D&D 4E 4e Aging

[Beastman]

Hi @all

Here's another topic for discussion:

I would like to have aging a more important role in the game. This was the case with older editions, where you could age because of a banshee's wail or some spell's effects. As it stands now (3.5), actual age has no effect at all with the exception of ability-score adjustments. I never had a player who grows beyond adult age and age/agind seems more or less useless under current rules.

so here is a proposal: instead of sacrificing XP to creatre magic items or spend them as part of a spell's component (if any), you age say 1 week per 1.000 XP (or part of) of the item creation process or due to spell-XP-component cost. other aging situations would be possible (especially if sacrificing "personality in form of XP).

second, you could have specific special abilities (advantages or disadvantages) as your charcater ages. Not only variant ability adjustments for races (each race ages differently), but also features such as Dwarf's skin turning the properties of sone (giving them a +1 DR at mature age, +2 Dr at old age and +4 at venerable age...)

What you think? What would you like to see them doing with Age/Aging in 4e?

Cheers

Beast

 

[delericho]

I'm not keen on the idea, primarily since most of the races live much longer than do humans. How do you balance these effects when a decade for a Human is 10% of his life, but for and Elf it is only 1%? Further, what about the fact that aging is actually beneficial to Wizards and the like, but a massive penalty to Fighters? (Yes, you can say a character has a 'biological' age and a 'chronological' age, and only give the Int bonuses for the latter, but the penalties for the former... but that's just adding complexity.)

Personally, and strictly for my campaign, I'm inclined to remove numeric values of age entirely, and just rate characters by age category. Beyond that, it'll just be a role-playing matter. I plan on doing the same with height and weight - you can give exact measures if you want, but ''tall", "fat" and "old" will do for the most part. For the game as a whole, I would be inclined to leave things exactly as they are.

 

[Glyfair]

I never had a player who grows beyond adult age and age/agind seems more or less useless under current rules.

I think a large part of this is the "never rest" tendency of most D&D games, combined with the somewhat accelerated level gain of 3rd edition. It's part of the adventure path "gain 20 levels in a year" syndrome.

This could be rectified by increasing campaign downtime a lot. At the extreme end, I've been considering a game where there is one adventure a year. The rest of the year the characters will be busy attending to other duties (most likely case - having them be rulers ala Birthright]).

I was never a big fan of aging in early D&D, and was glad to see it go when third edition came out.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

I would like to have aging a more important role in the game. This was the case with older editions, where you could age because of a banshee's wail or some spell's effects.

Which really makes sense: "Here, that old hag shouted at me, my birthday is suddenly two years earlier!

I never had a player who grows beyond adult age and age/agind seems more or less useless under current rules.

You say older people are useless? Why, you young whippersnapper. Don't make me get over there. Back in the day, we respected our elders. Spoiled brats, the lot of you!

so here is a proposal: instead of sacrificing XP to creatre magic items or spend them as part of a spell's component (if any), you age say 1 week per 1.000 XP (or part of) of the item creation process or due to spell-XP-component cost. other aging situations would be possible (especially if sacrificing "personality in form of XP).

You realise that this would be an utter and complete birch to keep track off, right?

And again, it could involve complications, as people would write a quick magic scroll in order to change their zodiac or stuff like this.

second, you could have specific special abilities (advantages or disadvantages) as your charcater ages. Not only variant ability adjustments for races (each race ages differently), but also features such as Dwarf's skin turning the properties of sone (giving them a +1 DR at mature age, +2 Dr at old age and +4 at venerable age...)

Nah. Dwarves aren't really made of stone, you know. The colour comes from their lack of hygiene.

We could enter that: For each year the dwarf hasn't washed, his charisma drops by 2 and his natural armour improves by 1!

What you think? What would you like to see them doing with Age/Aging in 4e?

away

And if they're not doing away with it, they at least should not change anything. I don't see the big benefit, certainly nothing to justify the added effort of keeping track of it all.

 

[WayneLigon]

I never had a player who grows beyond adult age and age/aging seems more or less useless under current rules.

The few times that I aged people from attacks or spells in 1E, the player wound up immediately dropping the character and making a new one regardless of any other effects. Pull them out of the teens/twenties (we never used the silly class-based starting age tables) and they'd be discarded immediately; I understood that because I've done it myself, because I'm no longer playing 'my' character. So hopefully we won't see things go back to any form of non-reversable aging effects.

 

[an_idol_mind]

I doubt aging comes back as a major factor in 4th edition. We've seen no indications that I know of that the design philosophy that removed magical aging in 3rd edition has changed. Unless someone can point out a WotC product that includes a staff of withering or somesuch, I think that bit of the game is gone forever barring house rules.

 

[Kaodi]

Hopefully, if they implement age at all in 4th edition, it will not be so crippling. Under the current rules, you are just screwing yourself over if you want to play a old veteran warrior.

Personally, I could see the adjustments being more like:

Middle-Aged: -1 Dex, -1 Con, +1 Wis
Old: -1 Str, -2 Dex, -2 Con, +1 Wis, +1 Cha
Venerable: -2 Str, -3 Dex, -3 Con, +2 Wis, +1 Cha

 

[Kae'Yoss]

The 3e aging rules never made that much sense to me, really.

I can see you growing weaker as the body ages. But the mind ages as well. It doesn't get better with old age. You start forgetting things. Your eyesight gets worse (I mention this here since it's wis based), you become more set in your ways, get get old and wrinkly.

All that doesn't sound like an increase in Int, Wis and Cha to me.

 

[Delta]

(Cross-posting from the Spot/Listen thread.) I was recently looking at Gygax's writeups for Conan's stats in Dragon #36 (I think), and he gave stats for about 10 different ages in Conan's career. Interestingly, his fighter/thief levels started going down after about age 40. To me that seems like a totally reasonable way to go about it, although it was never codified, and I'm sure none of the 4E design philosophy would permit that.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

It is a fantasy game. PCs don't age, or if they do, they don't suffer for it. Don't bother with aging rules. If they do include them, I will ignore them, just like I've always done.