Shattered Kingdoms

While I'm sure there are books you can discover this information in ICly, I haven't found them. Asking other characters leads to several, several different answers.

So to make a long question simple... what happens in the first 101 years of an elf or deep-elf's life? Do they age slowly or are they simply long-lived?

Way back in the day I did some math of the equivalency of years playable versus age of starting characters amongst the races. I wound up with two theories: either one human year is equivalent to multiple elf years beyond the ratio of their venerable ages, meaning all developmental landmarks are suitably delayed, or the extra slack years represent time spent growing mentally: being cultured, indoctrinated, and such.

The former is troubling since every race is equally potentially productive in a week of play-time. The latter makes sense since elves, which have some of the largest numbers in this area, have some of the most roleplay strings attached.

Drow, of course, are the exact same.

I miss Drow...

What happens for the first 20 years of a human's life? We are one of the species that takes the longest to mature, and get out on our own.

What happens during the first 101 years of an elf's life? That's that elf's backstory, whatever happened, happened. They spent time growing, maturing, educating, whatever.

I would just imagine like it's socially accepted for children to live with their parent's till the age of 18 (and sometimes beyond) it's the same with elves. It's just how their society works.

I think the extra 80 or so years are spent maturing intellectually, learning, etc.

Meaning that I don't think that a 50 year-old elf would look like an 8 year-old human with pointy ears.

I think that was your question.

This is probably something that should either be asserted by an IMM or agreed upon by the pbase.

I actually believe this to be the correct answer.

A 101 year old elf looks like a 16 year old human, and a 275 year old elf looks like a 90 year old human, with pointy ears of course.

All the lower number means is they are fully developed. Once they are fully developed, their "potential productivity" is equal. At least, that's how I see it.

Here's the riddle, though:

An elf is playable for 174 years... that's an elven 'lifetime.'
Humans, 74.

That's about 235% more time out of an elf.

But 16 * 235% yields only about 38.

For elves to basically Double Your Pleasure Plus a Little Extra, they'd theoretically need to be Young at 38 and Venerable at 212. This is not the case. There is a discrepancy. The elven maturation rate either does not follow humans or, if it does, there are additional years spent being indoctrinated in elven culture. Just as a human could theoretically have children and do all 'adult' tasks around, I don't know, 13, so too do elves seem to have suffered from the delayed maturation of societal norms.

tl;dr: elves have major adultescence issues

The numbers are even more pronounced with other races, if I recall.

Personally, I like the third explanation: the age system was added after the MUD was initially developed, so the numbers were arbitrary.