D&D General Does Character Lifespan Even Matter?

[Crimson Longinus]

No, it it doesn't normally matter except for world building, and perhaps for rare fast aging effects.

But I think the sort of campaign that would span decades would be cool. A lot of downtime, perhaps add some sort of politics/domain management minigame that adds some crunch to the years between "adventures". I haven't done this in D&D, but I have done it in Exalted. Though the characters were long-lived dragon-blooded, so old age was not an issue, but it was kind of cool to follow them from their teens as boarding school students to middle-aged movers and shakers of the realm.

In a world where there are characters with differing lifespans, you must either limit the campaign length according to the shortest lived species, or alternatively have the players agree that they need to eventually switch characters, perhaps to a descendant of their original character. Granted, In D&D the levels might make this a tad weird, if you want the new characters to start at the same level that the old one had reached.

 

[beancounter]

In 5E lifespan doesn't matter.

 

[Davies]

Way back when? Absolutely. In 1e and 2e Haste used to age you a year. Not a problem if you were an elf, but a real problem for humans and half-orcs. And Wish used to age you 5 years. I vaguely recall other spells having aging effects but those are the two which stick in my mind. Then there were monsters that aged you, like ghosts.

But not for many years.

This. It stopped mattering at all during 4th, and 5th hasn't seen it restored to what limited prominence it enjoyed in 2nd and earlier.

 

[Celebrim]

In just about every D&D edition that I've read or played, I've seen rules for a character's maximum lifespan...Has your campaign ever run long enough for lifespan to matter?... 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.

I have never seen it matter. The only time it matters even a little in any game I've ever played was 1e AD&D fighting ghosts where you didn't want to age so much that you ended up taking permanent attribute loss.

In college I was in a game for 5 years that ran about 5 years of game time and it kept going for like 10 more years of game time over the next few years after I left it so that it was verging on dynastic play (some PC's had children by that point), but even then it didn't really go long enough for aging to matter.

My own games I have a D&D campaign 10 years real time go only 6 months game time. I'm running a Star Wars game right now for 2 years that's gone 5 months game time and that mostly because there are assumed to be several weeks down time between adventures.

In order for aging to matter you have to deliberately be aiming for dynastic play where there are one or more years between adventures.

 

[Demetrios1453]

Back in my 2e playing days, wizards only cast haste very sparingly because of the aging side effect.

One wizard in one of the games I played back then cast haste on a particularly obnoxious quickling we had captured. The DM said that the quicking basically exploded.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

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

In ADnD haste used to cost you one year of your life. So my brother's gnome/illusionist used it in every fight that seemed hard, while my half-elven bard was a bit more hesitant.
Other than that, lifetimes don't really matter.

 

[Maxperson]

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?

Only with ghosts and the haste spell(back in the day). If you weren't an elf or dwarf, ghosts and haste wrecked you.

 

[Li Shenron]

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 remember using age-based stats adjustments in early 3.0 to play an old wizard, but nothing else. Even in the longest-running campaigns I've been in, characters didn't have time to grow old. I find aging rules interesting but typically unbalanced. The main problem though, it's that almost every RPG ruleset is designed to make your PCs go from 1st to high levels much faster than aging.

 

[Alzrius]

But has this ever been an issue at your table? Has anyone ever taken this into consideration when creating their character?

While playing a Pathfinder 1st Edition wizard, I wanted to put myself in the oldest age category in order to gain the mental stat bonuses (+3 Int, +3 Wis, +3 Cha) and didn't mind taking the aging penalties associated with doing so (-6 Str, -6 Con, -6 Dex). The GM agreed, but noted that he'd then make the random roll on the associated table for how many years I had left.

I found out after the campaign ended that he'd rolled a 1, and that he'd been carefully keeping track of how much time was passing over the course of the game, since there was a very real chance I'd have died before old age before it ended (unfortunately, the pandemic put the kibosh on that particular game).

 

[Seramus]

I have used some settings multiple times across campaigns, so it can matter when a later campaign still has living characters from the former campaigns. Both as NPCs that can be met again, and discovering the fate of former PCs.

Some players will literally squee with joy if old characters show up to help.