A question of the ages...

Tonight I have been reworking my character information, I have done this several times now, and I am hoping that this will be the finali-sh draft. I have needed to do this for a long time. As a character grows and evolves, so does their information/character sheet.

^{Though I seem to have noticed I have done this more than anyone else. *cough* Not that I am self conscious about it, or anything *cough*}

But now that I am here again, I am reminded how you can get hung up on something as simple as an age, particularly with playing fantasy people and creatures.  There really is no book or science that has been able to put a set aging process of life span on any creatures. You can look at the animal half of models, which tend to age and go through life cycles much, much quicker than their human counterpart and try and balance them, and then you have to kind of find a space within the glamor of being fantasy creatures which are generally accepted to live longer, due to their fantastical-ness.

Ages, years and life cycles get spread all over the map, once you get us all together... you can be 6, or 106 and still be an elven or a fae child.  You can be 4, or forty, and still be a child faun. Then again,  I have seen adult elves at 80, and adult fauns at forty.  Even if it would be fair to force everyone to adhere to the same age scale for the species they are, it would be pretty hard to do!

So I sat here with this dilemma, trying to fill in that age space with something less ambiguous than what I had before, and less specific than a number, when it occurred to me, the most rational way of describing my character's age, was to do so by seasons.  Because as the revered Cherno once said to me,  years, calendars, time in the form of numbers probably are not things that nature creatures are terribly concerned with.  But being nature creatures would make them very in tune with the cycles of seasons.

And, it is a pretty easy scale to work out on your own, I know I am not the first to use this sort of scale, or define my own but I am going to do it anyway.

You can summarize most mammals in the various life stages, and even other animals in similar life stages.

Spring:
Infancy - toddlerhood  = Early
childhood = Spring
Adolescence = Late

Summer:
Young adulthood, = Early Summer
Adulthood  = Summer
Early Middle Age = Late Summer (tick tock, my harvest clock is ticking!)

Autumn:
Middle age = Early (my harvest clock is running out!)
Old age = Late

Winter:
Venerable old age.
Verging on death/rebirth (if you're into that sort of thing!)

Using these values, I, personally, am better able to describe the life phase of my character, without depending on years, or even using terms such as "The equivlant of a 35 year old in human years."  I think my previous, confusing answer was "Early middle age,"  which I define as being around 35 human years... but others define differently, and it doesn't really *explain* anything to anyone.

But, if I said "Corinda is in her late summer" or Corinda said "I am in my early fall," people would kind of get the point, with a lot of explanation, don't you think? If she said "In my late spring, I ran away from home." People would pretty well get the idea of a person in their late teens, about to grow up very quickly.

It's simple, and I would like to share this as an idea for people to use when defining their characters age, as an alternative, or even a way for people with numeric ages to relate to other characters that just don't have that frame of reference.  But I also tend to over complicate things which should be simple, and it has been my experience that the more information you give a lot of players to help them, the more confused they become. So I want to tread softly

But I think it is a worthwhile thought, and worth some exploring... and I am talking about it, here, now, because I am supposed to be finishing my character application/sheet/information.

But it also holds some potential for the way Fantastypeoplebeingtypes could celebrate certain rites of passage, instead of a birthday every year, someone could celebrate their own "equinox" or solstice.

Yup. Still workin on that damn notecard. No closer to it than I was when I started this.