Character Age & Lifetime Experience


Homebrew and House Rules

Liberty's Edge

I've been doing a lot of research on character (NPC or PC) age and how they would progress through levels via general lifetime experience.

From all the reading I've done, there isn't much difference between a 16 year old human, elf, half-elf, dwarf or whatever. They grow and learn in a very similar fashion, the only difference is general outlook, not necessary maturity. The shorter lived races tend to start chafing to get out on their own sooner than longer lived races. There's no stopping a 25 year old elf, which has the same developmental cycle as a 25 year old human, from going out and making his mark on the world. He just doesn't have the desire to as he has so much still to learn about all the subtleties that elven life has to offer. In any event he's happy to live at home for the next 100 years as he in no rush to leave. To me this is the easiest why to handle general age between different races.

Now that being said: each race will experience the desire to leave the nest at different stages in their life, hence the starting age in the core rulebook. Which is just a general guideline and not written in stone :P

SO I've come up with a general Life Experience and Level progression for the core races, where the races will earn a set amount of XP over a year and progress through levels accordingly (this is based of other forum threads I've read and tweaked myself).

Some Notes
GMPC: Similar to a PC but played by the GM as a PC with similar advancement but still considered an NPC (4000 XP/Year).
Named NPC: An important NPC that the PCs interact with regularly (2000 XP/Year).
Unnamed NPC: You see that lady over there but you're not sure who she is or what she does but she kinda looks like ... (1000 XP/Year).
Cannon Fodder: Too the walls ... (500 XP/Year).

Here are the tables I did to help quickly see what a given level a particular race would be based: Character Advancement by Age

Let me know what you think.

Oh, I've used the Fast Level Progression table as a guideline so you can get a feel of what a given character can do. As you will see the only race to achieve 20th level is elf (no surprise there).


It's interesting, but generates much higher level NPCs than I would like in my games.

If around a third of real people are over 50, you'd be looking at a population of 100,000 8th level people in Absalom who can afford teleportation and kill a troll in personal combat? That seems way to high.

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