I'm trying to find rules for characters getting old. Permanent injuries, slowing down, forgetting things, all those wonderful things that happen to characters over the years. I know there are techniques for rejuvenation, but if characters don't have the time or money to get these treatments, I'd like to see them wind down some.

The thing is, as the characters get karma, they just keep getting better and better. I don't mind that for a few things, but I also think that characters should slow down over time - less in attributes, more in skills, and eventually even some skills - having not been used that much - begin to fade over time.

Not everyone dies in a blaze of glory - sometimes they fade away, or their age catches up with them, and they die because they just weren't as good as they used to be.

Ask Bull, he's old enough to know the example first hand.

Joey 'Bats' Pistella: "I thought you said the good times were gonna last forever."
Bobby Bartellemeo: "I thought we'd be dead by now." - The Crew (2000)

If your group is full of elves and dwarfs, then that might take some time.

I think aging should be the anti-power creep. The great equalizer. If you're in a highly physical, brutal lifestyle, you age faster than normal, and your body burns out faster. Elves and dwarves may have longer lifespans, but that means they also have the ability to heap more abuse on them and suffer for it.

I'm seriously thinking that suffering a 'serious wound' (I'm thinking more than 6 in a go), should run the risk of suffering damage to an attribute. It doesn't take off your current attribute, it takes off the maximum, limiting how high you can go. Over time, this adds up, and eventually starts to hurt your attributes. As this progresses, you'll focus more on skills and less on your attributes.

Perhaps adding 'age categories' can add to this, I don't know.

Not necessarily. Serrin "Dead Wife Makes Me A Sociopath" Shamandar has a gimpy leg due to injuries.

Some jobs will age you, no matter who or what you are.

EDIT: Ninja'd while looking up the name. To put things into perspective, I haven't been able to be on any school track team due to my knees being shot since I was... Eleven? Twelve? Before I was a teen anyhow. And that's without extensive abuse.

With the abuse a body takes... Yeah, catches up real fast. I said I've been feeling old since I hit High School.

You need rules for THAT?

Well, the severe damage rules already use 7 boxes as the basis, and it is completely reasonable to lower attributes, current or max, how you see fit. It's already offered as a possible "punishment" for reaching the Burn Out stage of the addiction quality.

Edit: Even worse for those mages and low-essance Street Sams, you can deduct from their essance. Let them feel the burn!

The more OPTIONAL rules that can limit power creep, the better, at times.

Less so in a system where a bullet'll kill you dead no matter how mach Karma you've socked away, or experienced a character. But it can be a way for GMs who are dealing with God Characters to convince Players to have them retire and be Bad Ass NPCs.

It would have to be a pretty long-running campaign for character age to actually come into play, even for orks. And it would have to be a campaign with a pretty stingy GM if the characters were in a game for that long and didn't have access to the right geneware.

The rules for Shadowrun characters not only lack rules for aging, but rules for technical skills falling behind the SOTA, or physical skills degrading because you haven't had a chance to practice them for six months, or physical Attributes getting lower because you didn't have time to hit the gym. Outside of actual attacks and injury, skills and Attributes only go up, not down.

I don't think that's a bad thing, by any means, but the rules simulate characters who do dangerous jobs for a living, always striving to improve themselves. They break down outside of the narrow set of circumstances that shadowrunners operate in.

I think if you want to simulate an older runner NPC, simply give him slightly lower skills and Attributes, and a physical negative quality or two. Trying to stat out aging, for player characters, is probably a bad idea. Character improvement with karma is a big part of the game. Losing Attribute or skill points due to age only makes it seem like you wasted/lost the karma for the last ten adventures.

IIRC, Bull gimped his own stats for his in-universe avatar in Street Legends due to not being so much up on SOTA as everyone else, and doing Fixer work more than Decker. Personally, I applaud this. Story over numbers!

I'd shift points from physical into mental/knowledge attributes/skills, if you'd insist on not simply loosing points.

Your old streetsam veteran might not be strongest, fastest and toughest anymore.
But he still knows how to survive the shadows and always be one step ahead.
That's what makes him superior to those youngsters.

Willpower increase at the very least. After you've seen some drek, it takes more to affect you.

"Did... Did you just kill a helicopter with a car?" "Ran out of bullets."

Do campaigns really span enough IC time to make it meaningful?



Personally, it doesn't seem like such a hot idea to me. It gets really complicated if you want to work out the effects of replacing bodyparts with newer bioware or cyberlimbs. Practically any organ can be replaced except the brain. And it's tricky to balance; a hacker might not suffer a lot from a deteriorating body, not compared to a sam.

One character I write still has his original Spleen and Appendix, I think... Another has also had some extensive replacements...

One word: Leonisation.

Actually, I do have some characters still around from 2050 (and they were in their 20s in 2050, so this says something). And it isn't just age - injury plays a big role as well. I think hitting the 'max' would work well, you don't feel the effects right away, but they do build up over time. I'll need to look into this more.

I'm going to take this opportunity again to call you all bastards for having been able to enjoy the game so long, while the closest I got to it was on a Sega Genesis.

Hmm. Can't find any rules for massive damage in SR4. I wonder if it might exist in War!.

I'm slowly making my way through it, again. This time not in an ER Waiting Room. Tell you if I find any.

So far, it's not *AS* bad as I remember it, but I'm still seriously thinking, "I paid full price for this?"... Hopefully it gets better.

Nope, not in War, either. And nothing on having limbs blown off, or anything like that. Seriously, as far as I can tell, even having a glitch on your soak roll against damage doesn't do anything truly major (your armour decreases by one, or you're bleeding out, seems to be the worst of it).

I'm seriously thinking I may need to write a few rules for crippling / permanent injuries. People should be considering getting cyberware / bioware replacement parts over time to offset damage. Or perhaps consider getting themselves cloned and moving into the clone to continue on.

Augmentation, pg 120. It covers glitches while healing, damage in the 7+ range, and glitches on damage resistance.

You mean you don't enjoy the lovely banter in these forum threads?

Oh, I do. I just wish I got to know the pleasures of things like Bug City and the Arcology first hand rather than second hand...

Holy crow. Thanks! ... ewwwwww.

I approve.

Don't worry, I missed them, too. My first foray was in 4th ed, and involved no pregen runs. Except the time I went through "On the Run"

Happy to be of help to some poor slot.

Yeah. I'm going to need to keep this in mind. The players don't glitch that often, but massive damage is always an option.

While I like the idea of aging rules it would play havoc with my character John. After all he is fifty-something.

When combined with wound modifiers to healing tests, and decreasing armour (Optional rule; Armour Degredation; Arsenal 45) makes glitches a little easier to come by.

I know this is going to sound silly, but I always try to make my characters "last" through aging. In most game systems "immortality" (not aging) is a "cool" perk that never gets to actually benefit the character, considering the timeframe in which the game lasts.

I mean, if your game is going to cover the span of 3 or 4 years being able to live to be hundres or thousands of years old doesn't really do anything for you. I just like the idea of my character enduring in that world past when I stop playing them.

I just love having a new character run into the three hundred year old version of my old character.

Actually, one of the unique things about the Deadlands system was that being immortal was actually a major advantage in Deadlands: Hell On Earth.

...

Too bad that meant you survived from the 1870s through until the supernaturally-pumped atomic bombs fell, and then some. With all the horrors and carnage that entailed. And, often, living forever was not exactly as one would wish it was...

so where in the SR rules does it say they have a longer life span?

I can't remember where exactly you find this in the 4th edition.
But back in first edition, you had a very scientific description of each metahuman species, telling the average height and weight, how many teeth, physical description and analysis over their aging process. It was described as dwarves and elves being able to reach the 100's quite easily and trolls and orks getting trouble to pass their 50's.

The nice thing is that here and there there's claims that elves will stay young for at least 200 years. Of course, how they tested that theory is a mystery...

Actually you can estimate this by studying the telomere degradation on each metahuman species.
And, of course, there are Great Dragons and Immortal Elves that actually know how many years each metahuman species can reach.

Yea, cause you can always trust GDs and IEs to tell the truth.

You can be immortal in plain Deadlands, too... ...but all that means is you'll probably live to see HoE.

The IEs you can, when the topic of discussion is something like "So, tell me how awesome elves are!"

found it.. page 72 SR4A

I just thought about giving players the choice:
They may gain negative qualities that simulate age (Low Pain Tolerance, Biosystem Overstress, Impaired Attribute, all those mental stuff from Augmenation, ...) and gain things like Knowledge (most likely Street, or whatever is appropriate), positive qualities (Will to Live, Guts, School of hard Knock, ...), Contacts/Contact points (which they most likely aquired over time) or maybe even Charisma or Willpower for an equal karma cost.

But doesn't that get tricky with the whole "parts of this DNA only function when ambient mana is high enough" thing the metahumans have got going on?

I mean, I'm fine with the game telling us that this is how it is, but it's just funny how we "know" things that haven't been shown to happen yet.

Actually, from what I gather, there is a shadow DNA (likely on the astral, within those auras) which seems to determine a bunch of that stuff. Since the parts that determine "elf" haven't been found on the mundane DNA in-universe. However, like most things about magic, it is just conjecture, and could be completely wrong.

It all sounds suspiciously like star-trek technobabble

Because it is entirely like Star Trek technobabble. But, it's what I got from reading the fluff in the books.

As I gain more medical and health related knowledge, I always felt that a big part of injuries seldom covered in RPGs is the kind of permanent and long term affects injuries can have on a person. That being said, in SR you can just get a cyberlimb, so I guess that's transhumanism for you.

RPGs are like action movies: escapism

"I reject your reality and substitute my own."

And besides that, in SR, at least, you can have a little of the long term effects. This would be best exemplified through negative qualities, but can be chalked up to attribute reductions, essance loss, and, if you might be really mean, you can also give characters skill reductions (I know, not strictly written, but almost everything else can be reduced or bought away, so why can't these?)

You can, but I don't really think you should, not on a regular basis anyway. Long-term, dragging disability and decrepitude aren't all that enjoyable.

obviously Reduced Sense (Hearing, Seeing) must be a choice!