For years, your character aged a year when they leveled up, so of course Age and Level have long since been conflated in Gemstone. This makes it difficult to roleplay an older character. If you try being a cranky old man/woman who talks down to a "very young" character for being young and not knowing the world, there's at least a 50% chance that they'll respond by talking about levels instead.

It's even ingrained in the actual game systems. You're asked to set every aspect of your character when they're created except for age, so there's tons of "very young" 0-year-old characters running around with players who haven't given the age of their character any thought. (I'm even guilty of that on one of my alts; I have the option of getting to it later, so I keep putting it off.) NPCs even use it as a shorthand for level:

>The guide says, "Somewhere out here is a massive cave of ice with terrible beasts called cold guardians. I suggest avoiding them until you're much older."

Aside from having one of my elves talk down to the young races by telling them to talk to him in a few centuries, I've given up on roleplaying age. It's just not worth it.

I'd certainly welcome any ideas.

I think "age = level" concept is not as common as it used to be. That mechanic hasn't been in place for 12(?) years now... and I think its use has faded a lot. At least from my own personal experience, I don't hear it that often anymore. (Yeah, there's some holdouts and some ancient messaging that probably still needs to be updated.)

I don't really see it as a barrier to RP anymore. My advice would be, "RP what you're going to RP and don't worry about it."

Signed,
Raelee and her Strings

>Speaking to Zyllah, Alyias says, "See? Raelee knows all."

Why the restriction for upward only?

Honestly, I don't react to age as my Elf. She sees time passing as nothing to her. She's still rather young for an Elf and doesn't get that sensation that it's running out. She has not see her friends age or die (yet!) from old age so it's nothing to her. Though, I sometimes will react if a character's appearance reads as old (white hair and bushy eyebrows). I've had a couple fun moments since my recent return with a couple older (age) characters. My girl has a soft spot in her heart for the Elderly.

-'Chelle, Misty's muse.

I would very much like age to be an option in the creator, but have it just like culture. That is, you get a single time resetting it after you start.

The thing I always have trouble with is explaining why someone is old and now just starting a career as an adventurer. Luckily I have managed to find my own explanations, but it's always something to makes me go hmmmm.

V V V V V

https://twitter.com/gs4_tahminarre

Or the farmer whose family (farm, village, local region, whatever) was wiped out by the <pick a creature> horde, and now they want revenge. Think "The Outlaw Josey Wales".

<spit> "Why bury 'em? Buzzards gotta eat, same's worms."

Hate me for suggesting this, but add the level aging back in. It will always be too much a part of game culture to refer to higher train characters as older. I understand it may not be realistic, but magic abounds in Elanthia, right? Maybe some races can age 1 year or 2 years per level and others only age 1 every 2 or 3 levels. I don't think we had the appearance system in place when level aging was stopped, and you can flag your age off, too. If you want to play a younger character, set a younger starting age.

>Hate me for suggesting this, but add the level aging back in. It will always be too much a part of game culture to refer to higher train characters as older.

I disagree, but I don't hate you for it. Considering that the current system that separates IC character age from OOC character skill level has been in place over a decade now, it doesn't make any sense to me to change it yet again.

Also, I don't want my main character to be in her 90s/100s again, which is what she would be if we reverted to the old system. That was a dreadful time period for her, and she's much better off now that she's passed her 700th year.

- Overlord EK

>You now regard Eorgina with a warm demeanor.

Players can't cling to something just because 20 years ago that's how it was done

Hah, fooled you! There are some people (one notable in particular) that do cling to the way things were 20 years ago in GS. Sadly, there are also people still using 56k modems (or worse!) to access the internet via AOL...

-Taakhooshi, and Me

For the Story of Taakhooshi:
http://www.gsguide.net/index.php?title=Taakhooshi

>>Hah, fooled you! There are some people (one notable in particular) that do cling to the way things were 20 years ago in GS. Sadly, there are also people still using 56k modems (or worse!) to access the internet via AOL...

>>-Taakhooshi, and Me

Which is fine, of course, but it doesn't mean that they get to hold the entire game back because people are playing on high speed internet and they are adamant about sticking to their sorry 14.4 modem. :) Just because some players choose not to, or fail to, adapt to the changes in the game doesn't mean that we should make bad RP choices to make them not seem silly.

Just like we shouldn't accept the word "toon" IC because so many people come from WoW or other games where "toon" to refer to a character is accepted. Or we shouldn't change the currency in GS to gold because so many other games use gold instead of silvers. The separation of age and level, IMO, is a good change.

~ The girl behind Debia

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Actually, the last re-do of the Boards was here in this millennium. It's gone through at least two re-writes and one re-organization that I can think of off-hand, and that's after they got converted from plain ol' Java.

I like the fact that no-one can inflict moving dancing annoying twerking icons and pictures on me in their post (or their sig, or their sideline); I like the fact that we do not have random rotating Flash ads down the sides of the window.

The boards are just text, and they just sit there, being legible.

Oddly enough, for the player of a text-based game, that's just fine with me. :)

The way I reconciled having a sorcerer that was over 1300 years old, but somehow not obscenely powerful, was saying he is suffering from a kind of preternatural nerve damage. Basically, his power over "the flows" was traumatized by exposure to a mana storm 20-ish years ago, so he is gradually recovering over time like Magneto. In principle that is consistent with the in-game "physics" for magic, and really could be a hazard for any very long lived spell caster. (You could have the opposite effect for a young character being unreasonably powerful.)

The trickier thing in the IC sense is having a character with two or three dozen times the life experience and memory as myself. Especially given that the actual game lore for that time period is only a skeleton, and nothing stops you from saying you were at whatever battle or world event at any point in the human history.

I assume it is normal to not remember most of it in great deal, maybe getting the timing of things mixed up in your head. Elves are not represented as having eidetic memories, so I'm guessing fallible/biased memory over many centuries is reasonably inferred, along with leveraging off the high redundancy of what seem to be quasi-stationary cultures over vast stretches of time. So, I will have him treat memory of things in the far past as kind of anecdotal, but any actual argument is still as much of an historical reconstruction as if he were human.

- Xorus' player

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>A monastic lich points a skeletal finger at you and exclaims, "Your soul is forfeit!"

I understand the need to have an age that makes the most sense for your character. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have a capped 12 year old, but the abominable ages of high-level PCs in GS3 was pretty amusing. I still think it'd be interesting if level had something to do with it -- I think it's going to confuse players forever at this point -- but maybe moreso if it was real years. If you have your age set, and have a birthday, does it increment your age? It'd be neat to open unusual age descriptors for characters based on their start date.

I think it'd be great that each train you gain a year of age. I continue to reference my age, to my level of training. And having your character naturally age, and not by real 365 days for each would be a nice addition to the game.

Nomada

>> I think characters do age on their birthday date - can anyone confirm?

Yes they do. Ask some of the halflings in the game who have been playing for the past 20 years.

-- Robert

Bazzelwyn says, "Maul maul maul maul maul maul maul."
Bazzelwyn says, "The answer is maul."

In a 100 level game there is a degree of absurdity in it. We used to have 120+ year old human warriors in The Rift and empaths pushing 300.

It made more sense when few characters were over Level 30, which was not even the case when I started back on AOL.

This.
Even at, well say over 60? For a Human, running around hunting, it doesn't make sense. I do like the idea of age by train and ironically it would be more feasable now with 100 level cap for say a Human if it were 1 year per 2 levels. Start off around 18-30, cap around 70-80. But yes it only really works for humans. 100 years is still a drop in the bucket to an elf.
While age is a wonderful roleplay factor - for those that actually use it, that's exactly what it is and we're in a role-playing game so...

I do agree with the statement though, that like the real world, people change professions mid-life. Like characters that reroll with the same name... to me it's the same person with a career change, but that's a whole other topic...

While I admit to finding myself as an older player also refering to people as older/younger by training. I almost certainly ask their trainings/skills not their age. I personally tend to treat people according to their actions rather than their appearance (and I do LOOK at people all the time.) If you're hunting kobolds, yes I'm going to treat you as a younger/ less learned individual until I discover otherwise. If you're dragging my body out of the Rift, I'm going to treat you with respect for your level/station, and yes I almost said age again too. Alas, that opinion could also change because not all "older" upper trained characters are deserving of respect when people power hunt/script their way too 100 or obtain characters and have no real concept of what their doing or how to actually play the game whatsoever.




Elanthia's most frequently fallen cleric (aka Aryleste)

>I think it'd be great that each train you gain a year of age. I continue to reference my age, to my level of training. And having your character naturally age, and not by real 365 days for each would be a nice addition to the game.

This was how GSIII worked. I found it a terrible design. People used stuff like "It's my birthday" to say "I just gained a level" and other things that make me cringe to this day. One should not reference a character's age to mean a character's level of training ever in my opinion. There are a number of reasons I say this. Firstly, the first 5 to 10 levels make very little sense as being your age. How is a 1 year old killing rats or being assigned to deliver messages, etc? Even GSIII was not this bad, because it assigned a random offset between about 20 and 40 as a character's age for level 0. And once we've added an arbitrary offset to attain the faintest amount of realism, it's pretty easy to just kick the entire concept to the curb as the better alternative, which is what is done in GSIV.

Another general problem with the approach of "age=level" for roleplaying is it means your character "ages" at a very erratic rate, since one levels more and more slowly as one progresses. It has the advantage to deal with the issue of how a character gains so much skill in such a short time, but I believe there are plenty of viable solutions to this. As an extremely simple example, there's nothing really wrong with wanting to spend a few days doing your part to keep the sewers clean of rats -- a kind of community service perhaps.

Finally another reason is...

>I know a lot of people, for whatever reason, insist on using age for level when one can just as easily talk in terms of ability.

For one, they actually used to be linked. Another is well...how to put it politely...a lack of imagination on how to ask an OOC question IC. Mostly all anyone would need to know is your skill in some respect or another and not your level anyway.

Basically treating "age = level" just always strikes me as an insultingly low level of effort to roleplay. Right up there with "e-scroll" for "email" and other barely-masked references to OOC subjects.

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>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p