You could do like what is done in Dungeons and Dragons (table top version). As you get older, some stats diminish at age thresholds. You lose strength and dexterity, maybe charisma. Perhaps integrating that in? In general, as a person ages they do lose strength and such, but that is once you reach a certain point.

I saw a thing on PBS a while ago about how age impacts learning and expertise. They profiled an orchestra conductor who, at 70 or so, was world-class and considered the epitome of his profession. His brain was old, and had lost some of its ability to gain and retain new skills, but the things he'd learned in the first decades of his life, enriched by a lifetime of experience, were substantial.

So I think you're on the right track, letting players get large bonuses to expertise and "pre-fabricating" connections and status that might have been obtained had they played the game for half a simulated century, but penalizing the acquisition of new skills and knowledge.

I'd like to see it made possible to start a character at age 15 and then "grow" him into a 75-year-old character with awesome skills and gradually increasing "age penalties" and the wealth, resources and affiliations that come from a lifetime of heroing, or to just zip through a character creation interface that lets you pick and choose life experiences, yielding an elderly character with the same level of sophistication. Ideally, you could "rebuild" the type of character you remember enjoying in the past. "Man, I really liked that part of the game where I'd just been promoted to Commander and was leading small teams in covert ops, but I don't want to redo all the stuff leading up to it, and my current character's an admiral who just does paperwork all day and can't run like he used to, so I'll retire this guy and whip up a rough facsimile of him in his prime."

What if you make it a challenge for the player?

When young it is easy to create and maintain strength, and most agility as well. Why don't you make it nearly free for the young characters to gain stats, but later in life increase the cost to maintain them. The rate of decline can be the same or even increase but if the cost to maintain your skills increases the player has to sink more effort into keeping his youthful body. Parallel to that you can allow the player to gain skills more easily when young. Maintenance for skills learned before age 25 are free and every point gained after that age is harder to keep. Newer skills are harder to learn as well.

All this can be set against the advantages that nearly every encounter the player may have during his career is going to make someone like him more. That provides additional alliances as the character ages. Alliances can also mean cheaper training in skills, cooler tech, or anything.

So the player is basically giving early life to excel at nearly anything. Physical stats as easy to gain meaning he can have them and spend the majority of his effort is training skills which he will likely never forget or need to maintain. This is then an extended character creation phase. Later in life the character transitions into his adulthood where he has to expend effort on keeping his skills and stats instead of building them, bringing gains slowly down to a crawl by old age but at the same time he has been and continues to do missions and other activities that make him friends who can make this maintenance task easier.

Like this a character can then start out strong (in either skills or stats or both) and work his whole career to maintain them, or he can spend his adulthood and old age forging alliances and allowing his body to age, choosing to rely on his allies for assistance, or he can even spend his youth getting a head start on making alliances meaning he is basically playing like an old man by adulthood because he never build stats up, but by his true old age he is nearly untouchable because of his vast network of alliances while being physically frail and vulnerable.

Quote:Original post by Wavinator

One tangential problem I've been thinking of is that I'd like some sort of heir system or handing off from one character to the next, though I haven't come up with anything I like yet. One exploit I can automatically see is "make a old character, play him a bit, let him die and then pass off all his cool stuff to a younger character."

I think maybe I have to think of this in terms of something you can do at an older age that you can't do when younger. Maybe you're better at diplomacy. Or maybe more of the world map is available to you, with locations marked simulating your past exploits. Or maybe there's more "old friend" encounters as you age.

I actually think this idea of yours would be the best. Why? Well for one thinsg its quite interesting. Where you are an elderly person somewhere in his 50's to 70's. You go through the characters life and try to political diplomacy for the country you are helping or working for or something like this.

The main character passes away. Was it murder, just old age, an accident, suicide, hiding something, just dropped everyting and walked away. left clues, ideas, suggestions for his niece or nephew or even an apprentice to come up and solve the situation. Everyone in the country is baffled on the idea and are trying to make of it. Even if there is something sinister to the cause it would make a on heck of an ending or even a continuation of a game. The main elderly character as you have already mentioned he would have at least alot of playable room to do his research or running around in. The secondary character would have limited access until he or she figures out the other parts of the story to gain more access to the main character.