interesting from a writing and world building perspective, but I haven't seen it make much of a meaningful difference at the table.

Yeah, I don't think age has really ever made a difference at my tables either unless the player purposefully made a point of it (i.e., playing an old wizard, who is physically weaker but with more lived experiences). The thing that got me thinking, though, was the potential roleplay interactions. If a 20 year old elf is physically indistinguishable from a 120 year old elf, the shorter-lived races might not even notice that the youngster should still be on his mother's apron strings. Other elves, however, might notice the moment they see him, and might even have the authority to assume protective custody of the young elf.

If the race physically aged slower, that can present unique roleplay opportunities as well. Take our 20 year old elf... At an age when humans are expected to be independant and more-or-less self sufficient, the elf would have all (or most) of those same life experiences, but be trapped in the body of, say, a 7 year old. That is unless mental faculties develop slower as well.

Long-lived races is one of those things that often doesn't hold up very well when you look at it closely.  Not that's it is necessary to do so.  You can just say that starting elves are 80+ or whatever, and leave what happens to the adolescents as unmentioned most of the time.  For a fun take, I've always thought that's where half elves come from--"teenage" elves trapped with their hormones for the better part of 30-50 years. 

If I'm going to use the defaults and need an explanation, I usually go with the cultural one.  Maybe elves in particular aren't fully mature until 30-40 or so, the same way many humans are still growing in some minor way between 20-25.  We don't usually think of a 20 year-old human as not physically mature even though most of them are not "done" yet.  If you think about it, it's not uncommon for a human child to reach full height (though not bone and muscular development) before 14, or just over halfway to their full development.  Elves still gaining height up to age 25, and most of that before age 20, isn't a great leap.  There have been times and places where the local human culture considered those in the 25-35 range not fully adult yet.  Heck, even in the USA, where it's all "they are kids" when questions of responsibility come up but "they are adults at puberty" when questions of letting them do whatever the hell they want come up, the insurance companies are still giving higher rates for driving up until age 26 and/or marriage.  So I'd think even in a youth-oriented elven culture, it wouldn't be odd to think of 50-100 year old elves as mostly adult for most purposes but still not fully there.

Now, what I usually do is chuck most of the extremes out the window by saying that most dwarves lives to about 150 and most elves live until about 250.  Their old age can be productive, and occasionally one lives until about 250 or 500, respectively.  Or alternately, elves are immortal but aren't player races.  I don't usually enjoy having effectively immortal races as player races, because it  monkeys with all kinds of timeline mysteries.  It's very hard to justify digging up ancient information from 2 centuries ago when two of the PCs were alive then.  Not impossible, just hard.  But I like to do that a lot, and this screen monkey is tired of jumping through that particular hoop.

It varies:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImmortalityBeginsAtTwenty
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProportionalAging

On Earth, we do have animal species that mature at different rates.  While a cow can become an adult in 2 years, an elephant takes 15.  When you meet a non-adult cow or elephant, you probably don't spend much time thinking about their comparative physiology or growth rates.  That said, either way they grow up quickly enough that with our human lifespan we notice ongoing and continuous growth.  If you met a juvenile elephant and then met it again 3 years later, even if it was still not grown up, you'd have noticed change.  If it instead took 110 years to reach adult status, it's possible that even over decades the elephant would appear unchanged, and that's a little weird from our perspective. 

If you have races that are extremely long-lived, having them achieve physical/mental maturity in a human time frame has a lot of advantages, even though they wouldn't be considered to have sufficient lived experience by their kin.  Of course, there's a question of how much lived experience does an elf get hiding in a forest for 110 years, anyway?  The idea that a 20-year-old elf hanging out with wild fast-living humans and getting the equivalent of a century of experience in a decade has some appeal to me, personally. 

Physically slow aging doesn't appeal to me.  If the elves have to deal with an orc horde every human generation or two, explaining children who remain children for dozens of years among other races seems problematic. 

When it comes up in my games, elves mature at a human-like rate, but don't appear to age.  Possibly relevant - in my games aging does not provide ANY benefits.  You don't get more intelligent or wiser for becoming middle-aged.  If you gained levels you would have gotten a stat bonus you COULD apply to becoming older or wiser - but you don't have to.  Instead, aging gives you physical penalties.  Elves don't suffer those penalties.   

Quote from: Hzilong on August 09, 2022, 11:47:56 PM
Specifically for elves, and dwarves I think, the most common way I've seen it presented is that they physically mature at around the same rate as humans. The big difference is cultural. On a social level, a sub-100 year elf does not have enough life experience to be considered an adult within their society. As far as physical stature, mental faculties, sexual maturity, it's pretty similar to humans, give or take a few years.

That said, I have seen a recent trend towards having elves mature physically slower as well. So a 15 year old elf might look like a 7 year old human relative to their species.

I'm split on my opinion for this. The extended development is interesting from a writing and world building perspective, but I haven't seen it make much of a meaningful difference at the table.

Pretty much, this^, including the last part.

The idea that "elves mature at the same as humans" BUT "they are somehow considered immature in elven society and treated like children till they're 100 (80 FREAKING YEARS after reaching physical maturity!!!), because...reasons" never sat well with  me, because it's NUTS.

My default assumption is that elves physically mature at two to three times the human rate, and don't start adventuring till they're at their 70s at the earliest. Similar for dwarves, but slightly faster maturing rate. Older age is more complicated, since it's never come up, but my assumption about elves is that they retreat to the fey world once they reach 400+ years and either eventually fade away and reincarnate, or become effectively immortal godlike beings if they were big stuff in life.

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 10, 2022, 12:07:39 PM
...
The idea that "elves mature at the same as humans" BUT "they are somehow considered immature in elven society and treated like children till they're 100 (80 FREAKING YEARS after reaching physical maturity!!!), because...reasons" never sat well with  me, because it's NUTS.
...

I agree this notion is crazy...

But there is a difference in not being treated as a child vs. being accepted by your elders as one of them.

Quote from: Effete on August 09, 2022, 10:34:34 PM
...
Or would an elf mature in all ways similar to a human, but have societal constrictions placed on them until they achieve "adulthood?"
...

This is the way to play it IMHO... But I would refer to it as 'The age of majority'.

Because Elves/Dwarves are such long lived races, that while not being treated like children when they are 70 years old - "Young" elves are not accepted as an "equal" to their elders until they have had a certain number of years of life experience under their belt for them to learn enough restraint, and wisdom, to be considered to have properly 'come of age'... 

Lore wise this can be reflected in various possible 'rites of passage' like the way the sons of the British aristocracy would embark upon a 'grand tour' to gain some continental polish when they had reached a certain age. Or various religious pilgrimages.

And a lot of it could be chalked up to the fact that for such long lived races their standards are just higher than short lived humans.

i.e. Dwarven or Elven craftsmanship - valued by men because even a dwarven apprentice has been functionally 'at his trade' for 60 years before he is determined to be 'ready' to strike out on his own by his elders...

One thing that most RPG's fail hard at is conveying that long lives races would have a completely different concept of time than men.

Their extended time preferences would give them an almost alien mentality when discussing everything from history to current evens with a man that might only expect to live 80 years.

Quote from: Jaeger on August 10, 2022, 04:22:38 PM

Quote from: Effete on August 09, 2022, 10:34:34 PM
Or would an elf mature in all ways similar to a human, but have societal constrictions placed on them until they achieve "adulthood?"

This is the way to play it IMHO... But I would refer to it as 'The age of majority'.

Because Elves/Dwarves are such long lived races, that while not being treated like children when they are 70 years old - "Young" elves are not accepted as an "equal" to their elders until they have had a certain number of years of life experience under their belt for them to learn enough restraint, and wisdom, to be considered to have properly 'come of age'... 
...
And a lot of it could be chalked up to the fact that for such long lived races their standards are just higher than short lived humans.

Yeah, this is the way I've always treated elves/dwarves/etc. in my games, but recently I've been thinking about breaking the mould a bit and trying something a little different. Gameplay-wise, very little would be different; you'd simply say "elves aren't fully mature until 100," or whatever. But for the sake of world-building, elves would physically and mentally mature at 1/3 or even 1/4 the rate humans do. This can be a good way to explain the calm, ponderous nature of elves. They have literally had a (human) lifetime to enjoy being a child, learning and absorbing the fundamentals of life. Juxtapose that with humans, who are expected to learn everything in a relatively short amount of time before the rigors and stress of 'adulting' gets dropped at their feet.

This speaks directly with what you were saying about long-lived races having an almost alien mentality and outlook of the world. A more stunted mental development would also help explain away why a 200 year old elf doesn't have intimate knowledge of the past... they spent much of that time as a carefree child. It's like asking someone to recall the memories of the first 10 years of theor life. They won't remember politics or global events; those are things they only learn about later in life through the scope of history.

It's not that they don't know the history - it's that they don't even think of it as HISTORY.  If I was born in 1779 I might not remember the adoption of the constitution, but I would have lived through just about everything our country has.  My parents would remember Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of the church - we would experience Protestantism as a 'fad' that hadn't even been around for two generations.  What's one historical figure or another in the grand scheme of things?  Were Abraham Lincoln's 4 years more noteworthy than the rise of automobiles?  All of these historical events you'd think of the way you think of the time before cellphones or the time before Covid - just different periods of your life and indicative of future changes.

Of course, it would justify refusal to go to war.  If you live 10,000 years, and orc kings usually rise and fall in a decade, waiting for them to flame out is no more difficult than waiting for the next football season to start.

Quote from: Jaeger on August 10, 2022, 04:22:38 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 10, 2022, 12:07:39 PM
...
The idea that "elves mature at the same as humans" BUT "they are somehow considered immature in elven society and treated like children till they're 100 (80 FREAKING YEARS after reaching physical maturity!!!), because...reasons" never sat well with  me, because it's NUTS.
...

I agree this notion is crazy...

But there is a difference in not being treated as a child vs. being accepted by your elders as one of them.

Quote from: Effete on August 09, 2022, 10:34:34 PM
...
Or would an elf mature in all ways similar to a human, but have societal constrictions placed on them until they achieve "adulthood?"
...

This is the way to play it IMHO... But I would refer to it as 'The age of majority'.

Because Elves/Dwarves are such long lived races, that while not being treated like children when they are 70 years old - "Young" elves are not accepted as an "equal" to their elders until they have had a certain number of years of life experience under their belt for them to learn enough restraint, and wisdom, to be considered to have properly 'come of age'... 

Lore wise this can be reflected in various possible 'rites of passage' like the way the sons of the British aristocracy would embark upon a 'grand tour' to gain some continental polish when they had reached a certain age. Or various religious pilgrimages.

And a lot of it could be chalked up to the fact that for such long lived races their standards are just higher than short lived humans.

i.e. Dwarven or Elven craftsmanship - valued by men because even a dwarven apprentice has been functionally 'at his trade' for 60 years before he is determined to be 'ready' to strike out on his own by his elders...

One thing that most RPG's fail hard at is conveying that long lives races would have a completely different concept of time than men.

Their extended time preferences would give them an almost alien mentality when discussing everything from history to current evens with a man that might only expect to live 80 years.

The problem is that none of this is mechanically reflected in the game. Elves and dwarves don't get extra skill/tool proficiency selections to reflect their stricter cultural expectations or decades (almost a freaking century in the case of elves) of study and honing their skills to extreme standards higher than expected of humans. They don't get bonuses to Int or Wis, or at least minimum Int & Wis requirements to reflect any of this either. Technically you could play an elven or dwarven drooling idiot, even though it goes against their (extremely) extended upbringing, and there's nothing in the rules stopping you.

Plus, if elves and dwarves physically mature at the same rate as humans there's no real reason they couldn't start adventuring right away—specially since other races wouldn't care or know what their cultural expectations are. If anything, everything you mention here implies that maybe they should start adventuring early to get all that wisdom and experience their elders expect from them. That would help explain why lore-wise those races are supposed to stand out in terms of talent above other races—they spend decades "leveling up" before they're even accepted as full members of their society.

But a level 1, one hundred year old elf or sixty year old dwarf with the exact same number of skills as a late teens/twenty year old human is dumb—specially if we're going to insist that those two were already fully grown by their 20s.

Quote from: VisionStorm on August 10, 2022, 07:20:25 PM
Plus, if elves and dwarves physically mature at the same rate as humans there's no real reason they couldn't start adventuring right away—specially since other races wouldn't care or know what their cultural expectations are. If anything, everything you mention here implies that maybe they should start adventuring early to get all that wisdom and experience their elders expect from them. That would help explain why lore-wise those races are supposed to stand out in terms of talent above other races—they spend decades "leveling up" before they're even accepted as full members of their society.

But a level 1, one hundred year old elf or sixty year old dwarf with the exact same number of skills as a late teens/twenty year old human is dumb—specially if we're going to insist that those two were already fully grown by their 20s.

This right here is exactly what my thoughts are. Many (if not most) fantasy settings do a poor job of truly explaining these things. The quick-fix would be to just eliminate the "age of maturity" category entirely from Aging Tables. Humans, elves, and dwarves are all adults at 16-20 and naturally live to different ages. Done!

That works fine for most settings. But as I mentioned above, another way to address it is to have longer-lived races physically & mentally incapable of gaining such experiences. In the same way a human toddler lacks the abstract thinking skills neccessary to grasp algrebra, a 40 year old elf might be in the same exact stage of development.

I just want to mention, though, that this discussion is intended to include hypotheticals as well. So saying things like "elves don't get extra skill points," etc., is not really a productive point since theoretically (hypothetically) elves CAN receive bonuses based on their lived experiences. I think perhaps I could have been more clear in the OP about the type of discussion I wanted to garner. (I'd blame the alcohol, but it didn't do anything wrong.)

Essentially I'm just looking to have an open discussion about long-lived races in relation to shorter-lived races. Just a place to spitball ideas and talk about different ways of world-building. I'm not looking for a "one true way" solution.

I always played it that gnomes/dwarves/elves would age a BIT slower than humans to maturity. (An elf would be fully grown physically by 25ish - though as a human's brain doesn't finish developing until 25-26, an elf's wouldn't until maybe 40ish.)

But culturally they would be considered something like an apprentice for the next 30-60 years. (gnome on the low end & elf on the high end) And I always had any dwarf/elf NPCs that the PCs run into would average at a much higher level than the human equivalent.

If a PC at the table was an elf/dwarf and I was starting the campaign at low level - I'd work with them to have their character be one of the weirdos that skipped out on their apprenticeship to go see the world at 30ish instead of sticking to his apprenticeship, and a couple of times other dwarves commented on what a little upstart he was.

One thing that comes to mind for me is that elves live longer because they engage in activities during which they do not experience the passage of time. We've all probably heard the stories about humans entering fairy rings who wind up dancing for 40 years. Suppose elves in this state do not age (mentally or physically), and that they do this sort of thing regularly.

In this scenario, the 100-year-old elf who is starting out on adventure has really only "lived" the same 15 years as their human counterpart, while the rest was spent in a timeless trance state. They age the same as everyone else during the span of their adventuring career, and generally return to long trancing/dancing/etc. upon retirement.

You know, the new Xenoblade got me thinking in similar lines; the entire main cast are effectively clone soldiers with a 10 year maximum lifespan. From what I've seen, they seem to be born at 10-12 years old biologically and rapidly age into the biological mid-20s (probably around year 2 or 3) where they plateau for the rest of their lifespan. The immediate question which came to my mind was if someone who ships off to war with only 2-3 years of life experience max can even be marginally helpful on a battlefield. Granted, that's also a question Star Wars opened, but Star Wars had the clone army being grown and trained on Kaminoa for about 10 years, which is far more plausible.

For super-long lifespans, I generally think that infancy should take about the same time as it does with humans, but childhood, adolescence, and education especially should take notably longer. And it's likely that a race where people live in excess of 200 years probably would have no concept for child labor laws. The opportunity cost of not putting a child to work is too high when they are going to be immature for 100 years, especially when you consider that education systems will get notably more ambitious.

Consider a person who lives to be 1000 years old. Proportionately, we would educate them for about 200 year, but in a modern academic setting, 200 years of study is getting introductory knowledge in all fields of human knowledge and about 10 completely different fields where the person has earned PhDs. That's a significant fraction of all human knowledge, even in modern times. This is almost certainly beyond the point of diminishing returns.

The way I would worldbuild a race with long life would be they spend more time in adolescence, the education system is more low and slow because it works with the expectation of child labor, the total education level is notably higher, there's probably a strong cultural expectation for time off or rotating employment so that you get a broader portion of the population with several industries they know well, and the people as a whole are probably highly wealthy because there's more time to accumulate wealth. I also think you basically have to introduce a disease or something which keeps their population low, because a longer-lived race will displace other species if they have comparable birth rates.