D&D General Does Character Lifespan Even Matter?

[CleverNickName]

In just about every D&D edition that I've read or played, I've seen rules for a character's maximum lifespan. Like in 5E, humans live up to X years, elves live up to Y years, and once you hit that limit you are done--game over, no resurrection can help you. Once you hit that limit you go straight to the afterlife, do not pass go, do not collect 200 gold pieces. And in 3rd Edition, you had all of that plus your stats would change as you grew older.

But has this ever been an issue at your table? Has anyone ever taken this into consideration when creating their character? Has your campaign ever run long enough for lifespan to matter? Has a character ever been artificially aged by magic so much that they were worried about their expiration date? Has a player ever deliberately shortened their lifespan (by choosing to play a venerable-aged character) just to get a better Wisdom score (back in 3rd Edition)?

I've been playing for decades, in several different editions, and I've never seen it matter. Not even once, and not even a little bit. I'm wondering if I'm the only one.

 

[Professor Murder]

It mattered for 1st ed Ghosts and some spells and magic items over the years.
It more matters for flavor and for NPCs.

 

[CleverNickName]

It mattered for 1st ed Ghosts and some spells and magic items over the years.

Yeah, I remember there was a potion of longevity and a staff of withering in BECM, too. Pretty handy to have, in a world where ghosts could age you just by looking at you!

Have you ever had a character die of old age, though? Or even get close to it?

 

[Professor Murder]

Yeah, I remember there was a potion of longevity and a staff of withering in BECM, too. Pretty handy to have, in a world where ghosts could age you just by looking at you!

Have you ever had a character die of old age, though? Or even get close to it?

No PCs no, but I am a forever DM. So for me, lifespans matter more.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I've had it actually matter like one time in my 6ish years playing D&D. Once a character's age became negative and they died, and another time a character's age increased so much that they died. Otherwise, it has never come up other than through roleplay and character descriptions.

 

[Charlaquin]

For the most part it doesn’t really matter any more than other descriptive details like height, weight, hair, and eye color. It’s just there to enable interactions where the 500 year old elf comically overestimates or underestimates a human’s age, and other such light RP stuff. Maybe if you fight a LOT of ghosts or spend decades at a time on downtime it might come up, but I’d consider those pretty exceptional cases.

I did once run a campaign that was done as a series of flashbacks, each having occurred a decade or so apart. Even then, age only really mattered for roleplay purposes, as different characters’ appearances changed more than others’ from one flashback to the next. But no one was ever at risk of death due to old age.

 

[James Gasik]

I've had it actually matter like one time in my 6ish years playing D&D. Once a character's age became negative and they died, and another time a character's age increased so much that they died. Otherwise, it has never come up other than through roleplay and character descriptions.

Wild Magic Sorcerers, amirite?

 

[Umbran]

But has this ever been an issue at your table?

Once, a long time ago. A GM I played under had two campaigns, both set in Greyhawk, several centuries apart. At one point, when the second campaign was reaching up to "name level", he stopped and thought about the Grey Elf wizard I'd been playing in the first campaign, who had a nominal lifespan of a couple millennia. He decided to start involving that character again (now an archmage) and one other long-lived character from that previous campaign.

Other than that, it matters when considering the role the race plays in the campaign world, and thus some general attitudes likely in characters of the various lineages.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It matters somewhat in my game, but mostly for NPCs and far-future concerns for PCs.

That is, our party Bard has, for legitimately only heroic reasons, absorbed a bunch of devilish power originally coming from his powerful devil ancestor on his father's side (identity remains undetermined, but the narrowed options are scary), and also a bunch of demonic power from his now-former-succubus great-grandmother, who is his maternal-line ancestor. As a result, he is now effectively half-human, half-devil, half-demon. (The player likes to joke that he's "broken math," but this whole fiendish-heritage thing does concern him, rather a lot.) As a result of being what is essentially a souped-up cambion, his lifespan has just grown from "several decades" to "multiple centuries and possibly indefinite." That's...a lot to think about.

Elves live to be 2-3 centuries old, dwarves the same or a little less, while most other sapient races don't tend to live past 100 (and that only with excellent medical care, nutrition, etc.--few common folk make it to that age.) So super-long lifespan isn't generally a problem for them.

On the flipside, however, noble genies have lifespans measured in thousands of years rather than decades or even centuries. The eldest tend to become reclusive and retreat from society, however, so it's not clear exactly how old they can get.

 

[tetrasodium]

I havent seen it matter since the old editionz where you adjusted physical/mdntal stats after middle /old age or whatever it was.

I do occasionally make use of it as a gm to tell players things that their elf(or whatever) would have experienced decades or centuries before when it's convenient to me as gm ut almost never see players try to think that way.