We have many debilitating effects that can be applied to characters... Instant death, debilitating poisons and disease, petrification, level drains... But why not scripted magical aging effects?
d20 rules give us the basics for this. Middle age results in -1 to all physical stats and +1 to all mental. Old Age is -3/+2 and Venerable Age is -6/+3. The ranges for these age groupings are also listed for each standard race.
See here: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/description.htm
I see it working two different ways.
First, an effect might steal years based on a fixed die roll, say 1d20 years per attack. This would give a natural advantage to the longer lived races to avoid the penalties of magical aging.
Second, an effect would steal years based on a percentage of total life. For instance, the average maximum lifespan of a human is 81 years (max lifespan is 72-90 years). The average maximum lifespan of an elf is 552 years (max lifespan is between 354 and 750 years). An effect might steal 10% of one's life at a time. Roughly 8 years for a human and 55 for an elf. Thus bringing the effect to be more equal for each race.
Since one or two drains doesn't necessarily put you into the next category of aging, I would further suggest these drains be persistant, even across resets. The only cure for them being Restoration. Of course, death and ressurection would also negate the effects. Naturally, negative energy protection would protect against the drain, as well as a save vs negative energy.
Death, would of course be a real risk here. If you are drained beyond the average maximum lifespan for your race, you must save vs death or die. If you are drained beyond the absolute maximum age, you die immediately, no save. It is here that certain races would still maintain an advantage over others. A human, for example in the second aging system would have a maximum of about 8 drains before they must save vs death, 9 drains before reaching automatic death. An elf, on the other hand, would have about 7 drains before having to save against death, but would have about 11 drains before guaranteed death.
This would make for an excellent challenge for adventurers on a quest, not to mention the hilarity of watching a bunch of young men and women go of on an adventure, only to come back a day later looking like they'd been gone for decades or centuries. Imagine slowly working your way through the laboratory of an evil wizard whose experimental creatures slowly drain away your remaining years. With each year drained from your party, the ancient wizard grows younger and stronger. Thus the more your party is drained, the more difficult the boss becomes. Both because you are weaker and because he is stronger.
The implimentation of this entire system would, of course, mean that all characters would be subject to the benefits and penalties implied by their age.
As a result, certain of our servers characters might take unexpected stat adjustments. The only fair way of dealing with this that I can see would be to allow such characters a one time opportunity to change their base age. This could be provided in the character menu. Beyond this, it would be smart perhaps to add an object to interact with in the OOC character creation area to allow them to alter their age if they are unexpectedly effected by the age they chose. In fact it may be best just to leave the age altering to this OOC area and if a character is unexpectedly effected by this if it is implimented, they simply need to grab a DM to port them so they can change it themselves.
As always, please feel free to agree or disagree, but give reasons to back your opinion.
