Thursday, September 24, 2015

PC Age

In your games, how relevant is PC age?

Is it just color, so you have a handle on how the PC looks and his or her background or experience?

Is it game-mechanically enforced, like in games like 1st-3rd edition GURPS, AD&D, Wizardry, or Traveller?

Is it something you totally ignore as irrelevant to play?

Is aging something that gets inflicted on PCs as an attack, a consequence of decisions to travel long distances, or otherwise modified in play?



I'm curious. My DF game doesn't pay any attention to it (people write it down, I look, the PCs die in a few short years anyway). It doesn't get inflicted on anyone or affect anyone in a negative way. I've had it matter before (mostly with players running too-young PCs who got treated as inferior to adults). I have a cool adventure that depends heavily on temporary aging (well, temporary if you win). But generally, it's not a big deal.

How about in your games?

13 comments:

  1. "My DF game doesn't pay any attention to it (people write it down, I look, the PCs die in a few short years anyway)." Awesome, I laughed right out loud when I read that. =)

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    1. Bjorn lived to the ripe old age of 8 sessions!


      Honestly, mayflies must look at delvers and think, "Those poor bastards."

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  2. In the campaigns I've run, they have not lasted long enough to have any serious effect. I think you'd have to have a campaign that took several LONG in-game breaks (like six months or a year at a time) before it kicks in.

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  3. Normally, not so much. I had one Elf character where I really tried to think through how to play such a long-lived race. Why is he the same pts as other starting PCs when he's 200 years old? Why are his skills so low? Ended up adding a lot to the world trying to answer those questions.

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    1. Rolemaster had immortal elves, and squared the circle of their skills and level increases being matched to humans by giving them a terrible Self-Discipline stat penalty. The idea is that if you have forever, you have no drive to do things now. They could pick one "burning interest" that would ignore the penalty - hence a great elven swordsman or wizard or sage in one subject was likely, but few had great skills in general.

      So it was very hard for elves to do more than keep up with humans, who would get a lot of stuff done and then die in 100 years, while the elves could put things off for 100 years and then get to it then . . . if they still feel like doing it.

      I always liked that approach.

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    2. That's always how I run my Elves as a Player (and as a GM) lazy as all get out, often times dilettantes, rarely sticking to doing any one thing, and generally with fairly poor memories... The few who have drive, ambition, and focus are scary NPCs.

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  4. I'm going to be running a D&D style game soon (either with Adventurer, Conqueror, King System or GURPS depending on how much my players object to GURPS) and age should become important. I intend on the game developing into having something to do with domain management as they advance so there will likely be instances of the players wanting to skip time to get their castle finished or a wizard's research project finished.

    I'll also probably use the convention of some monsters ageing someone as an attack. Though I don't know that any undead will do it, that'll probably be reserved for non-euclidian, many-angled horrors from beyond the ken of mortals.

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    1. Do you think it might create an incentive not to skip time? Since you can't get the years back, it's better to adventure during them. Or is the pull for domain advancement going to be so strong that failing to skip time means they're missing out?

      Hmm. Not sure that is clear. I mean, will "skip ahead" mean "less adventuring" or will "less skipping" mean "miss the good stuff"?

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  5. In the groups I played most characters would be either the age of their players, about 5-10 years older than their players, or a big multiplier of the ages of their players based on character race. Sometimes elf or Original Race Do Not Elf characters would have large, arbitrary numbers attached to their ages.

    And in the one GURPS game I played, I was 19 or 20 at the time but my PC was a 13-year-old wizard with Magery 3, IQ 11, and about 30 distinct spells (Minor Healing with 4 points, Fireball with 2, Recover Energy with 8 or 12, and all others at 1 point apiece). It was not relevant in gameplay or even particularly notable for character reactions; my Magery 3 was more important than my age in establishing how very talented an up-and-coming wizard I was growing into.

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  6. The only game I've ever played where age mattered much was Traveller. Because older characters had more skills and money, but had to start making aging rolls at 34.

    The other game where it mattered a bit, if you read the fine print, was AD&D1. I remember that teenagers got +1 Constitution and -1 Wisdom, then at 21 you got +1 Wisdom (canceling the earlier -1) and +1 Strength. In practice, this meant that everyone wanted to be at least 21, so they could have +1 Con and +1 Strength. Human fighters started as teenagers, so finding a way to get yourself magically aged to 21 was an important quest. (The 3rd-level wizard spell Haste aged its recipient one year...)

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    1. Those fell firmly under the category of "rules we knew about but didn't use." People would get appropriate ages from the DMG, especially elves and dwarves, and then . . . nothing. No stat changes, nada.

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  7. It can matter, especially if magical aging effects come into play. Or de-aging effects. A sip from the Fountain of Youth magically reverses 4d6 years for you; if the result is greater than your age, you cease to exist.

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  8. In the past, I was never much bothered with issues of age and aging. Although it did always kind of bug me that one would start a D&D campaign with a bunch of young adults at level 1 and within a few months of game play everyone would be mid- to high-level badasses. It seemed like that sort of advancement in power should've taken longer.

    Nowadays, both of my current campaigns make much use of age. Running Pendragon over the past few years has made me much more aware of the subtle pleasures of stretching a campaign out over years and decades.

    So I've got my Great Pendragon Campaign running, with its aging rolls and multi-generational play. And I just started up a Gloranthan Runequest campaign with all the characters starting out as young adolescents. I'm going to advance the campaign by "seasons" in between adventures, so that hopefully we'll get to see the kids grow up to manhood and then begin to age.

    Having said that, I *am* looking forward to running Horror on the Orient Express next year, with its arc confined to a month or two of game time and not-great expectations of PC survival even then...

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