Forums » RP Discussion » Character Aging/The Passing Of Time

A lot of people have a lot of different views about how aging a character should happen or how much time should have elapsed between X and Y.
I have, on more than one occasion, had my roleplay disrupted by people having varying outlooks on the subjects of time and aging.

What about you?
Have you ever had roleplay disrupted because of this?
Do you age your characters, or are they in a constant loop of youth?
Do you have a certain type of equation you plug numbers into to figure these things out?

Regarding character aging, I've encountered it and kind of tend to ignore it (even though logically a normal person wouldn't), and I think due to my ignoring of it, it tends not to disrupt rp. My characters don't bat an eye at it, probably because I'm not in the mood to get on people's butts all the time to let them know that it seems weird that my character hasn't aged ____# of years, but theirs have.

Some folks do this because they don't want to play children growing up-- usually the children of two characters that already exist who've just had a baby. It happens; people want to rp the interesting going-ons of older kids/teens, they don't want to have to bother waiting in real time for the results that come along. And y'know what? If that's what makes them happy, okie-dokie: I'm willing, in this instance, to turn a blind eye to it. I tend to play characters that physically age a bit slower due to their species anyway, so the difference isn't noticeable until you look at actual numbers.

As for myself, mine age normally because 99% of my PC'd characters are teens/adults of varying ages, a set of characters that I don't mind aging in real time.


Passage of time is totally on my whims. While I tend to play in real-time, I am more than willing to agree to time skips in events. Honestly it gets dull playing out the monotonous or chit chatty events between more interesting scenarios, such as having a meeting about stealing something and then waiting around for said thievery to happen a few hours later.

It's a difficult thing that needs to be agreed on by both parties, really.

I've been in a place where the whole setting was advanced at least five years because the owner wanted their character's kid to be more grown up. Nobody else was really aware of it too much, and when they found out they were like 'you can't do that, stuff was going on with OUR characters'. It tends to make a mess unless both parties agree to it.

I've done time-skipping for plot's sake, but only when the other person I'm RPing with agreed on it, and agreed on the length.

How about soap-opera kids?
Characters have children, they go away for a while, and come back around 16 years of age but their parents are in their thirties...?

I'm with Copper with regards to characters aging normally.. I am assuming that's following IRL times? I've had characters around for five or six years, and I just age them once every year. I'll admit, my main characters age had been adjusted some because I felt I had created her too young to begin with.

I have several periods of Lord Darth Angelus' life that I roleplay in. His situation, attitudes, age etc changes a lot over 25 years and I found that each time period offers different roleplay experiences.

So not only do I time jump, I also time jump backwards, depending on what I want to do.

Only in one time perioud did he age in real time but that's because the other people in the group did the same with their characters, so it made sense.

(Moved from Smalltalk to RP discussion so people can locate this thread more easily )

I personally don't bother much with character aging. If a significant amount of time has passed when the char has been 'idle' I usually revamp them and that includes aging, but otherwise I just go along with the flow of the storyline they're in. RP and real life timelines are different because RP moves slower, so I just adjust how I see fit and when it makes sense.

Me myself. I age them me. So how Kyles age is currently shown as 27, come dec 16, you guys will seeit change to 28 along with my own.

I have never really been bothered by aging issues. It's one of the most obvious advantages to roleplaying Elves, which I do about 80% of my roleplaying time. The world passes them by, while they remain relatively constant for a couple of centuries.

In addition, I have loosely planned out a timeline for some of my most developed characters, that contains certain key points along the line between birth and death, usually with exact dates. Perhaps a bit like what darth_angelus mentioned. The future part of the timeline of my characters is flexible and subject to change, leaving plenty of room for character development and unforeseen surprises that roleplays tend to bring you, but it's also fixed enough for me to be able to play the characters in whatever time setting a roleplay requires, going back into their past, or ahead into their future if necessary. There's a fixed point, "canon-age" if you will, which is an interval of time where the character is as he or she would appear on a character sheet and here at the RPR. It's the age or age-interval from where on I'm in the process of developing the character. When I feel that part of the character's life is done, I move the 'canon age' to a point further along the line in the direction of 'death'. This method probably requires you to be a nit-picking, meticulous control-freak when it comes to dominating your character's life, though.

If you RP and develop a character almost daily, Lance's method would seem perfect to me, aging the character in real-time. Otherwise I guess it would depend on how time passes in a long-term RP, which would hopefully be agreed upon by all parties. Major time-skips wouldn't be a problem for me, personally, because of the above-mentioned timeline I make up for my characters.

What about you?
My characters age along with how much time passes IRL

Have you ever had roleplay disrupted because of this?
No

Do you age your characters, or are they in a constant loop of youth?
Yes, they age. Some more differently due to what they are (ie, my Dread Creature NPC changes physically by gaining quills rather than actually adding on years and his species use how many hosts one has taken as a way of indicating how old they are -- ie, 2 hosts is young, 10 is getting on etc).

Do you have a certain type of equation you plug numbers into to figure these things out?
No

This varies for me on where I'm roleplaying at. The first place I RPed had a built in plot and world based off a book series and the rule was that a character ages up 2 years every three(3) RL months. So I played my first character from age nine to his early 20s til the group I was in dissolved. My character's adoptive father aged as well(and wasn't young when he adopted my character) in time remarried and had three kids of his own, two of which aged from newborns to teens while their dad went from just past his prime to old age(needing glasses and a cane to get around).

However most of my characters don't belong to such a structured setting as that one so they don't age much. One did age up from 12 to 16 at one point but it wasn't a slow normal aging so much as a age up to make him be older.

I have another such character which I'm slowly aging in real time (since I've adjusted when a certain event in their backstory happened and keep saying it was x time ago based on what year it is IRL).

So many responses!

My characters age with the passage of time within the roleplay- if he was 26 in spring and spring comes around again in the roleplay, he's now 27. I tend to do slice-of-life roleplays mostly, so time passes strangely; I've spent a week roleplaying a scene that only lasted a day in roleplaying time, then spent ten minutes glossing over a month.

Since I mainly do 1x1 roleplays, we tend to agree on how much time has passed before we start a new scene and what's happened in the meantime, so it's not really a problem. The only exception is Russell, who managed to gain enough independence and weight that he has a Facebook account. He gets to carry his experiences and aging over from one roleplay to the next.

I personally go with about real time, most of the time--if I can set the parameters. I try to follow the flow around me and not disrupt anything, but won't participate in an RP where everyone needs to be RUSHRUSHRUSH and drop a baby they just got pregnant with in two weeks, or have soap opera aging logic. I like development.

I go with real time when applicable and add a year to my character's age every time I rp them in a new place (unless the place is directly linked to the previous place.
I don't pay much attention to it myself on others, seeing as I always add only one year there haven't been too major changes to appearance or behaviour yet.

I age my characters on their birthdays every RL year. Their birthdays are usually the date I created them. However, I don't always keep track of my characters' numerical years.

Draca, that sounds REALLY cool. I'd like to be in an RP where the time was accelerated like that. It sounds scary, but rewarding.

Most of the time, I ignore it. A lot of my characters are rather long-lived as it is, so it's not like aging really affects them much.

With the fully mortal ones I play in Furc, I pop them forward a year when I feel like it. In more structured forum RPs that I'm in, I just follow how they're doing it there. Latest game I'm in has a one month RL = one season in-game, and it seems to work pretty well.

Another game had year-long timeskips that happened occasionally, which worked out once and totally failed the other time. They were usually done to skip ahead to an event (in the case of the former, skipping through some political machinations, and the latter one, it was for the duration of a war and a bit of the aftermath - which, honestly, would've been much more interesting to play through, but the mods wanted to skip past it for whatever reason). Otherwise, the game itself played out in a one-day is one-day ratio.

A lot of my characters have ambiguous ages so far as numerical values go, so aging on a small basis isn't such a big deal with them. They're all over the equivalents of middle-aged for their species and one is even a pseudo immortal, and so I don't often worry about it, because no big changes are going to occur to them from year to year.

My main character, though, is a Time wizard, so the passing of years is kind of important to him. I age him once every 'real' year, no matter what continuity he's in (though one year I did bump him up by 10, but it was only a numerical change, because the younger age didn't quite suit him). It's in accordance with the way I do my active roleplay (day-to-day stuff outside of very particular oneshots), which also progresses very slowly depending on the actual year. I feel there's less confusion that way, and it's served me very well so far!

I have encountered some pime taradox kids before, and it didn't really bother me too much. It's easiest to just roll with it, even if it is kind of annoying sometimes when it happens in communities that encompass more than just a small group of friends.

What about you?
My characters age along with how much time passes in real life, however if there is an rp where an agreement is made etc. because of time issues and what not I have at one time or another sped things up.

Have you ever had roleplay disrupted because of this?
No, never had an issue.

Do you age your characters, or are they in a constant loop of youth?
ALL of my characters age, I tend to pick DOBs out and even if not in their profiles I can look at it and their date of creation and age accordingly. I'm not a fan of a "loop of youth", with age comes a lot of development and the longer you play the more interesting the character becomes.

Do you have a certain type of equation you plug numbers into to figure these things out?
Definitely not, I'm horrible at math.

What about you?
My characters age in real time. I tend to play mostly human/humanoid characters, so there are effects to aging. I have a character that I started playing when he was a teen, that I feel has become more balanced and mature as he's grown up. I may not play them every single day, but they continue to grow. Have this weird idea that characters are still going about their lives even if I'm not playing them. The passing of time only when roleplay occurs has caused problems before.

Have you ever had roleplay disrupted because of this?
Has mentioned above, I've known people that only pass time when roleplay is occuring, so my character might have seen them 3 months ago, but for that character it's only been a day. It tends to get a little awkward, especially if said person was trying to cultivate a relationship with my character. Another problem is massive time skips with little to no reason why. I had an rp friend that would want to skip years at a time on a whim, drove me batty. xD

Do you age your characters, or are they in a constant loop of youth?
They do age, and they show signs of it. I have one character that is nearing thirty but she does a lot of work with her hands, and is already showing signs of arthritis because of it. But again, this goes back to me playing mostly humans. I suppose if I played something else, such as an elf or a dragon, or even a vampire, this wouldn't matter quite as much.


Do you have a certain type of equation you plug numbers into to figure these things out?
Haha no way, that'd just be even more confusing. I just pick a birth date and go with it. Oddly enough, I find that the zodiac sign they end up with always tends to suit them!

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