How it works
This age spin the wheel gives a character an age in two spins. Press Spin the wheel: seven bands, from Child (5 to 12) to Ancient (100 and up), one chance in seven each. The button then reads Spin the exact age and draws one age from that band. It is for fiction, not for guessing a real person's age.
Read the full guide
Why this wheel of ages spins a band first
A flat draw from 5 to 99 covers 95 ages, and 35 of them are 65 or older. A random cast would be 37 percent elders and 7 percent teens. Bands fix the mix. Child, Teen, Young adult, Adult, Midlife and Elder each get 14 percent, and so does Ancient, for elves, vampires and robots.
From the band to one exact age
Say Teen lands. Press Spin the exact age and the wheel redraws with seven segments, 13 to 19, and stops on one: 16. Child holds 8 ages, Teen 7, Young adult 10, Adult 15, Midlife 20 and Elder 35. Ancient holds 13 round numbers from 100 to 5,000, because no story turns on the gap between 1,412 and 1,413. For the next character, choose Bands under Show only. Copy results hands back the band and the age.
- Writing a school story? Skip Bands, choose Child or Teen under Show only, and the wheel of age keeps to school years.
- An Ancient result sets the register: 150 reads as very old, 2,000 reads as myth.
- Friends cluster in age. After the first spin, keep the rest of the group within three years unless the gap is the story.
Questions and answers
Is every age equally likely?
Every band is: one chance in seven. Exact ages are not, because the bands differ in size. Teen holds 7 ages, so a given teen age comes up once in 49 two-spin draws. Elder holds 35, so a given elder age comes up once in 245. For a level draw, the number wheel takes any numbers you type, up to 100 lines, in equal shares.
Why does the wheel start at 5?
Most people who spin are designing someone who can walk, talk and make choices, and a character under five rarely drives a story. For a baby or a toddler, open My list, type 0 to 4, one per line, and press Spin only mine. Every line gets an equal share.
Can it pick ages for a whole cast?
Choose Bands, switch to Tally and spin once per character. The count under the wheel shows how many landed in each band. Use Elimination for seven characters in seven different bands, since a band leaves the wheel once it is drawn.