Automatic Character Age Calculation

[Nehetsrev]

While personally I try to keep my character's birthdate in their in-game journal for easier reference when I need to think about how old they are, I was thinking it would be a nifty addition for the community as a whole if LORE could be coded to calculate a character's age and display it on their LORE profile page.

LORE already shows us how old a character was at creation, so I would guess the big problem in getting this to work would be finding a way to tell LORE exactly when, in terms of the in-game date, that the character was created.

Once we can give LORE the in-game creation date we'd just have to subtract that date from the current in-game date and then add the age of the character at creation to get the sum of their current age.

Current Date - Creation Date = Years in-play
Years in-play + Age at creation = Current Age

*shrugs*  I know it'd be low priority, but it's a thought anyhow.

[Aragon]

Unless we as a community are prepared to retire our characters after a set age, then I think keeping track of age is a bad idea.  There are a lot of "old" characters running around that would have to be retired because they are either dead of old age or so old they wouldn't be able to swing a sword.  I have a character in this same category.

So either 1) Do not keep track of age or 2) lengthen the time span so that a year of game play is longer than approx. 25 RL days.  I like #1 personnaly.

[Pseudonym]

Not necessarily. There have been IC explanations offered how and why Layo ageing for adventurers might be different and justifiable as compared to Real Life. This thread has some interesting ideas and explanations.

[Nehetsrev]

Not to mention the ages given in the racial descriptions are 'general' ages for most persons of a given race, and there's also the possibility of exceptionally long-lived individuals who could be likened to Methusela  (hope I spelled that name right...).  Not everyone has to choose to play a Methuselan, and those who wish can reitre their aged characters if they like without having to force the ones who don't want to do so into it.

Heck, for that matter since Layonara's it's own world, the powers that be could even decide the Humans (and other currently shorter-lived races) of Layonara live longer than Humans of Earth and simply make a minor change to the lifespans in the LORE descriptions of races as nescessary.

Anyhow... like I said before in the first post, it's just a thought.

[OneST8]

We did think about it when we first were designing LORE however both orth and I agreed that we didn't want to see Plenarius at age 200+ still kickin' around like he was 20 in-game. The character's ages are playable until their racial limits kick in, like for instance humans... 100+ year old human in a medieval setting like Layo? Seems just wrong to me.

In the end, orth and I decided to not have LORE itself track the character's age but rather leave it up to the players to figure things out.

The actual coding of such a feature is fairly trivial given the fact that we already have various systems converting time and dates from Layo to RL and vice versa. All we'd need to do is figure out the start dates and go from there.

If I do find myself with any idle time I'll try and hack this up as a user pref "show my character's current age" or some such thing. Don't bank on this happening anytime soon though as it is indeed extremely low on the priority totem pole.

[Nehetsrev]

Well, while I understand the view of not wanting to track age because of the character being ludicrously old, that arguement actually works against itself too, since it would be hard to explain how a character who is played over 200+ years of in-game time somehow managed to affect world-changes and the history of the world's events that show on the timeline centuries apart (except in the case of a longer lived character race such as an Elf, of course).

A simpler way of putting it, I guess, is that it seems to me that character ages are tracked indirectly already simply by having a steady passage of time in the world, and how they make their marks on the world through world-changing quests and events.

As I stated before, I'm not out to force any characters into retirement, but I would like to be able to have a better idea of their respective ages for the purposes of role-playing things like having a respect for elders, or taunting youngsters, etc.  Sure, I could dig up original character submissions to figure out a characters approximate age myself, but that takes a lot of work.

Anyhow, I'm still very glad to hear that this idea isn't being shut out completely, but may, however remotely, have a tiny chance of getting implemented.