Life expectancy of Medieval Britain was 64 if you reached adulthood:
"Medieval Britain[17][18] 30 At age 21, life expectancy was an additional 43 years (total age 64)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancyTherefore, I don't believe our current system of merely making 80, 90, 100+ yo characters a bit "slower" is very realistic. I think once we reach an age of, perhaps 80?, there is a random chance every sunset that the player will have slipped off into a coma during the night. This chance will increase with every year added.
To fit in with the new system, I guess this would be something like a triple critical wounding, taking considerable time to recover from. They could, of course, have a chance each turn of slipping back into the coma.
Granted - with many characters, few would actually notice they had slipped into a coma unless they lost their positions. But still, it would add some realism to the game. I mean, you can't really expect us to believe that a character who is, say:
XX 104 years
Would be able to slip into his plate mail and run off to fight monsters, do you? And who, In Game, would grant this type of person any sort of position knowing - as our characters do - that they should have been dead 40 years ago and could go face down in their evening soup? I mean, Bob Dole was only 73 when he ran for President, and his age was a major consideration. Would you grant an important job to someone who was
xx 103 years
or
xx 106 years
or
xx 107 years
If players want to keep these characters immortal, that's fine, but it really needs to come with a penalty. We're not role playing a chatroom, we're roleplaying Medieval Life.
