Talk:Demihuman Gestation Periods

Halfling Offspring Table

1-4: Twins!

5: Only Child

6: +1 Child and Reroll on Table 2

Table 2

1-3: +1 Child and stop rolling.

4-5: +1 Child and Roll Again.

6: +2 Children and Stop Rolling.

Math (note that above table doesn't consider miscarriage):

 0: 0.0
 1: 16.6666666666667
 2: 75.0
 3: 5.55555555555556
 4: 1.85185185185185
 5: 0.617283950617284
 6: 0.205761316872428
 7: 0.0685871056241426
 8: 0.022862368541381
 9: 0.00762078951379357
10: 0.00127013158563227
 n: (n - 1)/6 for n > 3

I want it to be noted that those gestation periods are pretty absurd. Elves and Dwarves aren't any larger than humans, and if cell division were actually that slow for those species, the individuals in them would never heal from a wound before they died from it. I mean, obviously magic can explain it all away, but if there's no good reason for it, why complicate? -Slitherrr

[1] -Slitherrr

Dwarves are dense and have more cells. Elves actually do heal slower because they have a lower constitution. Also, why are there not 11 million dwarves if they live to be 400 and pop out one per year like humans?

1) Dwarves would have to weigh correspondingly more. Like, four times as much as a human. Do infant Dwarves weigh 40-50 lbs? 2) Five times as slow? Two points of Con is more like, 4/5ths as slow. That is an enormous difference. And it does nothing to explain Dwarves, who heal 20% faster (on average). 3) Implantation/estrous/fertilization happen less often, social pressures keep populations in line, etc etc. Gestation periods, though, just don't correspond to lifespans. If they did, horses would live to be like 150 years old at the max and 100 years on average. -Slitherrr

I suppose attacking it from the length of fertility cycle is more productive. I'm keeping halflings the way they are, though. I MADE A CHART.

Halflings are fine. Maybe even awesome, but maybe that's because I'm drunk. -Slitherrr

I love you, Wilson, but any effort to relate this to the real world is bug fucking crazy. If we were going that route, clearly:

1. Dwarves are ~45% stone at a cellular, and inorganic stone cells can't reproduce via division
2. Most elf cells are homosexual, and thus they protest division caused by decidedly un-fairy heterosexual sex

For the record, I also protest any effort to explain demi-human population control using gestational periods. All this shit be crazy. Except the part where halflings are like dogs and have litter's of children... That's awesome --Msallen

I pretty much agree with all of the above, except for the bit that relating it to the real world is crazy. I mean, the numbers the article are basically from treating gestation as an extension of lifespan, and real life patently exposes that as ridiculous, and almost nothing is lost by REMOVING said assumption, so why bother? Make it 14 or 10 or 11 months instead, and explain it away with the rationalizations you've just put--but 40-46 months? Not needed, so whyyy? -Slitherrr

Wilson's right. Nothing is lost by changing the required bottleneck from gestation to fertility. And, in fact, much more is gained in terms of being able to flesh out cultures from the switch. I mean, say we tie the elven fertility cycle to the sun instead of the moon, and so, say, they're only fertile on the equinoxes or the summer solstice or whatever. Something that's relatively rare. It's going to, maybe, lead to a far more sexually libertine society than the humans have. Sex is no longer coupled with breeding, and so it matters less who you sleep with than who you choose to breed with. This also goes a long way towards explaining Al. We might also decide that, because of this, elves invent the first calendar (have we established who invented the calendar as a concept yet?). This invention of the first calendar necessitates a mastery of astronomy, which then allows Elves to become the first deep-water sailors. Which allows them to discover Sidhe-Praxen and later give rise to their dominance. I bet we could come up with similar connections for the other long-lived races. I think halflings are fine as they are.

Also: Yes, it is both intentional and awesome that halflings have quick gestation times (which fits with their small size) and breed in litters (Which is thematically appropriate). absalom 12:40, 27 November 2011 (EST)

Arbitrarily choosing new numbers based on discussion. Some correlation to size, but lots of things go into gestational period, too, so there's some randomization. I'm figuring Elves and Dwarves might still take longer to develop, for [insert explanation here], but there it is (note that even in the real world, the size correlation isn't straightforward--there's a scorpion on that table above that takes like five hundred days to gestate, although it is a major outlier). -Slitherrr