I only have a 4 sentence character backstory so far because I don't know if I should invest more time and effort.
Be careful what you wish for… If only I had listened to that age old wisdom and chosen my words more carefully. “Make me younger,” I told the hag I thought I had outsmarted but, by the time I realized my reverse aging wasn’t stopping, she was long gone. My only hope to find a cure is by adventuring, but taking the life from others accelerates my unaging. I hope I find a magical cure before I cease to exist. Tagline: All I wanted was to cheat death without becoming something gross!
I'm super new to D&D and I feel like this idea would be really cool to RP.... and have no freaking clue how a DM would make it playable.
My thinking is that I start playing this character when looks like he's in his mid or early twenties, but since he literally ages in reverse where every day he gets one day younger instead of one day older, he was actually born about one hundred years ago (assuming he was in his sixties when the spell was cast).
Somewhere along the way (maybe during an apartment fire, extended stay in a hospital, or raider attack), he figured out that people dying near him somehow magically transmits some of their life essence to him and accelerate his "unaging." To get rid of those last pesky grey hairs he spent a few weeks volunteering at the charity hospital or visiting the gallows on execution day.
He's also come to realize that, the younger he gets, the more sensitive he becomes to the "boost" of people dying near him, and of course, realizes that he has no "off switch" to make his "regular" reverse-aging stop either.
Thus he has to start adventuring to find a magical cure before he becomes too young to cure himself and even care for himself or somehow reverse-ages out of existence!
I was thinking that he absorbs the XP of people who die near him and the amount of XP is multiplied by his level number, and every 1,000XP = 1 year.... but first, I have no freaking idea how to really play D&D much less a whole campaign, and second, that seems really freaking complicated!
Or do I keep it simple by starting the game with him getting two years youngers for every level he gains?
I really like the more-youth-from-more-challenging-foes idea, but it makes things complicated. I feel like it even makes sense: if he gets a boost of youth from nearby death, then the death of a dragon or remorhaz or beholder should give more youth than a regular bandit.
I also really like that he becomes more "sensitive" to the "boost" as he gets younger, even though that also complicated game mechanics. I feel like that also makes sense: call it the exponential growth of the reverse aging process, the "boost" being more concentrated in a younger/smaller body, or merely a side-effect of the spell strengthening as it is used more.
Please help me!!! I just invested waaay more time and energy into trying to thoroughly explain the idea so that you would be able to judge whether the idea was worth spending time and energy on!!!
*edit* To expand on that, you've made mechanical something that's better expressed descriptively. Merlin aging backwards is a good model for the kind of description you're going for. It's a fun idea; have a try.
As others say, ask your DM. I know that if I were the DM, I personally wouldn’t be into the bookkeeping part. DMs have a lot to keep track of, and adding in a whole subsystem to keep track of the age of one character would be a lot.
Now if you want to track it yourself, that’s not as bad, just be considerate about what you ask the DM to take on.
Also, understand that in this edition, there is no official, mechanical difference based on character age. Your str score, along with all your other abilities, is the same if you are 15 or 50 or 100. So while it may be fun for you to role play dramatic age shifts, that’s the only impact it will have, is on your role playing. And really, a lot of the published campaigns take place over a couple weeks or so, too short of a period for it to really matter much.
Also, realize the other players are not likely to be as invested in your gimmick as you are. They won’t know, or possibly even care exactly how old you are on a given day — and they will, usually, be too busy with their own character to worry about if they should treat your character any differently because you look a week younger than you did yesterday. Ditto the DM, they probably won’t have separate sets of notes for how an NPC will respond because they won’t know if your character will be 28 or 17 at the time of the encounter. They probably won’t treat you much different, unless you start being it up, which will be a distraction for everyone. In general, don’t drift into a main character mind set, where you expect everyone to step away from their own things and just respond to you and what you are doing.
I have no problem tracking the XP myself. (I know DMs are already juggling alot of stuff)
I had not considered how character age would, or should would not affect combat, which means i either need to homebrew more rules/stuff or ignore some illogical inconsistencies.
The majority of my D&D experience is based on watching Vox Machina, who do hardcore roleplaying and years-long campaigns. I guess I'm better off getting some actually D&D gaming experience before I try to develop any complicated characters.
I would never want to showboat in my party. I know spotlight should be split equally amongst all party members, with maybe brief scenes/situations where one specific character's backstory or abilities let them briefly outshine the others.
I'm not entirely ready to completely scrap this dream, but I'll put this character idea on the backburner in the unlikely event I ever manage to find a hardcore roleplaying, longterm campaign.
Maybe I'll just make a character that's a kid or adult trapped in a kid's body. That could cause some funny scenes as newcomers try to treat them their age or wonder why their party members are letting this kid play with a sword...... or something.
The majority of my D&D experience is based on watching Vox Machina, who do hardcore roleplaying and years-long campaigns. I guess I'm better off getting some actually D&D gaming experience before I try to develop any complicated characters.
There's this thing known by most in the D&D community as the Matt Mercer effect. Basically it's when a new player or DM watches Critical Role or Dimension 20 and gets unrealistic expectations on what the game is actually like to play. It isn't anything against Matt Mercer; quite the opposite actually. He, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and everyone else on the aforementioned real-play games are just such good game masters and players that they set the bar so high, and then new players and game masters assume that's the norm.
I have no problem tracking the XP myself. (I know DMs are already juggling alot of stuff)
I had not considered how character age would, or should would not affect combat, which means i either need to homebrew more rules/stuff or ignore some illogical inconsistencies.
The majority of my D&D experience is based on watching Vox Machina, who do hardcore roleplaying and years-long campaigns. I guess I'm better off getting some actually D&D gaming experience before I try to develop any complicated characters.
I would never want to showboat in my party. I know spotlight should be split equally amongst all party members, with maybe brief scenes/situations where one specific character's backstory or abilities let them briefly outshine the others.
I'm not entirely ready to completely scrap this dream, but I'll put this character idea on the backburner in the unlikely event I ever manage to find a hardcore roleplaying, longterm campaign.
Maybe I'll just make a character that's a kid or adult trapped in a kid's body. That could cause some funny scenes as newcomers try to treat them their age or wonder why their party members are letting this kid play with a sword...... or something.
I really, really hope I didn’t dampen your enthusiasm. You found what could be a really interesting, fun idea, and it seems like it would be really fun for you. You should go for it. Also, I tend to be a bit of a devil’s advocate kind of person. You should find a way to make it work. Just keep your expectations in check. There are absolutely groups where something like your character would thrive, just realize that not all of them will be like that. If you really want a super-rp experience, then just keep looking until you find it. They are out ther, and I’ll bet they’d love a player like you to join them.
I think this is a really cool character backstory and gives the character solid motivation with something fun and mystical about them that won't immediately affect gameplay.
I would say, though, that I think you're overcomplicating the issue. Most games, even if the adventure takes 3 years of real-life time to play through, unless your DM is regularly giving out years of downtime between adventures, in-game it usually passes in just a few months. I recently finished a 2-year-long campaign with my friends that included a lot of roleplay, travel, and other things... we went from level 3 to 17, and in the end only 4 months of in-game time passed.
So I wouldn't go out of my way to come up with a unique system to track your characters aging (or de-aging, I suppose). Unless your DM is really going out of their way to show it off, it probably won't come up. It's still a cool backstory and explains why they're out doing what they do... I don't even think you necessarily need the "absorbing age from death" mechanic... you could simply say that they're adventuring looking for something to undo their wish... whether that means finding the hag that cursed them, or finding some other magical object.
Here's what I would do... for one, I'd start the game even younger than you're suggesting. Like the character is now in their early teens. Maybe they've been perfectly happy with the "curse" so far, living out their best years, only getting more youthful and energetic... but now they realize they're being treated as a child, and soon they'll be helpless and maybe they're terrified what de-aging to before birth would even be and they're getting desperate, so they have to resort to adventuring themselves. Having them be so young right off the bat helps to show how dangerous of a situation they're in, and also could lead to some funny moments where a 14 year old talks and acts like a grumpy old man. At that point it's more about how you play them to take advantage of their unique backstory, rather than giving them a separate mechanic that, odds are, won't really come up naturally within the game anyway.
I have no problem tracking the XP myself. (I know DMs are already juggling alot of stuff)
I had not considered how character age would, or should would not affect combat, which means i either need to homebrew more rules/stuff or ignore some illogical inconsistencies.
The majority of my D&D experience is based on watching Vox Machina, who do hardcore roleplaying and years-long campaigns. I guess I'm better off getting some actually D&D gaming experience before I try to develop any complicated characters.
I would never want to showboat in my party. I know spotlight should be split equally amongst all party members, with maybe brief scenes/situations where one specific character's backstory or abilities let them briefly outshine the others.
I'm not entirely ready to completely scrap this dream, but I'll put this character idea on the backburner in the unlikely event I ever manage to find a hardcore roleplaying, longterm campaign.
Maybe I'll just make a character that's a kid or adult trapped in a kid's body. That could cause some funny scenes as newcomers try to treat them their age or wonder why their party members are letting this kid play with a sword...... or something.
I really, really hope I didn’t dampen your enthusiasm. You found what could be a really interesting, fun idea, and it seems like it would be really fun for you. You should go for it. Also, I tend to be a bit of a devil’s advocate kind of person. You should find a way to make it work. Just keep your expectations in check. There are absolutely groups where something like your character would thrive, just realize that not all of them will be like that. If you really want a super-rp experience, then just keep looking until you find it. They are out ther, and I’ll bet they’d love a player like you to join them.
I would describe it more as a bucket of cold water that revealed my unrealistic expectations. In order to make this concept playable, I need to adapt it (in ways I'd rather not).
First of all, interesting idea but one that you need to talk to your DM about. Like others have mentioned, you also probably don't need a fixed system for exactly when you "age down", I'd say, leave that up to the DM.
All of that said, I was thinking about the whole "un-aging faster when people die around you" bit. Since it's actually a very easy solution to the problem that it causes (just stay away from people who die, problem solved), wouldn't it be more interesting if it was the other way around? That unless you kill people, you un-age even faster? Not only does that present an actual obstacle that can't be solved easily, it also opens up for some interesting moral dilemmas. Will your character become more bloodthirst as they become more desperate to survive, are you justified in killing "bad" people, etc. Just a thought.
First of all, interesting idea but one that you need to talk to your DM about. Like others have mentioned, you also probably don't need a fixed system for exactly when you "age down", I'd say, leave that up to the DM.
All of that said, I was thinking about the whole "un-aging faster when people die around you" bit. Since it's actually a very easy solution to the problem that it causes (just stay away from people who die, problem solved), wouldn't it be more interesting if it was the other way around? That unless you kill people, you un-age even faster? Not only does that present an actual obstacle that can't be solved easily, it also opens up for some interesting moral dilemmas. Will your character become more bloodthirst as they become more desperate to survive, are you justified in killing "bad" people, etc. Just a thought.
Substituting the life energy of those around me to satisfy the spell/curse so it doesn't affect me is a very interesting idea. I will give it some thought. It definitely opens the door to darker motivations and actions...
I DM a lot (it’s been 2 years and I have been a player…. for a single oneshot)
If I was your DM I would say absolutely but your looking at it from a way too technical perspective. If it is simply you are unaging and when you kill more things you unage more, that’s super cool. But linking it to XP and then to levels is way too technical and removes the power from the dungeon masters hands. If I was your dm I would wait until it had been a certain amount of time and you had killed a certain amount of enemies and then I would start the weird stuff forcing you to find a cure.
The point is, your idea is fabulous and would be incredible for RP, so when you enter your game chat with your DM and if they are very fabulous they will incorporate it into an element of the story and you won’t need to worry about it, your idea is really cool and not too outlandish to handle so go chat with your dm and enjoy your game!
Happy Gaming Friends!
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I only have a 4 sentence character backstory so far because I don't know if I should invest more time and effort.
Be careful what you wish for…
If only I had listened to that age old wisdom and chosen my words more carefully. “Make me younger,” I told the hag I thought I had outsmarted but, by the time I realized my reverse aging wasn’t stopping, she was long gone. My only hope to find a cure is by adventuring, but taking the life from others accelerates my unaging. I hope I find a magical cure before I cease to exist.
Tagline: All I wanted was to cheat death without becoming something gross!
I'm super new to D&D and I feel like this idea would be really cool to RP.... and have no freaking clue how a DM would make it playable.
My thinking is that I start playing this character when looks like he's in his mid or early twenties, but since he literally ages in reverse where every day he gets one day younger instead of one day older, he was actually born about one hundred years ago (assuming he was in his sixties when the spell was cast).
Somewhere along the way (maybe during an apartment fire, extended stay in a hospital, or raider attack), he figured out that people dying near him somehow magically transmits some of their life essence to him and accelerate his "unaging." To get rid of those last pesky grey hairs he spent a few weeks volunteering at the charity hospital or visiting the gallows on execution day.
He's also come to realize that, the younger he gets, the more sensitive he becomes to the "boost" of people dying near him, and of course, realizes that he has no "off switch" to make his "regular" reverse-aging stop either.
Thus he has to start adventuring to find a magical cure before he becomes too young to cure himself and even care for himself or somehow reverse-ages out of existence!
I was thinking that he absorbs the XP of people who die near him and the amount of XP is multiplied by his level number, and every 1,000XP = 1 year.... but first, I have no freaking idea how to really play D&D much less a whole campaign, and second, that seems really freaking complicated!
Or do I keep it simple by starting the game with him getting two years youngers for every level he gains?
I really like the more-youth-from-more-challenging-foes idea, but it makes things complicated. I feel like it even makes sense: if he gets a boost of youth from nearby death, then the death of a dragon or remorhaz or beholder should give more youth than a regular bandit.
I also really like that he becomes more "sensitive" to the "boost" as he gets younger, even though that also complicated game mechanics. I feel like that also makes sense: call it the exponential growth of the reverse aging process, the "boost" being more concentrated in a younger/smaller body, or merely a side-effect of the spell strengthening as it is used more.
Please help me!!!
I just invested waaay more time and energy into trying to thoroughly explain the idea so that you would be able to judge whether the idea was worth spending time and energy on!!!
Read T. H. White's The Once and Future King.
*edit* To expand on that, you've made mechanical something that's better expressed descriptively. Merlin aging backwards is a good model for the kind of description you're going for. It's a fun idea; have a try.
Ask your DM.
[REDACTED]
As others say, ask your DM. I know that if I were the DM, I personally wouldn’t be into the bookkeeping part. DMs have a lot to keep track of, and adding in a whole subsystem to keep track of the age of one character would be a lot.
Now if you want to track it yourself, that’s not as bad, just be considerate about what you ask the DM to take on.
Also, understand that in this edition, there is no official, mechanical difference based on character age. Your str score, along with all your other abilities, is the same if you are 15 or 50 or 100. So while it may be fun for you to role play dramatic age shifts, that’s the only impact it will have, is on your role playing. And really, a lot of the published campaigns take place over a couple weeks or so, too short of a period for it to really matter much.
Also, realize the other players are not likely to be as invested in your gimmick as you are. They won’t know, or possibly even care exactly how old you are on a given day — and they will, usually, be too busy with their own character to worry about if they should treat your character any differently because you look a week younger than you did yesterday. Ditto the DM, they probably won’t have separate sets of notes for how an NPC will respond because they won’t know if your character will be 28 or 17 at the time of the encounter. They probably won’t treat you much different, unless you start being it up, which will be a distraction for everyone. In general, don’t drift into a main character mind set, where you expect everyone to step away from their own things and just respond to you and what you are doing.
I have no problem tracking the XP myself. (I know DMs are already juggling alot of stuff)
I had not considered how character age would, or should would not affect combat, which means i either need to homebrew more rules/stuff or ignore some illogical inconsistencies.
The majority of my D&D experience is based on watching Vox Machina, who do hardcore roleplaying and years-long campaigns. I guess I'm better off getting some actually D&D gaming experience before I try to develop any complicated characters.
I would never want to showboat in my party. I know spotlight should be split equally amongst all party members, with maybe brief scenes/situations where one specific character's backstory or abilities let them briefly outshine the others.
I'm not entirely ready to completely scrap this dream, but I'll put this character idea on the backburner in the unlikely event I ever manage to find a hardcore roleplaying, longterm campaign.
Maybe I'll just make a character that's a kid or adult trapped in a kid's body. That could cause some funny scenes as newcomers try to treat them their age or wonder why their party members are letting this kid play with a sword...... or something.
There's this thing known by most in the D&D community as the Matt Mercer effect. Basically it's when a new player or DM watches Critical Role or Dimension 20 and gets unrealistic expectations on what the game is actually like to play. It isn't anything against Matt Mercer; quite the opposite actually. He, Brennan Lee Mulligan, and everyone else on the aforementioned real-play games are just such good game masters and players that they set the bar so high, and then new players and game masters assume that's the norm.
[REDACTED]
I really, really hope I didn’t dampen your enthusiasm. You found what could be a really interesting, fun idea, and it seems like it would be really fun for you. You should go for it. Also, I tend to be a bit of a devil’s advocate kind of person. You should find a way to make it work. Just keep your expectations in check. There are absolutely groups where something like your character would thrive, just realize that not all of them will be like that. If you really want a super-rp experience, then just keep looking until you find it. They are out ther, and I’ll bet they’d love a player like you to join them.
I think this is a really cool character backstory and gives the character solid motivation with something fun and mystical about them that won't immediately affect gameplay.
I would say, though, that I think you're overcomplicating the issue. Most games, even if the adventure takes 3 years of real-life time to play through, unless your DM is regularly giving out years of downtime between adventures, in-game it usually passes in just a few months. I recently finished a 2-year-long campaign with my friends that included a lot of roleplay, travel, and other things... we went from level 3 to 17, and in the end only 4 months of in-game time passed.
So I wouldn't go out of my way to come up with a unique system to track your characters aging (or de-aging, I suppose). Unless your DM is really going out of their way to show it off, it probably won't come up. It's still a cool backstory and explains why they're out doing what they do... I don't even think you necessarily need the "absorbing age from death" mechanic... you could simply say that they're adventuring looking for something to undo their wish... whether that means finding the hag that cursed them, or finding some other magical object.
Here's what I would do... for one, I'd start the game even younger than you're suggesting. Like the character is now in their early teens. Maybe they've been perfectly happy with the "curse" so far, living out their best years, only getting more youthful and energetic... but now they realize they're being treated as a child, and soon they'll be helpless and maybe they're terrified what de-aging to before birth would even be and they're getting desperate, so they have to resort to adventuring themselves. Having them be so young right off the bat helps to show how dangerous of a situation they're in, and also could lead to some funny moments where a 14 year old talks and acts like a grumpy old man. At that point it's more about how you play them to take advantage of their unique backstory, rather than giving them a separate mechanic that, odds are, won't really come up naturally within the game anyway.
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I would describe it more as a bucket of cold water that revealed my unrealistic expectations. In order to make this concept playable, I need to adapt it (in ways I'd rather not).
First of all, interesting idea but one that you need to talk to your DM about. Like others have mentioned, you also probably don't need a fixed system for exactly when you "age down", I'd say, leave that up to the DM.
All of that said, I was thinking about the whole "un-aging faster when people die around you" bit. Since it's actually a very easy solution to the problem that it causes (just stay away from people who die, problem solved), wouldn't it be more interesting if it was the other way around? That unless you kill people, you un-age even faster? Not only does that present an actual obstacle that can't be solved easily, it also opens up for some interesting moral dilemmas. Will your character become more bloodthirst as they become more desperate to survive, are you justified in killing "bad" people, etc. Just a thought.
Substituting the life energy of those around me to satisfy the spell/curse so it doesn't affect me is a very interesting idea. I will give it some thought. It definitely opens the door to darker motivations and actions...
I DM a lot (it’s been 2 years and I have been a player…. for a single oneshot)
If I was your DM I would say absolutely but your looking at it from a way too technical perspective. If it is simply you are unaging and when you kill more things you unage more, that’s super cool. But linking it to XP and then to levels is way too technical and removes the power from the dungeon masters hands. If I was your dm I would wait until it had been a certain amount of time and you had killed a certain amount of enemies and then I would start the weird stuff forcing you to find a cure.
The point is, your idea is fabulous and would be incredible for RP, so when you enter your game chat with your DM and if they are very fabulous they will incorporate it into an element of the story and you won’t need to worry about it, your idea is really cool and not too outlandish to handle so go chat with your dm and enjoy your game!
Happy Gaming Friends!