Aging, unaging, and "...you still die when your time is up"

[Fenes 2]

IMC, I don't enforce aging rules (although players are free to impose them on their PCs if they want to). I don't run campaigns that cover that many years in-game anyway, and I'd probably run a "find the secret to immortality" quest long before.

 

[S'mon]

Ha.

-Hyp.

Nickers!

 

[Malicene]

DO YOU THINK I FORGOT OUR RENDEZ-VOUS ?

(quote from T.Pratchett)

 

[Arnwyn]

Have you ever, as a PC or DM, enforced or seen enforced the bonuses and penalties for aging characters, or had a character age to the point where (s)he could not adventure? Have you ever had a sufficiently long running campaign that it was an issue? Did you actually keep track of character ages?

Yes to all of the above. There have been characters IMC that have reached the ages where penalties kick in, and the aging rules were enforced. I do run super-long campaigns, especially when the PCs reach higher levels are are leading their baronies. At these high levels, we often "skip ahead" 10 or 15 years for when the next big adventure comes along. Aging penalties apply. Finally - absolutely we "actually keep track" of character ages. Every player has written down his/her character's age on the character sheet, along with his/her birthday. When that day passes, they age themselves one year. And so it goes...

Then there's some more rhetorical questions... Would any DM actually let me make a 263yo elf in order to get the aging benefits if I took the penalties? How do these +/-'s interact with the stat boosts you get from leveling?

As a DM: yes, I allow characters to come in at any age the player wants, and they apply the aging modifiers to their rolled character stats. The stat boosts are applied normally, depending on what level the character comes in.

 

[Flyspeck23]

Characters in my campaign do age. Sooner or later they just have to retire (I'm not that much into epic roleplaying...).

A few years ago I was playing (not GMing) in a campaign where a high-level adventure involved a cursed landscape with time running very quickly (or, more precisely: everything aged very fast, and time was running normally). That was a pretty intense adventure I can tell you - if we hadn't acted as fast as possible, our characters would've died of old age right away (not the elf, of course ). In the end we aged by 7 or 8 years.
That was fun.

 

[Gnarlo]

I had PCs live that long in 1e where you had to earn each level, and walk uphill barefoot in the snow to claim it. In the faster days of 3e, it hasn't come up except for when I age NPCs or in one campaign where the high level PCs are now background NPCs and my players are running "their" children.

/gnarlo!

 

[Davelozzi]

We keep track of aging in my campaigns but we've never got to the point where ability changes or death became an issue. I guess I'd enforce it if we did.

 

[AmerginLiath]

We age in our DL campaign -- half of our 5th Age party in now middle age (since most are the children of previous generation characters -- this campaign has spread over about seventy years of Krynn -- from just after War of the Lance to now shortly before the War of Souls -- and three generations over eight years of so of playing). Hell, we have a few old age characters and my venerable druid!

No one's died of old age 'on screen', but folks have passed on naturally between generations...

 

[Devilkiller]

I've never seen a PC in play long enough for it to matter, but one former 2e PC is still around and active as an NPC in one campaign world about a century after his heydey. He's a dwarf, so he's still around but probably getting kind of old. There hasn't been any reason to stat him out though. Actually, the current party has never met him directly as he moves in higher circles now. I suppose that his elven companions would be middle aged at worst and possibly still adventuring.

 

[Urbannen]

I agree with what Angcuru wrote. Once your body stops aging (in fantasy, natch), there's no reason why you would die of old age. I guess that rule's just in there as some kind of balance, but I don't like it. Just because a character doesn't age doesn't mean the character is immortal. The longer you live the more chances you have of eventually succumbing to something. If you are familiar with it, think of Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil. In ADS, the aliens don't age, but their deaths are assumed (such as in the case of the breeding of a "spare" avatar).

I noticed that in 3E they got rid of all those potions of longevity. Now you have to become epic and take the increased lifespan feat.