Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Character Age Change

Or maybe you could not use dates at all, and just plug in an age? Like I would pop in that my character was 43 when I made them, and every 365 days from the date they were made it would tick up the age? Not sure if this would be simpler or not

Does that account for characters with profiles that are already made? And if their IC Birthday doesn't match their creation date, do you just set the 'creation' date to the birthday?

For example, my dark elf, Johann, was made somewhere in December 10-20th of 2010 (so his profile already exists and has since early '10 or early '11), but his birthday is November 17th. Would I just set the 'creation' date to Nov. 17th?

Doing it the second way it wouldn't keep track of a birthday, just -about- how old they were. I was just trying to see if I could make it simpler because I really want this feature

I guess what I'm getting at is how does the second way accurately reflect the change in the character's age yearly? To continue my Johann example, I'd be miffed if I looked up on November 17th this year or next and find his age hadn't changed/changed incorrectly and was inaccurate as a result.

It wouldn't be accurate, it would just be an estimate

As someone who's pretty touchy about accuracy, that would bug me so hard.

I think making it tied to creation date makes it less likely to happen!

Wouldn't it be easiest it you're asked to input the character's age and their day and month of birth. That way their age rolls up by one on the correct date every year, regardless of whether they were born in 1809, 1951, 2001 or 3843 or a fantasy year that can't be portrayed with mere numbers. If the player wants to display their exact year of birth it can be done elsewhere?

... THAT SOUNDS AMAZING!

Not sorry for the caps. That sounds easy peasy!

This is actually exactly how I've been thinking this would need to be done!

That is how I had first thought about it as well. Hope that can be done

Honestly, that's exactly what I wanted to begin with, but then people brought up characters that don't work on a 365 calendar

I'm 100% in favor, but I do wonder how many characters will be left out of this feature. I have several friends with characters that don't exist in a universe with 365 days in the year, more than 'regular' ones. I don't know the scope of the entire site of course, but if a large portion of characters can't use it cause it's limited to 365 days, is it worth implementing?

I believe that the VAST majority of characters either use a 365 day year, or are fixed age or a creator's whim per-RP age (both of which wouldn't have to opt-in to auto-aging, but could still enter a "searchable" age without a birthday).

So I'm not particularly concerned about those with weird age calculations, such as those on alien worlds or those who spend a lot of time in stasis so are a different physical age than they are chronologically. It seems like if you have that many particular concerns, you can choose to enter just the age without a birthday, or no age at all, and essentially nothing has changed for you. You just end up aging your characters by hand as we all do now.

And in fact, now that we're having this conversation, I'm recalling that age was once upon a time on my planned feature list to add as a searchable character field.

The really new part is auto-aging. My lingering question is, how many characters ARE aged in real time as opposed to any other system? I have no data on this, beyond the "yes"es in this thread. My personal experience views it as very rare, even though I have also had characters aged in this fashion.

If it helps the headcount of who does what, I age all my characters in real-time. That's 16 profiled characters + *6-10 more

*Those are Pokemon. Yes, I keep track of Pokemon Team birthdays in their trainers' profiles. Obviously only the Pokemon Trainers would be tracked with this feature, and I'd continue doing their teams by hand unless/until I made individual profiles (as I did with Taunter)

I do know that this sort of aging is common in persistent communities such as the ones found on Furcadia. One real day is equivalent to one IC day in many of the popular settings that have regular traffic.

I personally age my characters in real Time, but am not in the habit of making such exact trivia available on my pages, of which there are only two, in any case. All the same, I think this is a neat idea and a loving little bit of detail that would probably see plenty of use if people knew it was there.

All 150 characters of mine age on the 365 ideal.

I have three characters who age in real time. I RP in a community where time progresses naturally (for example, Christmas, birthdays and other holidays are celebrated at the same dates as real life).

All 212 of mine go on a 365 day calendar. And all my future ones will too because it's easy xD

Perhaps for an age/birthday option have two drop down menus one have the months and other having the days then have a third box this one a text box where you can type the year they were born? Seeking how large the drop down box would be if you was to have years would probably be massive.