Elves, Humans, and The Little Rascals

Fauchard1520 · Apr 19, 2018

I've got a longer post on the subject over here, but here's my question:

In cosmopolitan settings, you've got long-lived races like elves and dwarves living side-by-side with humans. It’s awfully difficult to picture these kids growing up together. I mean, what would The Little Rascals look like in a fantasy world? Are dwarves members for a dozen years before they grow out of it? Do elven children become depressed and withdrawn when their human friends get too grown up for hide-and-go-seek? Have you guys ever tried to address this kind of thing within your worldbuilding?

Blue · Apr 19, 2018

This is addressed under the races in the PHB - all of the races explicitly mature at the same rate. Read the Age section for each race. So none of them are children for longer.

Slit518 · Apr 19, 2018

Fauchard1520 said:
I've got a longer post on the subject over here, but here's my question:

In cosmopolitan settings, you've got long-lived races like elves and dwarves living side-by-side with humans. It’s awfully difficult to picture these kids growing up together. I mean, what would The Little Rascals look like in a fantasy world? Are dwarves members for a dozen years before they grow out of it? Do elven children become depressed and withdrawn when their human friends get too grown up for hide-and-go-seek? Have you guys ever tried to address this kind of thing within your worldbuilding?

The way I see it, in most cases, the fantasy races age to adulthood at the same rate as the human races, but live adult lives in a much longer span than humans.

So they may all be children and teenagers together, but once they become adults, dwarves and elves will quickly see lifelong friends of theirs dying of old age, which they still have quite a ways to go.

Fauchard1520 · Apr 19, 2018

Blue said:
This is addressed under the races in the PHB - all of the races explicitly mature at the same rate. Read the Age section for each race. So none of them are children for longer.

Pretty sure the half-orcs are shaving by the time they're 9.

Tony Vargas · Apr 19, 2018

Fauchard1520 said:
In cosmopolitan settings, you've got long-lived races like elves and dwarves living side-by-side with humans. It’s awfully difficult to picture these kids growing up together. I mean, what would The Little Rascals look like in a fantasy world?

In an old-school set-up where the age of adulthood is radically different for each race, gangs of similar-age-equivalent kids like that would have the faster-growing races drop out after a year or two, while the core of slower-maturing ones remains stable. In extreme cases, the kids of a Big Rascal could re-join the gang, and hear about what dad was like when he was their age from his 'old friends.'

Have you guys ever tried to address this kind of thing within your worldbuilding?

The one time I did was 3.0, the idea was the PCs were all born under a specific celestial conjunction - on the same day, 40 years before the campaign started. So human characters were already 'mature' with some NPC class levels under their belts, while the dwarf a 1st-level adolescent, and the elf was still a kid and the player was running his NPC guardian.

Starting in 4e, all the PC races matured at about the same rate, and different classes didn't call for different starting ages, so a party could all be childhood friends, for instance, and no issues with a fantasy-racially-mixed band of Little Rascals.

5e kept that, but the DM could always change it back.

AmerginLiath · Apr 20, 2018

Blue said:
This is addressed under the races in the PHB - all of the races explicitly mature at the same rate. Read the Age section for each race. So none of them are children for longer.

Elves stay in grad school for eighty years while dwarves crash on their parents’ couches for fifty. Humans meanwhile go out and get a job at eighteen.

steeldragons · Apr 20, 2018

It could provide a good/nice story reason for the human perception of elves as these "little/child-like or trouble-making/capricious people"...they're friends when they're kids. The humans grown up and [may or may not] still be friends, but the elves are -actually- still children...though they are really 50 or 70 years old (older than the now grown human friends, they do actually know more/are better at things than their human friends).

Rumplstilskin as evil magical mastermind? He was really just an elfin tween.