D&D General Death due to old age

Nebulous said:

gender i guess

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Oh, you're right. I missed the line about that in the instructions when i looked before.

i worry enough about getting old in real life, I certainly don't want to in my game!

TiwazTyrsfist said:

Oh, you're right. I missed the line about that in the instructions when i looked before.

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Yep. It is easy to miss if you just skim to the "good stuff" lol. The table I posted updates some the age information for starting age.

Also, note Drow are reversed (females tend to be larger than males).

More on topic with the rate of leveling, I will mention this...

As a DM, I usually rule 1 XP per level each day for NPCs to determine normal age past maturity. It I want them to be faster or slower, that isn't a problem of course but it serves as a nice guideline. Extending this to 5E, you get the following:



So, it would take about 18.42 years of adventuring and such to reach 8th level. This way, I might have human fighter who is roughly 40 or so, and decide he will be 8th level based on his age and activity, etc.

Obviously, by age, few humans would reach 20th level, etc. and of course this is purely for NPC-types.

dnd4vr said:

More on topic with the rate of leveling, I will mention this...

As a DM, I usually rule 1 XP per level each day for NPCs to determine normal age past maturity....

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Interesting concept. I do something related and assume roughly 1 XP per level each day (300 days per year, with the assumption that many days are taken off or otherwise unproductive) for non-adventuring NPCs to determine level and age.

While 5e's table does make it obvious just how unlikely you are to reach high level staying at home and reading a book (as it were), the small amount it requires to level up would suggest "staying at home" is a rather viable strategy for getting through the first few levels. If an apprentice or squire "stayed in school" for just one more year, they'd hit 2nd level and be rather more formidable.

Celebrim said:

Interesting concept. I do something related and assume roughly 1 XP per level each day (300 days per year, with the assumption that many days are taken off or otherwise unproductive) for non-adventuring NPCs to determine level and age.

While 5e's table does make it obvious just how unlikely you are to reach high level staying at home and reading a book (as it were), the small amount it requires to level up would suggest "staying at home" is a rather viable strategy for getting through the first few levels. If an apprentice or squire "stayed in school" for just one more year, they'd hit 2nd level and be rather more formidable.

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Yep. I have always liked it and used it (or a variant) for over 30 years. I guess that would make me 10th level in it LOL!

Something I dislike about the XP idea is IMO once you get to a certain point, you shouldn't get XP for easy tasks anymore. Consider the Elf-Kobold Conundrum (as I like to call it).

EKC (Elf-Kobold Conundrum):

An elf has a mentor who can summon animals or has a large tribe of kobolds to select from. Every day, the mentor arms a kobold and presents it as a foe for his apprentice. Even at level 1, the apprentice can make quick work of the kobold, earning 25 XP. After a couple weeks, they are level 2 and defeating the kobold becomes even easier. With each new level, the kobold presents less of a threat.

Obviously, as the apprentice levels, greater challenges can still be very easy to overcome. So, they can earn XP more quickly. It gets to the point that any elf over a few hundred years old should be 20th level in whatever class they want.

Even just killing kobolds the apprentice would be level 3 in under half a year.

A simple rule to battle this problem would be characters earn no XP for creatures with a CR more then 4 less than the PCs' levels. So, if you are a 10th level fighter, you won't get XP for CR 5 or lower creatures. The problem with that idea, however, is you are now removing a lot of creatures from the game that could give XP for defeating them.

It's a problem as I see it...

LordEntrails said:

I think it was removed because most of the time, dying of old age is not fun. It's not heroic and it's not adventurous. Besides, even when I used aging back in 1E etc, except for magical aging, I never had a character, or knew of one, who died from old age. And, loosing strength or con because the campaign went on wasn't enjoyable.

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Not only did I never see one die of old age, magic aging aside, most never aged more than a year or two during a campaign.

Most DMs I've played with just have you travel X days with random encounters to the "adventure" and then rinse repeat for the campaign. Very few actually have meaningful amounts of time pass in-between, so I can't tell you how many teenage archmages and generals I've seen over the years.

dnd4vr said:

It's a problem as I see it...

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Just another reason I don't use XP for leveling

I've run and played in multi-generation games several times. It is actually very interesting when you have powerful, high-level parents with hand-me-down magic items for their 1st level offspring who are just setting out on their own careers. Many games have lengthy periods of down-time, often 5 years or more and sometimes as much as 15-20 years at a time.

I like games where characters have lives outside of the adventure. Why are they adventuring? It is a dangerous profession, right? Do they need the money? Fame? What is it that makes them want to do it?

In our current game, our party has a group fund of over 60000 gp. Since we equate 1 gp = $100 USD, that is over 6 million dollars! The party could all retire and do what they wanted, but we have moved on to the next quest and are using our funds to rebuild a ruined town and see if the king will grant us lordship over the region.

dnd4vr said:

It gets to the point that any elf over a few hundred years old should be 20th level in whatever class they want.

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Ahh yes, the elf problem...

The elf problem was introduced in 3e and has been a problem for fans of world building every since.

It's ultimately a result of the linear increase in XP required to obtain a new level. Back in 1e AD&D when I first began considering this issue, each level required twice as much XP to obtain as the prior level. So the cost of getting from level N to level N+1 was the same as the cost of getting to level N. That meant that for any constant rate of XP gain, that an elf with his binary 3 orders of magnitude longer life span would only get three levels higher than a human with the same approach to leveling up.

This was not a big problem. If humans could get to 2nd or 4th level, it wasn't that big of a problem that elves could get to 5th or 7th.

But once the needed XP goes linear, the elves binary 3 orders of magnitude longer life span just gets silly and it's not obvious what you do about it. As a kludge, I have elves learn more slowly from non-adventuring tasks, but it's really not the best solution or the one most easily justified from the fiction.

As for your particular method of getting XP, in my game it wouldn't work. You don't get XP from defeating conjured monsters. The XP from defeating conjured monsters comes from the XP of the caster. But you don't get adventuring XP at all from facing an opponent that isn't trying to win, and in this case the caster doing the summoning isn't trying to win. But even if he has a large tribe of kobolds available that he is pitting against the apprentice, that still doesn't get full adventuring XP because I adjust XP awards based on how the threat is enhanced by the environment. For example, you'd get more XP from facing a dire tiger in a tall grass marsh than you would facing the same dire tiger in an arena. But in this case, it's a false arena. It's being very carefully managed so as to not actually yield any real threat. And if you have a false arena where the threat is managed to the point there is no threat, I don't consider that adventuring at all. The wizard teacher has a slightly rigorous method of training apprentices, that's all.

On top of that issue of defining what adventuring XP is earned from, I use a different custom XP chart so that past a certain point the XP you get for a given CR is reduced. Even if the kobolds in the arena are well armed and given some sort of chance to earn the crits fairly, and the tribe is cunning and trying to train up volunteers so that the wizard doesn't have full control over the CR of the encounter, and the wizard teacher is the sort that willingly culls the weak and would stand back and let the kobold kill the apprentice (that point where the kobold rolls 2 20's and the apprentice rolls 2 1's), and I decide this is true risk, there comes a point where killing kobolds teaches you less and less and eventually nothing.

That still in and of itself doesn't solve the elf problem though.