>Can Homeland and Occupation keywords be treated as functions of
>character age?
>
>
I use a modification of the HQ saga system for my game. I ruled that the
the first 10 years of adult life gives the player 1 keyword point to
spend per game year, the second decade would give one KP every two
years, and the third one point per three years. They can spend the
keyword point on any keyword they want, and I have found that they tend
to spread them out. Magic in particular gets a lot of keyword points
because it is so expensive to raise using HP. I treat affinities as
separate keywords for this purpose. Raising your religious keyword
raises the "mundane" abilities - not the affinities, etc.
I follow the "rising tide floats all boats" principle and let the increase in keywords raise all abilities including ones raised using individual HP. I did institute an ability rating cap (starting at 10W and rising one point every two game years), though, and ruled that if the keyword raise pushed you over the limit then effectively you have lost what you previously spent to raise the ability. This is regrettable, but I really don't want to track things closely enough to account for situations like this.
Once the characters reach middle age I plan to start making them test for health related things more often. Maybe a general health test at the end of the year (with a gradually increasing difficulty), and for every serious physical wound they receive. If they fail badly enough I will give them a new ability - Bad Back, for example. The accumulation of these little infirmities would simulate increasing age. I can see the quest to heal these infirmities perhaps becoming a larger and larger portion of the game - the refusal of the character to accept his own decline would be a meaty story if you ask me. Which, of course, you didn't. <laugh>
Anyway, this is my 2 cents on the issue...
~Kevin McDonald
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