Post by uncoolio on Apr 5, 2024 10:55:25 GMT -5
Age affects your stats. Basically, any age gets a certain percentage of whatever you rolled in a given stat at creation, before class-based bonuses are applied. It only takes your raw diceroll into account. 100 means you get the full roll while 95 means 95% of what you rolled, rounded down. Here is the table for humans:
age str% end% agi%
14-16 80 85 110
17-20 85 95 100
21-23 90 100 100
24-27 95 100 100
28-30 97.5 100 98.7
31-33 100 100 97.5
34-37 100 100 96.7
38-40 97.5 100 95
Any number below 100 is always at least -1. It's very rarely more than -1, but it can be in cases like a 22 year old human whose base strength roll is 18. 18*0,9=16,2, so you would get -2 to strength. Old elves can also lose multiple points of agility if your base agility roll was high. In general, strength is the only stat that could drop by more than one point within the age ranges that people normally pick for characters that care about stats. Don't be young if you want to have as much strength as possible. Never pick an age below 21 because then you also lose endurance, and you gain nothing in return. I believe the minimum age is 16, and you do in fact get a 10% agility bonus at that age--but only until 17, and your other stats will be really bad.
There is no age that doesn't get a penalty to either strength or agility. You want to pick the age bracket that gives you the stats you prefer, and the lowest age of that bracket, so you have as long as possible before aging out of your optimal age range. The optimal ranges are 31 for strength, which lasts until the age of 38; and 21 for agility, which lasts until 28. That's the longest a character can live without reaching the age bracket where your favored stat is penalized. 24 is an option for characters that care about both strength and agility, but then you only have until 28 before you lose a point of agility.
Wisdom has a penalty at any age except the final 'ancient' bracket which is like 60+ and not something anyone ever picks for a character whose stats matter. For all intents and purposes, every character has -1 to wisdom from age. Not worth putting wisdom percentages in the table.
For non-human races, there's a formula to calculate your 'virtual age,' which is what that age equates to in human years. Take a given age for that race, multiply it by hundred, and divide the result by:
Elf: 116
Half-elf: 108
Dwarf: 220
half-giant: 180
mul: 75
So to see what 40 elf years compares to in human years, it's (40*100)/116=34 years. There may be some rounding oddities here and there that I can't account for, so I recommend erring on the side of caution and picking an age one year above the minimum threshold for your intended age bracket when making non-human characters. Any race besides muls will have more years in each bracket anyway, so it's less of a concern.
Note: I seem to remember hearing that when you age into a bracket that would give a stat adjustment with an existing character, there's only a chance that the adjustment kicks in, and then another chance on each subsequent birthday if the change hasn't happened yet. This is uncomfirmed and effectively impossible to test. You should probably assume that your stats will be adjusted as soon as you reach an age bracket that says so in the age table. When creating a new character, the age-based stat adjustments always take effect.