With the death of my sister and talking with my dad and learning a few things about the family. This got me thinking about the general lifespans of races and PCs in RPGs.
My sister died in her mid 30s, and like Kishma who passed away recently at around the same age, suffered from a lifelong illness. Way too young to pass on like that.

On the flipside though according to my dad alot of the women in the family tend to live well into their 90s. My grandmother was 97 when she passed away in 2012. Same for my great grandmothers. Well into their 90s.

So does anyone actually enforce lifepans of PCs and NPCs? If so. How much or how little? Seems alot of DMs ignore that. Or the nature of a campaign is such that it never becomes an issue?

Playing AD&D was when it seemed we used it the most. Not sure about 2e. But characters did get older. If they lived so long. There were tries to extend lifespans. But eventually those fail. Assuming the character did not become some sort of undead or otherwise no longer exactly alive.

But in general life extending magic and items were rare or epic quest sorts of deals.

Then there are the long lived races. They can end up playing across generations of shorter lived comrades even. Had one player way back, Dale, who played an elf across a generational campaign. Same elf. Eventually hitting the peak for his race and just kind of adventuring with the descendants of his original companions out of fond memories. Contrasting with Jans usual half-orc PCs who tended to never even make it to the ripe old age of 50.

And as mentioned way back in an older thread. We did once accidentally Haste to death one players Dwarf character. No one could tell how old he was anyhow!

I'll occasionally refer to the 1e DMG age tables. It rarely comes up within a campaign.

These days I generally have game time progress at same rate as real time, so characters get older but rarely die of old age.

The longest a campaign has run for in game time recently was my Mystara game 1000 AC to 1025 AC. William the Wizard my son's first pc went from age 20 to a 45 year old grandfather at time of final death. He was level 18 up from 4 at start.

Barring death by accident or violence, the prevalence of magical healing gives humans a natural lifespan of about 120 years in my setting (about the limits of what science says is possible before telomeres are no longer able to replicate). Half-elves live no longer than humans, but retain the vigor of youth until the end (if they die of natural causes they probably look no older than 45 by the end of their lives and when the moment of death comes simply fall asleep and don't wake up).

Due to the botched job the demons did warping Men into dwarves to better survive their hellish mines, they start to suffer organ and muscle failure starting around the age of 20 (their parts wear out at different rates), but they've learned to replace those failing parts with runic artifice and, presuming they keep replacing organic parts as they fail can potentially live to about the age of 180 (though by then all that's left of their original body is their brain).

Elves are entirely immortal, but due to how they entered the world from the Realm of Dreams, have a fixed maximum population of souls. Once that number is reached no further elven births are possible until an elf dies and their soul is free to be reincarnated.

The various Beastmen only live about 60 years (though reptilian ones live twice that), but become a "teenager" by one year of age and are fully mature by age two so end up with an active adult lifespan of nearly 60 years after a very short childhood.

Malfeans (elemental tieflings) live about twice as long as a human (240 years), but generally fall to violence before the age of 60. Those who embrace their demonic heritage (instead of rejecting it as most Malfeans do) find their lifespans greatly enhanced; those who fully embrace their demonic nature are called Cambions and are effectively immortal (and no longer even remotely pass for human).

I have rarely run the same campaign world long enough for it to matter, other than as color for the world.  Lately, I've been leaning more towards elves not being immortal, and not even as long-lived as the DMG.  In the current campaign, I decided to do a split, with the "high elf" analog having several centuries and other elves not.  The elves long-life is tied not only to who they are, but how they live.  It's the "high elf" isolation and ritual that allows them to live so long, and they know it.  I've got a similar dynamic going with two different types of dwarves, though not nearly as extreme.  (The longer-lived dwarves might get double a human lifespan.)

Part of my D&D play on this issue is driven by some ideas I've been wrestling with for some time in a home brew system.  Don't really have an answer that I like, yet.

No campaign I've ever run have lasted long enough for someone to grow that old and die.  I've have had 5 year long campaigns, spanning about two or three in game years.

I don't recall a campaign ever lasting for 20+ years of game time, let alone more.

Dying of old age doesn't happen much at my game table.

When you almost constantly go adventuring, it's just a matter of time.

Characters approaching old age? The closest I can remember was the (human) character aged from 25 to 55 years old by a ghost; the character died before meeting another ghost, though. (The other players started calling the character "old man", even after I pointed out that their DM (me) was older than the character.) Campaigns just don't seem to last that long or have a large enough game time to real time ratio for life span to come up. Maybe if there was a player character race with a very short life span...

In AD&D, age matters since you get stat bonuses/penalties at certain ages (a player at my table just turned 21 in the 5th year of my latest campaign last week). Admittedly, 5e doesn't normally care about such things and he's probably the last character with a "real" age, but I still record the years because I track what goes on in my game world, well over a century in age.

Quote from: Doom;1072743In AD&D, age matters since you get stat bonuses/penalties at certain ages (a player at my table just turned 21 in the 5th year of my latest campaign last week). Admittedly, 5e doesn't normally care about such things and he's probably the last character with a "real" age, but I still record the years because I track what goes on in my game world, well over a century in age.

What do you think of systems that penalize for old age and reward for young age? Or rather, it tends to be young = higher physical stats, older = higher mental stats.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1072745What do you think of systems that penalize for old age and reward for young age? Or rather, it tends to be young = higher physical stats, older = higher mental stats.

Seems about right. As you tend to get older you accumulate insights and usually lose a bit physically. And considering my grandfather was still inhumanly strong at 70, makes one wonder what his stats must have been at his prime.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1072745What do you think of systems that penalize for old age and reward for young age? Or rather, it tends to be young = higher physical stats, older = higher mental stats.

I prefer the Traveller approach where all stats decline with age. OK if that can be partly offset by advancement bumps from level/xp/etc.

It has never come up in any game I have been part of. In theory, I reduce non-human lifespans to a sensible range - perhaps 120-130 years for dwarves, and 150-170 for elves - for practical reasons, just like none of my game worlds have 20,000 year histories either. But that's aesthetics: our campaigns tend to take place over a span of a few years maximum. The current one is around Day 91 (counted from mid-Summer); our historical fantasy Helvéczia campaign lasted 3 in-game years, and our large Fomalhaut campaign was around 2.5 years. Aging does not figure into it.

I've been in two that went generational. In my Spelljammer one two of the PCs are long lived and have been active across I believe now at least a hundred years and more likely approaching two hundred. They have actually beaten two empires by simply out-living them. Some of the other PCs have lived on through later generations. Others have fallen and someone new stepped in.

You could give a campaign a much longer timespan by extending long rests to be very long indeed; if a long rest (or more generally, preparation for an adventure) goes from a day to six months, then an adventuring career might mean decades to reach high levels. The level limit might arise naturally from declining abilities (older characters might also take longer to advance, effectively an experience penalty).

It would not work for a fast moving campaign; more Cold War than World War II. But if adventuring opportunities are scarce and in remote places, it might be the natural pacing for the campaign. Odysseus took 10 years to return home from the Trojan War, and how many encounters did he and his crew have? More than twenty?