In your game; do they have to go 15 years before being potty-trained? Or do they age like humans but just stop at a certain point?

RPGPundit

Like turtles.

As with wines, they get better as they age, but of course this also depends on the quality of the glass that they sleep in.

JG

Quote from: James Gillen;570427As with wines, they get better as they age, but of course this also depends on the quality of the glass that they sleep in.

JG

Because depending on the environment, some elves age like more a cheese than a wine.

The long time to grow to maturity is a bit embarrassing in 3E, in AD&D it bothers me less than your elf dude is 1st level at age 100 since he's probably trained in two or even three classes, while the human gets only one.
 
Post maturity, the weirdest take on elf ageing I can think of was in Tunnels and Trolls. It was never published officially, but on his web site game designer Ken st Andre had campaign notes about how elves got ridiculously long ears and noses as they got older (presumably based on the fact that humans ears/noses keep growing) and had to use illusion magic to hide it.

I've always like the idea that elves don't age.

They were/are created fully formed and live that way until they die.

Of course that's a mysterious process that raises more questions than it answers. Just like answers involving the fey world should.

EDIT: also orcs and goblins spawn from cave pools and dwarves are carved from stone.

This is how I explained it for my 3.5 games, because I didn't want to penalize elves for what was essentially a roleplaying aspect of their characters:

Elves age normally up to adulthood, then just stop until they reach the next age category.  Because of the slow pace and long lives, time doesn't mean as much to elven culture, they don't focus on doing one thing as well as humans do, so they tend to approach training as "Well, that was a good day of training, I'll see you next month?" So they tend to learn slowly.

When Elves get around humans, though, they find themselves caught up in the exotic swirl of the fast life, and things happen more rapidly than they expect, or even notice.  

Elves aren't stupid, by any means, nor lazy, but when they're in a purely elven environment things just move slower.  "Oh, she's taking a nap, come back in a week or so" is a valid response to an unexpected visitor.

What this means is that you could conceivably have a 700 year old senior elven matriarch who's a 5th level cleric, if she's never left the elven communities.  You could also have an elf who left at 25 and who returns as a 20th level ranger at 50.  Your Elven tavernkeeper might not even make a secret that he was a Drowslayer for a century or so, leaving it all behind so he could focus on improving his skills at wine making.

Without grace. After a life of fun and frolic, the fae suddenly get dorian grayed, and spend their last years carrying the horror of all the old age they had so far avoided, shunned by a society that puts beauty and the illusion of carefree hedonism above personal worth.

(haven't actually used elves in... many years)

I usually just say they age normally until maturity, after which the aging process is supernaturally slow.

Not to pull a "ITS JUST LIKE REAL LIFE" thing, but I don't think senescence really kicks in until you've reached full biological maturity, anyway, so you could say they age normally up to a point but are resistant to advanced aging, since they're two different biological processes.

My elves are immortal their weakness is stasis at a certain point.  They tend to calcify like a tree or even nature itself.  Very reliable sometimes increbidly mercurial but unable to change despite knowing they need to. Very much a first race dying race motif.

Having been entirely robbed of the "...Like Fine Wine" comment, I am forced to actually contribute.

I'm rather fond of my racial studies over in le sticky, but beyond that I've always been partial to the sort of 'sudden burn out at the end' philosophy.

In my sort of semi-generic take: Elves only age and mature slightly slower than, say, humanity (roughly closer to dwarves, say..) but due to their vastly longer functional lifespans they tend to treat elves below a certain age like children (much as we seem to do now with young men and women in college, for example...), which can be frustrating for some elves. So a hundred year old elf runaway is physically (and mentally) a full grown adult but in Elven society he is, at best, an adolescent. Lots of adventuring elves are thereby 'children' who have acted out rebelliously and are hanging out with the younger races where their age gets them a little respect.

On the other end, if you assume Elves actually do die of Old Age (instead of persisting until someone kills them, or riding off to some mythic Summer Lands when they feel tired of life)... then at some point, rather randomly (possibly indicating purity of bloodlines, relative nobility or what have you...), an elf that has reached his allotted span rapidly ages over the course of a few decades (out of millennial lifespans this is drastic), growing weaker and more frail until, just like a human, they succumb to accumulated ravages.

The exact amount of time an elf spends 'dying' is largely dependent on lifestyle, general health and vigor, and what sort of care is taken with their health... though I would assume many elves, after a millennia (or seven) of youthful vigor may just give up when they get too old to dance and play and frolic like the fucking ADHD poofters they are.

If I were going to do a traditional D&D style 'age chart', their 'young', 'old' and 'venerable' age catagories would be at most twice as long as human, with their 'adult' and 'mature' phases filling the vast bulk of their life.


Of course, my elves, as magically bred pleasure slaves of the lost Titans, are immortal and eternally young, as befitting the slaves of would be living gods.  Who wants useless, old pleasure slaves littering up the place?

They are budded fully-formed from the earth and slowly gather ennui until they must depart the corrupted beauty of mortal lands.

You could always take immortality as a half-metaphor and have them slowly merge into great trees as they age, like in those Robin Hobb books, the Soldier's something or other (or even Avatar), so the wisdom of the elders remains available to the rest. This would also explain why elves are so fond of trees in general.

I think something could also be made up on the immortal=soulless basis, similar to Moorcock's The Warhound and the World's Pain. Whole areas that can't be entered or even seen unless you are damned, although damned in this case probably meant not destined for the Christian God.

Quote from: The Traveller;570480You could always take immortality as a half-metaphor and have them slowly merge into great trees as they age, like in those Robin Hobb books, the Soldier's something or other (or even Avatar), so the wisdom of the elders remains available to the rest. This would also explain why elves are so fond of trees in general.

I think something could also be made up on the immortal=soulless basis, similar to Moorcock's The Warhound and the World's Pain. Whole areas that can't be entered or even seen unless you are damned, although damned in this case probably meant not destined for the Christian God.

I really like Kevin Crawford's take on them in Red Tide, they're truly immortal, with their souls being recycled into a set population over and over again.

Quote from: Panzerkraken;570484I really like Kevin Crawford's take on them in Red Tide, they're truly immortal, with their souls being recycled into a set population over and over again.

Nice, somewhat like the Minbari in Babylon 5 or Buddhists with a better memory.

In gaming terms the most useful would probably be the transfer to trees, what kind of weapons, ships or artifacts could be made from wood like that assuming you could get some? Can elves transfer a small part of their essence to their own bows and arrows, or plants maybe, to control them? Wood lore starts to take on a whole new meaning!