Aging and it's effects

[Lucas Manderik]

Hey all, been gone for awhile (had a mobo fry and wasn't able to replace it until recently). Anyway, I was just curious if there was any thought to implementing aging effects on PCs. No need that I see to have this done in any coding if somehow a DM could simply "buff" the person correctly. It offers some good roleplaying, imho, and make certain character ideas more available. The core rules for aging are as follows:
Adult Middle Age Venerable Ancient
STR/CON/DEX +0 -1 -3 -6
INT/CHA/WIS +0 +1 +2 +3


Anyway, it shouldn't be hard for a DM to alter the stats as reasonable based on a character's age, but this may not be agreeable to some. Just wanted to suggest the idea and see what others thought!

[johnlewismcleod]

An interesting proposition, to be sure, but I suspect we would suddenly have few or no PC's IG that were beyond adult quite rapidly.

I would have to vote against it and hope those PC's of advanced age merely try to reflect it in their RP, rather than see them crippled and unable to leave town.

[AcadiusLost]

This idea comes up occasionally, but generally gets argued down for a number of reasons:

1) time compression (8.52 : 1 ratio vs. RL time) means even in the best of cases, a half-orc PC played for 1.5 years RL is already going to be starting to see stat penalties due to old age. As it happens, our ingame clock has a habit of jumping ahead days or months at a time on occasion, so this would only be worsened in practical terms if it had statistical effects on PCs.

2) Balance shift. The attribute penalties and bonuses favor spellcasters and penalize melee/dex based classes, while spellcasting PCs already tend to have a pretty significant edge over melee classes at high levels. Adding to their primary stats is the equivalent of rewarding all "aged" spellcasting PCs with a 100% stacking, highly valuable magical stat booster.

3) Technical requirements. We'd actually need to script this to apply it fairly, with requirements for an editing function to adjust the statistics on the character sheet (do-able, but more work than we'd prefer).

It's possible sentiments have changed since last time it was discussed, so interested in others' impressions. For now though, not a tech priority.

[Aelred]

In terms of following with canon this idea won't work. When the first NWN2 server went live it was officially 1375, Year of the Risen Elfkin. This gives us only 10 'normal' years to play with until the big canon cataclysm that changes everything...1385 is the Spell Plague - Mystra is dead the world is turned upside-down. Likely we will just continue to RP it being 1375 for a long long time and depending on the server you play on, major canon events may come to pass.

[Rotku]

1 IG Year = 1 RL Year, so 10 IG years = a hell of a long time.

[AcadiusLost]

It just turns out to keep the passage of time somewhat arbitrary.

And re: canon "future" events in NWN2, we're certainly not bound by them; ALFA is free to develop in whichever direction fits the story, just as it was in NWN1-ALFA. We just synchronized the "past" to match WotC 3.5 E canon.

[Kest]

As far as I know, the age field in character creation is vestigial - DMs/Builders can't actually use it for anything.