40 year old Elf baby

And yet we have written anecdotes of half elves feeling alienated because they age much faster than their full blooded kin

maybe thats why i'm confused, I must be thinking of pathfinder.

Pathfinder ruins everything

>Pathfinder ruins everything

I mean, maybe, but not for this. At least Pathfinder made it clear right from the get-go, unlike D&D, which took awhile to clarify things.

>What if Elves childhood was proportionnal to their lifespan? Does Veeky Forums has any neat ideas on the concept?
>DEPENDS ON THE SETTING!!!
autism.

/pol/ism is a mental illness and the cancer killing this board, you need to go back.

Ironically he hasn't sprung the /pol/ shit on us yet. I suspect this has something to do with /pol/ dm arguing elves are untermensch

>it can be presumed that this is the standard for Greyhawk.
Or you could read some of the greyhawk books and find out.

orcs are essentially niggers and elves are essentially chinks/gooks/whathaveyou
goblins are jews who seek to breed the orcs with the other races to have an eternal supply of strong, dim enough to follow orders but bright enough to understand the orders slaves who also have big enough dicks to fuck their goblin wives while they watch.

annnddd there it is

That sounds like considerably more effort than I'm willing to put in for something I don't actually care about. I'm satisfied with how Races of the Wild explains things.

>Since 3.5 sorta-kinda used Greyhawk as the official setting, it can be presumed that this is the standard for Greyhawk.
Then your previous statement is:
"I don't fucking know about Greyhawk", to which no one can call you out on, instead of talking out of your ass.

>That sounds like considerably more effort than I'm willing to put in for something I don't actually care about.

Other anons, remember these words the next time you go on a meaningless rant about shit that doesn't matter.

>instead of talking out of your ass.

In what way am I talking out of my ass? I cited Races of the Wild, pointed out that 3.5 sort of uses Greyhawk as the default setting, and then extrapolted that it's likely that Greyhawk uses the same rules as Races of the Wild.

Am I wrong? If so, feel free to post how Greyhawk actually runs elf aging. I don't see why it should be my responsibility to do all the damn research in this thread.

Not that much different overall. Maybe a bit better behaved. It would take decades for an elf that needs to reach 100 to be an adult to gain stuff like object permanence. However, at the same time, they'd probably also be speaking sooner.

You could probably add on a year or two to an elf child's outward appearance to get what human age their mental maturity is at. An elf toddler is more likely going to be on par with a 5 year old, at least in terms of speaking and understanding, to a degree, simply because they're spending more time at each development stage pondering and thinking and learning.

It's still a dumb way to handle elf aging though. At most, you should cut it in half so that a fully mature elf is 40 to a human's 20, but beyond that it just starts getting creepy.

>And yet we have written anecdotes of half elves feeling alienated because they age much faster than their full blooded kin
Yes we do because a Half-Elf lives to be what? 150 or so max? What about Elves? 500+? Yeah, they get old and die faster but they age approximately the same right until young adulthood and then Elves just kind of linger there for a few centuries.

Eh, I kinda like the idea that elf gestation is quite a bit longer than a human's, to the point they skip the whole infant stage entirely and often have picked up a basic grasp of their language just by overhearing their mother while in the womb

>arguing with me over whether or not Elves should grow normally
>arguing

Either this is some homebrew setting he has made with his own fancy fucking elves, or he's an idiot. This information is listed in like every edition of DnD, and Burning Wheel, and probably most other games that have elves.

> what a 40-year-old baby with a brain of an infant, but with 40 years of experiences would be like.

You want a baby that is somehow more cunning and knowing than it should be? You're heading into Twilight territory, user. Are you sure that's where you want to go?

Oh boy ! Here comes the uncanny valley !

elves are hatched from pods fully formed in their final adult body, all the knowledge of the elves is pumped into them as they're body is being built by the plant pod. There are no elf children.

In Ed Greenwood Presents Elminster's Forgotten Realms, elves mature the same physically and mentally as humans. They just extend their concept of adulthood to schooling. Hence why they practice art for decades before becoming adventurers.

Keep in mind, however, that Ed Greenwood is an actual crazy person. Creator of the setting or not, he's a full-on sex fiend.

They age otherwise normally both physically and mentally until they shed their first ears at age 40, at which point they undergo an extended period of mental reversion to a state of neotenous self assurance and physical stasis until at 200 they shed their final set of ears and enter a phase of melancholic aloofness.

>And yet we have written anecdotes of half elves feeling alienated because they age much faster than their full blooded kin

That's true, but no where in your original post did you say that. You said Elves mature faster than Humans, which is wrong. Half-Elves get older much sooner than Elves, but Humans get older the soonest of the three.

Someone post the elf pregnancy thing.

It's just cultural, though. If you had a society of people who lived until they were thousands of yeras old, would you take the opinions of some 200 year-old as fact? Would you take the opinions of a 16 year-old black as fact in real life? He might not look like a kid, but he might as well be.

And even then it only works when comparing it to other elves. A 100 years-old elf might be seen as a child to other elves, but they could still very well be much more knowledgeable than a human. I think it's fair to say that if said elf was raised among humans, he'd not even behave as a child at all, simply because he would be taught how to be an adult by the time he was 18.

Meanwhile elves go super slow and let kids be kids until they're a few hundred years on their backs.

That's how DnD elves are generally descipted, and pretty much how most fantasy settings seem to do it. You don't really see 50 years old loli elves outside Japanese eroge (and even then they usually just make female dwarves into lolis instead).
For elves who live for several centuries or millenias, it would make sense that they wouldn't consider somebody with a mere few decades of life experience to be a proper adult yet.

I like that as well, althought admittedly partly because it ties in with my magical realm. Still, I consider it canonical in my setting that elven pregnancies last for about three years and the babies will be able to walk shortly after birth and learn to speak much sooner than human babies. Also, as a side effect of having to give birth to larger babies than humans do, all female elves have Wakfu-tier hips.

>A DM friend who resides in /pol/
Stopped reading there. Go to gulag.

D&D outright states that Elves are physically adults at age 21.
Only a remark that Elf society considers them to be ''legally 18'' at age 100.

Culturally Elves are not considered adults until atleast the age of 100, where they can earn an adult name and all the rights and responsibilities of being an adult. Before then, they have a child name, and are treated as a child.

What sort of consequences must Elves have gone through due to overpopulation, before they had to somehow regulate their population?

Elves don't have sex drives similar to humans. Once they have like 1 children their libido disappears.

That's stupid and makes no sense, so i'm going to ignore it for this scenario.

Have we actually seen geriartric elves?
I play it so they age exactly the same as humans until they peak (18 for women, 25 for men) then stop aging altogether and eventually centuries later drop dead out of accumulated grief and disinterest rather than physical deterioration.

Elves reach maturity at the same age as humans but age slower. While a human might lose his edge at, say, 40, an elf will lose it much later, maybe at 100 or so.

The reason for this could be longer telomeres, more life energy etc.

...

Tolkien had one elf who was so old he had a beard. You see old elves with white beards occasionally, but I can't think of any time I've seen one that was really suffering from old age. I guess that when elves die old age, their condition deteriorates rapidly rather than over decades.

Although I disagree that the brain can only hold 100 years of data. (Decay and Alzheimer's probably get to it quicker by that age.) It's also my head canon that Elves can only remember so much.

This is the reason they gravitate towards crafts and the arts so much. "Use it or lose it" is doubly true for Elves, who don't put stock into some of the milestones humans seem to cherish. Their first kiss was 300 years ago, their first divorce 299. They can hardly remember it was so many lifetimes ago. But their art? It's always there. It's their passion, and it's what they practice on a day to day basis. There's no need to fret over how you embarrassed yourself in Elf Highschool or other clingings of the past, they are so many years passed that they probably don't even recall highschool as anything but a blurr that happened.

I like it imagine my elves with more chaos at heart, and so instead of memory problems they just suffer ennui easily its how they know a little of many things, but still need to focus and commit to be any good at any one thing.

That's why an elf adventurer is not overpowered with the amount of years of experience. They often abandon things to pick them up again later.

I go with the "elves physically mature slightly slower than humans and are phsyical adults at about 20" route, it just takes a hundred years for young elves to properly learn swordplay, archery, etiquette, the nuance of Elven language, etc. This is compounded by the fact that elf parents basically keep their kids from accidentally killing themselves and provide the necessities but otherwise let them run wild rather than intense training like humans do with their offspring.

I seem to recall one of the AD&D books explaining this is why the elves do their weird trance instead of sleeping. Since to the observer it seems like they're just meditating, but in truth they're basically going through their mind and memories and choosing what to archive and what may have been a joyful memory but can be forgotten about without issue.

i came to look at cute elves
I leave enlightened in the knowledge of user.
Thank you

...Wasn't Veeky Forumss headcanon regarding elf ages that they develop at the same rate as humans up until they hit adolecence, at which time, they spend nearly 60 years doing idiotic teen stuff, shich is why the elders of elven communities pretty much lock away their hypersexual teens until they calm down.

Then again, this was so we'd have the hilarious situation where a 60 year old elf teen girl is being "raised" by her 40 year old half-elf daughter.

Yeah, occasionally, Veeky Forums can be highly enlightening.

It doesn't matter how you try to explain it, skew the numbers or try to adapt their culture to it. Elves, or any other race, that needs much longer to learn and stays much longer in their teenage years would be overall pretty retarded and their societies dysfunctional. This probably stems from a need to balance things that never needed to be balanced.

Your friend is likely right, since /pol/ is always right, even when it's left, but especially when it's right.

>The Magos Biologis really outdid himself huh?

headcanon elves have indefinite lifespans unless slain, and are more intelligent than humans on average, but very limited capacity for memory. Their written language is extremely important to them, They write on whatever the can: clay tablets, hides, textiles...

The introduction of cheaply made paper by the humans revolutionized elven culture. Suddenly they could record every detail their short memories could not, instead of only the important details. The short term effects of this were a very good relationship with the humans, but the long term effects was elves spent a lot more time organizing the notes they all kept and trying to sort out what was important and what was not. New advancements came more slowly, but more surely, as nothing would be lost due to a lack of sturdy materials to write on.

The elves consider humans to be fascinating. The humans can easily remember details of things that happened years and even decades prior.

Half-elves don't exist in this setting as the two species, while compatible physically, are not biologically capable of cross-breeding.

>A DM friend who resides in /pol/
Dropped. Sage goes in the every field.

depends on the setting. In warcraft Valeera is around 106 years old and shes still considered a teenager. I have no clue how quickly elves physically age

She has very fine body for teen.

The whole idea that a 40 year old elf is mentally inferior to a 40 year old human is retarded and full of autism. They should be equal in terms of mental capacity with the only defining factor being how they life has been spent so far

Those final lines reminded me a lot of Aerie with that "Then the pregnant elf prances about, wrestling balrogs or picking flowers or whatever".

...

Hi r*ddit

woah. I'm half way through and this is mind blowing

Havent we all visited /pol/ at some point?

Okay, I'm gonna explain this to you since you seem not to find it obvious

Let's start with humans in the real world.

Way back when people used to be considered adults when they hit puberty. That was it. 13-14 was adulthood.

But then our lives got more comfortable, our lives longer. Adulthood got pushed back to physical maturity. & this weird thing called adolescence was made, 13 year olds were no longer considered adults. Adulthood was now 18

Now people are going to college or other sorts of training after graduation, where they aren't exactly being treated as adults, what is considered adult is now in flux again. Don't be surprised if it's pushed back to mental maturity at age 24 or so in a generation or two.

Now apply this to a race like elves who are effectively immortal or at least incredibly long lived. It would take a very long time before an older generation elf would consider a younger elf an actual adult.

If you have trouble wrapping your head around this, just picture a dumbass 13yr old trying to boss you around, & then realize King Tut was 9 when he became Pharoah & died at age 19. Or that Richard II was leading armies when you were in the 11th grade. That's how anice elf views an elf that is 60, or 40 or whatever. It's someone 16 years old wanting to be an adult, sure some are mature enough but our society does not accept this as the norm

>some fags get triggered by OP mentioning someone from /pol/.
This is pretty sad actually

Depends on the setting, LIKE ALWAYS. Example; Forgotten Realms elves physically mature at the same rate humans do.
Dragonlance elves do not.

Why visit /pol/ when it comes to you?

Yes they do, for the most part. Dragons of Summer Flame has a kid from the original party as a POV character if I remember right

People have always done this to get their threads attention. Four years ago he'd have casually mentioned /mlp/ and got the same result. Next year it will be something else.

Simplest thing to do would be too look at creatures irl that do live long, like turtles and lobsters. How do they age?

Quickly and they have very large amount of offspring compared to humans.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowhead_whale
Our oldest relatives live for 211 years.

Jesus, that's a good screencap.

Evolutionarly speaking (and don't bring magic into this, it won't explain shit), elves as PF has them make no sense - the longer a species takes to mature, the longer it remains vulnerable to predators, and the longer it takes before it starts adding resources back in to the group. After a certain point, the species is no longer viable without truly massive resource gathering capability.

The only option that makes sense is them maturing about as quickly as humans, but culturally being considered underage kiddos by other elves until they're a century old.

old, but good, and still mindblowing

your friend is fucking retarded there would be no fucking point to their longevity if they matured at a 1:1 proportional rate to humans.

Depends on the DM's fluff.

Personally, I'd have elves go through childhood at the same rate as humans, but once they go through elf puberty (elferty?) aging essentially stops. That would bring with it major psychological adaptations, I imagine.

Is it because we need a daily elf thread in the catalog that this thread had to be bumped again?

They might just age *differently*, in addition to having longer lives.

Cats, for example, are mature after just 1 year but typically live 12-16, and are quite active for most of their lives until senescence kicks in hard during their last few months.

Compare/contrast humans, who take about 18 years to reach maturity, get about 20-30 years of activity, and then have senescence start to notably kick in around age 60, but then tend to linger until age 70-80.

(we're discounting injury and disease, of course)

The two lifespans aren't really comparable. If humans aged the way (if not the length) that cats do, then a human would be an 'adult" by age, say, 5 at most, and then be the equivalent of an 'adult" for the next 65 years, before suddenly and rapidly entering senescence during the final 5-10 years of life.

Giant turtles reach sexual maturity at 30 years old. The 40 year elf baby meme is a bit exagerated, but the idea that elves take much longer maturing that humans is scientifically sound. Things that last longer tend to take longer to develop in the first place, from animals to funguses to trees.

In b4
>elves
>science

Personally, here's how I do it.

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 17.65% the speed of humans. So a 75-year-old elf is the equivalent of a human around 24 years old.

From 110 to 400 is then the equivalent of a human aging from 30 to 70, or 13.79% of the speed. So a 387-year-old elf is the equivalent of a human who's a little over 68 years old.

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.

It's setting dependent. Personally, I like to think that elves might physically mature only slightly slower than humans up until adult age, so a human might be considered an adult after around 20 years, while an elf might not physically be an adult until after 25-30 years, but that they also have entirely different customs concerning adulthood, so that culturally they may still be considered children for far longer than that (say another 10 years or so).

Elf bed death?

I like this. It's always nice when someone does something different for how standard races interact.

From a biological perspective, I don't think the 40 years of experience are really effectively integrated if the brain is still in an infant stage of development. Like, the neurological connections that create "knowledge" aren't even really forming, at least not very many of them. Maybe the infant's face recognition and sense of object permanence is advanced enough to reflect 40 years of existence.

I definitely don't know much about that kind of stuff, though.

They are fictional and you can just make up your own rules if you want.

you know, i've been thinking about this, and my own take on it is that for elves, 'adulthood' is less about the number of years you've lived and about the experiences you've had.

So, technically, a 40 year old elf would be physically an adult.

But elven society considers them still children until they've...
>Held a steady job for so many years (often decades)
>Experienced betrayal of the heart (lost romance, yes, elven adulthood requires you to know what it's like to be cucked)
>lost a loved one
>Saved a life (like, actual, saving, not just some vague shit)
>Been imprisoned/lost your freedom
>Fought for your life
>Studied magical theory (just magical theory, not actual magic per-say)

And a long list of other things that basically mean most elves don't end up experiencing all of until they're 110.

It's almost like this is exactly how some books of DnD handle this.

My headcannon

They hit walking and talking about when humans do (though Elvish is complicated as fuck so talking WELL takes longer) and reach general physical competence (like immediatley prepubescent humans, about 10 years old) by around 12-15.

Then they don't hit puberty. Their growth actually slows drastically. Over the next 20 years or slow, they'll move towards their adult height and realize some cognative landmarks. in the next 20 years after that, they'll stop gaining height, and begin to develop sexually: females will have their first ovulation at around 40-50. At around 70, elves have reached the point of humans of about 18: entirely physically mature, but with a few cognitive changes yet to come. The next thirty years they're still considered 'minors' by elven culture, but are expected to be finding their place in life, working seriously in their apprenticeships and journeyman periods (or, to compare to modern life, existing in high school through college). at 100, when they are initiated as full-fledged members of society, they're at a level similar to a 25-year-old human: Mentally developed, trained, and ready to start a family and serious career. Compared to the 25-year-old human the elf will have a massive breadth and depth of knowledge; city-dwellers, nobles, and academics are all more or less polymaths, and even peasants have a breadth of folk wisdom that rivals or surpasses human elders. Many if not most will have at least tried to learn a little magic, though more never get to the point where they actually cast a spell than do. Their practical experience is lacking primarily because elves, with so much time to their lives, believe very strongly in taking the time to do things perfectly. In raw deeds over time, humans out-achieve elves every time, but elven precision is second to none.

>Keep in mind, however, that Ed Greenwood is an actual crazy person. Creator of the setting or not, he's a full-on sex fiend.
At least he admits it.

>having to choose, every day, between remembering her smile and remembering the spell you learned to kill the one who took her from you
Being an elf is suffering

^This^

/pol/ loves pleddit though. They have a whole general for /r/T_D posters.

Neat.

The issue isn't that someone changed gender, it's that the person rambles to you about it stupidly when it IS supposed to be just a normal thing.

If it's integral to the realms, then it makes sense that someone has suck a massive axe to grind about it the game would seem odd and politically motivated, no?

The reason that people don't like it is because it's fucking hackneyed and pushes a real life political narrative in a setting that shouldn't have fuckall to do with that. Even right down to the weird globalist shit where that character changed their name to a hodgepodge of different cultures to accompany their transformation.

That person would seem even MORE mentally ill and fucking weird in that universe than this universe just because of how much they overreacted to their gender.

I know right? Babies are terrifying.