Baleful Polymorph, Aging, and Natural Death

[liquidformat]

So interesting/goofy thing I was thinking about, when casting BP you are turned into an average example of whatever creature you are turned into, so how is age and aging handled? If your age doesn't change but you are subject to the natural life span of said creature, for many creatures such as insects this is less than a year, even for things like rats and many animals we are only talking about 5 to 20 years. So if we use BP to turn your average elf adventurer (110 year old min) into say a guppy wouldn't they immediately die since you know guppies only live for 2 years and all?...

[Khatoblepas]

I mean technically a lot of animals don't have age categories or max ages at all, so by RAW they're immortal. They never reach venerable age, so their maximum age is never rolled, so they never die of old age.

More reasonably, I'd just rule that you keep your own age categories even when balefully polymorphed - that's how it works in fantasy fiction, anyway.

[JNAProductions]

So interesting/goofy thing I was thinking about, when casting BP you are turned into an average example of whatever creature you are turned into, so how is age and aging handled? If your age doesn't change but you are subject to the natural life span of said creature, for many creatures such as insects this is less than a year, even for things like rats and many animals we are only talking about 5 to 20 years. So if we use BP to turn your average elf adventurer (110 year old min) into say a guppy wouldn't they immediately die since you know guppies only live for 2 years and all?...

I would rule that they're turned into a creature along the same relative part in their lifespan.

So a target that's a century old and lives to two centuries would be turned into a year-old guppy, since that's halfway there.

[SimonMoon6]

I would rule that they're turned into a creature along the same relative part in their lifespan.

I agree with this idea.

In fact, I had been thinking about this a lot in relation to the Renaissance ability of the Shaper of Form prestige class, which allows one to change race in a permanent non-dispellable way. So, what happens if a 200 year old elf becomes a human? Or a 81 year old human becomes a half-orc?

They shouldn't die instantly.

I would say that their effective age should be pro-rated correspondingly.

So, a middle-aged human Shaper of Form might turn into a middle-aged elf and then spend hundreds of years until they become old. Then, if they turn into a half-orc, they become an old half-orc, not a pile of dust.

[Segev]

Hm. Anti-agathic treatment: turn somebody into a Portuguese Man-o-War, wait for them to enter an age-backwards cycle, and then turn them back?