A suggestion for shapeshifters...

Allow -age EQ to work in form like -svs EQ does.

Rationale:

A lot of EQ does not benefit shifters because many EQ attributes do not carry over: AC, hit, dam, resistance mods, age mods, progs...

While I'd like more things to carry over to give shifters more EQ options, the age modifier seems like a no brainer. All the others would make a form more powerful in combat. Age only allows the same benefit to shifters that everyone else has. If you're old, can wear -age gear and live longer (until you are killed that is). It seems that to do this as a shifter, you can never shift into form again.

Is that a reasonable change to make?

nt

Was told they see no reason to change things from what they are.

Nt

Murphy wants to play long-living felar shifters.

Other chars can extend their lives by wearing -age eq once they are very old if they do not get killed. When they get killed of course the eq comes off and they die of old age.

For a shifter who is trying to prolong his life the same way cannot shift into form because the -age doesn't carry over to form so they will die of old age as if they had been killed.

Can you think of a reason why a long lived shifter char shouldn't be able to use this mechanic like any other long lived char?

But to answer your question no, I suppose I can't, except that some classes have drawbacks.

Wearing -age gear is only an issue for less than 1% of characters ever. And probably less than 10% of those are shifters. So your answer is probably the best explanation.

So this change would really only impact Murphy and maybe heralds, as they are the only ones that:
a) play a char long enough without con dying
b) will actually do so with a shifter and not get bored enough to delete.

But Murphy wants 2000 hour lifespans so no age gear ever really matters to him (And I agree, I wanted longer lifespans too but we're more a minority as very few ever play to age death)

I wore -age gear on Allysia, but that was about it. I would say it gave me maybe 5 extra hours, but that was on an elf that ages quite rapidly in terms of hours played to years. Likely more noticeable on say an arial/felar, but even then the returns are probably not that great, unless you are stacking a ton of -age gear. And even then, you're now playing with zero deaths, which is far less fun to play when you're clinging to a character.

What I'd like to know is if I roll a new char that is age 20, and happen upon -30 years of gear, what happens if I wear it?

If you are 20 years old and you wear -30 years worth of gear, you die instantly. (Not permanently.)

First, I'm not Murphy.

Second, you kind of made my point. This only affects long lived characters who are doing things. So, why would you want to not allow them to take advantage of this very small perk of -age gear because they are a shifter.

When there's no good reason to have a restriction like this in place, that's when you get rid of it.

Gear works when worn. Shifters are weird in that for the most part, you're a new person w/o gear. I assume that design used your current max HP/Mana/erc, but then saves, etc had to be specifically coded. Similarly, I assume effort would have to be place toake the age thing happen.

The return on investment just isn't there in the staff view.

Classes, races, etc are mechanically different to encourage the uniqueness of each. If you want to live a really, really long time, play an elf. Ironically, this gear has little impact on them. Biggest impact are for orcs, arial, felar. Arial being the one race I used a bit of this for. On the same note, I've also had an orc die to wearing an Uber axe w/ +age gear, so I guess that's a wash.

Personally, I feel the bigger issue is that +/- age gear exists with any amount of commonality. The mechanical effect is mostly non-existent, until there's too much, then it's nonsensical.

As an aside, the code changes regarding -age was after happening to see someone run around at age 0. Sadly, I couldn't convince Scarabaeus to make it so you revert to nonexistence and deletes the character. Also, I am totally finding an excuse for an Uber fountain of age/youth type gear that's like the best piece of gear in the game, except +/- like 10,000 years.

Thinking about that, guess it'll have to be no-undead, too, but...yeah, totally making that.

Thanks for the reply. I was thinking that it might just be a flag that could be set for the age attrib, but if it's a time investment, it's definitely not worth the return.

nt

If I had to guess, even to make it an edge would require having the basic system in place to allow the edge to say "yeah, take age gear into account". At that point, may as well just make the gear do that.

Shifters are one of those really weird setups that made something cool happen, but doing so made a lot of things fuxxoredly weird and haxxored to do it.

nt

Then I would probably think it would be like the the vitality edge, where you could take a -10 years, multiple times, getting more expensive each time.
Again, requires some coding to do.

It would give those who want super long lived characters an option. Sort of like a compromise. I like it.

The whole suggestion was to remove a restriction that shouldn't be there in the first place. Not to make anything cost me edge points.

You don't get the idea of 'compromise'.

Compromise is when you have two opposing views and you find a solution that makes both sides as happy as possible.

I haven't heard anyone with the view that shifters should be unable to use the same age mechanics as every other class.

The explanation I heard was that it wasn't intentional, but to make age carry over into form would take real coding that may not be worth the investment.

Then, you suggest making it into an edge which would require even more coding.

Ysal's idea of a -10 years edge would only really help short lived races and would still leave shifters being treated differently when it comes to age mechanics.

But, I would rather it stay the way it is then to allow every player to have +10 years (or more) because I'm not sure that would be a good idea.