RPGaDay 2023, Day 13

Final Curtains?

Again and again, my characters are bucking the trend. Most of them by not actually dying.

In fact, they don’t even grow old. Unlike my body, none of my characters have ever faced an aging roll.

My time on this Earth may be limited, but theirs will never be.

Example: One of the mainstream anti-aging treatments in Traveller is to take a monthly shot of anagathics to stave off those aging rolls. The rules as written are so heavily twisted as to make it a Herculean task to even find these drugs once, let alone monthly. And even then, when you read some of the additional rules piled on later by writers who really get a hard-on for nerfing stuff in games “in case the characters get funny ideas.” you realise how stupid some game rules actually are.

Sometimes, an anagathic drug has a side effect of piling on visible, inoperable facial tumours. The “immortal” gets uglier and uglier. Either that, or they develop an “allergy” to Jump space, meaning that they are forced to stay on one planet forever.

I can imagine the grim expressions on the frowning faces of the writers and think “You must hate your players.” And then I ignore all of the aging rules completely. My characters acquire some sort of ageless quality from exposure to Jump space, or they fill their lives with love rather than hate.

Hate ages a bitch.

My characters invariably avoid situations where firearms and other weapons are being brandished and used. And the way I play them, they don’t do stupid things.

I like playing RPGs solo these days, because they give me a chance to imagine what my characters’ lives are about, and to live vicariously through their senses and perceptions. Their faults, such as they are, are my faults. And unlike myself, I like to keep them forever ageless, to confound their peers in their universes who might wonder how these characters manage to remain so apparently youthful.

I don’t like killing off any characters. Not even the players who might play in my worlds. There’s always something that might keep the characters alive, where every other game might mark them down as dead the moment they get to zero hit points.

Apart from superrich non-player characters. They can just drop dead. All their wealth can’t buy them one extra second of their wasted fucking lives.