HardLife - new leveling system in the works

I'm planning to work on the leveling system, specifically I want to move levels from a byproduct of base-stats into their own variable with modifiers, and an internal system of growth (similar to XP, but not XP)

Raising base-stats will still increase level, but there will be other ways as well.

This also allows me to put a proper growth and aging cycle (dependent on racial traits), that can simulate both through level-modifiers on developmental and entropic curves.

(anyone else getting a little tired of all the 80 year olds with stats of 18 year olds? It'd be one thing if they worked for it, but right now there's no entropy in the creature-generation off the racial table, and what we had for NPC generation age-stats was a crude hack that barely worked with humans, and would be totally incompatible with other races)

All this brings us one step closer to merging the HardLife engine with the PSL rule-system it is primarily based upon.

I'm also planning on adding things to the game that specifically award levels, not experience. And my view from table-top was if for whatever reason your GM awarded a level, it was a level-modifier not x amt of XP... if it were the latter, and you applied it early, let's say at level 1, then it would only be worth 300 XP and your cost to gaining a level would go up... whereas if you saved it it could be worth 30,000 XP, not to mention could break the level 20 cap if used at the end. (not that our campaigns EVER made it to level 20 before the DM and at least some of the Players wanted to start a new game, or switch characters, or we lost old players and had to make new characters for balance.... the highest I got through experience was usually ~14 before this would happen.)