D&D 5E Aging and the 5E PC

[Mark CMG]

I was recently playing a bit of Traveller and it struck me while the characters aged during generation that it had been some time since I had a gaming group playing D&D or any Medieval Fantasy campaign where the players were all that concerned about the age of their PC. I think Aging is an element of the game that sometimes gets shrugged off by players who shun roleplaying too immersively but others tend to embrace as an aspect of characterization well worth exploring. Is it something worth building into the system? Is it something that should be left to only those players who wish to define their character in some manner by their age? Does aging during a campaign mean much in your games or do the campaigns tend to be fast and furious affairs where little campaign time really passes as the characters leap through their levels? What are your thoughts?


*edit*

Added OP question - How do you think it would play in 5E if the cost of using certain high levels of magic aged a character or if major amount of healing all at once caused aging (like half or more of HP in a single 24 hours)?

 

[Mattachine]

Aging is very dependent on the type of campaign. I have run, and have played in, campaigns that use the following systems for time and aging:

1. The campaign has a "floating timeline", like most soap operas and comic books, or the tales of Fafhrd and Gray Mouser. No one ages, and the background setting stays in the same general time period.

2. The campaign has a specific flow of time, but the character's exploits all take place within a relatively short time, such as one or two years. Aging is inconsequential. The Dragonlance Chronicles and Lord of the Rings are a great example of this.

3. The campaign has a specific flow of time, and long periods of time pass during and between adventures. The campaign might cover a span of 10 or even 25 years. The Conan short stories are like this (though asynchronous), and I think the Elric stories as well.


A PC's age might matter for roleplaying, or maybe a character trait in any campaign.

Keeping track of aging really only matters in campaign #3.

 

[Kaodi]

I think aging is one one of those things that is only ever going to concern a minute fraction of games. Very few scenarios have substantial passage of time built in (Kingmaker is one; man I use that as an example for everything). I think that if a DM really wants to build the passage of time into their game, adventures are going to have to be episodic in some way, and players are going to have to accept that they are going to stick around somewhere instead of going cavorting off in a random direction looking for more things to kill.

One way to support an episodic type of game might be to bring back a sort of DM fiat version of the training rules: long periods of time tend to pass in between when you earn the experience and when you actually level up. In this way you might even describe levelling up as the sum of what happens in the game plus various off-screen events.

Like I said though, it really comes down to having the kind of DM who both cares enough about that sort of thing and can pull it off, and players who accept it. I do not think changes in age would ever be much more or a niche thing then unless you have harmful aging effects in game (like various undead or spells).

 

[am181d]

I don't think that most campaigns cover enough time for this to be a relevant concern. In cases that DO cover an extended period of time, I think individual DMs generally keep this in mind.

Remember that most of the demihuman races age more slowly than humans, so even campaigns that span 20+ years may only see the humans age noticeably.

(I ran one campaign that did one adventure per level, and skipped one year between adventures. Two of the PCs were humans, and age became a factor for one of them. The other was disintegrated before that could happen in a tragic save or die-related accident.)

 

[delericho]

Yeah, I'd be inclined to ignore it, for two reasons:

1) Very, very few campaigns will last long enough (game time) for the PCs to age significantly. It's such a niche subject it's probably not worth taking up space in the rulebooks with.

2) Aging affects us all differently anyway, and that can only be more true in a fantasy universe. Should elves gain intelligence and lose strength in the same way as humans? Indeed, should humans really gain intelligence, given that mental faculties generally do degrade with time? And so on...

Basically, if it is to be addressed at all, I would suggest a set of guidelines (not rules) in the DM's section suggesting ways that the DM could handle the issue.

 

[Yora]

D&D has always been a game with a rather high level of abstraction, even 3rd Edition. There's a lot of wiggling room in a given set of mechanical statistics which is left to the player to fill with details or not. I think it's a good thing to reduce the things that have a mechanical effect to the bare neccessites and leave it to players to asign stats and skills in a way that best represents the character they have in mind.
If you want to play an old character, put less points in physical attributes and raise Wisdom and Charisma instead. There really is no need to have age modifiers, and even when they did exist in 3rd Edition, they were almost never used, even when they would apply. And since campaigns usually don't keep track of time in the scale of decades, having age categories is mostly useless.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Bring back ghosts, age effects from haste, potions of longevity, venerable stat adjustments? Hmmm ...

On second thought, maybe not.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There are existing rules for aging, which mostly came into play in my gamea when a player was aged by undead.

 

[tlantl]

At one time it was much easier to cause characters in a campaign to age. Some spells and monster effects could do it. The default healing and research rules could do it too. If a character is seriously injured and has no access to magical healing they needed to take time to rest. If the magic user or cleric wanted to research spells or to create a magic item then they needed to remove themselves from the game for long periods of time. If they were part of an established group the group's time scale had to match that of the missing player character when the research was done. Weeks and months would pass between adventures even if the Dm decided to abstract that time it was still real game time.

I usually like to have a little time pass between adventures. I also like to use real time as game time when we aren't playing, unless we were unable to complete a mission before the end of our gaming session. I also like to advance time a year or more on a whim.

I have never designed a campaign where the characters will gain lots of levels and have it take a few weeks or months to play out. Most of my stuff could be done with only one or two level ups.

I also like to run several different groups of characters concurrently. Different combinations and different levels. The idle characters don't sit in a vacuum waiting to be used though. Time passes for them at the same rate as the active characters. Over a period of years with the same group characters are retired or pass into a place where they are no longer player controlled.

But that's me. I like my game world to feel alive and ever changing. At some point I need to open new frontiers and invent new cultures for the group to discover. The ideas available through game settings and fiction make for a rich source of different ideas. Sometimes the new ideas don't mesh with the established lore and I will move to a new place, usually adding time to the campaign in the process.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Aging must be more relevant in my games than in yours. I've seen it come up and I sometimes apply age modifiers to NPCs.

That said, it is an element that could stand to be emphasized more.