This thread is for discussing the "experiment" on how well a Sahir can weather aging, that can be found here.
This looks pretty neat. I don't really have anything to contribute here, but I'm watching.
I still want to know where the writers get the assumption of 2 warping points a year. Sahirs don't, to the best of my knowledge, use very many continuing effects.
Anyway, I'll be interested to see if an un-Gifted sahir is able to do the immortality thing without eventually developing all five Arts.
Well, there are a few effects that would reasonably sustained for a few seasons at a time (like the characteristic boosting effects of Solomonic Physics). Plus, I guess sahirs would often be affected by powerful effects from the beings they summon and request services of. And there are always botches 
Now, I guess that if one wanted to create a really careful Sahir, one could have him almost completely avoid warping. Still, I'll go for the 2 points/year assumption.
And warping is warping. If a Sahir spends a lot of time in a Divine Aura, he will get warping points (Not his realm, right). Given all the holy sites in the Middle East in canon, and the Crusades, I would imagine that's a real problem for them.
Possibly. I generally assume that when that was applied to magi, though, they factored in the longevity ritual (and sahirs have a much higher variance there).
I thought it had to be a powerful aura (5+). Even then there is a limit to how high the score can go just from exposure...but that might just be the Magic realm...
I would think the biggest issue would be losing access to his magic via Warping or lost experience, right?
Being unGifted, that's standard Warping with mostly Flaws, not Twilight, Fatra Banya, etc. Living outside powerful, non-magical auras will solve some of it. Not having any continuous effects will do a lot. Much of the rest is handled by only using his own spells on himself. Oh, and don't use Second Sight in non-magical auras. He should be able to avoid a lot of Warping pretty easily. You could always throw in a little Cautious X to help dodge problem areas if needed. So Warping isn't the issue.
So we turn to losing experience when reducing age. As long as that doesn't hit the critical Abilities he has, no problem. He just has to keep up with experience to more than make up what he loses. I would think Affinity with something he could get a summa for (Quran is handy for this) would be handy for this.
Another thought: Improved Magical Defenses will give him a big bonus to his aging rolls, making him far less likely to get a really bad result. It will also give him a big boost to his Soak.
He said "no munchkin." So let's not abuse XP loss like that - save that trick for Divine Gloom-ers.
And being a sahir means you get Fatra Bayna, Gifted or not.
Really meaning "no munchkin" ends the thread.
Because, like, we're going for a 400yo Sahir. A character who manages this has to be at least a bit optimized in that direction.
Just saying.
I think the point is that it has been heavily asserted elsewhere that Sahir can live for a really long time, and it's easy for them to do it. My general sense that it is not as easy to do as people have indicated. A 400 year old sahir is about like the magus with a lab total of 200. It requires a fair bit of work and dedication, perhaps to the exclusion of a lot of things...
I'm just now getting a character flirting with 100 for a lab total in her preferred TeFo, but that's in some pretty specific circumstances that take advantage of similar spell bonus and multiple lab assistants which can really juice the lab total.
Hmm. A TeFo Lab Total of TeFo 20+20 and Focus (20) and Aura 3 and Int 3 and MT 10 for 76 is very straightforward. Depending on your TeFo, pulling another +20 from the Covenants lab rules is also easy. So that's 96. I've probably spent 6-9vp on this. No similar spells, no lab assistants. Raise your primary Arts by 1 to add another 3.
I think it's straightforward for some Sahirs to do it, but clearly not all: Many Sahirs truly suck at longevity because they lack the Arts.
And how long does it take to raise Arts to 20 and MT to 10, that's 895 xp. If we go by the RAW PG advancement rules and ignore the SQ of books, giving only 30 xp per year, that's 30 years, without any additional spells, items, or anything. Of course, you can reduce that with virtues. He's had no time to improve his lab for that +20 bonus.
Easy is questionable... and certainly based on circumstances...
I think I need to reread the rules. I thought you could just age 10 years and remove 10 years (requiring a 25-point lab total and a loss of experience). Repeat once every 10 years. Even without learning Virtues, you only waste a couple seasons' learning. So maybe 3 seasons spent on this, 2 on relearning and 1 in the lab. I didn't think it was that hard. What did I miss?
Hence the 6-9vps I noted.
Pu+Af TeFo for 4. That's 204xp for 20s in each.
Pu MT for 1. That's 180 for 10.
Focus for 1 or 3.
A starting character can do a lot of this with Good Parens (and hey, that's my classic "If you don't know what to do for your first character, AfPuTeFo + Focus + Good Parens...")
300xp - 204 = 96xp (+ childhood + pre-hermetic life) to cover the basics.
That's 60 + 3 + 3 + 3(1) = 70 out of the box. 7-9vp spent. PuAf MT costs 2vp more, unless we want to diversify.
Your character doesn't have to be this optimized, so it will just take him a little longer.
Mainly, the fact that controllably losing XP is, I think, an abuse. "I have one Art that I have a really good book in, so I consistently forget fifty XP worth of that Art and re-learn it." I don't think that the rules as intended support losing XP solely in an easily-regained Art. The fluff certainly indicates that you should be losing childhood memories, so I'd be more inclined to suggest that you forget skills that you haven't practiced or gained XP in in forever.
Your offering to take the xps from skills that are never used works very nicely too!
After a lot of number crunching, Rashid is now 40 (although effectively 22 thanks to Al-Iksir)!
I'll keep working at this, but it will take some time.
I'll try to make sure Rashid loses xp roughly in the same "order" he gained them. In fact, his first elixir robbed him of some Speak Arabic xp, some Area Lore, and some Charm - xps gained during his first 5 years of life. In any case, note that it does not make that much difference when advancing a character with a set number of xp/year (rather than detailing where he gets those xp from - books, teachers etc.). The only potential munchkinism I'd see would be losing xp in abilities boosted by an Affinity, which would allow faster re-learning.
Well, he must have access to either Solomonic Physic or Solomonic Alchemy, yes. The other Solomonic Arts provide no bonus to aging rolls. But other than that, I don't think Rashid looks "optimized" for longevity.
Yes, and your method works out to essentially the same thing. Control the experience you gained recently and you control where you lose experience. It looks better, but it amounts to the same thing from a perspective like this exercise.
But, looking more generally... Consider Book Learner. Then each time you read you get bonus experience. Collect a bunch of summas (not particularly high level). Whatever you lose, you study again if you didn't want to lose it. Alternatively, look at what's being done with Wealthy for this Sahir. We're really just looking at total experience. If you gain +5ish experience per year, then over 10 years that amounts to +50ish experience from one Minor Virtue (Book Learner, for example). Removing those 10 years costs 5d10 experience, which is well under the +50ish gained on average; it is even enough to make up for the time spent doing Al-Iksir. So the losses for removing aging amount to less than the gains from a single learning Virtue, meaning those losses are not very significant.
Heh. No munchkinism alongside taking Poor and Affinity for Weaponsmithing? So you spend a few seasons to drop Poor and gain Wealthy, and it has cost some experience along the way. That was essentially a pile of free points of Virtues initially. I'm just saying my Greater Magical Defenses plus Book Learner or similar is no more munchkin than this.