Getting Old

  I've been playing RPGs for about 10 years now, both as a player and a GM. And I have yet to grow older in the hobby. In-character that is!

  You see, I'm somewhat jealous of players who, through a mixture of having played them long enough and of keeping track of the in-story time that passed, have characters who have grown significantly older than the age they had when they were first created.
  I mean, sure, I had a character start at 18 and stopped playing him at 23, but at that age he was still in his prime. He never got to Middle Age or older. His Ability Scores never saw any change.
  Part of me wants to experience that, playing a character through his long adventuring life until he dies many years after the beginning of his career or even from old age. And not in an artificial way where it's done on purpose with exactly that in mind, with the DM setting the next adventure 5 years later or things like that... No, just by keeping track of travel time and all that. If the character has to cross the ocean via boat, if they have to wait a week or two for a NPC to return for some reason, etc, etc.

  In fact, I'm sure a lot of gaming groups would be very surprised of how old their characters actually should be if they had kept track of time spent during their adventures.
  My current character is Kelleck Mage-Hunter. He is in his early 20's, a D&D 3.5 character in a two-players campaign that uses the fixed XP amount for monsters from the 3.5 version of Unearthed Arcana. The DM throws really nasty encounters at us and we somehow manage to live through them every time. I'll share some of those stories in future posts, but before anyone rolls their eyes, I'll let you know that she rolls her dice in the open. Anyway, I'm stating these things because the amount of XP our two characters gain after every fight is insane. We managed to win battles we should have probably run away from if we had been more sensible. It's not even that we're lucky with our dice, we just play smart in a fight. And since we know that this particular campaign will end when(if?) we reach level 20, I know that not even with my favorite character will I get to live a full adventurer's life, since we're already level 9 and not even a full year has passed in-story. (I speak with the best-case scenario in mind that he lives to see the end of the story!)

  So yeah, hopefully one day one of my characters will get to have gray hair. It'd feel fulfilling somehow, knowing I've gotten him that far.