Age, revisited

[Delia]

It has been mentioned in some other threads that contrary to the public notion, age does have an effect on your character. This meaning age affects your stats somehow similarly as, for example, in AD&D.

In 2010 there were some forum discussions in which Abharsair stated that age has no effect on your character whatsoever. Does this still stand true?

[luminier]

I spoke briefly with Louis about it. To his knowledge age had no effect on your character.

But he also said it probably should... given that we have youth potions in the game.

Delia I know you are anxious to get that old age Wis/Int buff.

Maybe we should ask Big T

[Delia]

Could be sweet, I agree. Though it takes ages for elves to age. She is mature already though. Perhaps an alchemist could brew her a potion of insta-crone if things change...?

Though she can be petty and vain at times. Perhaps she just wants to stay young and pretty? She did enjoy the scar removal potion very much. It should really be changed into a lotion though.

[luminier]

A lotion to apply at night before bed after Delia dons her Mages bath robe and puts her hair up.

[anglachel]

The age of the char is recorded and displayed: 'young/old etc for a ....'. But it has no real effect.
Besides this,there a potion of youth that can decrease the physical age oh a char.

[ferranifer]

That's what I thought and I personally prefered if it stayed that way!

It'd be very hard to model the positive effects of age in certain aspects of the game mechanics, but very easy to overdo it with the negative impact. Pass of time in the game is also a very abstract concept that is going to be hard to correlate between multiple characters, races and real life constrains of the people behind the keyboards.

This game asks for rather extreme amounts of investment from its players. It would be wrong to let characters 'expire' after all that investment or to feel like you are on a 'death timer'. I don't think it's a good player experience to feel like you have to abandon your character and start anew because you have been playing for 12 years. I wouldn't want to have to make that choice and if presented with it, I would simply quit.

I rather see the effects of age stay exclusively within the realm of roleplay than have an actual mechanical impact. There is plenty of space to do meaningful roleplay around age with the system as it is as proven by characters like Rafael. It's more a matter of people wanting to do it or not and how interesting that roleplay is when compared with religious/political struggles, heroism or romance.