Elves take 100 years to become adults

To not be held accountable would imply they are not mentally mature or are women. Either way it means they must rely on another the support them for their first 100 years, making them the ultimate basement dwelling neckbeards

If they got started at 25, they'd be done raising kids at 50, 60/70 tops. what are they doing for those last 30+ years?

>To not be held accountable would imply they are not mentally mature
I am implying that, although kids aren't mentally mature we trust them to play outside or stay away from home for some days Of course that depends a bit on where you live Maybe they are not mentally mature enough to deal with the important parts of elvish society, but already physically mature to defend themselves. I'm trying to justify here why they could be adventuring around this age, there isn't much they could do at home, but maybe seeing and experiencing the world might be regarded as maturing.

If she has had so many life experiences shouldn't she have more skills than her human compatriots?

talkexd about this just today
Elves reach physical maturity around 20-30
just like user said
The 110 year thing is about comprehending your long livespan, learning patience and understanding that when the human girl you befriended when you wwere 12 and she was 8 will be dead when you are considered an adult.

you learn these things slowly and carefully, and because elves can afford this this takes about 100 years.

You're pretty much saying elves are special needs adults for 75 years of their lives

Fucking and being NEETs.

After raising their kids they basically accomplished their universal role in Elven society, anything they do afterwards is up to them.

>Dwarves reach adulthood at 40.

What retard came up with this? Why does anyone take this race of literal autists seriously?

You wouldn't let special needs adults run around killing dragons. "Accountable" was probably the wrong word and I can't find the right one. I meant it in the sense that a company wouldn't let someone be a CEO which has no experience, doesn't have something to show off.

You assume that elves have just one kid or one set of kids at a time or close to each other the way humans do.

For a human, committing 20 or so years of life to raising a kid is a major investment: you start just as you become a biological adult and by the time you're done you're entering middle age.

For an elf, you have your first kid at 30 (you think elves get married immediately at 25?) and spend 25 years raising it, and you're...55, and biologically almost identical to the way you were back when you were 30. There is no reason not to have another kid.

Only if she learned from them.

Shit's gonna suck when the orcs come rolling through and kill half your population in bloody warfare, and all the surviving elf couples are only popping out one kid every 30 years to make up for it

Found the buttmad elf

No, those are kalashtars, they mature both mentally and physically even before humans, yet their starting age is 80 years old.

venerable perhaps?

No. Elves plateau quickly.

We are getting close. Elves would have their own word for this in their language.

So they're handicapped

Only when compared to adventuring humans. Most non-adventurers hit a limit to their skills pretty quickly too.

The Asari in Mass Effect live much the same way. Liara is a brilliant scientist but no one takes her seriously because she's only 106.

This post made my day. Thanks for the laugh

Elves are only autistic during their formative years.

Elven children are raised in creche by caretakers. They are not helpless like human babies are, but they are not quite fully formed either, looking more like hairless felines than they do elves. They also have a full set of teeth and nails. They are nearly animalistic for the first five years of life, untrainable and unthinking, acting only on base instinct.At the age of six they look more humanoid, and they become sedate and calm, as their brains go through an adjustment period, moving from instinct to trained behaviors. Durign this time their senses become more acute and useful, and they grow to be more childlike in appearance as well. This stage lasts about 20 years, and is when most of the social and societal customs are taught and aborbed. At the age of 25 or so they appear to be human teenagers, but their brains go through another growth period, and they become very strange as they become used to the senses that are no developing. Durign this time they can be taught by rote, and they can learn basic skills. They fall asleep often and they spend long periods of time sitting still and trying to make sense out of the glut of sensory data they are receiving. Their overloaded senses and the formative state of their brains make this time ideal for magical and mystic training, though a patient teacher can usually manage to teach them basic combat and physical skills as well. This period of time is also when sorcerous talents manifest and many die as a result, which is why there are so few sorcerously inclined elves. After 70 years of this they have become fully adult, nearly fully grown elves, and their minds and brains are fully formed, and they are ready to lean about other cultures and more physical trades.

Let me put it this way, if you knew you would die at 500 years old, how much would you procrastinate?

Less, because now I can do something meaningful with my life, unlike now where I just can't fight the forces of fate.

The thing is that the same elf couple can KEEP popping out kids, and there's nothing stopping them from having multiple kids at a time.

Let's play a raw numbers game: A human woman is biologically soundest having kids between the ages of 15 and 35, give or take. That's 20 years of churning out kids. Assuming she has one successful pregnancy every two years, that's 10 kids she pops out.

Now take the elf woman. From ages 25 to 110 is 85 years. According to 2E's Complete Book of Elves, elf pregnancy lasts 2 years. But even if we give the elf a break of 2 years between each pregnancy (i.e., one kid every four years), that's still about 21 kids over that timespan. Even the infamously low elven fertility rate is easily counteracted by just having a whole heck of a lot of sex.

The big trick, though, is that a human woman at age of 35 has entered a point where it's starting to not be biologically safe for her to have kids anymore: menopause is going to start kicking her ass soon. An elf woman at age 110? Is still more than ready to go. She's got a good century or two of safe pregnancy still ahead of her.

This is even before we take into account the fact the elven clerics - and their healing magic - are probably not shy about being present during childbirth and on-call whenever a pregnant elf needs help, leading to a much higher survival rate for both mother and child.

The long and short of it is, elves can have tons of kids, way more than humans, if they want. All before they set out on adventures.

So why don't they have tons of kids?

Look at it this way.
Elves pop out kids while their kids and grandkids pop out kids.
Elven hordes should be the norm.
Actually at some point I even think that they have retarded maturity rituals to keep the population from exploding.

Orcs and dwarves regularly thin the elves. They actually try to have tons of children, but there is a mass culling every century or so. If humans get involved, it starts becoming a Lord of the Rings situation where you can fit literally all the elves in a single city.

Who says they don't? It has been said that elves have a low fertility rate, i.e., that any one act of sex is unlikely to get them pregnant. No one ever, however, said anything about them having small families overall.

>Elven hordes should be the norm.

Except that, like modern society, most elves are shown to live in low-stress societies where food is plentiful and disease is low. As a result, elves in most setting probably choose to have fewer kids, much as how most couples in First World nations choose to have fewer kids.

Ask Tolkien. After you got an answer that makes a lot of sense, ask all the other settings why they never bothered to explain that.

They di but they take the extreme Darwinist approach to raise them I.e. the strongest survive.

By the way, if we take the whole "elves are expected to have kids between the ages of 25 and 110" thing, then this is another way of explaining drow, or at least noble drow: they are sexually frustrated to Hell and back. When they should be getting it on with other drow and having kids, they're instead forced by Lolth and her clergy into becoming fighters, clerics, or wizards, spending all their time training to be that.

By the time a drow priestess leaves Arach-Tinilith in Menzoberranzan, she's been unable to do anything but munch carpet for 60 years and is understandably upset at this.

Not sure whose lore makes this claim but I am not fond of such a concept. I prefer the idea that elves age at roughly the same rate as humans up till about 23 then either stop aging or the aging process slows so dramatically that the only elves you see with grey hair are in their late 500s. Unless they are Drow. In most of my settings almost nobody knows what an elderly Drow looks like...

It takes 25 years for an elf to become the equivalent of a 15-year-old human, or in other words they age only about 60% as fast to that point.

From 25 to 110 is the elf equivalent of a human aging from 15 to 30, or about 27.28% the speed of humans. So a 75-year-old elf is the equivalent of a nearly 21-year-old human.

From 110 to 400 is then the equivalent of a human aging from 30 to 70, or 17.5% of the speed. So a 387-year-old elf is the equivalent of a nearly 68-year-old human.

From age 400 on, each year is only about 10% that of a human. So a 410-year-old elf is like a 71-year-old human; a 500 year old elf is like a 75-year-old human. This continues until the elf dies of old age, usually some time around 450 or so.

>This is even before we take into account the fact the elven clerics - and their healing magic
Why would this not apply to humans too?

Elves are Chaotic Good as a race: if someone needs healing, they'll give it to them, no questions asked.

Humans run the gamut of alignments but are just as likely to be neutral or evil as they are to be good - which means that Neutral + Evil combined outnumbers good rather notably. If someone needs healing, they better be able to pay. Most people can't.

If you actually read the fucking elf entry you know that adulthood doesn't equate physical maturity. They physically mature as humans do, but don't earn the status and responsibilities of an adult until they're atleast 100 years old, where they must prove themselves to be an adult. It's then that they earn their full name and status.

I always thought it was dumb that elves have a low fertility rate. The actuality is that they've likely got some good contraceptives due to their connection to nature and all that.

I imagine elven families are full of half-siblings because being inherently chaotic individuals relationships don't really last forever, but they're still fruitful.

I've taken to thinking that the reason why a 100-somethign years old elf PC is about equal to a 20- to 30-something human PC is because human PCs are exceptional. Like even a 1st level fighter (which is probably the most "mundane" class) is far superior to a regular human soldier.
Elves, on the other hand? Your PC could just be an average elf. Hell, back in 1st edition, humans were the only ones who had classes: you were a human magic user or thief or fighting man, while elves' and dwarves' classes were just "elf" and "dwarf", implying that just being an elf or dwarf would place you on the same level.

So it's not that elf PCs are retarded, but the human PC is exceptional enough that they can match the skills of a 100-yars old elf and far surpass most humans despite only being 20-something.

I like this explanation, though some humanoboos might get pissed at it.

Eh...more that it works for 1st Edition due to that whole "Elf class" thing, but doesn't work anymore, since nowadays elves just take the standard classes.

Most elderly drow look young and strong and no different from younger drow, except for the most powerful ones who've performed terrible rituals like Zin-carla and were aged in the process. Yvonnel Baenre is a notable example, who performed such rituals many times and looked withered and wrinkled.

Here's my take on it:

Elves reach full physical and mental maturity at 20-25. It takes 2 years for a pregnancy, and 5 years to get pregnant again, allowing for a strong K-strategy with children (imagine having 25 years to raise your kid instead of having 5 years of "I can't do shit", another 5 of "I'm going to be a teenager soon!", fitting 2-3 years of "Here's how you not be a fuck up" between those two, and then 5 years for "you fucking fucker, you did fucking what?")
Most elven cultures have an "Age of Wisdom", which is when your opinion is taken more seriously than "under advisement from a competent teen", allowing you greater access to the decision making process of your community (and in some, allowing you to actually lead your own household, instead of being attached to an elder/mature relative).

That's pretty similar to my take, except there isn't necessarily a multi-year gap beween pregnancies. It's just that most elves don't have children very often: wood elves have small communities since their lifestyle can't sustain large centralised populations, and try to keep their population roughly static to limit enviromental impacts, while high elves are just extremely rare in general.
Dark elves are the exception, as they have large communities and reasons to encourage high birthrates (to have a steady supply of soldiers mostly), but they also have higher mortality rates (shorter natural lifespan, more warlike culture, and habit of messing with weird eldritch magics).
Unlike humans, though, elves of all kinds can only get pregnant during a relatively short time (like 1 month a year), which also restricts the birth rates.

Also elven pregnancy takes 3 years, since I couldn't find any details aside from it being long, and 3 years is exactly 4 times longer than on humans, which is a nice even number. I admit I've probably put far more thought than would be necessary on hof elf pregnancies work, because that's kind of my magical realm (elves, pregnancy, or pointless biological details? Yes).

I put just as much but I have no taste for such magical realms. It's just an interesting way to make them less human without making them arboreal apemen or humanoid mushrooms or some crazy shit
>Elves are fertile for three months/one season out of the year
>Gestation lasts one year
Maturation takes 30
>Season of birth determines subrace/caste, thus caste inherited from the mother

2 years comes from Complete Book of Elves (2E) and Book of Erotic Fantasy (3.5), with the 5 year gap also coming from BoEF.
They kinda followed the entire "not an adult until 110" thing though, I'll have to double check.