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Kordak
2016-04-16, 12:47 PM
So, I've been looking at the aging effects from D&D and wondering if anyone had actually played over a time frame where getting old actually affected their adventuring. Has a character ever died of old age in your games? Have you ever had a character age to the point that it impacted their stats? How long do you generally think a campaign takes, in game time?

Linken
2016-04-16, 01:42 PM
Honestly, I think campaigns take about six months to one year when you count travel time if it's a long one like (go here, do this, find the macguffin, do that) etc, but if it's just a short one like (clear this dungeon) it should take a few days tops.

Final Hyena
2016-04-16, 02:06 PM
I play 5E so no ageing penalties, when you realise that D&D is a fantasy anime why care about ageing penalties for PCs?
I've ran a game that went for about a year (in and out of game time) which is the longest I've experienced, the idea that a character can die from old age is strange, unless you start the campaign very old it shouldn't come up.

Knaight
2016-04-16, 03:07 PM
It depends. There are games like Pendragon which are explicitly generational, and there are games which can be one action packed week.

JNAProductions
2016-04-16, 03:14 PM
It depends. There are games like Pendragon which are explicitly generational, and there are games which can be one action packed week.

Tell me more. That seems cool.

Velaryon
2016-04-16, 03:18 PM
I'm sure it will vary heavily from one game to another, but since the OP seems focused on D&D, I'll stick to that.

I've never had, nor seen aging really come into play except when someone wants to play an older character. My longest-running D&D game (currently on hiatus because life isn't giving me the time to devote to it) has spanned about eight months of time in-game, although some of that was because the story skipped ahead a couple of months between adventures.

In my experience, time really only advances at a significant pace in D&D when it gets eaten up by traveling, which is mostly at low levels before alternatives like teleportation become available. Or in cases like mine where the game is a lengthy adventure or series of adventures, and the time gets padded out with gaps between events.

Knaight
2016-04-16, 03:26 PM
Tell me more. That seems cool.

On the generational side, or the action packed week side? For the former, the big thing is that there's a codified mechanic where there's the part of the year where the knights quest (Pendragon being a game about knights), and then there's the winter phase, where they can't do so because of the weather and instead focus on things like their estates. When a knight dies, the player picks up with their heir, who's been developed this whole time during the winter phase. Generally the idea is for one session to be about a year, but that's flexible.

Thrudd
2016-04-16, 03:49 PM
It depends on what is meant by "campaign". To me, a campaign is potentially unlimited in length both in and out of game. As long as the same timeline in a particular game world is being followed, it is the same campaign. Hypothetically you could have characters age and die. In practice, I have never had a campaign go on for that long. It was rare to reach or go beyond level ten, which might be after a year of playing every week. In AD&D, with around 1 month of training time required between each level and healing, traveling, time spent looking for henchmen recruits, etc, levels 1-10 are probably no more than a five years in-game time, unless a narrative fiat passage of time takes place somewhere in there or travel distances are extremely long.

Newer editions of the game have failed to emphasize keeping track of the passage of in-game time and have minimized the time required to heal and restore spells and abilities, which in my opinion is a short sighted omission that has led to many problems with balance of power and verisimilitude.


Note: D&D is not necessarily "fantasy anime". In fact, the rules do not really do a good job simulating that sort of action. Actual fantasy anime, like Lodoss War, was inspired by a D&D game, not the other way around.

oxybe
2016-04-16, 05:34 PM
Note: D&D is not necessarily "fantasy anime". In fact, the rules do not really do a good job simulating that sort of action. Actual fantasy anime, like Lodoss War, was inspired by a D&D game, not the other way around.

Yeah, but The Slayers was also supposedly inspired around a D&D campaign too. It's definitely goofier then most campaigns but I've found over the years people are looking for Lodoss but generally wind up with Slayers and I'm happy with that: Slayers is a good bunch of dumb fun.

Thrudd
2016-04-16, 05:44 PM
Yeah, but The Slayers was also supposedly inspired around a D&D campaign too. It's definitely goofier then most campaigns but I've found over the years people are looking for Lodoss but generally wind up with Slayers and I'm happy with that: Slayers is a good bunch of dumb fun.

Oh yes, D&D can create extremely dumb stuff. Slayers is like some of the D&D games my friends and I played when we were 12, not really understanding or using all the rules, and full of adolescent hormones.

Darth Ultron
2016-04-16, 05:49 PM
Old D&D was very generational, so it was common for a character to get old and die.

oxybe
2016-04-16, 06:12 PM
Oh yes, D&D can create extremely dumb stuff. Slayers is like some of the D&D games my friends and I played when we were 12, not really understanding or using all the rules, and full of adolescent hormones.

Eh... the "serious D&D" is not something i can take all that seriously, in all honesty. Some moments sure, but embracing the goofiness inherent in the system has, for me at least, produced some, if not the most, enjoyable moments.

Those stories were told by adults and adults can, and do, enjoy them. to go "yes, but we were dumb kids full of hormones back then" sounds needlessly condescending.

Thrudd
2016-04-16, 07:16 PM
Eh... the "serious D&D" is not something i can take all that seriously, in all honesty. Some moments sure, but embracing the goofiness inherent in the system has, for me at least, produced some, if not the most, enjoyable moments.

Those stories were told by adults and adults can, and do, enjoy them. to go "yes, but we were dumb kids full of hormones back then" sounds needlessly condescending.

It's never "serious". But there is a difference between adult gaming and 12 year-old boy D&D, when we rolled to see how big the boobs were of every female NPC, rolled to see if we could have sex with them, randomly killed each others' characters, ignored or never bothered to read half the rules, and basically just played out violent power fantasies. As adults, especially in company of both genders, the game might still be a swords & sorcery power fantasy, but there are differences. Goofy things still happen, the life of an adventurer is fast and cheap, but it is definitively less juvenile in content and structure, even if we still use the "random harlot table" from the DMG :smallwink:. No judgment there about the value or quality of "fun", but it is a different experience.

Knaight
2016-04-16, 07:18 PM
It's never "serious". But there is a difference between adult gaming and 12 year-old boy D&D, when we rolled to see how big the boobs were of every female NPC, rolled to see if we could have sex with them, randomly killed each others' characters, ignored or never bothered to read half the rules, and basically just played out violent power fantasies. As adults, especially in company of both genders, the game might still be a swords & sorcery power fantasy, but there are differences. Goofy things still happen, the life of an adventurer is fast and cheap, but it is definitively less juvenile in content and structure, even if we still use the "random harlot table" from the DMG :smallwink:. No judgment there about the value or quality of "fun", but it is a different experience.

Your experiences as both an adult and as a 12 year old aren't necessarily indicative of the whole though. It looks nothing like anything I'm familiar with, for instance (other than most of the group never bothering to read half the rules, but that sure hasn't changed).

Thrudd
2016-04-16, 08:18 PM
Your experiences as both an adult and as a 12 year old aren't necessarily indicative of the whole though. It looks nothing like anything I'm familiar with, for instance (other than most of the group never bothering to read half the rules, but that sure hasn't changed).

The issue, to me, isn't what people's experiences are. My point about Slayers and my childhood games is that when the rules are ignored, there could be and are experiences of every description. What the rules of the game create/describe when they are actually followed is often a different matter, and will be more limited. In terms of the passage of time, older AD&D emphasized how important keeping time was, had modifiers based on character age, and had rules that represented a more realistic passage of time during healing, studying, training and recruiting. New editions of the game largely ignore or minimize all these things. When talking about in-game time and aging, the edition makes a big difference, and it also makes a difference whether or not your group actually follows all the rules of that edition. Defining what constitutes a campaign also makes a difference. I get the impression that to some groups, a campaign is a much more limited affair with a specific story/plot that has a definite ending. If a campaign is actually a single adventure/story, then it likely will take relatively little in-game time, apart from enforced narrative time-passage. If a campaign is however long the group wants to keep playing in the same setting with the same DM, then hypothetically you could play long enough for all the characters to die of old age and keep going with new ones.
How much time passes in-game largely depends on the DM, how realistically they want to portray certain things, and how they interpret what it means to gain a new level and whether they even bother to keep track of down-time in between adventures. If you get to the point, in AD&D, where the characters are high enough level to start building castles and towers and gathering followers, building siege engines and warships and having arms crafted for your army, in-game time will start passing much more quickly as the construction and managing of the domain eats up a lot of down-time.

GreatWyrmGold
2016-04-16, 09:27 PM
Slayers is like some of the D&D games my friends and I played when we were 12, not really understanding or using all the rules, and full of adolescent hormones.

...when we rolled to see how big the boobs were of every female NPC, rolled to see if we could have sex with them, randomly killed each others' characters, ignored or never bothered to read half the rules, and basically just played out violent power fantasies.
Aside from the "violent power fantasies" thing, I don't think any of that remotely applies to any of the Slayers episodes I've seen. And those displays of violent power usually have more repercussions than you'd expect from a power fantasy.

goto124
2016-04-16, 10:01 PM
Ars Magica?

Thrudd
2016-04-16, 10:42 PM
Aside from the "violent power fantasies" thing, I don't think any of that remotely applies to any of the Slayers episodes I've seen. And those displays of violent power usually have more repercussions than you'd expect from a power fantasy.

Now I think about it, I was probably thinking of "Bastard!" rather than "Slayers", as resembling those early games. I haven't seen either of them since the 90's.
Note of clarification: the sexual stuff in our kids games were not connected to the violence. It was just pervasive. Every tavern, we had to check if there were any hot barmaids there, and if there were, we'd roll to see if any of them would make out with us. Sometimes, a character would end up with a girlfriend that he'd return to after the adventures. During the adventures, we picked each others' pockets and sometimes killed each other in between killing everything else we encountered and generally got as much money as we could. I was usually the DM, and so was mainly adjudicating and describing the hotness of barmaids and dedciding what happened when a shop or the town was set on fire, etc.

Âmesang
2016-04-16, 11:23 PM
Longest campaign I played was Shackled City, once a week (depending on weather/schedule), for a year. Maybe two? We never finished, but in-game went from late autumn 593 CY to high-summer 594 CY (which, based on a particular article from 2nd-Edition, corresponded with 1378 DR — "Year of the Cauldron").

I once contemplated having a character "retire" by hanging around till venerable age before casting a wish-augmented contingent reincarnate (to come back in the same, youthful race/body) and follow it up with kissed by the ages to stop further aging.

…which would leave her in 645 CY/1429 DR, at least. Granted, I believe 5th Edition FORGOTTEN REALMS® starts in 1492 DR, so I guess she'd be ready for a 3rd Edition variant? GREYHAWK® 2000, perhaps?

Kelb_Panthera
2016-04-16, 11:37 PM
3e D&D for me.

Generally, the time scale for adventures increases with level. Low level stuff can take a few days to a week or two while high level stuff can take months of in-game time.

It's rare for thing to reach the scale of years or decades. Rarer still for it to stay in that realm long enough for aging to become a factor. I could see putting together a game with the explicit intention of working in that time scale but it'd be a more than a little different from a typical campaign and is probably more suited to a different system.