Certainly I'm the first to believe in hard training for keeping one young indefinitely, but the fact of the matter is that performance does decrease the older you get (the last Rocky movie had an excellent examination of this). With that said, that's offset by experience. So, for instance, in an RPG, you might have a 25 year old Level 10 character with high strength and dexterity, or a 50 year old character with slightly lower strength and dexterity but is level 25. The greater experience would offset performance declines. It's all about balance. You could have that same level 25 character with the stat levels of a 25 year old and have the character be a god, but unless that's your intention - to have a character ascend to god-hood - having some type of balance mechanism in place to keep things real makes sense.
In "Phantasie" for instance, unless you already started with an old character, your character would definitely have aged by the time you finished the game's main goal, but you wouldn't have necessarily reached the point where stats would start to diminish. It only really came into play if you wanted to bring that character or characters over to the next game. To me, that's fairly realistic. Of course on the downside as is typical for RPGs, bringing over characters was not really worth it as they were stripped of quite a few things.
Certainly I'm the first to believe in hard training for keeping one young indefinitely, but the fact of the matter is that performance does decrease the older you get (the last Rocky movie had an excellent examination of this). With that said, that's offset by experience. So, for instance, in an RPG, you might have a 25 year old Level 10 character with high strength and dexterity, or a 50 year old character with slightly lower strength and dexterity but is level 25. The greater experience would offset performance declines. It's all about balance. You could have that same level 25 character with the stat levels of a 25 year old and have the character be a god, but unless that's your intention - to have a character ascend to god-hood - having some type of balance mechanism in place to keep things real makes sense.
In "Phantasie" for instance, unless you already started with an old character, your character would definitely have aged by the time you finished the game's main goal, but you wouldn't have necessarily reached the point where stats would start to diminish. It only really came into play if you wanted to bring that character or characters over to the next game. To me, that's fairly realistic. Of course on the downside as is typical for RPGs, bringing over characters was not really worth it as they were stripped of quite a few things.
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director | Armchair Arcade, Inc.
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Bill Loguidice, Managing Director
Armchair Arcade, Inc.