I'm wondering if anyone might have house rules or suggestions for a change to the aging table to make it a little more reflective on reality.
Something to reflect that a 35 year old man needs to rely on skill, where a 20 year old still has speed and strength the 35 year old doesn't. Currently there's no difference. As a 30 year old, I can say I work five times as hard as I needed to when I was 20 to keep the same speed and strength.
Perhaps a delayed mental characteristic issues. I just don't see many folks suffering from mental decrepitude until they get very old, unless there's a flaw involved.
Possibly something about receiving flaws such as Arthritis as people get older.
If you really wanted Aging to be more "punishing" you could treat it similarly as Warping from an unaligned realm, where you get a flaw when you hit a certain Decrepitude score. This would also mean that even Wizards would feel the effects of age, even if their attributes don't necessarily suffer.
I am not sure about physical strength going down earlier. For example in weightlifting is often said the peak usually reached in mid-30s. AFAIK word records have been made in the range of mid-20s to mid-40s.
In real life some characteristics can even be improved over time. For sake of simplicity I tend to ignore real life.
Ars has enough things to keep track of without adding something like this to achieve some verisimilitude. In all games, when there is a rule change, HR, or otherwise, you need to evaluate on what it adds or subtracts from the game.
I remember helping my friend out on Saturdays as he and his father did all kinds of chores around the house. A couple of Saturdays we were too tired to game, while his parents went out on a date. I also don't remember him slacking off any, he was in his 50s back then, while we were 15 and 16. Granted, I have never been in great shape (well, maybe round), so I think it's a bit of a myth that older people can't outlast younger people. They have stamina, determination, and intelligence in how to work smarter not harder that young people don't have. Do I care that it's represented in one physical stat? No, not really.
I think that has more to do with the setting than anything.
If nothing else, just think of it as "Mythic Aging" and be done with it xD I mean, we're already using a mythic understanding of the body and how to heal it of its ills. It's okay if how people age isn't consistent with reality as long as it looks like the reality people thought they lived in.
The system is very obviously not 'realistic', but then neither is the characteristic system. I've known people to go from being weaklings to immensely strong and then back to average strength all before they were 35. In real life, things develop and things atrophy all the time. About the only thing that you 'lose' as you get older is the boundless energy of youth, but you get to replace that with wisdom and crotchetiness.
When you try to thinker a subsystem, you always give it more spotlight. That is why I think it is not worth it to complicate the aging subsystem. Ars is not about realism, and you can put your energy into story development.
On the other hand the Longevity Ritual description mentions that mages are especially resistant to ageing - circa twice as much as mundane humans bc if the better living conditions and magic.
So I think we as mundane humans in the modern age experience this "decay" after 30-35 bc we have way less phisical activity and way more food to eat than average humans in the middle ages. Both of those factors are heavily detrimental.
Mental decline is a LOT more subtle than physical decline. Nobody is as mentally sharp at 45 as they were at 25, but skill and experience carries the day at that age.
Also note that the aging table accounts for this, as mental stats are less likely to decline than physical stats the younger you are. Most of the early ones let you choose the stat, and the ones the table chooses, physical ones happen at lower rolls (for the most part).
