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View Full Version : Age as a price in games



Segev
2015-03-10, 09:05 AM
I'm gonig to try to keep this relatively broad, though my specific inspiration for it stems from a moderately-common trope I've seen in some fantasy: namely the idea that using magic makes you age faster. (Chaos magic from the Recluse series and Mages from Denis L. McKiernan's Midkemia novels are two examples.) Conversely, in response to this, I'd positted to myself a magic system where the price of magic was the opposite: one gets younger the more magic one uses (and thus can recover from it, but it takes time - literally - to do so).

But just in general, "do this and it will cost X years of your life" or similar age-related costs come up in fantasy at times.

Modeling this in a game, however, is tricky. Sure, one-time curses are okay. "You age 10 years" is bad, but given that the game is still likely to only last a few in-setting years, it has minimal impact on actual playability of the character (provided this doesn't push age categories into uncomfortable stat adjustments).

But what if it's meant to be a resource that players can shepherd or use to fuel PC abilities? Whether it's magic, or a non-recoverable cost to make a particular power all the more precious and restrictive to use, or it's just some factor with which your setting plays, how much would things have to cost, and on what scale, to make it both playable and still a resource to be managed carefully?

It might be easier to treat it with the "get younger as you use it" perspective, because at least there's a built-in recovery mechanism. (You spent 1 year of age on that spell? You'll have it back in a year.)

But what would be reasonable "rates" to "charge" for varying levels of effect? How much and on what scale would the charges have to be for it to be enough to worry about spamming, but not so much that using it "reasonably" while on an adventure doesn't amount to permanently exhausting the character's resources insofar as the game's timeframe goes? (Sure, the mage who cast himself back into pubescence might recover in a decade, but the game's only going to last a few months of in-setting time.)

How would you scale it?

Ashtagon
2015-03-10, 09:11 AM
In AD&D 1st edition, casting a haste spell aged the target by three years. Wish aged the caster by ten years iirc.

I once contemplated this as a means to kill troublesome NPCs.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-10, 09:59 AM
It doesn't sound like much of a price to me. In a world like that I don't see how you would ever have mages old enough to cast more than a couple spells. As soon as any of them started feeling the effects of aging they would cast a spell or two to get back to an optimum. You would end up with a class of immortal, perpetually 25-year-olds.

Thrudd
2015-03-10, 10:11 AM
It doesn't sound like much of a price to me. In a world like that I don't see how you would ever have mages old enough to cast more than a couple spells. As soon as any of them started feeling the effects of aging they would cast a spell or two to get back to an optimum. You would end up with a class of immortal, perpetually 25-year-olds.

There isn't such a spell. They could try to craft potions that will reduce your age, but every time you drink one after the first, there's an increasing chance that it will have the reverse effect and age you a number of years equal to all those you had recovered via potions in the past!

NichG
2015-03-10, 10:14 AM
I'm currently running a game where every three sessions there's always a 15 year time-skip. So I suppose aging would actually be a reasonable price in that campaign. Methods of extending life expectancy are pretty common for PCs in that game however (and there's an advancement mechanism tied to dying anyhow), so it'd be more of a price for NPCs.

Segev
2015-03-10, 10:25 AM
It doesn't sound like much of a price to me. In a world like that I don't see how you would ever have mages old enough to cast more than a couple spells. As soon as any of them started feeling the effects of aging they would cast a spell or two to get back to an optimum. You would end up with a class of immortal, perpetually 25-year-olds.


There isn't such a spell. They could try to craft potions that will reduce your age, but every time you drink one after the first, there's an increasing chance that it will have the reverse effect and age you a number of years equal to all those you had recovered via potions in the past!

I think Maglubiyet's referring to "casting spells reduces your age" when he says it's not much of a price.

He's hitting on the dichotomy I'm seeing, as well, but he's missing that it's to conflicting extrema. If casting spells doesn't reduce your age by a lot, then mages just do it regularly and, if they feel themselves getting too old, cast some big ones or a ton of little ones to get back to a comfortable mid-20s. If it invariably costs a lot, then you never have mages who have more than a few spells "available" at a time...and then they have to wait inordinate amounts of time to be able to do it again.

AD&D did, indeed, have those spell effects; it meant fighters actually didn't want Haste all that much. (Though I recall Haste only being 1 year.) Unless they were elves or maybe dwarves.

It is a good example of how one or two effects with those costs can make them particularly unusual to use while still showing up dramatically. But as a general application thing, the calibration of how much is "too much" vs. how much is "not really a cost at all" is hard to judge with so large a potential pool and yet so sharp a limitation to it (once it's gone, it's gone).


But, IS there a happy middle ground, where the scaling of powerful effects for increasing costs in either age or youth are such that you can still use a few high-end effects in your career without having to retire for a while, and you can regularly (if moderately frugally) use your "everyday" effects, at least enough to remain archetypal?

Ashtagon
2015-03-10, 10:36 AM
AD&D did not iirc have any magical means to reliably reduce your age. There were potions of longevity (and presumably a matching spell somewhere in a splatbook). But you had a lifetime limit on how many of those you could consume. Each one added a cumulative percentage to the chance that consuming it would reverse all of them that you had ever consumed, at which point you'd probably die from rapid ageing.

Lord Torath
2015-03-10, 10:40 AM
It might be easier to treat it with the "get younger as you use it" perspective, because at least there's a built-in recovery mechanism. (You spent 1 year of age on that spell? You'll have it back in a year.)

But what would be reasonable "rates" to "charge" for varying levels of effect? How much and on what scale would the charges have to be for it to be enough to worry about spamming, but not so much that using it "reasonably" while on an adventure doesn't amount to permanently exhausting the character's resources insofar as the game's timeframe goes? (Sure, the mage who cast himself back into pubescence might recover in a decade, but the game's only going to last a few months of in-setting time.)

How would you scale it?This could be interesting, but you'd have to specify the effects of youthenizing (yes, youthenizing. Not euthanizing :smalltongue:) yourself back to childhood. At some point you'd be too young to cast any more spells. To prevent immortality, you could still have a maximum age unaffected by the youthenizing process. So mages would be in their 20's for 6-7 decades before suddenly dying of old age.

Essentially, you're placing a "cooldown" time on your spellcasting. If casting a 1st-level spell youthenizes you 1 week, you can effectively only cast 1 first level spell per week. I'd expect most adventuring mages to always be right at the threshold of being too young to cast. I don't think this is a caster I'd be interested in playing.

AD&D did not iirc have any magical means to reliably reduce your age. There were potions of longevity (and presumably a matching spell somewhere in a splatbook). But you had a lifetime limit on how many of those you could consume. Each one added a cumulative percentage to the chance that consuming it would reverse all of them that you had ever consumed, at which point you'd probably die from rapid ageing.There was also the Elixir of Youth, which removed 1d4+1 years of aging (natural or unnatural) with no risk of backlash.

AmberVael
2015-03-10, 10:43 AM
But, IS there a happy middle ground, where the scaling of powerful effects for increasing costs in either age or youth are such that you can still use a few high-end effects in your career without having to retire for a while, and you can regularly (if moderately frugally) use your "everyday" effects, at least enough to remain archetypal?

I think yes. Or maybe no, it depends on how you look at it, but I think you could implement such a concept and make it work.

The problem that's been hit on here is that the passage of time in any given game is unreliable- some games might have long periods of inaction, others might not, so adjusting an exact age cost is difficult. So my thought is "lets strip out actual age as problem entirely." Basically, rather than having the immediate problem people deal with being losing years, have it be losing vitality. Having more years to your name is not necessarily the biggest problem- I knew of a man in his hundreds who was more physically sound than a lot of people half his age- but having your youth and vigor sapped away sounds pretty fearsome.

So essentially, you'd use two separate systems for this idea. One system simply costs a portion of your life, prematurely aging you. This system would not be intended as a method of balance, but more as flavor. With this in mind, you could have the cost per spell or use or what have you be relatively low. The other system represents the effects that such a drain has on you- sure, maybe you only aged a month or even a day, but that's a hit. You'd feel the difference, and it would take its toll. This second system would apply some penalty to you, whether temporary or otherwise (fatigue, pains- something aging appropriate). You'd feel that weight of time and decay pressing down on you if you used your powers too much, regardless of how much time you'd have left. This second system would be the balancing point.

The appeal to this system is that it has immediate effect. A character would be capable of interacting with the idea of the system- of the weight of age and its infirmities- without necessarily being subjected to that final toll at every single turn. It would make you have to worry less about balancing "you get this many charges of power before you drop dead" absolutely perfectly, because that wouldn't be the balancing point of the system.

Flickerdart
2015-03-10, 10:45 AM
Casting off age is the metagamiest resource possible, because it's not the age of your characters that matters. Rather, it's the time frame of the campaign, because every year your character "lives" after Big Bad McGee has been vanquished is a year that you could've used to cast something.

Kid Jake
2015-03-10, 10:50 AM
I find the idea of everyone looking at an 80 year old sorcerer with extra-awe, because he's got sooo much magic saved up exceptionally amusing.

DigoDragon
2015-03-10, 10:59 AM
I wonder if this means all the powerful spellcasters are now elves? They'd be able to scoff at a mere 3-year cost casting a Haste spell. :3

aspekt
2015-03-10, 11:07 AM
I think first you'd need a reliable means of tracking age along with its deleterious effects in the campaign that players could count in a consistent manner.

TheCountAlucard
2015-03-10, 11:11 AM
youthenizingThis pun is terrible and you should feel terrible. :smalltongue:

Shadowrun has treatments to help the rich man kick Father Time's ass - Leonization, named after explorer Ponce de Leon.

In this case, I think it's a better fit than that terrible pun. :smalltongue:

Lord Torath
2015-03-10, 11:32 AM
This pun is terrible and you should feel terrible. :smalltongue:

Shadowrun has treatments to help the rich man kick Father Time's ass - Leonization, named after explorer Ponce de Leon.

In this case, I think it's a better fit than that terrible pun. :smalltongue:I'm afraid I can't take credit for that pun. That goes to the King of Puns, Pier Xanthany (Piers Anthony), author of the pun-filled Xanth (http://xanth.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page) series.

Segev
2015-03-10, 02:03 PM
I keep wondering if "Youth In Asia" is a band.


As for the "get younger when you cast spells" effect, it probably isn't essentially required that it should FAIL to provide extended lifespan. Fiction is rife with long-lived sorcerers and wizards and witches. The sole real consequence this would have is the removal of the attractiveness of undeath and other immortlity/death-cheating schemes, since it's part and parcel of being a mage.

Particularly from a PC perspective, nobody really cares that the elf will outlive the human by generations of the latter's family tree when there isn't noticeable aging in the timespan of the game.

But that also brings up the point that, yes, if it's based on real time age, elves would be a lot better at magic just for having more leeway to store it up. On the other hand, if it's based on some sort of growth factor, such that a spell that turns a teenaged human into a pre-teen human also turning an equivalently-mature elf to an equivalent pre-adolescent maturity, elves suddenly become WORSE at it, as it takes them longer to build it up.


Magey mcMagicpants of the party, in a "you get older as you use magic" setting, would meta-game wise have little reason to not go totally nova against the BBEG at the end of the campaign; you're right about that. Still, that is not necessarily a bad thing, if that's the kind of story you want to tell: how this great sacrifice was needed to put down the villain.

I am inclined, from a gamist standpoint, to not like "get older" as the resource, precisely because it's fixed and finite. Resources are generally best in RPGs when they are finite in the short term, but recoverable (and thus infinite in the long term).

"Get younger" can function like this...provided there is a proper calibration of cost/recovery that doesn't also overly reward recklessness.

I think what we need is to establish a unit of expected spell-use per day while "adventuring" (whatever taht means for the game in question). Let's be unoriginal and call it "mana." The expected spell-use per day will net cost a mage 1 "mana." (Mana obviously can be in fractional increments, since presumably more than one spell will be cast per day.)

The next step is to determine how "mana" translates to time, both gained and lost. That is, if a mage does nothing magical all day, how many mana does he regain? This should be symmetric with how much younger he gets for spending mana. (e.g. if it's 1 mana/day, then a mage spending 1 mana each day doesn't age, while one spending 2 mana/day gets younger at the rate that most people get older, and a mage doing no magic accumulates 1 mana per day.)

I believe it to be desirable that a mage who has been out adventuring for any extended period should wish to spend downtime recovering some age. That is, if he's expected to expend 1 mana/day, he should be expected to recover less than 1 mana/day. This is because, if the game were calibrated at "mages who are actively adventuring generally don't get older or younger," then it would be pretty easy to double, triple, or even septuple the output and not have it really impact the game play over the course of most campaigns.

If we assume the average starting age of most adventuring mages is in the early 20s (let's call it 20 even just for ease of math, and for now ignore non-human age rates), then it's safe to say that there are at least 10 "years" the mage can afford to lose before he starts to really and truly be falling into "can't adventure properly" territory.

It would help if we had some defined penalties for very young age, and established where we, as designers, feel even a magically-gifted little kid with a grown-up mind is too physically weak to be out adventuring. We don't have to be precise; a ball-park will do. Design the penalties for being so little such that the ballpark becomes a sliding scale into uselessness.

Physical penalties to stats might start to rack up below age 15. Size category loss happens at ages 11, 8, 5, and 3. Lose ability to walk at 1. Lose ability to talk sometime in the 2, 1, or infancy range.

Probably a touch of slippery slope, too: as you get weaker for being smaller, if you're adventuring you'll wind up relying more and moreo n magic to do things you could have done without it, before, hastening your decline.



So with that in mind, how long should a mage's expected downtime/recovery time be between adventures? Obviously, the nature of this will make it a function of how long he was adventuring - if he spends 1 mana per day, it's a function of regained-mana-per-day to recover what he spent.

The simplest, here, would be to say, "For every day adventuring, he should need a day of rest." If N(k) is how much mana he has at the end of day k, and his expected expenditure while adventuring is fixed at 1, while he recovers r per day, then:

N(k)=N(k-1)+r-1 while adventuring.

While doing no magic at all, N(k) = N(k-1)+r.

So the rate of change in effective mana available is (r-1)/day while adventuring, and +r/day during dedicated magicless downtime.

If it takes 1 day of magicless rest per day of adventuring to stay the same net age at the end of one such cycle, then r-1 = -r.

So r would be 0.5. Or the recovery rate would be half the expected expenditure per day. Or a mage would be expected to expend 2 days' worth of age on magic every day of adventuring.

This is likely too low. It would be possibly to greatly exceed that over the course of a campaign and not reduce one's age by even 5 years. Consider that many campaigns happen over the course of a month to two years.

Let's say an intense adventure - one where PCs are expending their various resources at the expected daily rate every day - lasts between 2 and 5 days. They usually rest at least a month after that, in most "typical" dungeon-crawling games, right?

So let's say it should take 30 days to break even after spending 1 mana/day for 3 days. That would make r = 0.1 mana. Expending 1 mana per day would net cost .9 mana per day; mages who are practicing an expected amount of magic for adventuring will get 9 days younger every day of adventure.

The next step, I think, to really examining whether that's the right rate to plan for is to see how many days it would take before the youthening effect would become "noticeable." Looking again at "early 20s" as the general expected age for functional mage-class adventurers... is a year enough to be "noticeable?"

With r=0.1, it would take 40 days of "standard" adventuring for a year to fall away. 19 days if spending at twice the intended rate.

One could expend at 5x the "standard" rate and lose a whole year only after a solid week of adventuring.

So that's probably too low.


But, perhaps other mitigating factors can be added in. Maybe there's a non-linear scaling of cost to power of magic. So the "standard" rate might assume one or more 4-7 level spells, and not generally assume even 1 8-9, but assume a largish number of 0-3. Doubling the number of 8-9 level spells per day might actually do more than quintuple the amount you "expect" to spend.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-10, 02:06 PM
I keep wondering if "Youth In Asia" is a band.

Yes, yes it was (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_in_Asia).

Aedilred
2015-03-10, 02:13 PM
Essentially, you're placing a "cooldown" time on your spellcasting. If casting a 1st-level spell youthenizes you 1 week, you can effectively only cast 1 first level spell per week. I'd expect most adventuring mages to always be right at the threshold of being too young to cast. I don't think this is a caster I'd be interested in playing.

I guess it's horses for courses. That sounds really interesting to me. A week is perhaps a bit much for a first-level spell, but how about a scaling effect: only a day for a cantrip, but three days for a first-level; nine for a second-level; and on from there. By the time you get to sixth-level you're losing a couple of years every time you cast a spell; ninth-level spells are the sort of thing you can only do once per normal human lifetime. Perhaps vary the effects depending on the spell in question a little, and maybe mix it up by school a bit, but as a general benchmark.

At a lowish level it's really not a problem, and an adventuring wizard can easily maintain a healthy livelihood. But in high-pressure situations his magic suddenly becomes a highly finite resource, and blowing it will cost him not just for the next few days but possibly the next few decades. It gives a wizard a reason to spend a lot of time studying; not just because there's a lot of the time when he doesn't want to be casting spells, but so he can work out how to use his spells more effectively.

And when he's not saving the world or whatever he has to deal with people treating him as a kid when in fact he's twice their age and possesses the theoretical power to unmake their existence.

It wouldn't work in all campaigns; certainly if the rest of the party are humans they're not going to have time to wait ten years for him to prepare every sixth-level spell. But it could be interesting in longer-term ones with longer-lived PCs, and also help to rein in caster supremacy a bit.

Talakeal
2015-03-10, 02:33 PM
I personally hate aging as a game mechanic. It doesn't serve as a balancing mechanic as most power gamers don't care about their characters age and it simply dissuades people who actually want to play a young character from RPing.

From an IC perspective reversing the process is a bit nicer as you get healthier and cuter instead of withered and decrepit, and it expands rather than shortens your time on Earth, but from a practical matter it has the exact same problems.

Most RPGs consider mortality to be sacrosanct. D&D is pretty uniform in that effects that reduce aging don't actually extend your life span, and most of the methods that legitimately expand your time on earth are branded as arbitrarily evil, unnatural, and prone to marut intervention. Even in a lot of other games where players are free to go crazy with magic like Exalted and Riddle of Steel make you jump through huge hoops to reverse aging if they are possible at all. Even in Mage, where arch-mages are so powerful a lot of their higher end spells are hard for me to even comprehend, only have extremely limited and dangerous methods of preserving or restoring youth.

Flickerdart
2015-03-10, 02:34 PM
By the time you get to sixth-level you're losing a couple of years every time you cast a spell; ninth-level spells are the sort of thing you can only do once per normal human lifetime.
Anything with a cooldown timer measured in years isn't a character power, but a plot device.

LibraryOgre
2015-03-10, 03:12 PM
In AD&D 1st edition, casting a haste spell aged the target by three years. Wish aged the caster by ten years iirc.

I once contemplated this as a means to kill troublesome NPCs.

Haste aged you by a year... and, if you went strictly by the rules, had a chance of killing you (since magical aging forced a system shock roll).

veti
2015-03-10, 04:13 PM
I wonder if this means all the powerful spellcasters are now elves? They'd be able to scoff at a mere 3-year cost casting a Haste spell. :3

Would have been, except that 1e elves capped out at 11th level as magic-users (and couldn't be clerics at all, and clerics had some of the most punishing costs - casting a Resurrection, Regeneration or Restoration would take a few years off your life, with the result - in my early campaigns, at least - that those spells were basically non-existent, because anyone capable of casting them would demand truly colossal amounts of money for doing it. The only creatures that could cast them comfortably, per the Monster Manual, were extra-planar - which of course was one good reason for doing a deal with a devil.)

But it's being the subject of a Haste spell, not casting it, that aged you.

LibraryOgre
2015-03-10, 05:03 PM
Hmmm... casting spells ages you a number of days equal to the square of the level (1 for level 1, 81 for 9th level). Wizards and clerics must keep track of a separate age, totaling up the days they've aged... which only applies for physical penalties; their real age applies for mental adjustments.

Still going to give elves and such a huge advantage. It might be interesting if different races have different reactions to spellcasting... humans age, but maybe elves take Con damage?

Zale
2015-03-11, 04:22 AM
Dying of old age halfway through a game because I had the gall to use my class features does sound ever so fun, don't you think?

Any wizard worth their intelligence score will realize that the only winning move is not to play.

Aedilred
2015-03-11, 07:42 AM
Dying of old age halfway through a game because I had the gall to use my class features does sound ever so fun, don't you think?

Any wizard worth their intelligence score will realize that the only winning move is not to play.

With the general tenor of normal conversation around here, I'm surprised that's seen as a problem.

So long as you're aware of the rule in advance and the campaign is adjusted to compensate, I don't see why it would be too much of an issue. It just means the wizard has to marshal their resources better and plan for the long term rather than just the next 24 hours.

It's still a trade-off many people would be prepared to make, IC: you burn your candle half as long but twice as brightly, trading longevity for glory and power. It's basically the Achilles deal.

Lord Torath
2015-03-11, 07:55 AM
Dying of old age halfway through a game because I had the gall to use my class features does sound ever so fun, don't you think?

Any wizard worth their intelligence score will realize that the only winning move is not to play.Unless you can figure out a way to let someone else take the drain for you. There was a series of books that used this mechanic, but I only read the first one, and I don't recall the title/author.
There were dragon/insect things that could somehow bond with a caster and let them cast more often, and these people lived behind a magical barrier where they preyed on a simple human population. The magical barrier was erected by others to keep them away, and was slowly breaking down (I know, shocker!). Mages outside the barrier would pay others to take their drain for them, and take care of their "thrall's" families. Ring any bells?

Segev
2015-03-11, 10:39 AM
One good point - amongst many - that has been brought up is the long-term resource management. That's what the issue with designing an "age" based cost-mechanic really is: it's a long-term resource, and replenishes slowly if at all.

Balancing a long-term resource is tricky. The costs have to be real enough that the long-term resource's eventual exhaustion is a concern, but low enough that it doesn't feel like every use of it is character-damaging. High enough that people won't spam it, but low enough that using it isn't a life-or-death consideration every time it comes up.

Jay R
2015-03-11, 11:21 AM
I think it's a lousy mechanic. It's either going to have no effect, or it's likely to eventually make the character unplayable. Neither improves the game.

Knaight
2015-03-11, 11:29 AM
There are specific games where I could see this working; outside of that specific type it gets sketchier. The big one is games that are explicitly set across generations. For instance, Pendragon will often have you playing a character, one of their children, one of their grand children, and maybe eventually one of their great grand children. If that's the paradigm in the game, aging has a real cost. The character will die before their time, and for a while the player will end up using a replacement character that is weaker. It's similar to the balancing of troupe play, almost.

With that said, the vast majority of games don't fit in that paradigm. In these more conventional games, avoid it.

warty goblin
2015-03-11, 11:43 AM
Unless you can figure out a way to let someone else take the drain for you. There was a series of books that used this mechanic, but I only read the first one, and I don't recall the title/author.
There were dragon/insect things that could somehow bond with a caster and let them cast more often, and these people lived behind a magical barrier where they preyed on a simple human population. The magical barrier was erected by others to keep them away, and was slowly breaking down (I know, shocker!). Mages outside the barrier would pay others to take their drain for them, and take care of their "thrall's" families. Ring any bells?

That sounds a lot like the Magister Trilogy by C.S. Friedman. I made it through the first book and part of the second, but found it generally sort of terrible.

Although in that series the wizards just leeched onto the life force of a completely random person, and it was straight up "I'm going to suck this person dry because I want to do magic and don't feel like dying for it." No compensation or getting the consent of the abridged peasant. So basically every single main character was a serial killer. There was also some more or less annoying gender stuff - only men were psychopathic enough to do this, except for the Magic Prostitute Lady pseudo-protagonist, who had been abused enough to get in touch with her inner vampire and start sucking dudes dry. Apparently a lifetime of sexual trauma has roughly the same effect as testosterone. Who knew, right? Naturally most the male wizards also had massive superiority complexes on account of being male and sucking people dry and were therefore better than the weaker women casters - and you could sort the good mass murderers from the bad mass murderers by how patriarchal they were - so the Magic Prostitute Lady using her abuse-granted powers of non-empathy to kill random people for fun and profit was a total blow for gender equality, or something.

The plot of the first book was the protagonist woman getting her vampire-magic mojo online, and discovering that her randomly selected victim was a prince, whom in a rarity for the book wasn't a completely vile person. Only maybe 70% vile. Predictable drama ensued, everybody but the protagonist lady died, she learned the important lesson of never getting attached to the people she leeches, and is thereby rewarded with a completely anonymous peasant half a world away to drain next.

The second book remembers that this is supposed to be epic fantasy, so some bad dudes had better invade from the North post-haste. his naturally requires a vaguely repressed but totally awesome and nearly extinct culture of incredibly boring people to protect all the total psychopaths down south from the horrible things beyond the ancient magic barrier. The bad guys on the other side of the ancient magical barrier used exactly the same magic as the other wizards, but had lizard-butterfly things that let them drain more people at once if I'm remembering right. So basically if the bad guys won the entire world would be enslaved by a hegemony of nearly immortal spellcasters who ate people's life-force like breathmints. If the guys with the lizard-butterflies won, it would be exactly the same, but a lot less civilized about it. Since by this point I hated basically everybody, and foresaw some sort of boring socio-economic commentary coming up, I jumped ship at about this point.

Yeah, skip that series. At least Terry Goodkind made it an entire book or so before his heroes became essentially indistinguishable from the villains.

Boost
2015-03-11, 11:45 AM
What you're really looking for is a tangible, measurable trait that a player would consider to be of value, in such a way that they won't want to squander it on their spells unless they really have to. Age will never work like that since it's almost always a pointless variable in an RPG. However, there is an already-existing mechanic that basically does the same thing: XP cost for spells.

The XP cost of a spell essentially serves the same purpose that you're describing. It means that the spell is draining you in some way that can make you weaker... literally weaker, since if you keep casting spells with XP costs on a regular basis, you'll soon lag behind the rest of the party in levels. Sure, you can eventually catch back up, but there's a good chance you'll remain behind the rest of the party for a long time if you continue using high-XP-cost spells.

There's no point in developing a separate mechanic to do the same thing with your age, since most players would happily squander their PC's years without regret since they don't need to live forever, only until the end of the campaign. But XP is something the player will treasure and be hesitant to squander.

Telonius
2015-03-11, 11:51 AM
Green Star Adepts might actually have a reason to exist. Undead casters would be really frightening (100 castings of Haste will get me to the next Undead Evolution level? Yes please!)

Segev
2015-03-11, 11:56 AM
I think it's a lousy mechanic. It's either going to have no effect, or it's likely to eventually make the character unplayable. Neither improves the game.

Let's examine it without considering it as "age," then, and think of it as MP.

In most games that use MP, you have an MP cost per spell, an MP pool, and a recovery rate for MP. (D&D 3.5e uses a daily pool that fully recharges for psionics, and has a rigid PP cost per power level.)

The short-term limit is your MP pool, mitigated by the recharge mechanic. There is no long-term limit.

If you increase the size of the pool, you can moderate the effective limits by making its recovery rate be such that it takes longer to refill said pool.

For instance, if you have an MP pool of 1000, and recover 1 MP/hour, you could nova your MP pool and take 1000 hours (or 41 days, 16 hours) to completely recover. Of course, if spells cost in the 1-50 range of MP as a general rule, you likely consider yourself "recovered" for most purposes much sooner.

The key is expected expenditure rate vs. recovery rate.

As a player of a mage in such a system, you likely measure your daily expenditure of MP such that you're goal is to spend no more than 24 MP per day. You likely also are willing to spend more - perhaps far more - if you can be sure that you can spend less in the near future to give yourself time to recover.

As a designer of a game using such a system, your goal is likely to be certain that the expected ability to spend MP a lot on an "on screen" day is offset by a sufficient length of downtime needed to recover from it that it could run into the next "on screen" set of events without fully recovering if the expenditure is too high.

So, really, the question is, what SHOULD you balance for? If you have an expected "burn per normal adventuring day," how much should it be possible to exceed this for moments in extremis? How much should a cost that might not be fully recovered really be?

If you have 10,000 MP, how low would you be willing to go in expending this, knowing you only get 1 back per hour? If you have a feel for how many MP you tend to get back over, say, a month of mixed activity (adventuring and downtime), how much are you willing to exceed this by, knowing that you're probably semi-permanently reducing your MP total? How far down are you willing to push it for just making a tough fight easier? How bad would it have to be for you to be willing to push it into a zone where you might not be able to recover to your usual daily output for a few sessions?

Or should resources be capped in small pools with high recharge rates, instead? Is that just the superior way to balance them?

Can long-term resources be managed meaningfully in a game?

How does the time scale of the game have to compare to the time scale of the resource management for it to work?

It's been said a generational game could make age-based costs feasible. It's arguable that D&D's daily cost-refresh is too generous for the time-scale on which it operates, since multiple days pass per adventure. The idea behind encounter powers is to balance it with short-term, small-cap resources which recover quickly.

But hit points never have worked like that; they've always been, at BEST, daily-limited (if only because spells were, and healing magic could usually fully restore a party in at most a day).

Measurement of time scale of resource management vs. time scale of game could be interesting, if a theory and mathematical model-analysis could be adequately explored and constructed.

CarpeGuitarrem
2015-03-11, 12:06 PM
The main problem, in my mind, is that time doesn't seem to matter until it adds up in big chunks. Get a year older? Eh, no big, there's not much of a difference between me now and me a year ago, physically. Get ten years older? Noticeable, though not debilitating. Twenty years older? Well gee, what just happened? That could be an interesting story catalyst, but you need to attach some sort of meaningful concrete effect to it.

What happens when you gain 10 years of age? Do you get an "aging trait"? Do you lose stats? IMO losing stats is a boring option, because having 16 Strength instead of 18 Strength really doesn't add to the narrative and it just acts as punishment. On the other hand, gaining a unique trait from aging (arthritis?) is memorable and distinct and easy to play out.

Though I do agree with Jay R, this is not a good all-purpose magic system--it needs to be something that fits well into the game, and it does make casters something of a trap option for people who don't see it coming.

Segev
2015-03-11, 12:08 PM
What you're really looking for is a tangible, measurable trait that a player would consider to be of value, in such a way that they won't want to squander it on their spells unless they really have to. Age will never work like that since it's almost always a pointless variable in an RPG. However, there is an already-existing mechanic that basically does the same thing: XP cost for spells.

The XP cost of a spell essentially serves the same purpose that you're describing. It means that the spell is draining you in some way that can make you weaker... literally weaker, since if you keep casting spells with XP costs on a regular basis, you'll soon lag behind the rest of the party in levels. Sure, you can eventually catch back up, but there's a good chance you'll remain behind the rest of the party for a long time if you continue using high-XP-cost spells.

There's no point in developing a separate mechanic to do the same thing with your age, since most players would happily squander their PC's years without regret since they don't need to live forever, only until the end of the campaign. But XP is something the player will treasure and be hesitant to squander.

This is a valid point, but really only applies in D&D and its close kin.

Still, from a mechanical analysis standpoint, using D&D as a baseline, this could be a good way to measure long-term resource management.

Comparing the exp minima for each level to the number and level of spells a pure caster would be expected to cast...

Figure out how many encounters it should take, in theory, to gain the next level. Divide that by 4 to determine how many days it should take. Multiply that by the daily spell slots for the caster.

This should tell us how many spells a given caster is expected to cast while adventuring over the course of a given level. While making it cost exactly that level's worth of experience points to cover all those castings is too much (because he'd never level up!), it does provide an upper bound for exp costs for each spell slot at each level.

How much more than the daily alotment of spells they normally would get should a caster be able to do at all, if they're willing to utterly exhaust their exp reserve? 2x? 3x? 10x?

If a 15th level caster is content to never level up again, how many mroe spells/day should he have access to than a wizard trying to achieve the expected level-up cycle?

And how much do we want the "expected" castings of spells to slow down a caster compared to a non-caster? This is intrinsically linked to the earlier question about how much they shoudl be able to exceed that expectation.

Set it, say, so that it takes half the exp it costs to get from level 15 to level 16 in order to cast the number of spells at various levels that a level 15 wizard would be expected to cast over the course of that level, and you're also saying that a caster who is content to forever be level 15 could cast twice that many. You're also saying casters should level up at half the rate of non-casters.

Calibrate it so that a caster "should" level up 2/3 as fast as non-casters, and one who is content never to level up could cast 3x as many spells per day "safely."

Calibrate it so that a caster who casts a mere 1.5x as many spells/day as he "should" never levels up, and you've set it so that casters casting as they "should" level up at 1/3 the pace of non-casters.

It IS an interesting metric to use. And while I'd like to eventually return to the question of age (because it's something that players WILL care about if it's pressing against the boundaries of playability at some point), it makes for an easier-to-grasp resource to discuss exp for the moment.

Segev
2015-03-11, 12:14 PM
The main problem, in my mind, is that time doesn't seem to matter until it adds up in big chunks. Get a year older? Eh, no big, there's not much of a difference between me now and me a year ago, physically. Get ten years older? Noticeable, though not debilitating. Twenty years older? Well gee, what just happened? That could be an interesting story catalyst, but you need to attach some sort of meaningful concrete effect to it.

What happens when you gain 10 years of age? Do you get an "aging trait"? Do you lose stats? IMO losing stats is a boring option, because having 16 Strength instead of 18 Strength really doesn't add to the narrative and it just acts as punishment. On the other hand, gaining a unique trait from aging (arthritis?) is memorable and distinct and easy to play out.Consider that going the other way also could make the cap harsher: If you're not-quite middle aged, you a year ago and you now isn't that different, but you 10 years ago...that's a change. Nothing that's going to impede you, really, yet, but it's definitely noticeable.

You 20 years ago...now you're at teen, at most. You're going to start running into people treating you like a kid, and might have physical penalties to stats due to underdeveloped body. Push that another 5 years and you're pretty much a kid. 5 years more and you're a LITTLE kid.

Where you draw the line of "acceptability" in terms of minimum apparent age to be actively adventuring is a bit of a personal choice, though the physical penalties could rack up.

The long-term resource management question, though, comes in when you ask, "How much did I have to exceed my 'normal' usage to plummet all the way back to teenagerhood? Or was that due to extended normal usage? If so, how much do I have to cut back to maintain a more reasonable even keel over the long term?"

And calibrating costs of magic to make sure there is a sustainable rate that isn't trivially exceeded, but which can be exceeded on occasion, is tricky at best.


Though I do agree with Jay R, this is not a good all-purpose magic system--it needs to be something that fits well into the game, and it does make casters something of a trap option for people who don't see it coming.Oh, it absolutely would have to be baked into the setting. The consequences of magic operating that way would inevitably change how mages are viewed and how they use their powers. It certainly should not catch anybody by surprise; like any mechanic governing PC resources, players should know about it going in.

veti
2015-03-11, 03:32 PM
Though I do agree with Jay R, this is not a good all-purpose magic system--it needs to be something that fits well into the game, and it does make casters something of a trap option for people who don't see it coming.

Obviously it's not something you can reasonably spring on people after they've decided to play a caster, just as a random gotcha...

But if you declare it up-front as part of your magic system, and players choose to go into it with their eyes open, I really don't see the issue with that.

Talakeal
2015-03-11, 03:34 PM
Another problem with this system is you are going to have a lot of adults in children's bodies. If your campaign has a lot of violence (to say nothing of sexuality!) you are going to get into situations that make a lot of players very uncomfortable.

Tarlek Flamehai
2015-03-11, 03:48 PM
The getting younger as a cost seems frivolous to me. Getting older as a cost, could be a great mechanic for a low-magic world. Yes, every mage will want to be an elf....unless elven mages are considered a community resource and not allowed to go adventuring.

This has me thinking of the Dance of the Gods series by Mayer Allen Brenner. Magic (actually a sufficiently advanced nano technology) was fueled by energy...which the wizard had to provide. In general this was done through expending calories. You could literally starve yourself to death through over casting. Specialist wizards were able to offset some of their magic cost through their specialty. A "frost mage" might burn kinetic energy from the environment or his target to partially fuel his castings. A "necromancer" might burn the heat energy released by decomposing corpses. I was thought this would make a very flavorful RPG magic system.

LibraryOgre
2015-03-11, 04:15 PM
Obviously it's not something you can reasonably spring on people after they've decided to play a caster, just as a random gotcha...

But if you declare it up-front as part of your magic system, and players choose to go into it with their eyes open, I really don't see the issue with that.

Oh, gods no, this wouldn't be a gotcha. This would be a known and established cost of spellcasting.


Another problem with this system is you are going to have a lot of adults in children's bodies. If your campaign has a lot of violence (to say nothing of sexuality!) you are going to get into situations that make a lot of players very uncomfortable.

With aging being a cost, I think you'd find the opposite... a lot of children in adult bodies. However, assuming you calibrate the length of apprenticeships right (say, 15 years), you wind up with a lot of young adults in prematurely old bodies.

Lord Torath
2015-03-11, 04:25 PM
With aging being a cost, I think you'd find the opposite... a lot of children in adult bodies. However, assuming you calibrate the length of apprenticeships right (say, 15 years), you wind up with a lot of young adults in prematurely old bodies.Talakeal was referring to the propsed mechanic where casting spells makes you younger, not older.

Talakeal
2015-03-11, 04:28 PM
Oh, gods no, this wouldn't be a gotcha. This would be a known and established cost of spellcasting.



With aging being a cost, I think you'd find the opposite... a lot of children in adult bodies. However, assuming you calibrate the length of apprenticeships right (say, 15 years), you wind up with a lot of young adults in prematurely old bodies.

I was talking about the reverse aging in the OP.

Although, if advanced aging was a common balancing mechanic you probably would see a lot of pcs starting at the minimum age in an effort to game the system.

Segev
2015-03-13, 10:32 AM
Although, if advanced aging was a common balancing mechanic you probably would see a lot of pcs starting at the minimum age in an effort to game the system.

Indeed. The ability to choose your starting age would become a game-the-system element, as starting old would be optimal for a system wherein magic made you younger, and starting young would be optimal for a system wherein magic made you older.

The trickiest issue for me remains calibrating the long-term resource such that it is a limit that is felt enough that players wouldn't spam it, but such that it is not so sharply limited that each expenditure feels like it's going to make them have to retire the character if they even try to use his gifts.

Storm_Of_Snow
2015-03-13, 10:56 AM
This has me thinking of the Dance of the Gods series by Mayer Allen Brenner. Magic (actually a sufficiently advanced nano technology) was fueled by energy...which the wizard had to provide. In general this was done through expending calories. You could literally starve yourself to death through over casting. Specialist wizards were able to offset some of their magic cost through their specialty. A "frost mage" might burn kinetic energy from the environment or his target to partially fuel his castings. A "necromancer" might burn the heat energy released by decomposing corpses. I was thought this would make a very flavorful RPG magic system.
Sounds a bit like Dark Sun, with mages ripping energy out of the surrounding environment to power their spells.

As an alternative, I guess you could put in place ways to offset the aging effects - say for something like a Wish, you might need to perform a ritual before hand or have specific items present (rare and costly, and either single use or a long time to recharge) that will protect you, or, if you're evil, you could possibly redirect the aging off into someone else.

That way, if you're utterly prepared, you can do it without penalty, but if you need to do it in a hurry, you still can.

Erth16
2015-03-14, 11:18 AM
What if the ageing wasn't just one way, or if you never mentally aged, so say we have this green wizard who wants to show off and casts a few spells and ends up 40, from being say 30. Well maybe in those 10 years he would have researched a spell that would shorten his life span, but at the cost of his knowledge of it, and ageing back up would get him the knowledge back. So say this elf lives for 300 years researching his spells before going out into the world, casts his stronger, youthening spells that he discovered in his later years of study, and then to be able to use them again had to age up some more in order to cast them again, using his weaker spells. This system would work better in a setting where all races had similar lifespans, but it could work elsewhere, with say a human wizard not having as many powerful spells in his repertoire at once, but being able to use them far more often, and of course, whenever you hit your hard lifespan, you die, this will be something the players know, through a basic divination spell I guess, and they could try saving their more powerful spells up for a little bit to go nova, but if they wait too long, they die.

CarpeGuitarrem
2015-03-14, 12:55 PM
Obviously it's not something you can reasonably spring on people after they've decided to play a caster, just as a random gotcha...

But if you declare it up-front as part of your magic system, and players choose to go into it with their eyes open, I really don't see the issue with that.
Well, I didn't mean "gotcha", I meant "trap option": some people like playing awesome spellslingers, and you have to make a specific point of saying that this is a game where those just don't exist. Putting the age price on it goes part of the way there, but you really need to hammer it in as part of the overall setting and design of the game.

There are plenty of people out there who won't realize the true price of spellcasting in your game until they're well into it, and they've cast enough spells that they're a few spells away from plummeting into decrepitness. At which point their characters no longer have anything interesting going for them in terms of mechanical abilities. That's what I mean by "trap option": you don't realize the full implications until you've played with it some.

Segev
2015-03-16, 08:45 AM
Not directly related, but playing with the long-term resource management thing...

There's an anime - Maburaho - wherein magic is a bloodline-related thing. People have two traits to their magic (if they have it at all): the power of the spells they can cast, and the number they can cast in their lifetime.

Magic seems to largely be a matter of wishing something to happen, and it does...as long as it's within your power limits (which are ill-defined, as is the case in many fictional works). The main character's power is such that his spells can apparently affect things on a global scale and even bring back the dead.

The finite number of times you can cast magic is also fixed - you get N of them, period. This is detectable by devices the setting has which count how many spells you have left in you. If you cast the last one, you disappear forever.

The setting's class of people typically thought of as mages have tens of thousands of uses of magic in their lifetime, if not hundreds of thousands.

The main character has 8 uses, period.


I wonder how hard such a system would be to balance for game use. How many uses of magic in a lifetime would be needed to make it "functionally infinite," how many would be so few that you'd not use magic really much at all, and how many would be just enough that you use it a "reasonable" number of times per session?

(This is, of course, further distorted by the reality of RPGs: the player will never use the character again after the game is over, and even the best-intentioned role-player will ahve to judge how much magic the character would want to "reserve" for the rest of his life. More power-gaming types might not care as long as they keep that last important one so their character doesn't die, so burn through all or nearly all of them by the end of the game even if it was something more reasonably expected to last them through decades more of life.)

Thialfi
2015-03-16, 09:21 AM
I've never been a fan of this mechanic. I tend to put myself in the place of my characters and this is a price that I would never pay. If the party wizard aged my character a year with a haste spell, he/she better damned well be convinced that we would have died unless the spell was cast or there is going to be some serious party conflict. All those cleric spells with aging penalties? Good luck getting my cleric to cast them on your character.

Flickerdart
2015-03-16, 09:23 AM
I wonder how hard such a system would be to balance for game use. How many uses of magic in a lifetime would be needed to make it "functionally infinite," how many would be so few that you'd not use magic really much at all, and how many would be just enough that you use it a "reasonable" number of times per session?
I frown upon systems that balance power with frequency, in general. Sure, it's cool to be a gun-slinging cowboy, but if your gun only has one bullet then you only actually get to play your character concept once. In 3.5 this is most obvious with the Paladin and Barbarian - the berserker can only berserk for a few seconds a day, and the stalwart warrior of justice can only punish evil with one hit a day. Of course, neither Rage nor Smite all are that strong, but that just makes it worse.

By comparison, I think something like Incarnum works really well - you get a small number of abilities, but then they last the entire day even at level 1. I think a system with long-term resource tracking would work well with an ability like this, where you only pay the cost every day/combat/dungeon delve/whatever per ability you want to turn on, and then reap the benefits of that payment for as long as you need to. Then it becomes less of "do I want to be awesome" and more "how awesome do I want to be" which plays a lot better next to the Fighter and the Rogue and the Ranger who get to contribute without taunting the grim reaper.

Segev
2015-03-16, 10:00 AM
This is not to argue, nor is the question rhetorical, but I do not understand what you mean by long-term resource tracking wrt incarnum-like abilities. Those are daily resources with 24 hour durations, effectively, not resources which are used up/recharged over a long period.

Flickerdart
2015-03-16, 11:13 AM
This is not to argue, nor is the question rhetorical, but I do not understand what you mean by long-term resource tracking wrt incarnum-like abilities. Those are daily resources with 24 hour durations, effectively, not resources which are used up/recharged over a long period.
I'm just using them as an example of how I think abilities with a long-term cost should work. If it helps, think of a DMM Persist Cleric instead, since they at least get the kind of power that would justify long-term costs. "Lose a day/month/year off your life to be huge and strong today" is a much easier pill to swallow than "lose a day/month/year off your life to shoot a laser at a guy once."

NichG
2015-03-16, 11:24 AM
This way lies interesting questions but difficult game design. I was about to ask 'would you play a character who has three uses of a power that lets them end the existence of any entity they can name, and thats their only power over the course of the character?', but I realized there's a better thing to do:

'How would you design a game to make the above work on a session-by-session basis, such that the character gains enough agency to be functional from the fact that they possess the power even if they never use it?'.

Segev
2015-03-16, 01:20 PM
This way lies interesting questions but difficult game design. I was about to ask 'would you play a character who has three uses of a power that lets them end the existence of any entity they can name, and thats their only power over the course of the character?', but I realized there's a better thing to do:

'How would you design a game to make the above work on a session-by-session basis, such that the character gains enough agency to be functional from the fact that they possess the power even if they never use it?'.

That is precisely the question to which I'm hoping we can figure out an answer.

I think the easiest abstraction remains a functionally cap-less mana pool with a recharge rate that is used to calibrate effective burn rate. Because that's sort-of what we're looking at: what ratio of recovery to expected burn per time period is feasible while not making exceeding that expected burn rate trivial?

Alternatively, given a recovery rate X and a starting pool Y with no cap to how much higher than Y your current total N can go, what might a player playing a wizard spend per time period if he expected the game to last for D in-game days? (D can be either very small or very large, as well as anything in between.) Consider that the larger D is, the more likely there will be down time where recovery rate X could be used to recover more efficiently than normal, compensating for higher "on screen" burn rates during adventuring times.

Echobeats
2015-03-16, 03:00 PM
Here's my idea ( for a good-aligned campaign).

"Good" spells make you older. "Evil" spells make you younger. Neutral spells do neither. The BBC is an evil mage who looks 19 but is actually millennia old.

Watch the ethical dilemmas unfold.

NichG
2015-03-16, 07:43 PM
That is precisely the question to which I'm hoping we can figure out an answer.

I think the easiest abstraction remains a functionally cap-less mana pool with a recharge rate that is used to calibrate effective burn rate. Because that's sort-of what we're looking at: what ratio of recovery to expected burn per time period is feasible while not making exceeding that expected burn rate trivial?

Alternatively, given a recovery rate X and a starting pool Y with no cap to how much higher than Y your current total N can go, what might a player playing a wizard spend per time period if he expected the game to last for D in-game days? (D can be either very small or very large, as well as anything in between.) Consider that the larger D is, the more likely there will be down time where recovery rate X could be used to recover more efficiently than normal, compensating for higher "on screen" burn rates during adventuring times.

I was going down a different line of thought. If we assume that the resource is rare enough that PCs will never actually want to use it, then all of the power derived from the resource must be in one of two forms: the threat of its use, or the long-term consequences of its use.

For the first, I think most players simply will not consider 'the threat of its use' to be a valid character power. It's a weird way to think compared to the smash in the door, everyone go nova on each-other style of play. So I think the system would need to really make it explicit just how much weight such a threat could have and give it explicit mechanics to show the players 'hey, this is actually the main part of the game, not the really crazy thing you can do 3 times in your life'

Here's an extreme case of the second: 'This character has a single use of a power that creates a new class or prestige class of the player's design, fully formed, and converts their existing eligible class levels into that class'. By definition this has a sufficient long-term effect to be viable because the long-term effect is to replace itself with viable mechanics. But its a bit of a silly case, so we could think of how to do that in a non-silly way.

One campaign I was in gave each player 5 points of 'Sark', which was distilled energy from the cosmic force of change and growth. A point of Sark could be expended to alter anything about the world whatsoever. This was a White Wolf based campaign, and one player used a point of Sark to make it so that everyone could gestalt into two different types of supernatural creature. Another player used one to change the history of the setting so that the Neverborn had never died in the first place. By the end of a 1.5 year campaign, we'd used about 2/3rds of our points (and of course the gimmick was that the end boss had a similar resource which he used directly in battle and we had to ration our remaining points to deal with his attacks and defenses). So that's an example of a case where a rare, limited resource was balanced 'about right'. But the power scale is way too much for most games.

veti
2015-03-16, 09:49 PM
This way lies interesting questions but difficult game design. I was about to ask 'would you play a character who has three uses of a power that lets them end the existence of any entity they can name, and thats their only power over the course of the character?', but I realized there's a better thing to do:

'How would you design a game to make the above work on a session-by-session basis, such that the character gains enough agency to be functional from the fact that they possess the power even if they never use it?'.

I'd say that's perfectly doable.

It would be hard to make it work in a D&D-like system, which is all about personal prowess and what you can do by the raw strength of your mind/voice/good right arm/etc. But in a game where individual characters are less massively powered, where you're expected to augment your abilities by intelligent planning, preparation, engineering - it'd be eminently reasonable. I'm thinking of games where even a basic grunt can make a difference in a combat - the character could still contribute to virtually all scenes, and could even master one or two sub-skills, such as diplomacy or trap-building, that would let them shine on plenty of occasions without using their "big" power.

The real danger is that they will decide to use their big power to shatter your entire plot into tiny teeny smithereens.

NichG
2015-03-17, 04:13 AM
I'd say that's perfectly doable.

It would be hard to make it work in a D&D-like system, which is all about personal prowess and what you can do by the raw strength of your mind/voice/good right arm/etc. But in a game where individual characters are less massively powered, where you're expected to augment your abilities by intelligent planning, preparation, engineering - it'd be eminently reasonable. I'm thinking of games where even a basic grunt can make a difference in a combat - the character could still contribute to virtually all scenes, and could even master one or two sub-skills, such as diplomacy or trap-building, that would let them shine on plenty of occasions without using their "big" power.

The real danger is that they will decide to use their big power to shatter your entire plot into tiny teeny smithereens.

A game with big powers like that doesn't have a 'plot' so much as it has a 'ground zero'. The interesting thing about such games is often what patterns the blast-shadows make when stuff finally blows up.

TheTeaMustFlow
2015-03-17, 05:57 AM
The Midkemia example is a little recursive, given that Midkemia was based on a D&D game, and might have based its magic = ageing on the spells in early editions that aged you (such as wish), though it's been a while since I read any of them.

I'm really not a fan of ageing as a cost, for pretty much the same reasons already said. De-ageing as a cost seems a little more interesting (and a lot less possibility-limiting), and mages getting youth/immortality is an idea with a long and glorious pedigree, but this has many of the same problems - essentially, it's too all or nothing.

Casting a spell and going from 35 to 34 costs you nothing. Casting a really big spell and going from 85 to 35? You're not reluctant to do that, you're looking for excuses to cast that spell. But going from 20 to 10 is crippling, and casting that 50-year spell when you're 35? That's all folks.

Either system applies a cost that is either negligible or massive, and I don't think that's a good dichotomy to have.

Segev
2015-03-17, 09:13 AM
Midkemia was based on a D&D gameI did not know that. Interesting.

Casting a spell and going from 35 to 34 costs you nothing. Casting a really big spell and going from 85 to 35? You're not reluctant to do that, you're looking for excuses to cast that spell. But going from 20 to 10 is crippling, and casting that 50-year spell when you're 35? That's all folks.

Either system applies a cost that is either negligible or massive, and I don't think that's a good dichotomy to have.

It's a bit weird, but true. You'd think, if you can identify "too much" and "too little," you could come up with something in between. But the actual swing-point between too little and too much is weirdly hard to identify.

I wouldn't, for example, be too sure you're looking for the excuse to cast the spell to drop from 85 to 35; after all, if you've stored up your years for that long, are you eager to use them all up in one go? That truly is a "once in a campaign" spell you'd be casting.

From a game optimization standpoint, though, you definitely have reason to start your character old. It's having "a full mana bar." That way you HAVE the potential to cast the 50-year spell at least once.

In fact, it would probably be part of character generation costs: you'd have to spend CP to have higher starting age.

This would also lead to an oddity that non-mages would pretty much all start in their prime - whatever the "0 CP" age is - because spending CP on something that makes you ONLY weaker is usually a bad idea. (And being 90 years old when you have no way to get younger is going to likely come with physical infirmities and no real benefits.)


One way to approach it would be to provide a way in-setting to "trade" for it: a spell that, perhaps imperfectly, allowed a mage to transfer somebody else's physical age to themselves. But that would reduce the "magic" (if you'll forgive the overloading of the term) of the cost, as...well, let's be honest: if mages could do that, people would PAY THEM to do so if the mages were not so profligate that it became rare to find people anywhere beyond their prime.


But again, the question lies in where the middle ground is. It's pretty clear that a mage who's managed to youthenize himself down to teens or younger is probably going to be using magic at a rate that is, at most, going to make him stay the same age. Getting much younger would be a genuine inconvenience. A 20-something or 30-something mage, on the other hand, might, in high stress situations where magic is more than merely convenient, be more willing to burn a decade or so off in the course of a few weeks.

Even if you spend CP to be older, it's a one-time purchase. There's no re-investing earned CP into regaining that age; it's solely governed by time passing in the game past the point of chargen. So the cost should be calibrated accordingly. (Effectively, CP spent this way represents the character having exerted the self-control needed to refrain from magic for that long.)

I'm thinking a "typical" mage's day-to-day use of magic might amount to cutting his age rate down to 3/4. That is, on any given day, he averages out to about 6 hours being "spent" on incidental, convenience magic plus whatever magic is used in his daily job (if he's got a day job). Active adventuring might raise this to as much as a month per "adventuring day," with most adventures taking 1-6 days and being followed by at least that much downtime.

That may be unrealistic, though; I know I've been in games where the "adventuring days" came one after another, with at most a week between them. But I also know there are games with months of downtime.

I'm inclined to calibrate it here, anyway, on the grounds that the campaigns which have extended "adventuring days" with no real downtime are still focusing on a rare highly active portion of the mage's life and career; years likely passed before, and will pass after, wherein he'll have a far less active time.

So the in-game burn rate that will probably leave him several years younger after all the use of his powers is not nearly so bad from that perspective.

This can be partially achieved by making "day-to-day" magics - utility and convenience things - take minutes to tens of minutes of age, and little more, while "combat" and "big" utility effects rapidly jump to the days level. Then, of course, would be the larger-scale, high-level effects which take weeks or months or even whole years.

If "years" are truly impressive effects, then it would be worthwhile to make advanced age particularly expensive to purchase, as you're buying uses of the Really Big Spells at that point.

Flickerdart
2015-03-17, 09:39 AM
One way to approach it would be to provide a way in-setting to "trade" for it: a spell that, perhaps imperfectly, allowed a mage to transfer somebody else's physical age to themselves. But that would reduce the "magic" (if you'll forgive the overloading of the term) of the cost, as...well, let's be honest: if mages could do that, people would PAY THEM to do so if the mages were not so profligate that it became rare to find people anywhere beyond their prime.
Haha, now that would be a hell of a story! A city of eternal youth...where the citizens have been trapped for millenia, their years siphoned off by sorcerer-kings against their will. Nobody is allowed to leave! Nobody is allowed to die! And as the mages' appetite grows stronger, they must lure more and more people into their city. Of course, the obvious question is "couldn't the locals just have babies" to which the obvious answer is "the mages have drained them all into childhood because of short-sighted greed and to make them easier to control."

Amidus Drexel
2015-03-20, 02:30 AM
Haha, now that would be a hell of a story! A city of eternal youth...where the citizens have been trapped for millenia, their years siphoned off by sorcerer-kings against their will. Nobody is allowed to leave! Nobody is allowed to die! And as the mages' appetite grows stronger, they must lure more and more people into their city. Of course, the obvious question is "couldn't the locals just have babies" to which the obvious answer is "the mages have drained them all into childhood because of short-sighted greed and to make them easier to control."

The only city of suspicious-looking children where the children themselves are not the evil party. :smallamused:

Segev
2015-03-20, 11:13 AM
Given the gluttonous magic-use of the ruling elite, even they would likely be no older than 20-somethings, and probably teens. It would have a lot of child labor (since there aren't grown-up peasants to do it), and would look like a teacher-less schoolyard run by the biggest kids as tyrants, writ on city-scale.

There is potential there.