NPC Aging, levels, and populations

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So let's say in a population with a mix of levels presumably age is the dominate reason for gaining levels as the longer you live the higher chance you have to gain experience; therefore, the higher level you would be expected to be. Outside of extraordinary characters (like PCs) this seems to be a reasonable expectation that most of your highest level characters are also the oldest unless there exists some sort of system where you loose levels with age once you hit say venerable age which doesn't exist in the standard 3.5 universe to my knowledge. Since the rules only talk about starting age it is a reasonable expectation that once you hit adult age exp gained/year should be similar across all races since there is nothing in the rules saying otherwise. IE nowhere in the rules do you have an exp penalty for being an elf compared to being a human because you live longer. As such we can quantify average exp gained per year for a population based on level and age of said population.

By this logic we would also expect the populations with the highest ratio of adult to maximum age to also have the highest average level. So you would expect (ignoring splat book races) elves to have the highest average level, followed by gnomes with dwarves slightly lower then a huge jump down to halflings, half-elves, humans, and half-orcs. As such you would expect Elves, gnomes, and dwarves to be the most powerful and dominate races. Often in many settings there is the trope that elves while long lived don't reproduce often; while this would mean they have smaller population in general this would also suggest that more resources would be focused on elf offspring which should help ensure lower mortality rates are lower and the general population chooses more powerful classes. So you would expect more 'PC' classes in elf populations which would also increase power level of elf populations, or any other longer lived race with low reproduction rates.

There is also the trope of kobolds (ignoring dragonwrought), goblins, and orcs having high birth rates and age much quicker than other races though outside of kobold general goblins and orcs aren't given any aging stats, so you would expect these three races to have large populations with relatively low average levels. Races like kobolds, goblins, and orcs, heck even humans thematically are cast as being more combative than many of the other races and given the exp system in 3.5, there is an expectation that they gain exp faster since they are more likely to engage in combat. Even so lets say an orc reaches maturity at 10 and max age sits around 40, that is only ~30 years where an orc is gaining levels compared to 640 years for an elf. For Orc populations to have similar average level we would expect them to gain over 20 times more experience per year compared to elves but you would also similarly expect mortality rates to be at least 20 times higher. Even worse lower level characters are more likely to die so shorter lived races that are more combative would have much higher mortality rates and should have lower average levels since they are so much more likely to die at lower levels. This would be compounded with races that have high birth rates since there would be less resources to go around comparatively. So once again this highlights that long lived races should be more powerful.

So then why in many settings are humans which are one of the shortest lived races normally portrayed as the most dominate and powerful? It seems rather clear that given the natural course of things they should be a rather minor race.

[Tiktakkat]

Assuming all those things were true and held up, then yes, that would be the situation.

For a number of reasons, those assumptions are not as absolute as you are assuming they are, do not hold up upon examination of strict RAW and background material, and ultimately are fatally flawed as functional demographic models, being intended only for generic "quick and dirty" random generation.

If you wish to have a non-human gerontocracy and demographic distribution you can certainly do so. You do not need any appeals to extrapolations from RAW to justify it, and would likely be better off not using such as it allows critique on the same basis.

[Duke of Urrel]

The natural age limit of a species is not the only factor that determines how many characters of this species advance to very high levels of experience. Another very important factor is the survival rate. Just because elves have longer life spans than humans doesn't mean that most elves spend hundreds of years adventuring and gaining experience – or even choose to be adventurers in the first place. That's a good way to die a lot younger than you intended.

Of course, PCs, who have all chosen to live dangerously, rarely encounter enemies who are powerful enough to kill them all, but this is because dungeon masters carefully contrive hostile encounters so that they are mostly easy to moderately challenging and rarely deadly for PCs.

NPCs, on the other hand, are not so lucky. No dungeon master cares much about the survival rate of NPCs who go poking their noses where they don't belong. Consequently, NPCs don't expect encounters with hostile enemies to end well for them, and for this reason, most of them avoid the adventuring life. And this is the natural, in-game reason why most NPCs who advance to a very high level do so as commoners or experts, regardless of the longevity of their species.

Still, it is reasonable to speculate that a disproportionate number of high-level characters may belong to longer-lived species than humans. At the very least, I imagine that elves, dwarves, gnomes, and even halflings create a disproportionate amount of the magical treasure that humans later acquire by adventuring. It's reasonable to assume that aging spellcasters of high character level are major suppliers of magic items to all the magic-item merchants in the world. They consider themselves too old to go dungeon-diving themselves, but they make a good living selling their wares to rich young adventurers who still do.

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The natural age limit of a species is not the only factor that determines how many characters of this species advance to very high levels of experience. Another very important factor is the survival rate. Just because elves have longer life spans than humans doesn't mean that most elves spend hundreds of years adventuring and gaining experience – or even choose to be adventurers in the first place. That's a good way to die a lot younger than you intended.

Of course, PCs, who have all chosen to live dangerously, rarely encounter enemies who are powerful enough to kill them all, but this is because dungeon masters carefully contrive hostile encounters so that they are mostly easy to moderately challenging and rarely deadly for PCs.

NPCs, on the other hand, are not so lucky. No dungeon master cares much about the survival rate of NPCs who go poking their noses where they don't belong. Consequently, NPCs don't expect encounters with hostile enemies to end well for them, and for this reason, most of them avoid the adventuring life. And this is the natural, in-game reason why most NPCs who advance to a very high level do so as commoners or experts, regardless of the longevity of their species.

I wasn't claiming the npcs were gaining exp solely through violent encounters, in fact I brought up the point about 'violent' races just to highlight the fact that doing so leads to high attrition rates and should most likely lead to low average level of a population, granted you would most likely have a few that are very high level.

There are two things I am drawing on with my idea behind giving NPCs exp/year. The first is all settings have NPCs above level 1; therefore, NPCs gain levels even though we generally wave are hands and ignore that. Two it is RAW to potentially get exp from non-combat related challenges though exact amounts and what not is kept vague (and keeping it vague works fine in this case). Therefore, we can expect that NPCs gain exp through noncombat related challenges periodically, and we don't care why just the fact that they do gain exp this way. Even if the exp worthy challenges are sporadic in nature and may not even happen once a year, they still can be represented as exp/year rather than trying to get down into the dirt of exactly how much per year is correct.

So given the fact that we can represent npc growth as exp/year, I believe it is to be expected that a longer lived race populations would have higher average level if all else is equal. I also believe if we look from a country to country, race to race basis, average exp/year and mortality rate should be relatively equal if the populations we are comparing are similarly violent. Granted this is also ignoring things like disease vulnerability and as I briefly went over resource focus depending on birth rate. But end of the day if we compare two similar countries one is human one is elf I would expect the average level of the elf country to be higher than the human country.