>>96430318
>This makes starting age feel almost like an afterthought
Always wanted to make a game that takes different ages for character creation into account, being able to play a young, adult and seasoned human with different distributions for stats and skills. Older characters have more skills and abilities, but worse attributes. Maybe younger characters can learn skills quicker, although they shouldn't be able to catch up to the older characters during the campaign. But they have room to grow whereas old characters barely do.
And balance be damned, make it even more extreme with long-lived races. If the GM allows it, the 500 years old elf may just dunk on whatever orcs, trolls and monsters he throws at the party.
Maybe this could work if we take some notes with WFRP, where humans have more of the metacurrencies, and can therefore cheat death more often. If the 500 years old elf happens to fuck up, he's really fucked. Or with such a long lifespan come trauma, past grievances, obligations, duties and feuds.
Although, it's hard to fit massive discrepancies between characters like this into a resolution mechanic without it breaking itself. Only really the d100 comes to mind, at which point I might as well just run WFRP