This is a pretty funny intro to Ars Magica honestly. Watching this 60 year old man I rolled up as my first ever character wither away and nearly die. It reminds me of starting a hardcore save in Kingdom Come: Deliverance where your character dies as a child when you hit "start" half of the time.
The thing about aging without a longevity ritual, it seems, is that rolling a Crisis is really not that difficult. Pretty much a 1/10 chance most of the time. This poor guy rolled 3 crises on his way to 60, and now he's a frail old man before hitting seniority. Not a single positive characteristic to his name.
Am I understanding these rules right?
You roll for aging every year and if you roll a crisis, you dump as many point into aging as it would take to get an ability- as many as 20 points if you're moving up to Decrepitude 4 really early?
By extension, once a mage is old enough to be stuck in that 1/10th chance for a crisis range, it's just a matter of time, right? That's why there aren't many 200 year-old mages?
I guess there's only so much that can be done when you're rolling a d10...
Yes, it is harsh. I made a 54 yr old NPC for my next session and she had some bad aging rolls, which left her pretty nerfed. Luckily it didn’t hit the main characteristic that she needs to use for the adventure…
Premodern aging was rough. The average life expectancy before 1960 was below 50, death due to all causes. Toss out war, famine, and childhood death, and you’ve still got mortality ages below 70.
(Most life expectancy averages are skewed by childhood fatalities, which Ars Magica does not, and need not, generally model.)
When I modeled aging in a thread a while back, average adult life expectancy in ME with the aging system was ~64. That is pretty accurate, since it should have been somewhere ~60-64 depending on the exact year and location in Europe. Those are numbers without childhood fatalities, which would take around a third of people as babies and just under half before adulthood at the time.
The problem are not the characters without longevity rituals, but the players.
I was in my mid 20’s when I started playing Ars Magica. This year, I am going to be 60. Sure, I might be in a better shape than an average person in 1200, but I have surely lost 1–2 on all my characteristics. I started with character who were my age or older, up to their 40s. But some of my characters are now way younger than I am.
I have personally played a PC that without the longevity ritual that aged very gracefully, but that’s via some cheesing- regiment, living in the country side, excellent quality food crafted by experts and such. I think the final total was like, a -10 before aging stuff which meant he aged really really well for a 70 years old man.
That said, he was a Count who could afford all of this. So not quiet the norm.
If I recall correctly, in 13th century England, based on land inheritance records from yeomen, if you survived childhood, you could expect to live into your 50s or so. This of course is an average which includes a fair number of people surviving into their 60s, but also a lot of people dying in their 40s.
Sounds a little low, but then it makes sense with the environmental health modifiers.
I said that in jest, but environment and conditions have serious effects on life span. And body wear also mattered, which is one thing that AM doesn’t do well.
I remember reading somewhere that because their food/grains weren’t heavily processed in the Middle Ages, the wear and tear on teeth was considerable.
Essentially skeletons of older people showed what remaining teeth they had were worn down to uselessness.
I imagine once your teeth wore out, quality of life dropped quite a bit. Which I imagine did not help with Aging rolls.
I remember reading somewhere that because their food/grains weren’t heavily processed in the Middle Ages, the wear and tear on teeth was considerable.
That would explain a lot. I get people dying of some disease, injuries never really healing, it's just how frail this character became at 60 that's sort of odd to me. Basically bedridden. Then there's people like my grand-uncle who did landscaping and was still probably more physically fit than I am in his 60s. Looked like an old leather shoe but tough like one too.
