What do Elves do before 1st level?

[Morghen]

Not kidding.

They hit 100+ years of life before they go adventuring, and they've developed NO skills in all that time?

How do you folks fluff that?

[Rorrik]

Elves lack all ambition and spend their first century learning speech, being potty trained, and otherwise repeating their years in elementary school ad nausium.

At least that's my take. Others might say they are being trained culturally, communing with nature, or ... singing?

Okay, you got me, unless you adhere to my belief that elves are lame sauce, there is absolutely no reason they shouldn't have a lot of bonus practical skills like craft, knowledge, and perform.

[Jeraa]

How do you folks fluff that?

I don't. Its stupid. Elves in my games have starting ages of 20 years, slightly longer then humans.

[Craft (Cheese)]

I don't. Its stupid. Elves in my games have starting ages of 20 years, slightly longer then humans.

This. Plus, the idea of a species that's dependent for 100 years just doesn't make any sense. Honestly, I think it's because whoever came up with that idea for elven lifespans thought "Well, I'll just take the human life cycle and scale all of its parts uniformly! What could possibly go wrong?" without thinking through the actual consequences.

[Morghen]

I don't. Its stupid. Elves in my games have starting ages of 20 years, slightly longer then humans.

This sounds like a pretty good idea. Unrelated: Why do Humans get a bump to Intelligence and Wisdom after 50 years of life but Elves have to live to 400 or whatever to get the same bump?

Of course they develop skills, they don't wake up one morning with all of their skills instantly developed, they learn them over a lifespan.

So a human who starts with skills X, Y, and Z at 1st learned those skills over 10 years, but an Elf who starts with the exact same skills at the exact same level took 90 years to learn them. Got it.


Wait. No, I don't. That makes no sense.

[ChaosLord29]

I don't think it's that Elves don't learn anything in that first 100 years are so, so much that it takes elves that long to find their calling. Even in this era with all are advanced education their are plenty of people who are backed into a corner career wise, and that's with 12 years of school and 4-8 years of college of secondary education on top of it.

Think about it, if you had a 100 years to live before you were considered and 'adult' wouldn't you spend it learning and trying everything you could until you found your calling?

Most of the elf traits in the Elves of Golarion companion book are based on just that. They give you advantages based on your previous 'callings' before now.

So you can basically say that Elves spend all that time learning, unlearing and relearning the skills they enjoy/like/show talent in before becoming adventurers or NPCs.

[Jeraa]

This sounds like a pretty good idea. Unrelated: Why do Humans get a bump to Intelligence and Wisdom after 50 years of life but Elves have to live to 400 or whatever to get the same bump?

I remove that as well. No aging penalties or bonuses at all. Old people are supposed to become senile, and have a hard time hearing/seeing. They actually get better vision and hearing in D&D (as Spot and Listen are Wisdom based). Sure the elderly lose some of their strength, and can't move very well. But this is D&D. No reason the elderly can't be just as fit as they were in their youth.

(Also, the aging effects unfairly penalize non-casters. Its a total of -6 to physical scores, and a +3 bonus on mental scores. Melee characters get almost no benefit from the increased mental scores, but the penalty to physical scores hurts. Meanwhile, casters [probably] don't care about the physical penalty, but the mental bonus improves their casting.)

[Mnemnosyne]

This. Plus, the idea of a species that's dependent for 100 years just doesn't make any sense. Honestly, I think it's because whoever came up with that idea for elven lifespans thought "Well, I'll just take the human life cycle and scale all of its parts uniformly! What could possibly go wrong?" without thinking through the actual consequences.

A large part of this has, I think, been misinterpretation. At least as far back as I've been involved with D&D, if you look at some of the supplemental materials, elves don't spend a century being children. But since 'minimum age' always said 100+, many people for some reason imagined a hundred years of growing from a toddler through puberty.

The minimum age given for them has always indicated a cultural transition to adulthood, and not a physical one - much like we humans are generally physically mostly adult between 14-18, while most modern societies restrict full 'adulthood' from us until 18-21.

This is unequivocally cleared up in Races of the Wild, page 13, where there's a sidebar talking about elves and adulthood - physically they grow a little slower than humans, but not a great deal.

I do, however, think that with the way D&D's skill system is set up, it presents something of an odd situation in that they were probably doing something over those hundred plus years, and yet have no additional skill points to account for it. I've sometimes considered creating a houserule to give elves and other long-lived races a boatload of extra skill points that can only be spent in Craft and Profession skills, to reflect the many mundane things they learned during their youth.

I should also note that most elf characters I play, I simply start out in their 20's or 30's in order to avoid that very issue.

[Shadowknight12]

They take things slowly. Very slowly. Very, very, very, very slowly. Why would they rush? It's not like they're going to get old any time soon.

Sure, they learn skills over those 100 years, they just don't hurry. Ever. They take their sweet time to master in a century what a human would master in a decade, because humans (to elves) are frantic bees buzzing about to and fro, never stopping for a moment and scrambling in anxiety every moment of their lives.

An elf takes time for everything. All the things we're "too busy" to do, an elf has time for that. Taking a couple of hours to groom oneself and get dressed is perfectly normal, and eating slowly to enjoy every bite of a meal is expected and commonplace. Why fill our days with activity when we can devote a single day to something and enjoy it/do it properly?

That leaves an elf with very little time during the day to practise a skill. But who cares? They have such a long lifespan that taking several years to master a skill is of no concern.

As for the time it takes an elf to get a mental bonus due to age categories, I rationalise it as a mixture of the same slowness I mentioned and the fact that an elf isn't in any hurry to throw themselves into situations that will give them the wisdom of old age. An old person isn't wise because they're old, they're wise because of all the things they've done and seen in those years. Take two people in their seventies. The old man who's never left his cabin in the woods, interacted with people, read books or done anything to stimulate his mind will never be as wise as the man who's travelled the world and crammed those decades with experiences. Combine that with an elf's tendency to take things slow and you'll realise why it takes them so long to be considered "wise elders."

[TheOOB]

By human standards, elf society would be very stagnant. It wouldn't be unusual for an elf to say, meditate in front of a tree for a few months, just seeking some sort of enlightenment. The fact is, in all probability, they will die of unnatural causes long before they have a chance of getting close to dieing on old age(the longer you live, the greater chance you have of dieing from accident, disease, or misadventure rather than old age). Why rush twords it, especially when, with a low Con, going out and doing things might get you killed.

For the record, I usually play it that elves are physical mature long before they mentally mature. I usually say they have the body of a teenager around 30, and stop growing all together around 50-60, but elven society want them leaving home until around 100. Since they have low birth-rates, they live very sheltered lives until then, the elders making darn good and sure they are prepared before venturing out.

An elf who grows up in human lands may start adventuring as early as age 40, though they would be at a physical disadvantage.

[Tenno Seremel]

They are married to tree spirits and can only leave after 100 years. That's why forests are important – some of those trees contain elf spirits

[SgtCarnage92]

I've always imagined those first 100 years or so in youthful abandon. The elves are a long-sighted race as they don't think of things in terms of years but in decades and centuries. We look at the 100 or so years to "mature" but an elf might just consider a human society a group of adolescents that are forced to do "adult" work. While an elf is physically mature at 20 or so as most of the fluff says, they give them a human lifetime to get all of their reckless abandon out of the way before they finally settle down and find their calling because elves can get away with doing so, it takes time to develop the infamous elven patience. In times of need young elves (those just out of their teenage years) are often trained as soldiers to defend elven lands. Imagine a century worth of having the body of a 20 year old, wouldn't you do everything in your power to take advantage of that? Humans are forced to learn skills quickly because we have a relatively short lifespan. Elves value freedom to such a degree that it creates an atmosphere that doesn't pressure them to find a calling or whatnot. Young elves may try a few things here and there but their interests are flighty at best. I see the point about having additional skill points at start because of their extended lifespans and i may integrate it into my future games.

[Omegonthesane]

I would be inclined to extrapolate from the slow growth that elves are slow to develop and learn, possibly because of Shadowknight's suggestion of them taking time to savour everything, possibly because they simply cannot process anything they are trying to learn as fast as a human can. I would be inclined to take the "elves need 400+ years to get an aging bonus" as a result of elves being passionate, arrogant, and slow to change, and thus not only slow to learn from their mistakes but quick to become defensive if anyone points out they made a mistake.

That's my take. It probably doesn't line up with a lot of D&D fluff though.

[Worgwood]

I generally assume that an elf takes about 30-40 years to reach full physical maturity, but is only really considered a contributing, "adult" member of society when he hits 100 or so. Until then, society doesn't have particularly high expectations of them so they're not compelled to do anything that interests them, and most just kind of use it as an extended gap year.

When they hit 100, that's when they need to pick up a trade. They can learn it as quickly as a human can, but I imagine their training would be slow, patient and repetitive. For instance, elven warriors spend might a year learning a single strike with their sword and no other so that when the time comes for real battle, it will be perfect every time. A human doesn't have the lifespan for that sort of process. I also imagine they have a lot more downtime than humans because they are much longer-lived, which gives them the appearance of learning more slowly, though in reality they just have a lot more leisure time.

[Solaris]

They spend seventy-five years as a teenager, doing what teenagers do. You either remember (or will discover, if still one of them) how useless teenagers are - especially in an advanced, stable culture. Perhaps their brains simply develop differently than a human's, and they really can't pick up advanced skills until the hundred year mark. They're not helpless children before that, but they're still not... skilled. Perhaps they simply don't need to develop that quickly, and so they don't.
A'course, there's nothing wrong with an elven prodigy or one who was raised outside of a safe environment and thus forced to develop faster (much like a human child in a certain environment will mentally mature faster than one in a safe, stable environment).

[Ravens_cry]

It's as much cultural as biological.
Before a certain age, elves are not allowed to learn certain skills and must put aside the 'children's skills' they learned earlier once they reach of age.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Me, I lower the starting age to just 50 (+ the RAW random factors).

That still leaves elves with over half a human life time - in which they've gained only their 1st level skills...

So to address this lag, I take a cue from nature: elven childhood is very long, to let them fully develop.

Some context: we humans have the longest childhood of all creatures, because we have to be born with under-developed brains, because our heads are too small to contain all that adult cognitive power. Kids spend years just learning to use their bodies, let alone learning skills.

Why do we need this long childhood? Why aren't we, like deer or horses, for example, born already able to walk?
We're born with the biggest head that can possibly fit through the birth canal, and it still takes us years to grow a full sized, fully operational brain.

So, back to elves: Elves have a slender body shape. The birth canal is narrower than in humans. An elf child is born much smaller and even more helpless than a human infant. Their development takes longer.
(I'm no paediatrician, so I won't guess at putting numbers on those developmental stages.)
Elves, of course, have a higher average intelligence - which takes longer to develop.

So that's why a 60 year old elf is just about as capable as a 16 year old human.

[Solaris]

So, back to elves: Elves have a slender body shape. The birth canal is narrower than in humans. An elf child is born much smaller and even more helpless than a human infant. Their development takes longer.

The elven body shape is still well within the possible parameters for a human. Admittedly, not a D&D human (going by the vital statistics, though there is some overlap), but certainly for a real-world human.

[Ravens_cry]

Again, culture and biology.The age at which a person physically matures , at least to the point of being capable of reproduction, is potentially markedly different than the age of majority.
It might take 'only' 20-40 years for an elf to reach physical development, but culturally, it takes quite a bit longer before one is considered an fully fledged member of society.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

The elven body shape is still well within the possible parameters for a human. Admittedly, not a D&D human (going by the vital statistics, though there is some overlap), but certainly for a real-world human.

Hmm. I don't see any mention of the birth canal diameter in the vital stats in my book. Have you been playing FATAL?

[prufock]

You're comparing elves (and other long-lived races) to humans, which I believe is a mistake. You could as easily ask why humans take 15 years to mature instead of one year. The physical and mental development of each race works differently, as I imagine it.

Elves, for example, perceive time as less meaningful because of their long lives, and simply take longer to develop physically. For one thing, maybe it takes them 10 years to grow beyond infancy. As elves progress, they may learn more slowly than humans, but it may also be that they don't have the urgency of humans. It's okay to spend a whole day admiring and considering a beautiful piece of art. It's fine to spend a year crafting a single weapon to make it perfect. They may have philosophical discussions that last for weeks, they might relax over a cup of elven iced tea for a whole day, they may chart the entire root and branch network of a tree as recreation, and so on.

To a human, this might seem to make elves slow learners, but the elves look at humans as missing out on the detail and deeper meaning. Humans with their hasty lives must, by necessity, ignore much of what the world has to offer in order to do anything meaningful in their short years. Elves are not so restricted.

So then, elves that become adventurers are the anomaly. They pick up causes that other elves see as fleeting; they have an un-elven sense of urgency.

[Mastikator]

I don't. Its stupid. Elves in my games have starting ages of 20 years, slightly longer then humans.

I also concur with this. Aging and growing up are two separate processes. Elves may grow up only slightly slower, but they age incredibly slowly.

[TechnoScrabble]

Simple:

They're afraid of the dwarves.

And why do the dwarves take so long to come of age?

They have to fight their way through a hell pit with nothing but their fists and a dead carp before they're considered adults.

[hamishspence]

If drow are physiologically similar to their elven cousins, Elaine Cunningham's Liriel Baenre stories might be informative. In the short story The Blooding it discusses drow aging- and the period between late childhood and early puberty is 15-25 years old.

It's during this period that Drow have to hunt and kill a dangerous creature alone as a rite of passage.

[Rallicus]

Elves lack all ambition and spend their first century learning speech, being potty trained,

The thought of a 30-40 year elf trying to learn how to use an outhouse frightens me.

But yeah, it doesn't really make sense with D&D mechanics.

[Cerlis]

A large part of this has, I think, been misinterpretation. At least as far back as I've been involved with D&D, if you look at some of the supplemental materials, elves don't spend a century being children. But since 'minimum age' always said 100+, many people for some reason imagined a hundred years of growing from a toddler through puberty.

The minimum age given for them has always indicated a cultural transition to adulthood, and not a physical one - much like we humans are generally physically mostly adult between 14-18, while most modern societies restrict full 'adulthood' from us until 18-21.

This is unequivocally cleared up in Races of the Wild, page 13, where there's a sidebar talking about elves and adulthood - physically they grow a little slower than humans, but not a great deal.

I do, however, think that with the way D&D's skill system is set up, it presents something of an odd situation in that they were probably doing something over those hundred plus years, and yet have no additional skill points to account for it. I've sometimes considered creating a houserule to give elves and other long-lived races a boatload of extra skill points that can only be spent in Craft and Profession skills, to reflect the many mundane things they learned during their youth.

I should also note that most elf characters I play, I simply start out in their 20's or 30's in order to avoid that very issue.

This is the base of it.

I find evidence (maybe not good one mind you as i barely remember it) but whenever i (rarely) went through encounter tables and premade adventures, low lvl human encounters involved lvl 1s- 3s, while with elven hunters and soldiers where always level 5 or 6. I dont think the original post takes into account that an elven propulation minimum level is probably higher than a human one.

If you went 60 years as a human commoner you might reach lvl 4 by the time you die. Adventuring classes are alot more stressful and involve more information. Yes it might take a bit longer for me to learn how to harness arcane magic, or be comfortable in almost every armor and wield so many weapons without killing myself, than to learn how to exist (which is basically all a commoner does)

[Aidan305]

I generally have it so that elves have a rather peculiar form of ADD. They've spent those years mastering dozens of professions, but once they reached what they consider to be the pinnacle, they put it aside, and never touch it again, moving on to try something new.

[Crasical]

Elves spend the first hundred years of their life qualifying for Breadth of Experience.

[Threeshades]

Young template (PFRPG) and 1 level in an NPC class which on maturity will be replaced with a PC class level. Commoner for becoming arcane and most divine casters, expert for skill-monkey classes, adept for clerics, warrior for fighty types.

[Rogue Shadows]

In my world...

- Elves are basically as mature at age 25 as a 15-year-old human.
- Between the ages of 25 and 100, an elf is expected to be raising a family. They are, themselves, supported by grandparents and great-grandparents. Elven parents basically don't have a job, or rather, their job is their kids, thus explaining their lack of other skills. Time spent not raising kids in these years is basically spent slacking off.
- However, 100 years is a long time, so elves in my world get a +2 racial bonus on all Knowledge checks.
- On reaching 100 and having raised a few kids, they're now considered full adults and can do whatever they want with their lives, including going out and dying in a dungeon somewhere if they really want.

Basically elves have a completely different societal structure from humans. With humans, it's "Childhood/Adolescence -> Adult, where you either have kids/get a job OR run off an adventure -> Middle age, where your kids are adults now but you still need a job of your own -> Old age, where you retire."

For elves, it's "Childhood/Adolescence -> Raise kids and slack off as a sort of extended adolesence -> Adult, where you get some other job(s) as the mood strikes you -> Middle/old age, where you look after elves who are between 25-100 years old who are looking after their kids."

Elves in my world can go off and adventure at earlier than age 100 if they like, but their racial bonus to Knowledge checks is reduced to +1 if they're between 51-100, and they lose it entirely if they're between 25-50. They also face a severe social stigma from other elves, as they're basically seen as children needlessly risking their lives and, more heinously, not raising younger elves.