If you’re walking in on the middle of this series, there’s an index here.

The main subsystem I didn’t interacted with in the last post on Heritage is ageing, which in second edition is poorly designed and weirdly ageist. It wasn’t my plan. I’m going to detour here, as I’m not sure it’s a value add, but I want to think it through.

There are two sides to the ageing subsystem in second edition: Creatures and effects which age people, which is usually completely negative, physical ageing, and playing a youth, an adult or an ageing adventurer.

“Age damage” works better in my opinion as flavour applied to another sort of damage: ability score or experience damage works well. Second edition spends time on level damage, but book keeping is not something I want to threaten players with. I’m not sure if these will work in the larger framework, but this is something that will be easy to implement disconnected from an “adventuring age”.

Starting characters at different “adventuring age” adds a lot of interest, if there interesting choices involved. Second edition does not have those, but it clearly considers age important enough to spend time on. An ageing adventurer is less likely to survive a hit, but will definitely know more, and probably had assets when they arrive. A young adventurer has more to learn, but will learn quickly and survive more serious injury. An adult adventure is somewhere in between: Not weakened by age, has learnt some, but likely not rolling in assets.

The key questions are: What are interesting assets to be gained with ageing? How do we express learning associated with previous careers? How do we manifest physical age-related changes without it feeling like a too-severe punishment? Lets break them down.

What are assets gained with ageing? This is intuitive to me: Reputation, Relationships, Riches, Land. Which of these are interesting? Relationships, only, I think. The others are only interesting as functions of relationships: My old business serves as a base of operations for the party; I am being pursued by debt collectors or petty inheritors; I am feared in this town or scorned in that city. This is fun, but it’s supposed to be a reward for ageing, so potentially we should focus on: We gain a portable asset (a companion or follower) or a fixed asset (a business and employees, or a connection in a place like a mayoral).

How do we express learning associated with previous careers? In this system, that’s easy, and even further it can be folded directly into the character creation system, because this is what proficiency is. So, we can simply say that an adult adventurer gains a proficiency at first level, a youth adventurer does not, and an ageing adventurer gains mastery. The specifics of this might be worth exploring, as it feels stingy and perhaps mastery as an adult and a second mastery as an ageing adventurer is a better place to start. It makes proficiencies become more important as choices of advancement at all levels. To a degree, we get to make a small life-path choice, which is neat (referencing Traveller). Easy, clean, and supports other systems.

How do we manifest physical age-related changes without it feeling like a too-severe punishment? This is interesting to me, because I work in geriatrics and I think people read ageing wrong: Ageing adventurers aren’t weaker or more vulnerable inherently, but they find it harder to get back up again. We just have to figure out how we want to show it. So, look at different levels: Hit point recovery speed could be affected, but this is easily substituted for by magic so I find it a dissatisfying solution. Saving throws are a defence, so I don’t feel like that’s the right solution either. Perhaps the right place for this is at the point of death. “Hovering on deaths door” is an optional rule; if age affected the amount of time you spent hovering on death’s door, or how likely you’d be to survive it, we might have an interesting way to add drama and tension without constant limitations affecting play. You’re still a heroic adventurer, after all.

This is workable and fun in my opinion, although there are flow-on effects in character creation, proficiencies and in injury and death.

This has been a part of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeon Series! Honestly, it’s getting complicated to be doing this in blog format, but it’s actually a valuable process, I hope for you all too! Let me know your thoughts on this ageing, whether I’ve overlooked anything glaring, or anything of the sort!

Idle Cartulary

11th April 2022