Dragonlance Dragonlance age categories

[Herzog]

I am trying to create the Tanis Half-Elven character for a 3.5 Dragonlance campaign, but are running into a little problem.

According to the official Dragonlance sources, Tanis Half-Elven is over 100 years old, but looks to be about 21 due to his elven heritage.
Also, his Strength is 16.

According to the player handbook, a Half Elf of 100 years old has a -3 penalty to his physical stats, which would make his starting strength 19. (unless he took an ability increase at 4th level, in which case hist starting strength would be 18)

This would suggest either incredible starting stats (given his other physical stats would have to be Dex 18 and Con 15) or the Dragonlance race(s) use different age categories for the standard races.

I've looked online, but cannot for the life of me find any reference to an offical Aging Effects table for dragonlance races.

Does anyone know where I could find such a table? Or is Tanis Half-Elven really 'Old' during the official campaign?

Edit: Ok, found ONE reference myself, in Races of Ansalon:
Half-elves (including phaethons) mature at 20
years and use the half-elf age effects chart from the Player’s
Handbook with +20 years added to each listed age for Middle
Age, Old and Venerable.

That would make Tanis Middle Aged, not Old.
If anyone has anything to add to this I welcome additional sources and references, but for now I think I'm good.

 

[Jester David]

This might be the result of two things.
1) It might be the result of half-elf age categories changing between 1st Edition and 3rd Edition
2) The novel and story writers who set his birthday didn't consult the rules prior.

You could ask on the Dragonlance forums
(http://www.dragonlanceforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?6-Gaming)
But there's quite a bit of oddity with Tanis' age and birth year that really suggest he should not be ageing as fast as the rules say he should.

 

[Jackinthegreen]

As a unique character it's possible that the writers simply said they wanted him to be X years old. For uncommon but perhaps not legendary unique characters that would be player characters, the age categories are in place since that's representative of the vast majority of the race, and those age categories might not line up with Tanis.

And do keep in mind the actual D&D rules don't always easily carry over into books or real life. There are people with strength scores of 23 or so based on carry capacity, and if they worked by D&D rules to get it naturally they'd have to either be 20th level or have a special class that granted a strength boost (such as War Hulk.) If it wasn't for Natural Heavyweight being a planar heritage feat I'd say that's what those weightlifters had, but it can always be refluffed.

 

[Morrus]

It's almost 10000000% the case that they simply didn't think about age ability modifiers at the time. So you're kinda stuck between either simply ignoring g the problem, or plumping for an unlikely scenario (such as the very high starting stats you suggested). I don't think you're going to get an elegant answer, though!

 

[jedipilot24]

Edit--sorry, didn't catch your edit.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

It's a result of changes between editions. Remember dragonlance was written back in 1e days. And depending on the setting elves lived from a few hundred years up to 10x the lifespan of a human (some subraces from FR got to 15-20x human lifespan).

As such you can't build them precisely under the new rules. But if it's important to you it's easy enough to pick up a 1e rulebook and make a simple change to the age category table. If I remember right dragonlance was on the low end for 1e elf lifespans. There were some very old elves that actually remembered the Cataclysm but they normally only lived 3-4 times a human lifespan.