Breaking Down the Metatype Costs, Is there a formula? Options

[Fox1]

I recall a number of the source books having throw away comments like this from the Sprawl Survival Guide:

"That drinking age limit is an affront to orks and trolls. By the time I'm legal to drink and get in a club, I'll be middle-aged and halfway dead. Fraggin' moralists."

It's rather consistent IME, elves have longer life spans than humans. Orcs and Trolls have shorter ones.

However I don't imagine that it would in practical terms affect the typical campaign. It would have an impact on a group that started in 2050 and is now considering continuing the campaign into 2070.

[Adarael]

Busting out the old saw I always do when this topic comes up:

You will find that the Shadowrun books are remarkably inconsistent about telling you how long every race lives, at least in any concrete and factual way. They live as long as you, as GM, think they should.

Me, I think the seemingly usual player opinion who say Orks only live to be 35 to be patently ridiculous. Not just because of the fact that the same chart said Humans lived to be 55, on average, indicating that the numbers weren't 'you die of old age here'. Orks wouldn't be able to function in society worth anything, because if 35 was crotchety old man age, Orks would be getting sexually active between 6-10 years old.

[hyzmarca]

[hobgoblin]

thats the funny thing about avarages. have some that live to they are 60 or so and then a higher number that only live until they are 40 or so and suddenly the avarage is closer to the 40 then the 60 :P

so i say that one should take the avarage age to read the peak age. after that your body is going down hill even tho you may live until your touble that value.

allso, a lower avarage age seem to point towards a faster developing and more active race. combo that with a higher chance of getting twins or more and you have a race that can grow rapidly even tho they dont live long.

basicly the orcs are buildt for harder lifes then elfs and humans.

they kinda remind of of those insects that have exactly 24 hours to go from larva to insect and then mate. their biological clock is just faster.

so lets say that 1 human year equals 2 orc years. this means that a orc kid thats 6 years going by the human calendar, is in fact 12 years.

kinda like how you calculate the age of a dog in a way...

i must say that i have a bigger problem with elfs then i have with orc ages. the thing about elfs is that they seems to have this ability to never age past their prime. kinda like having a natural imunity to cancer or something.

the orcs on the other hand are just accelerated humans, with higher cellular division leading to a easyer time building up body tissues. problem is that this higher growth rate leads to them having less of a time to train their minds before their bodys hit the point of no return. but i would expect that a orc that have a teaching plan that takes into account all this should be able to match most humans.

basicly orcs live a life on fast forward compared to humans. yet they have to deal with a system of laws buildt for human speeds.