[3.5] A Question of Age and Aging

[Golden-Esque]

So when one of my players asked to make an old character for a Summer Game we're planning, he was less-than thrilled with 3.5's system of merely stacking on +2 to all mental scores and -2 to all Physical scores. After all, plenty of elderly people manage to keep themselves in decent shape and plenty of elderly people loose their minds as they age. I agreed with him when he said that Aging in DnD 3.5 doesn't make sense, but I'm sad to say that I'm not really sure how to remedy the situation.

One option I thought of doing was letting a player pick their bonuses and penalties. Something like this:

Adult - None
Middled Age - +1 to Stat A, -1 to Stat X
Old Age - +2 to Stat A, -2 to Stat X, +1 to Stat B, -1 to Stat Y.
Venerable - +3 to Stat A, -3 to Stat X, +2 to Stat B, -2 to Stat Y, +1 to Stat C, -1 to Stat Z

I like it in the sense that a character stays good at "hopefully" what they practice at, but it does have the downside of encouraging min-maxing to an extent; I don't want entire Adventuring Parties of ancient grandparents simply because it gives you bonuses to what you need, which I'm sure would happen.

I was curious to see if anyone else had any suggestions on Aging in general. Its an interesting topic that's important to the game, in my opinion. I want to encourage more adventuring types other than the "newly-budding adventurer" archetype after all.

[HunterOfJello]

That would work as long as all the bonuses are Mental and all the negatives are Physical.


BUT, all that's really going to happen is min/maxing stats because they can cherry pick all of it. I'd check other system's methods for aging characters.

[Lord Vukodlak]

I think d20 modern is softer in that the penalties don't stack so they simply match the bonuses,
but then d20 modern has significantly less magic.

[JeminiZero]

One simple solution is to ignore aging penalties entirely. Make the character normally (roll, point buy, whatever) and then give him age you want without applying any modifiers. That way, if you want a venerable barbarian with 18 Str and 8 Int, you can have one. Mechanically speaking then, there will be no difference between an old barbarian, and a young barbarian. But they can be roleplayed differently as the players wish.

This should work perfectly so long as the campaign DOES NOT span such a time frame that the venerable barbarian actually dies from old age.

[DabblerWizard]

Aging in 3.5 is a way to add some verisimilitude to the game. A lot of elderly people have significant health concerns that come about because of the natural deterioration of human bodies. Faces wrinkle, hearts weaken, bones become brittle, etc.

Yet in terms of staying true to the system, where you play characters that are ultimately beyond normal human beings, with massive strength, incredible intelligence, and so on, it seems strange to have them face the cold, impersonal effects of age.

Maybe WOTC was making a subtle statement about the inevitability of aging, even in the game world.

In any case, I see why DMs would want to throw out those mechanics, keep them, or even change them around.

Concerning new mechanics, maybe once every encounter, a venerable aged character rolls a percent die, and if they fail according to some criteria, their attack stalls, or they don't quite run as far as they had planned, or something like that. These events would be annoying, but ultimately not super significant. You could maintain "realness" without worrying about min/maxing.

[Lapak]

The idea of people gaining the traits that they work at just caused an idea to pop into my head. Possible houserule:

For every level in a full-BAB class that a character has, treat them as 1 year younger when calculating penalties due to age.

For every level in a full spellcasting class that a character has, treat them as 1 year older when calculating bonuses due to age.

Boom. Studious characters get smarter faster. Physical characters get weaker more slowly. If you wanted a downside to the rule, you could count them as a year in the less-favorable direction for every 2 levels they had in a class. (So a level 4 wizard would count as 2 years older in terms of physical penalties due to age.)

[Golden-Esque]

The idea of people gaining the traits that they work at just caused an idea to pop into my head. Possible houserule:

For every level in a full-BAB class that a character has, treat them as 1 year younger when calculating penalties due to age.

For every level in a full spellcasting class that a character has, treat them as 1 year older when calculating bonuses due to age.

Boom. Studious characters get smarter faster. Physical characters get weaker more slowly. If you wanted a downside to the rule, you could count them as a year in the less-favorable direction for every 2 levels they had in a class. (So a level 4 wizard would count as 2 years older in terms of physical penalties due to age.)

The problem with this concept is that all people age different. Not every old person is in terrible shape; some are quite active even until the end of their lives. Not every old person gets smarter or wiser as well. The system for aging penalties is pretty bland and stagnant in a system otherwise known for its sheer flexibility. Hence why no one wants to play an older character.

[Volkov]

Realistically, healing magic should reverse aging, because all aging is, is damage your body is incapable of fixing on it's own due to free radicules breaking DNA strands beyond repair. How long one can last before succumbing to age alone depends on how well your DNA strands can resist them, Free radicules are loose oxygen molecules that are an unfortunate byproduct of oxygen using respiration. But of course, that'd mean that liches would have very little reason to exist because going to a cleric would fix you pretty quickly.

[Crow]

One simple solution is to ignore aging penalties entirely. Make the character normally (roll, point buy, whatever) and then give him age you want without applying any modifiers. That way, if you want a venerable barbarian with 18 Str and 8 Int, you can have one. Mechanically speaking then, there will be no difference between an old barbarian, and a young barbarian. But they can be roleplayed differently as the players wish.

This should work perfectly so long as the campaign DOES NOT span such a time frame that the venerable barbarian actually dies from old age.

Best answer yet.

[Sir_Elderberry]

Realistically, healing magic should reverse aging, because all aging is, is damage your body is incapable of fixing on it's own due to free radicules breaking DNA strands beyond repair. How long one can last before succumbing to age alone depends on how well your DNA strands can resist them, Free radicules are loose oxygen molecules that are an unfortunate byproduct of oxygen using respiration. But of course, that'd mean that liches would have very little reason to exist because going to a cleric would fix you pretty quickly.

In DnD, I highly doubt there is such a thing as DNA. I'd be kind of surprised if there was such a thing as an oxygen molecule, really--"air" is an element, after all.

And the inability of healing magic to deal with many conditions, like disease (except for specific spells), suggests to me that Cure X Wounds only deals with catastrophic damage. Age may be another category of "damage" entirely.

[Eldonauran]

Realistically, healing magic should reverse aging, because all aging is, is damage your body is incapable of fixing on it's own due to free radicules breaking DNA strands beyond repair. How long one can last before succumbing to age alone depends on how well your DNA strands can resist them, Free radicules are loose oxygen molecules that are an unfortunate byproduct of oxygen using respiration. But of course, that'd mean that liches would have very little reason to exist because going to a cleric would fix you pretty quickly.

Real world logic in D&D universe. ERROR, ERROR! DOES NOT COMPUTE!!

Suffice it to say, since death and aging is a big part of the D&D universe, magical healing (except for the most powerful kind) would only restore the body to an uninjured state.

Every character, whether NPC or PC, has a limited time on the material plane until their body gives out.

[Crow]

I always imagined it as "cure" spells rapidly repairing damage to your body. After all, you would heal naturally, and the magic just speeds it up.

Which is different from a disease, in which the body is actually having to fight off an outside entity (the virus), or poison, in which your body has to endure and process out a chemical.

[Volkov]

In DnD, I highly doubt there is such a thing as DNA. I'd be kind of surprised if there was such a thing as an oxygen molecule, really--"air" is an element, after all.

And the inability of healing magic to deal with many conditions, like disease (except for specific spells), suggests to me that Cure X Wounds only deals with catastrophic damage. Age may be another category of "damage" entirely.

Real world science works perfectly well on greyhawk with zero modifications, and evolution exists on it too (of course, Oerth is 200 million years old.) So yes, science does work.

[Sir_Elderberry]

With zero modification? Really? Conservation of energy? (Fireball) Relativity? (Teleportation) Newton's laws of motion? (Immovable rod) Gravity? (fly)

Notice, of course, that this is magic. Point is, science and logic might work in real-world DnD, but it doesn't exist in the points where you mix it with magic.

[Volkov]

I'd rule that restoration fixes aging and sets you back to your prime. Of course this makes becoming a lich somewhat more pointless, so to throw them a bone I'd increase the benefits of becoming a lich.

[BenTheJester]

The problem with this concept is that all people age different. Not every old person is in terrible shape; some are quite active even until the end of their lives.

Staying in shape for an old person demands a lot more efforts than it takes at 20.

So an average adult would have 10 str with not much effort, while an old person would have to give extra effort to get that much str. It makes sense.


I have to agree on mental stats though. (This is even parodied in OotS)

[Crow]

Staying in shape for an old person demands a lot more efforts than it takes at 20.

So an average adult would have 10 str with not much effort, while an old person would have to give extra effort to get that much str. It makes sense.

Yes. On average, adult males lose 1% of their lean muscle mass each year after age 30.

[Devils_Advocate]

The thing is, there's already a mechanical change to make to a character in the d20 system to represent improved competence in his field due to experience. It's called "giving him more class levels". I don't see a verisimilitude justification for giving the elderly more of anything other than XP.

You could hand out negative level adjustments along with various penalties, but, like bonuses to mental stats, this would likely be quite favorable to spellcasters, who are overpowered already. It makes playing a young adult wizard instead of an elderly one akin to playing a drow wizard instead of a human one: There are benefits to it, but they're probably not worth lost wizard levels.

In D&D, modifying character statistics based on age is like modifying character statistics based on sex: The game is coarse-grained enough that that level of detail gets ignored / rounded off anyway, so it can be a bit jarring at best to shoehorn this particular consideration in, and other problems it raises pretty much recommend against doing it. You can build individual characters to reflect the influence of some factor without hard-coding it into the rules anyhow.

Realistically, healing magic should reverse aging, because all aging is, is damage your body is incapable of fixing on it's own due to free radicules breaking DNA strands beyond repair.

"Realistically"? Are you under the impression that in real life, healing magic is capable of reversing any sort of damage to the body? Because if you have a concept of "what healing magic can do in real life", then you have some rather... unconventional beliefs.

My understanding is that in D&D, healing magic reverses alterations to the body's natural functioning by external forces, and thus is useless for combating aging and congenital disabilities. Of course, this doesn't explain why the reincarnation spell (which is Transmutation, not Healing) arbitrarily can't revive creatures that died of old age, despite explicitly creating a new adult body. Or why there's not other relatively low-level Transmuation or Necromancy magic that can reverse or at least halt aging. That would raise some unanswered questions about the setting, sure, but numerous things that are included in the game already do.

Real world science works perfectly well on greyhawk with zero modifications

Really? What's your basis for this claim?

I'd certainly be interested to know what the chemical compositions of mithral and adamantine are...

(There may be no logical contradiction involved in having a setting where e.g. a bunch of natural stuff works based around the concept of the four classical elements despite them not being elements at all and the setting having the same periodic table that we do. But... why would you ever want to?)