Age

[tashiro]

Age. Not something talked about much in roleplaying games, and dealt with even less. In D&D, you have age categories, and you suffer some minor attribute slide from it, but I think only Ars Magica really addressed the idea that over time you were going to get worse, not betterThe thing is, aging makes sense. A person only progresses so far, then

Comments

[marinredwolf]

One big thing is: For most RPG campaigns, aging is a non-issue simply due to the timeframe involved. Unless there's a deliberate time lapse involved, characters are likely to see a few months or maybe a couple years of action. Sure, there are exceptions, but for 99% of the campaigns I have been in or been aware of, this was true.

[tashiro]

There are generational campaigns as well, but I'm also looking at serious injuries. And I was just pointed to the critical / massive injury rules in Shadowrun. Holy crow.

[vegetius]

The original Traveller RPG had aging rules since one could choose how long your character followed a career prior to becoming an adventurer. If one got too greedy for skills, the character would have to roll for attribute loss due to being middle-aged or older. The question why a much-decorated Imperial Navy Admiral (for example) would suddenly abandon a successful military career to embark on a dangerous life as a gun-for-hire at age 64 was not addressed.

The system could also kill off your character in character generation. Most people ignored that for obvious reasons, but perhaps they should have modified that to debilitating injuries.

[jkahane]

There are very few rpgs out there that address the issue of aging, although several games do so in a solid manner. The reason for this is simple: I don't believe there is an expectation among game designers that characters will actually age significantly during the course of a game, because players don't play given rpgs for long periods of time such that the characters in said games do age.

The key with aging is that the character gains lots of skills and has the experience, but is physically and mentally perhaps not up to the Life and all it encompasses any longer. It's few systems that make mention of this, and the issue of how injury affects the characters when they are older is one that games don't seem to address.

One of the real lacks at times is rules for creating younger and older characters, but this has been addressed in several rpgs that I've run the last ten years or so. To be honest, it's not hard to figure out a way to create older or younger characters, but that's a subject for a whole post in and of itself. :)