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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bmcdaniel" data-source="post: 832679" data-attributes="member: 1772">Some of the posters here have already said this in slightly different terms, but the answer is really quite simple.Long-lived elf adventurers are not generally higher-level than human adventures because VERY VERY FEW adventurers die of old age. For both elves and humans there is an almost perfect correlation between their death rate and their rate of xp advancement, because xp are earned for taking possibly fatal risks. It is as simple as that. Almost by definition, for adventurers, ie those that take risks, the risk of dying in an adventure vastly swamps the risk of dying of old age*. As long as humans and elves gain go adventuring at the same rate, they will advance at the same rate and die at the same rate. Thus, for the population as a whole, the proportion of the population of any given level will be about the same. The only difference will be that (small) subset of the population that goes adventuring but retires before death.Of course, I also believe that elves, having much longer lives and therefore much more to lose, are less likely to go adventuring in the first place (i.e. elves are more risk averse). Whereas humans may go adventuring every year, elves are more likely to go every third year, thus slowing down their rate of death, but also their rate of advancement.  This effect also tends to bring the populations into conformity.-----------Footnotes Below------------------------------------------* Consider, the PHB says average human maximum age (ie the age an average human will die by old age) is 90 years. Even among the non-adventuring population, few humans would actually reach this age; death will occur by accident, random violence, war or diasease. Of course it depends on the campaign, but I would guess that less than 5% of the non-adventuring human population actually reaches this age (and dies of old age). Adventurers must die at vastly greater rates, I'd guess that about .1% die of old age.  This also has interesting implications for elves and shows why they are so much more risk averse. If (non-adventuring) elves take the same risks and die at the same rates as (non-adventuring) humans, then only 0.0000015625% would actually die of old age at 550. My guess is that elves are risk-averse, compared to humans, at about the same ratio of their lifespans (1:6).</blockquote>

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