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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ainamacar" data-source="post: 5605473" data-attributes="member: 70709">I hope some good ideas crop up, this topic gnaws at me a bit.  The usual ways I've seen this handled (besides outright ignoring it) are with flavor or metaphysical constraints.  Short-lived races as moths to the flame, long-lived ones as having slow maturation or simply an outlook that prevents going from level 1 to 20 in a decade (unless they're a PC!).  If, however, we treat elves as just people that live a really long time, these tend to fall a bit flat.  Plus, if it were just issues of age that would be one thing, but level also comes into play.  Are there any 500 year old elves that are still level 1?  What about all those elven veterans of 15 wars?  Even if such things were easy to explain away in PC histories, the quiet retirement of a 20th level, age 105 elf is still a bit bothersome.  In short, the thing that best promotes verisimilitude to me seems to discard with age and balance concerns, so we just make elves better.  So unsatisfying.The Song of Fire and Ice (a system which I have neither played nor read) idea seems like a decent start if you scale it by expected lifespan.  I've also been batting around ideas like quiescent periods that are required for permanent character growth, or character development that occurs during the "seasons of life."  For a human these periods would be relatively short (say a decade) but for longer-lived races they might be 100 years.  The idea is that anyone can learn skills in the short term, but that maintaining them in the long term requires something akin to destiny points.  If one chooses not to pay a destiny point to maintain abilities over one of these seasons of life, then at the end of this period they degrade.  No skill or training is lost, but it does work less efficiently.  (In a 4e setting perhaps the 1/2 bonus from levels degrades by 2 per season or something.)I think an elaboration on the Song of Fire and Ice idea might be to let characters choose to keep their destiny points and degraded abilities to gain other abilities of less overall power (like starting a new theme or class from low levels) or pay the destiny cost to restore their old abilities to full use.  So on the one hand you can have highly trained old guys at the top of their game with very little destiny (probably the default), or guys who have decided to keep more destiny points and branch out it newer, but not as powerful directions.  If these destiny points are renewable (say per day) having more might be an important part in day-to-day adventuring, then permanently giving one up from the pool is a tradeoff a player can choose to make with older characters.I have no idea how this might be balanced, much less as a minor houserule for any edition of D&D, but let me quickly imagine some characters:1) A 700 years old elf (Perhaps all elves start with 10 destiny points, ~1 per 100 years of expected life.)  This elf was a hotshot wizard adventurer in his youth, but eventually settled down.  He takes a moderate penalty on arcane spells, he's so rusty, but remembers every spell he learned.  Recent events have seen him turn to the divine, and he is currently a less powerful cleric, but learning quickly, and has retained many destiny points as he pursues a new path.2) The same elf, except he has has spent several destiny points to recover all his previous arcane prowess.  He has fewer destiny points, and no cleric abilities, but is nearly as fearsome as when he was young.3) A middle aged human (Also up to 10 destiny points, ~1 per 10 years of expected life), who has been a farmer his entire life.  In a recent attack he finds himself needing to be something much greater for the first time in his life.  He has nearly all his destiny points available, since despite his age he has never developed heroic skills, apart from some social skills.4) A young man, the farmer's son.  He has all his destiny yet before him, and as soon as he learns proper use of a sword (pro-tip: Stick them with the pointy end) he'll make something of himself.For all these characters the seasons of life are unlikely to come into play except in the longest campaigns, so it is effectively part of character creation.  However, it also gives a little rhyme and reason to what happens when an elf doesn't simply work work work all the time.  First of all, his skills won't degrade for a very long time, an entire human lifetime or more.  Second of all, if destiny points are sufficiently powerful then there is an incentive to leave options open and branch out in new areas as the need arises.  Finally, even if the character permanently spends them to keep in top shape with old skills, hopefully the few that are left are actually more powerful by virtue of being used with (presumably) more powerful abilities.This is practically stream of consciousness, so treat as such.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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