Shattered Kingdoms

This doesnt seem right.. I played a griffon before.. and after 200 hours he was still around 24 years old. Granted.. I made this character a while back and haven't begun playing him until now... but I thought aging was based on how long your character has been alive in SK years. And obviously.. it isnt 25!..

Whats going on here?

There was a bug before that had something to do with not ageing correctly. It had something to do with you aged slower well logged on or aged quicker I cant remember exactly what. Since that has been fixed I believe all ageing is done from real time to SK time. It doesnt matter how long you have logged in, the time and date of SK keep rolling on.

In short unless Im totaly missing what you have to say here no bug, you made your griffon 22 IC years ago.

Doh, that's not the matter. I think he thinks that years pass for the character only if he logs in. Which is wrong, time passes wether your characters logs on or not. So nomatter how many hours you have played him, if there have been 22 IC years since his creation, your griffon will be 25, thank you.

Correct.

The aging system, IMO, is absolutely ridiculous. The way I see it, if you age when you aren't logged in, then you should also recover from wounds, regenerate move points and mana, and get hungry and thirsty. I don't see what the problem would be if it was made so that characters only age based upon the amount of hours they played rather than by real time. If the argument is that some people will just keep their characters around, who cares? Most characters die of personal deletion rather than old age anyway, and it's not because they're getting old; it's because the concept is boring and the player wants something new.

And regarding people with super powerful characters staying around longer... great! The mud needs the people who are awesome RPers and good PKers to keep everything fun, and prevent stories from changing every damn week. I think we'd see a lot more griffons and giants, too, if the age thing was changed. People who play dwarves/delfs/elfs/helfs for their age might choose something else, but those classes (save the helf) have inherent RP aspects too that would still provide people with reason enough to play them.

I dunno. What does everyone else think about this?

No.

I feel there are enough things that strain my ability to suspend disbelief already without [for example] humans being able to live to age 400 simply because their players are relatively inactive.

Imagine this scenario:

You and a friend create a couple of newbie characters, an elf and a griffon. You play the elf daily for a couple hours every night. Your friend with the griffon logs in once every week or two. This continues for a year until the elf dies of old age. The griffon, with the shorter lifespan, logs in to find your headstone somewhere in Ayamao, since his lower played hours allowed his griffon to age less. How's that supposed to work? How can it be explained?

While it would be cool to have long-long-term characters around, it would also stagnate. Many *many* faiths would die out, maybe cabals too.

First off, humans wouldn't live to be 400; they'd still die at age 90ish, it's just that to reach age 90 would take awhile.

I understand the stagnation problem, but there's also a flipside to your point. Let's say, for instance, that the Adepts have some badass leaders, but not many other people, at that time, wishing to join. Well if the desire to join the Adepts doesn't increase for a long time, given the current system, those badass leaders could die out, leaving the cabal in shambles. (I only use the Adepts for the sake of example, not for any particular IC or OOC reason).

And yes, it's hard to completely suspend disbelief with everyone in the game. But that's kinda what you do when you play a MUD. Sorcery, centaurs, plaguelords in distant realms... it's all fantasy. Why is it so wrong to say people are only going to age while they're actually around?

No one made any mention about the whole healing/hungry/thirsty thing. If time is elapsing, the character should get hungry, if not starve to death, and all that jazz. If it's just the spirit that is aging, that's crap; people die because their BODIES have grown too old. Yet when you sign off of SK, the BODY isn't there anymore. Does it just go to some aging pit while it's stuffed full of food and water constantly, yet prevented from having its wounds healed? Talk about disbelief...

well any group that has no recruitment would end up in shambles IRL, so why is it not the same here. so having a group that has kickass leaders ,and not one else, end up in shambles is a good thing. also they would be older than 90. even if you are not logged in, mudtime is still running, there is a date and everything, how could you explain being 15 in the year 776 and being 17 in the year 789?? well you didnt log in right, but from an IC point of view that is just not going to cut it.

Then, like I said, if time elapses then why don't wounds heal, et. al.? The only thing that happens when you sign out is that your life still goes by, but everything else is stagnant. That doesn't make sense from a practical point of view