I've been looking at creating fan rules for several different things, unfortunately age has no effect on characters. A character who is 200 should by all rights have far more XP and abilities than someone in the same field at 100.

This becomes even harder to reconcile when you get to careers that are actually age dependent. A farseer for example will have passed through many different careers before becoming a farseer, because of the amount of time needed to control the mind etc. They have to go through psychic training, perhaps being a warlock etc. Also, the squat Living Ancestor only becomes one at the end of their life, after they've spent 300 years doing and mastering other careers.

It's also problematic when the starting ages for DH are so variable. A 16 year old kid starts with the same abilities and XP as a 50 year old grandad.

It would be ridiculous to roll a Farseer as a starting character, like any other 16 year old DH character. They would have advanced through multiple careers before becoming one. There is no way you could realistically create a farseer that hadn't already accrued 60,000+ XP from their previous life.

So I am wondering how would YOU fit this in to make sense within DH's rules? This isn't really about getting decrepid as you get older, more how XP advances are independent of age and how you reconcile that with the game.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Wait... farseer? Warlock? Are we talking about Eldar???? If so, applying DH *human* rules should go straight out the window, and you need to actually *think* like a creature that will naturally live hundreds, if not thousands of years. You needed to be very, very explicit that you were not talking about DH as written to begin with.

I had written a long dissertation on the masses, commonality, banality, and skilling in RPGs, and it occurred to me that it would not apply here whatsoever, since you're not wanting to play dark heresy, you're wanting to play Eldar using the DH mechanics.

Seriously, you might want to look into Rogue Trader. It will probably deal with xenos far more than DH will.

Hellebore said:

On the one hand, you have powerful character concepts that should rightfully require tons of XP to create - IMO, those shouldn't be available as starting characters (that is, basic DH characters with 400xp) under any circumstances. Farseer, for example, would be at or beyond the far end of an Eldar Seer career path, with rank after rank of abilities leading them to that point. An Eldar must have seen and done a great deal upon the Seer Path to become Path-trapped, at which point, they're a Farseer. Squat Living Ancestors, meanwhile, as they'd come from any and all walks of life, would be better suited as a late-career alternate rank for Squat characters of appropriate age and experience, rather than as a distinct career path in their own right.

Certainly, I've taken that sort of approach with my work-in-progress Eldar in 40kRP rules, where Rangers and Corsairs sit a few ranks up the path - a lot of the interesting and iconic elements should justifiably sit somewhere beyond the start of the list, both as something to aspire to and to do those character concepts justice.

On the other hand, there's the issue of character age, which is a little easier to deal with. Characters do not gain XP at a linear, constant rate - you don't get an automatic 100xp per month or year just for existing. Rather, xp comes from deeds and accomplishments and events. A soldier recruited by the Inquisition, placed on the front lines of an extremely deadly secret war will have accomplished more and consequently earned more xp during his life than a soldier twice his age who has been sat on a backwater-but-strategically-vital world as part of a garisson but otherwise done very little.

TheFlatline said:

RT uses the same career rank progression as DH. The mechanics are not changing. Farseers were an example. The point is that the game does not facilitate, with the rules as they are (and this is the core rules, not DH 'specific' rules) characters that must be older having more XP.

Hellebore

N0-1_H3r3 said:

XP DOES though increase with time. Although there is a very small chance a character will receive 50,000 XP in one second, the truth is that, irrespective of the time frame characters WILL increase as time goes by. Which means time does play an important factor in character advancement. This is simply because all encounters are spread through time - you cannot play one session that covers every encounter you will have for the next 2 years of game time.

If a character starts as an arbitrator at 16 and joins the inquisition at 40, he WILL have experience from his time in the force (the fact that a generic arbitrator in the dramatis personae section has skills and talents is proof enough). However, a 16 year old arbitrator in DH will have the same starting skills as a 40 year old arbitrator.

The only argument for this is that characters, irrespective of age, all begin their careers when they join the inquisition. That rolling 40 for age means that you joined the arbitrators at 40, whilst rolling 16 means you joined at 16. It also says that you gained no skills or abilities throughout your time before becoming an arbitrator.

This is stretching credibility just a tad. The argument that you only get XP from game encounters and nothing from previous life encounters only goes so far. A guardsman that has seen action for 20 years WILL be better than a green recruit.

The problem is that the ages in DH are extremely variable and they mean that any character you roll is one of the miraculously insignificant number of people that join careers late in life with no previous experience in anything else. A hive world scum could spend 10 years wheeling and dealing until he's scooped up by the guard. He is technically a guardsman but has had 10 years of scumming under his belt before hand. And yet somehow all that is forgotten when he joins the guard.

Just because you don't get a regular dose of XP every year doesn't mean you never get ANY. If that argument were true craftsman would never get good at their jobs, soldiers would never improve etc.

However, this thread isn't here for people to try and pretend the problem doesn't exist (because it surely does) it is to ask how people would change the rules or at least work within them to make sense of it. The simplest solution is to confine the age of starting characters to say, 15+1D5 or 1D10 at the most. Psykers get off a bit because their sanctioning teachs them not to blow up, and so can be older without actually having learned anything.

The simple fact remains that a 30 year old guardsman having been recruited at 16 has 14 years of soldiering under his belt and you cannot ignore that with a statement of nonlinear XP accrual.

Hellebore

You should also remember that according to some sources (and GM's) the standard imperial year is actually 1000 Days, so some one who is say 18 yeares old is actually 54 years old as a nomral terran year woujld go. Also you have to remember that people in this setting (if they have access to age retarding treatments) live for hundreds of years already so 50 years isnt really old at all.

No the year is seperated into 1000 units for reference purposes. It's still a standard year (which is variable per planet anyway but is assumed as a standard rate for ages).

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Assuming for a moment that NPCs gain experience - a matter I'll get to in a moment - then the average PDF trooper on a backwater world may only accrue a few hundred XP within a ten year period. A Guardsman PC, serving the Inquisition in an active and violent capacity, will gain that much in a matter of months. The difference is vast, and while xp remains proportional to age, the difference between the upper end of the scale and the lower end of it is so large as to make that notion all but worthless.

Of course, there is no reason that an NPC should have any experience - they aren't, afterall, subject to the rules for career paths. Consequently, an NPC could be said to have 0xp regardless of the number of skills and talents he may possess or how many in-game years he may have lived for. His stats are a mechanical construct designed to represent him for the space of time the character will be relevant to the game for.

Hellebore said:

I can, actually.

XP is not , nor does it even conceal itself behind the pretense of being, a system of representing the learning process, nor are skills and talents and characteristic increases entirely representative of the sum total of human or nonhuman experience. A character's skills and talents are only the mechanically-represented side of his knowledge and insight.

XP is a system of player reward - accomplish this task, and recieve a resource that lets you improve your character. RPG economies are typically based on the same notion - you don't reward the character, you reward the player. Consequently a starting character will have a nominal, arbitrary starting amount of XP and wealth for customisation purposes, and will later accumulate XP, wealth, equipment and suchlike that empowers and rewards the player controlling that character.

XP and level systems, in various combinations, can't adequately represent the way people learn things. They're game considerations, not narrative ones. Every possible approach is an abstraction, from the "past life and slow-learning" method used in Traveller, to mix-and-match background effects like those currently favoured in D&D (where you assemble your character's background and gain a couple of small mechanical bonuses picked from amongst those your collected background provide you with).

The other issue is that, should you try and represent greater experience with greater xp, every player will come along and claim that his character was stuck in a decades-long war and thus he should get a couple of hundred extra xp to play with just because his character is older. It's one of those situations where a wider variety of mechanical choices end up resulting in a smaller variety of actual results because nobody uses half the choices available.

As far as I'm concerned, the better approach is to ignore the matter of XP as the primary means of representing advanced age. The Background templates given in The Inquisitor's Handbook are, IMO, a better idea, but somewhat less specialised, and not necessarily with the cost taken from the character's starting XP, but rather each one coming with a commensurate risk or drawback to acquire that could be deleterious to the character - afterall, why should a character's life experiences all be beneficial to him? So long as the risks/drawbacks are sufficient and well-balanced against the benefits, there isn't any reason why you couldn't allow a character to pick up two or three of these backgrounds.

The solution here is simple.. ignore the age table and start out at a young age.. One you deem appropriate as a starting age for your career.

If you want to roleplay an older character then you have to have a boring background.

Want to be a old adept? Then you need to give a reason for why you have not gained any skills in those years. Lets say your job was inventorying the copy paper in the administratum complex. Just like your father, and his father before him etc... Not many useful adventuring skills to be gained there. Though I suppose if your inquisitor needs you to inventory paper you would be hell on wheels.

The point is that just because you are older does not mean you have done anything worthwhile with that time.

N0-1_H3r3 said:

XP is a system of player reward that is still represented as experience and skill training. Although it is an abstraction, it's main form of representation is in learning skills and abilities. These are no different to any other NPC's skills and abilities. As skills and abilities can only be accrued through experience and training, and that can only happen through years of living (unless you've had something downloaded into your brain in an instant) time will grant extra abilities.

How would an NPC Adept work if he never gained skills through experience through time? If he is like any normal person you'd meet him at level 1, he's a lowly adept. You go out on a mission and encounter him again, but now he's more experienced he's got more abilities. Later your characters are at rank 8 and they encounter that same adept, now years through his career, in charge of an administratum building on a planet. The universe still continues on around the PCs.

Every person in the universe experiences, learns, and practices. That the game chooses to represent that as XP to players doesn't change that. All the non player characters in the universe have to get better at their jobs. It's an extremely gamist notion to seperate NPCs out into levels. They learn and experience too.

If the players used PC specific skills and talents, then perhaps there would be more of an argument. In that case PCs will have access to abstract player rewards that are not comparable to anything used by NPCs.

However that is not the case. An NPC merchant uses Trade (Merchant) just like any PC can get. If he is to become a better merchant he needs higher fellowship and skill mastery in his Trade. Although you won't give him 'XP' (just increase his skills) the end result is the same as if a PC had recieved some XP and spent it in the same areas. In this instance the XP is a tangible image of the experience that allowed the NPC to increase his abilities, represented for the PC, implied for the NPC.

Every sentient creature gains experience in some way. The game chooses to abstractify this into XP for PCs - every character has invisible lines of advancement behind them, the game chooses to make visible lines of advancement for PCs and chop it up into units. But that doesn't change the fact that everyone learns and improves. It is the rare human these days that has the same knowledge base at 90 as they did at birth. That the game highlights this experience as units of reward for PCs and not for NPCs doesn't affect the fact that everyone still advances. It is the higher end NPCs that ram this message home. They weren't born in a vacuum. They weren't born with 45,000XP worth of skills and talents. Yet if NPCs don't advance in some way (that XP isn't given doesn't change that they advance) you cannot get high level NPCs. Or if you do you are left with trying to explain how a guard general was born leading troops out of the uterus.

Hellebore

Hellebore said:

Sorry sir but that makes no sense, because say imperial world or rich hive worlder people who roll high on teh age table are called Methusela's (and there are only 50 years old which is acutllly given REAL LIFE med tech only middle aged now (Im a immunologist and anti-agaphic researcher in real life) and as said they are only 50 years old, that desciption makes no sense at all if its a standard terran year, its no age atll in the World of 40k given health care on a imperial city (or a rich hiver for that matter liek say a cleric from a hive world). The age table only makes sense to me if the year they describe is in fact 3 times longer (roughly) then a normal year otherwise its not taking into account med tech (which really inst desribed at all in teh setting but given real life technology, the types of med tech you could get readily and easily in Dark Heresy would enable people to live for 100s of years, like in the series by Dan Abnett The Eisenhorn triology (which is considered by mots to be one of the best 40k novels ever written and as a bible for the setting).

Abhoth said:

Hey don't blame me, it's been the way 40k worked since 1st edition.

Imperial medical technology is only available to the rich. The average Imperial human will have a life span shorter than our own. Especially feral worlders and hive worlders (reflected in their young ages in the table). Void Born have far fewer threats to their life than a starving underhiver or savage feral worlder.

Once they become an acolyte and get access to inquisitorial medical tech then sure, their life span can increase. But the age at which they enter the inquisition will be a reflection of human life spans in the imperium. Which are short brutal affairs.

Hellebore

Abhoth said:

I agree with Hellbore, and the Imperial standard day is approximately 8 hours long making the year around the same length as our own.

On the other hand your theory would have feral worlders, who by definition have access to no medical tech living to an age of between 75 and 105 and also the starting age would likely be 5 +d10 rather than 15+D10. Since I can see no evidence (or logical reason) why the coming of age would be somewhere around the region of 45 considering the war torn state of the Imperium. Not to mention the age range on the table already seems to large for the starting degree of competence (I.e reasonably incompetent.)

There's also the point that while they may have superior technology, their society lacks the basic scientific literacy that is prevalent in our society and even in the supposed experts their understanding of what they do is questionable. Meaning that general health information is at best going to be anecdotal at worst completely inaccurate it wouldn't surprise me to hear that there is some highly damaging drug which is considered health enriching.
So it has been at least 10,000 years since there was any serious medical research as we know it, their society doesn't seem to invent at all, for new technology they scavenge the ruins of their former cities. Now in terms of viral and bacterial evolution that is a extremely long time frame, before we even consider the possibilities of pathogens from other sources. Their are probably going to be some substantial gaps in the what they know how to deal with and pathogens that have completely out evolved the treatments.

Now there may be some hyper advanced medical technology around, an AI that can create antibody against any given infection, medical nanites, magical health rays but like most advanced technology in the Imperium they are probably very rare next to impossible to replace and poorly understood. So yes the Inquisition may live centuries and some of the senior members of the Mechanicus may live even longer. That doesn't mean that your factory worker is going to be living a long time.

That's before you even take into account the other effects of the poverty that seems prevalent in the universe. Malnutrition, poor access to healthcare, bad water supplies, pollution etc all of these are going to have an impact on age.

As for the original topic, yes really their should be a difference in experience between the 15 year old and the 40 year old. However of things to reward players with extra experience for deciding to play an older character really isn't high up on my list. You introduce those rules and soon everyone's age is edging up to get more exp.

Fair points I concede!, (however sorry to go off topic!)

The simplest way it seems to me to solve the ageing 'problem' would be to allow older characters to trade amounts of Characteristic stats in for Skills, Talents and possibly even other Characteristic increases. This would represent an individual becoming more specialised in their chosen field as they aged, whilst simulating increasing physical/mental infirmity.

The main problem is the amount of extra xp gained back through this which I have not been able to judge accurately yet. How much would you guys think would be a fair amount for trading in characteristics?

Obviously this might allow more min/maxing of characters to be more effective from the outset (which is fine with me).

The other solution is just to start your games with more xp. I have never run or played in a DH game where we started on less than 2000xp, which leaves enough comfortable room for actual backstories that tally with your stats.

Well, I solved my problem in a way I'm satisfied with. It balanced novice PCs against veteran PCs by tying XP increases to dangerous events that effect them. With great experience comes many opportunities to get your ass kicked.

www.mediafire.com/file/yjngxz3lynl/Age and Experience B&W.pdf

www.mediafire.com/file/hitnwtoztfx/Age and Experience.pdf

It also has optional aging rules and accompanying rejuvenat treatments as well. This was made to solve something I didn't like whilst still retaining more or less a balance at character creation. I'm sure not everyone will like it but, meh.

Hellebor

Stupid lack of editing.

www.mediafire.com/file/zz0y3zz0zma/Age and Experience.pdf

www.mediafire.com/file/yqed5wd0rzu/Age and Experience B&W.pdf

These links are updated and work unlike the ones in the previous post.

Hellebore