aging in d&d

[kiryoku]

i have a thought in real life aging is the failing of cells to replicate properly. so if you have the fast healing ability through feats or items why would you age?
just a thought not sure if i am thinking about this right or not.

edit: now that i think of it regeneration would stop aging too.

[HunterOfJello]

Aging is a highly complex process that is still not fully understood by scientists in the real world. Hopefully, we'll learn all the secrets of the process by analysis and the amazing work that's being done by the Human Genome Project.


However, a Ring of Fast Healing 1 may have highly beneficial effects on aging, considering that it heals you constantly. If you had a Ring of Regeneration 1, then that might be even more beneficial to increasing your life's longevity.

I don't remember too many ways of increasing the natural lifespan of a character in D&D, which becomes important when there's a lack of magic to reverse the aging process. The Ruathar prestige class increases the age limit or slows down the aging process for whoever undergoes the ritual. That would increase the lifespan of a character by 150%, so we can ascertain that there are possible magics to extend a lifespan by slowing down the aging process.

[kiryoku]

i didnt know about that class but i think the epic handbook had a feat that doubles your max age too. but i was talking about fast healing and regeneration but that kind of was what i was talking about how magic stops aging.

[Noblesse]

If fast healing essentially causes 'faster cell reproduction', and as you get older you have more 'improperly replicated cells', fast healing would in effect, make you age faster. Very similar to how 2.0 haste aged you by a year or something.

[kiryoku]

but its not your body doing the healing its the magic of the world you made part of yourself so thats why i asked. but your view is a valid possibility too.

[HunterOfJello]

If fast healing essentially causes 'faster cell reproduction', and as you get older you have more 'improperly replicated cells', fast healing would in effect, make you age faster. Very similar to how 2.0 haste aged you by a year or something.

Good Point. However, healing spells in 3.5e including Lesser Vigor work as Conjuration(Healing) spells and not Transmutation spells. Because of the differences between the two schools of magic, I'd suggest that Fast Healing through a process such as Lesser Vigor does not use magic to increase the speed natural cell reproduction, but instead uses magic to either conjure or replicate the cells magically. (That said, having healing spells fall into the Conjuration school never really made sense to me in the first place.)

If the former is true, then a Ring of Lesser Vigor should give you a shorter, healthier life. If the later is true, then the Ring should give you both a longer and healthier life.

[kiryoku]

ya magic is not normally part of a person in d&d it is part of the universe around the caster. i forget what book but there is a weave arcane casters pull there power from. there is also a shadow weave but it seems to take you out of time instead of slowing the aging process. the shadow weave almost makes you an undead without using negative energy or damaging the body.

[slaydemons]

I feel the subject has brought on catgirl deaths, but to continue this what would resortration I think it is (regens limbs and such) would do to you?

[kiryoku]

hmm well normally you cant grow limbs back so idk but some lizards can do that and they dont age faster because of it .

edit: starfish also have no problem with limb loss.
Edit2:so restoration and regeneration give you the ability to grow limbs back like the lizard or starfish

[Crossblade]

If fast healing essentially causes 'faster cell reproduction', and as you get older you have more 'improperly replicated cells', fast healing would in effect, make you age faster. Very similar to how 2.0 haste aged you by a year or something.

I knew someone would make this mistake. Congrats on being that person.

Firstly, it's magic.
Second, look at it as Wolverine from the Xmen. He has regeneration, but lived hundreds of years. Why? Because along with the regeneration, the cells are rejuvenated as well.
If they replicated improperly then they didn't regenerate properly, meaning the ability failed/didn't work right.
Regeneration would make you live longer, if anything.

[kiryoku]

that is my favorite x-men and i didn't even think of that. but that is what i was asking if fast healing and regeneration would slow or stop aging.

[Privateer]

Out of curiosity, is there a reason this important or are we just engaging in a thought experiment?

I'm not even referring to the fact that most campaigns don't last long enough for your characters to age, but when there is a mid-level druid spell that can give you a whole new young body when yours wears out, it becomes kind of moot that you can't stop aging, no?

[kiryoku]

its a random thought i had and i just wanted to see if anyone agreed with me or i was just looking at it wrong its 50/50 at the moment. but some of there views is based off of some misunderstandings of how magic works in d&d. well in eberron and the forgotten realms anyway.

and i just thought of something fast healing dosent let natural healing even happen because you heal 1hp x per HD an hour normally and fast healing 1 heals 600hp an hour.

i think thats the right natural healing at least.

[Privateer]

Well, as a thought experiment, I'm not sure on what basis the claim can be made that magical healing heals cells. Best I can figure, it heals mechanical damage - i.e. absence of cells where they should be. Nor does small amount of damage get healed - else one's beard would grow back every time a heal spell is cast. :smallwink: Also diseases cannot be cured by healing spells, they require a different kind of spell altogether. This hints at the possibility that magical healing simply replaces one's absent cells with exact copies of one's other cells. And if those cells are old, all the errors accumulated in them would be reproduced in the magically created cells.

Eventually these errors accumulate and the subject dies of old age. There is no substential wound for the magic to heal, and yet the entire body has become next to useless, its every cell garbled enough inside to not be able to reproduce anymore.

[kiryoku]

thats a valid point but were you just talking about fast healing or both it and regeneration because it sounds like you were just talking about fast healing.

wait now that i read it again it looks like your talking about cure spells not fast healing and regeneration. because the way they all three heal are different but all repair damaged cells as the end result.

i forget what book its in but fast healing heals ability damage or ability drain at a increased rate so it would repair the damage a disease would do but not cure it because thats white blood cells not red blood cells that do that.

i am not sure about the hair thing its kind or a grey area because they are different then most cells they stay on us long after they die so idk how they would react.

[Privateer]

all repair damaged cells as the end result

That's the part I'm not sure about. If it was true that individual cells are being repaired, then aging may be impacted, but I don't see any evidence to suggest that. Everything you mentioned seems to be explainable by repairing with copies of existing aged cells.

Furthermore, if we assume that individual cells are repaired and errors in them reversed, then it's unclear how the magic could function. Well, less clear, since we can't claim a scientific basis for magic in the first place. :smallbiggrin:

How does it know what the damaged cell should be? In case of repairing damage by duplicating cells it's easy: take a nearby cell, copy it, repeat until there is no more wound. You could even regenerate a limb with different kinds of cells, or a whole being from one cell (theoretically, not that any spell does it), because each cell contains the genetic makeup of the entire organism. But where would the information come from to fix errors in this genetic makeup that accumulated over time is less clear.

[kiryoku]

thats magic for you its a lot more complex then you thought it was. but if regeneration works the way it does in x-men then it would repair cells to a perfect state and stop the aging process but if they did not then the person would age normally so like you said its all on how you interpret the information.

[Grim Reader]

i have a thought in real life aging is the failing of cells to replicate properly. so if you have the fast healing ability through feats or items why would you age?
just a thought not sure if i am thinking about this right or not.

edit: now that i think of it regeneration would stop aging too.

Well...there is a theory that I find quite compelling that aging is a feature not a bug. It is basically our best line of defence against cancer. Cancer cells are nonspecialized and immortal. Most work on cancer is done on cell lines taken from a woman who died in the 50s. He cancer is still going strong.

Creatures that demonstrate dramatically extended lifespans or even no appreciable aging tend to have auxillary cancer defenses. (Although some extend life by having very slow metabolisms.)

Note that there is a limit (Called a Hayflick limit) to how many times a cell can divide before it goes senescent and stops.

[Mayhem]

DNA starts to get worn out after being ripped apart over and over throughout the course of life causing ageing and cancerous growth. Why this doesn't happen in our semi-conservative reproduction but does in cell replacement, and effects larger members of the species more keenly than smaller members I wouldn't have the foggiest idea.
Sometimes I suspect "scientists" of speaking out of their arses about certain things :smallsigh:. Although I could be interpreting this information wrong.

[NichG]

Here's my understanding, with the caveat: not a biologist.

Basically, there are two things in tension. Each cell's DNA has a bunch of junk at the end (called telomeres) that insulate the end from anything important. When that DNA is copied, the process doesn't handle the end of the DNA properly and a telomere is lost each time. There is another protein, telomerase, that adds new telomeres onto the end of replicated DNA.

Telomerase is regulated by the body, and so somatic cells (skin, muscles, etc) have a limited number of replications before they fail due to loss of something important. This is basically, as was said earlier, a mechanism that prevents uncontrolled cell growth and other malfunctions by limiting how much damage a single deviant cell line can do (if it gets 10 copies, one cell gaining a bad mutation can at worst mess up something like 1000 cells worth of tissue). Of course, if it gets a mutation that enables production of lots of telomerase...

So if we're bringing physics into D&D, fast healing/regeneration might cause that tissue to prematurely age, but it would probably be restricted to the areas that actually get damaged. If it didn't, then in some sense it needs to be pulling information about former cell states from somewhere - it could do this from reproductive cells, from the aether, whatever. Fast healing granted by a spell could establish a magical record of the body state when cast, that then restores it to that state (though it'd have to be careful to not do that to the brain if you still wanted to gain XP...). Innate fast healing could correspond to a creature with fundamentally different biology in some way that renders this entire point moot, or it could just be part of the thing's natural lifespan that its constantly healing.

[kyoten]

I'm not even referring to the fact that most campaigns don't last long enough for your characters to age, but when there is a mid-level druid spell that can give you a whole new young body when yours wears out, it becomes kind of moot that you can't stop aging, no?

What spell is this and where can it be found!?

[hamishspence]

Reincarnate- in the PHB.

On the minus side- you don't get to choose what race- it's determined randomly.

[Kylarra]

You do have to make sure someone offs you before old age gets you, but other than that...

[kyoten]

You do have to make sure someone offs you before old age gets you, but other than that...

Heh!

"You have been like a brother to me." Hack Koff "Do me one last favor...kill me." koff koff "It is for the best for......all of us."

[kiryoku]

we are kind of geting off subject i was talking about how fast healing and regeneration would stop or at least slow aging. my main point was that they magically made copys of cells and maintained them so they didn't degrade because thats what regeneration implies it is doing. because most creatures that have regeneration in D&D are immortal or at the least long lived.

[kyoten]

I personally don't see it as stopping OR slowing down the aging process. The magical effect on the cells in my opinion anyway simply resets the body to the point in time prior to the wounding effect.

It wouldn't necessarily halt or decrease the rate of aging beyond this point. Personal opinion of course!

~Kyoten

[kiryoku]

how do you see regeneration working. it using the bodys healing ability or as a separate magic ability that heals for the body.

[kyoten]

how do you see regeneration working. it using the bodys healing ability or as a separate magic ability that heals for the body.

I see it as using the body's natural healing ability. This excludes magical Regeneration. I don't however 100% believe that it should shorten one's life. As to me this is why animals die at random points in time. Some animals have a, for lack of better choice of words, durable system.

~Kyoten

[Amnestic]

I personally don't see it as stopping OR slowing down the aging process. The magical effect on the cells in my opinion anyway simply resets the body to the point in time prior to the wounding effect.

It wouldn't necessarily halt or decrease the rate of aging beyond this point. Personal opinion of course!

~Kyoten

Wouldn't that also mean that with regeneration you can never learn anything new/advance in level? :smallconfused: Your body is constantly being reset after all - your body including your brain.

[kyoten]

Wouldn't that also mean that with regeneration you can never learn anything new/advance in level? :smallconfused: Your body is constantly being reset after all - your body including your brain.

Not exactly how I see it. You may not necessarily, going by this point of view, remember the exact cause/effect of the wound that was recovered you would however retain the memories of up to this point. That basis combined with the ebb and flow of combat and other risk would still provide you with plenty of opportunities to learn and thus level up.

~Kyoten

[Amnestic]

Not exactly how I see it. You may not necessarily, going by this point of view, remember the exact cause/effect of the wound that was recovered you would however retain the memories of up to this point. That basis combined with the ebb and flow of combat and other risk would still provide you with plenty of opportunities to learn and thus level up.

~Kyoten

Ah, so your version of regeneration only affects overt injuries as opposed to normal cell death from merely aging? Suppose that makes some sense.

[kyoten]

Jackpot!

~Kyoten

[kiryoku]

hmm i think this is too complex to ever figure out with out being able to examine a creature for a long time and it would take way past are life times to even part way understand it so i guess are way of thinking both have weight to them but its kind of pointless to discuss this anymore so i guess ill take the rules way of using it it heals and thats it.

[kyoten]

I'll keep tabs on the thread in case it continues. If you decide to let it pass on I would like to say that it has been a joyous thought exercise to be a part of.

[JamesonCourage]

Fast Healing
A creature with fast healing has the extraordinary ability to regain hit points at an exceptional rate. Except for what is noted here, fast healing is like natural healing.

At the beginning of each of the creature’s turns, it heals a certain number of hit points (defined in its description).

Unlike regeneration, fast healing does not allow a creature to regrow or reattach lost body parts. Unless otherwise stated, it does not allow lost body parts to be reattached.

A creature that has taken both nonlethal and lethal damage heals the nonlethal damage first.

Fast healing does not restore hit points lost from starvation, thirst, or suffocation.

Fast healing does not increase the number of hit points regained when a creature polymorphs.

Fast healing (the trait) is exactly the same as natural healing. Does healing wounds shorten someones lifespan, lengthen it, or about break even? Whatever you think, there's your answer.

[kyoten]

Kudos for the above post.

~Kyoten