D&D 5E Character Age

[TheCosmicKid]

My issue with Age is not HP and level but with proficiency.

You can be a 200 year old elf and a 20 year old half-orc at level 1 fighter and they have the same amount of proficiency (unless the elf is high then in a whole one more).

There's only so much of the whole "elves under age 100 are treated as children" that can stretch here.

5E D&D really just isn't set up to model finer distinctions in skill level. It assumes that having a skill is more or less binary: you either know how to do something or you don't. It further assumes that the benefit of skill is comparatively modest against the vagaries of circumstance: only a few extra points on a d20 roll. Whatever difference there is between your half-orc and your elf is just a rounding error -- whatever marginal improvements the elf has made to the basic technique over the years are not significant to be worth modeling in such an abstracted system. Other games, of course, make different assumptions, but they come with tradeoffs of their own.

There's also the fact that elves officially mature at about the same rate as humans now. So there's nothing saying that centenarian elves are equivalent to twenty-somethings of other races any more. Maybe that's the problem solved right there.

 

[Minigiant]

That sounds like a failure to utilize the (I admit, expensive to the point of being a bit goofy) downtime training system - that 200 year old elf can certainly find far more time, since they have so much of it, to learn a few more languages, to play the guitar, and paint than said 20 year old half-orc that has a short enough life to seem, in comparison, scheduled down to the minute from birth to death.

As for the treating of elves under age 100 as children... I tend to like taking an approach I find a bit more believable: All the races progress through physical stages of life at basically the same rate so that by age 20, regardless of race, you are physically adult and mentally pretty close too - but the longer lived races are also proportionately more inclined to allow for the "young adults" to stay around home and not really get out there and "live properly."

Like how a couple decades ago living with your parents at age 30 meant that something had gone seriously wrong with the "plan", but more and more these days you see adults living with their parents and it is considered normal (or at least more so than it used to be) for various reasons - humans and shorter lived races equate to those parents that rushed their kids out of the house at age 18 (or earlier) so they could get jobs and pay their own bills, and elves and other long-lived races equate to those parents who don't care when their kids finally leave home "there's no rush, dear, you can do that whenever you are ready." and, just like real young adults being told they don't have to go be an adult for real, the young adult elves milk that chance to not be responsible for a century, give or take.

I go for the more mental route in my game.
Elves are just slow learners because they are too mentally flighty and perfectionist when given free time. Elves are quick to start over because of a single mistake and are easily distracted by other pursuits (which causes them to start over when they get back to it). Also elven parenting is very relaxed when the child isn't being groomed as a heir.

I don't recall what edition it was, but one of them stated something along the lines that elves are perfectionists, so they spend more time fussing over details and sweating the small stuff, but when they finally reach that +1 proficiency it's the best darn +1 proficiency anyone has ever seen! Still, it seems like a stretch.

I think someone said it earlier and I can't remember who but I liked their depiction of becoming an adventurer being something like a mid-life crisis.

I tend to give the old races a mental quirk to justify it.

Dwarven don't care about nondwarven stuff. They just don't care and are so traditionalist that they never bother to learn many skills outside their job. However every dwarf is good and dwarven stuff.

On the other hand, an elf's mind buzzes constantly with the lingering craziness of the fey mindset. This makes they seek perfection but lack the dedication to reach perfection without outside prodding. They don't consider elves under a century adults because that's usually how long it take for an elf to actually finish training for a lifepath mentally outside of a war forcing them to focus on something.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

For me, this is exactly why I appreciated that 4e started characters off with a few more HP (relative to the typical damage dealt--level 1 chars can still die, especially in grittier settings like Dark Sun, but it takes more than a lucky crit for even the frailest classes), and with some more baked-in competence, whether for fighting, exploring, or socializing. I find "green adventurer" play to be either constraining, harrowing, or both--and neither is cathartic. Yeah, yeah, "use your imagination! Do whatever you want!" people will tell me, I'm sure. No WotC-edition DM I've had actually lived up to the hype on that front...except in 4e. Might be that I've just gotten incredibly unlucky, dunno, but that's my experience. And my experience of pre-WotC edition DMs is that failing to "play the DM" gets you killed. Quickly. Not because the DMs are antagonistic--just because the consequences of failure are often dire.

 

[Azzy]

I dunno. Maybe you should just keep in mind that regardless of your backstory, a 1st-level character is going to have a limited amount of "experience" and cater towards that. If we take your example of a character that's been a soldier for 10 years, let's look at what they may actually entail. Unlike modern, volunteer (typically) and highly trained (usually) soldiers, your soldier likely started his career as a conscript in a peasant levy. As such, he was likely issued a easy to manufacture, and mass-produced shield and weapon of some sort (mace, sword, etc.). No armor (you can't afford that, and your noble's too cheap to outfit his conscripts—that gets really expensive), no training to speak of. Just you, your fellow commoners, crap equipment, and the basic knowledge of hit the enemy with the hurty bit of your weapon and use your shield to block the hurty bits of your enemy's weapon.

In this initial period of your career, you may not even see a battlefield. You probably get marched about to potential battlefields, meet up with allied nobles' armies to work together (theoretically) as a bigger army. If the army you're in does see battle, the battle may be won or lost before your levy sees any action. Or maybe your levy actually got sent out to "feel out" the enemy's strength and morale (you guys are expendable, after all—unlike those expensive, nicely outfitted men-at-arms and knights) in which you might have gotten wounded and was out for the rest of the battle. After the war, you may have been given the option to be retained as a man-at-arms because of your ability to follow orders, general competence, and the fact that you survived a winning battle (possibly with talk that you killed an enemy sergeant or heroically shielded a fellow soldier). From there, you may not have seen any action or maybe limited skirmishes, maybe a lot of garrison duty where the majority of any fighting you did was firing bows or crossbows down on would-be besiegers and maybe ordering boiling oil or flaming pitch dumped on the enemies below. But, hey, you have better arms and armor, now. And because of your competence and general charisma, you advance in rank to sergeant-at-arms, and maybe to a lieutenant where you've earned the respect of your fellow soldiers (especially as you rose from being a lowly conscript).

So, it's quite possible for a 30-year old veteran soldier to have less actual fighting experience than a fresh-faced farmer who's had to help defend his village on a regular basis from marauders over the last year and a half. What's more, your soldier is probably trained and experienced in fighting in formation using battlefield tactics and from atop fortifications rather than in the swirling melee that adventurers typically find themselves in—that being a mostly foreign experience.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

For me, this is exactly why I appreciated that 4e started characters off with a few more HP (relative to the typical damage dealt--level 1 chars can still die, especially in grittier settings like Dark Sun, but it takes more than a lucky crit for even the frailest classes), and with some more baked-in competence, whether for fighting, exploring, or socializing. I find "green adventurer" play to be either constraining, harrowing, or both--and neither is cathartic. Yeah, yeah, "use your imagination! Do whatever you want!" people will tell me, I'm sure. No WotC-edition DM I've had actually lived up to the hype on that front...except in 4e. Might be that I've just gotten incredibly unlucky, dunno, but that's my experience. And my experience of pre-WotC edition DMs is that failing to "play the DM" gets you killed. Quickly. Not because the DMs are antagonistic--just because the consequences of failure are often dire.

Rule of thumb: 1st level in 4E = 3rd level in other editions.

The way 5E is written, 3rd level is pretty obviously intended to be viable starting point, if that's what the group prefers. But a lot of DMs I know started parties at 3rd even in 3E.

 

[Minigiant]

Rule of thumb: 1st level in 4E = 3rd level in other editions.

The way 5E is written, 3rd level is pretty obviously intended to be viable starting point, if that's what the group prefers. But a lot of DMs I know started parties at 3rd even in 3E.

According the 5e PHB the tiers are:

1st-4th- Apprentice Adventurers
5th-10th- Experienced Adventurers (Heroic tier)
11th-16th- Step above Normal Adventurers (Paragon Tier)
17th-20th- Adventurers at the Pinnacle of their Classs (Epic Tier)

Basically, you're green until you hit 5th level or Challenge Rating 2.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

For me, this is exactly why I appreciated that 4e started characters off with a few more HP (relative to the typical damage dealt--level 1 chars can still die, especially in grittier settings like Dark Sun, but it takes more than a lucky crit for even the frailest classes), and with some more baked-in competence, whether for fighting, exploring, or socializing. I find "green adventurer" play to be either constraining, harrowing, or both--and neither is cathartic. Yeah, yeah, "use your imagination! Do whatever you want!" people will tell me, I'm sure. No WotC-edition DM I've had actually lived up to the hype on that front...except in 4e. Might be that I've just gotten incredibly unlucky, dunno, but that's my experience. And my experience of pre-WotC edition DMs is that failing to "play the DM" gets you killed. Quickly. Not because the DMs are antagonistic--just because the consequences of failure are often dire.

There is a thing I do which might just work for you too:

Any time I am starting a campaign that isn't specifically about "green" newbies to the adventuring world, but about established adventurers known to be competent (the thing that 4e established 1st level characters to be, but other editions don't), I start the characters at 4th level.

I picked 4th over 3rd for a couple of reasons. Primarily that it is the final level of the "apprentice" tier of the game, so it feels like a good narrative point to start - the apprentinceship is over, and it's time to prove you've got the chops to make it as an adventurer - and because that is the level at which characters not only have all of their class-generated defining features chosen, but also an option to pick up any character-defining feat they might want, so that the players is playing their concept from the start of the game rather than coming into it sometime later.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Big fat huge flaw with the "start characters at a higher level" suggestions:
I'm a player. Starting level isn't something I even get a minor say in, unless the DM is being unusually relaxed about how the campaign starts. Every DM I've ever had, for any system whatever, has simply declared a starting level and nobody even considered asking for anything different. Except me, at the start of my current 5e game, but the DM said no (partly because we have total TTRPG newbies in the group, but mostly because he doesn't think you SHOULD start above level 1).

In fact, for all the *talk* about starting at higher level in 5e as an option, I very rarely...as in never, to my knowledge...hear about groups that actually DO it.

 

[Mouseferatu]

In fact, for all the *talk* about starting at higher level in 5e as an option, I very rarely...as in never, to my knowledge...hear about groups that actually DO it.

We started our current 5E campaign at 3rd. FWIW.

(Back during 3E, my groups started close to 3/4ths of our campaigns at 3rd rather than 1st. I can't say that average will carry over exactly to 5E as the game goes on, but I have every reason to expect it'll stay at least 50/50.)

 

[Sunseeker]

In fact, for all the *talk* about starting at higher level in 5e as an option, I very rarely...as in never, to my knowledge...hear about groups that actually DO it.

I regularly start my players at 3rd to 5th level. For two reasons:
1: My group is fairly skilled, starting at level 1 isn't useful for gamist reasons, it's fine for story though.
2: Because my regular players are so skilled, they tend to blow through "starter content" fairly quickly. They're smart, clever and good players.