Character Age

If wanted, here are rules for aging.

The only reason to incorporate character age at all would be in the event of a D&D campaign.  The actual age of the character is irrelevant if the goal is to run a one-off adventure or some similar episodic game, where a sustained period of time isn't part of play.  In such cases, it doesn't matter if the character is 20 or 200, or 2000 for that matter, so long as they're able to stand on their two feet and function accordingly.

The game of D&D as it is usually played does not incorporate age well.  In my present campaign, which I began playing online in late 2016, the total "game time" that's passed is not quite three months, from April 18th to July 7th.  This despite the players having gotten involved in two dungeons, many encounters and several short journeys overland and water, though none of those more than 40 miles at a stretch.  The reason for this compressed time comes partly because players do not want to expend food for days just sitting around, but also because viscerally they don't get "tired" of constantly being on the move, as actual living characters would.  Players will concede to sitting in any one location just long enough to heal, but then they are instantly off the next morning, without pause, as though it really matters that they are gone within 8 hours of healing that last hit point and not the day after.

As such, even in face-to-face campaigns, where a great deal more ground can be covered in six hours than in an online campaign, it can take 2-3 years of real time to pass one year in game time.  Of course, if the players chose to do so, they could agree to sit out a full year and that could be calculated and applied in perhaps an hour and a half ... which could enable the DM to create more personal relationships between the player characters and NPCs in the neighborhood, build up hireling loyalty and relations, allow the players to plan and build a home base, raise food, accumulate goods, build contacts with local vendors and even the constabulary or authorities.  At the cost of a player moving from 23 years old to 24, the players could more easily protect themselves from misunderstandings with the law, gain considerable status by supporting and aiding a community with spells and their experience and build in-roads to greater opportunities for larger, more ambitious adventures than what they happen to find in the local wilderness ... but they just won't do it.  They want their marshmallow RIGHT NOW, and though they probably have 60 years to spend before any chance of dying of old age, players will not spend one.

In large part, we should recognize that at least 85% of all participants in D&D have never experienced any age older than their early 20s ... and that their whole conception of being in their thirties, forties or later in life is entirely superficial.  They know only what they've observed about middle age or being old, and are particularly influenced by things like appearance, apparent indifference that old people display, or evidence of old people being tired or incalcitrant.  Unless the young player happens to have good relationships with older family members, they will have little to know understanding of why an older person thinks as they do, or how experience has influenced the older person's perspective on things.  And even if they have that, it's probable that they enjoy that small insight with a very few persons, perhaps no more than one.

Obviously, a forty-something person knows hundreds of forty-something people very well, a truth that will hold as people age steadily.  Every person of forty plus can recall many conversations about "getting old," and about how they see the world very differently from when they were in their teens and twenties, and why they see the world differently.  It is impossible to be in your post fifties and have a multi-hour conversation with anyone near your age without drifting into subjects of "what we have to do now about our health" or "what we're doing about preparing ourselves for getting older."  These are facts of life that older persons must consciously control, just as young persons must consciously control their approach to school or their approaches to a new career.

Because of this discrepancy — in which an older person can recall what it meant to get ready for school, do homework, pass courses or adapt to a new working environment, but a younger person knows zero to nothing about having their formerly excellent body break down slowly or prepping for retirement — it is somewhat facile to roll character ages of 50+ for players to imagine running; and positively ridiculous to tag a character with ages in the hundreds of years, when no person living anywhere has the least conception of what personality an age like that would provoke.  Since players don't care, on the whole, about campaign games, and don't care, except trivially, that their 50+ character has grey hair and moves a little slower in the morning, the concept of aging presents, for most D&D players, an utterly useless and empty-headed rule set.

On the other hand, if players COULD see age as a resource to be exploited in the same way as a pile of food, personal skills or wealth, as something spent in order to obtain those things mentioned upper in this post, there might be reason to see the accumulation of years over real-time spent to mean something, even if it's only that formerly, before spending the time, we were strangers in this community, and that now, ten years later, we're well known and liked because of the time spent and the work we've done to earn trust and friendship from others.  It is far easier to "spend" ten years in D&D than in real life, where those years physically challenge the body and mind with boredom, ennui and undesired doubt — and make no mistake, we all DO spend ten years the hard way, and experience those effects even when those years bring success and recompense.  In any case, the only reason to have age be a part of the game is when that age is given real value, something more than a number written underneath one's ability scores.

Of course, this presupposes the DM is open to seeing age as a resource and is not, like most players, as anxious to get the next encounter or adventure started once the hour of the last one has barely finished chiming.