How to: Ageing Abilities

How to: Ageing Abilities

Have you ever complained about Extended Lifespan and Unaging being too expensive while providing little to no actual benefit in-game? Have you ever tried making an ageing attack that makes these abilities more relevant? Well, let's see all the ways to make one such attack.

Note: according to Google, both "ageing" and "aging" are correct spellings.

There's several options, and most of them are very janky.

1. Leech.

Leech has the Steal Youth enhancement on p. 96 of GURPS Powers. But how do you make it so you do not get younger yourself? There's a very hard to notice line on p. 73 of GURPS Psionic Powers under Additional Biokinesis Abilities - "Leech (with Steal Youth). If you don’t grow younger while your subject ages, this is a -50% limitation." I noticed this one by accident when browsing the book.

2. Affliction.

GURPS Basic Set has a special enhancement for the Unaging advantage - Age Control, +20%. It allows the user to “age” in either direction at will, at up to 10 times the normal rate. It should be reasonable to allow Age Control, Only to get older, +10%. If we afflict this trait on somebody, he will begin to age ten times faster for the duration of the affliction. With many levels of Reduced Time, +20%/level applied to Unaging (not Affliction!) we can increase the rate of ageing to produce significant effects. However, this is quite expensive and janky.

3. Ageing attacks.

Salty Grognard was a very short-lived GURPS blog that, however, managed to produce a few very interesting posts. One of them is a new damage type for the Innate Attack advantage - Ageing. I really like this approach.

4. Affliction.

Again? Yes. While inspecting the Fright Check table, the following result caught my eye: "24 – Major physical effect, set by GM: hair turns white, age five years overnight, go partially deaf, etc. In game terms, acquire -15 points worth of physical disadvantages (for this purpose, each year of age counts as -3 points)." That means that we can afflict people with extra years, at +3% per year. +10% per 1d years sounds fair too. However, this would require Extended Duration, Truly Permanent, +300% and possibly Cumulative, +400%. And that alone increases the cost by 70 points, while the extra years will be only an insignificant part of the Affliction write-up. An alternative would be applying the aforementioned two enhancement to those +3 percents instead. 3*8=24%, which we can round up to 25%. So, each year of permanent ageing that stacks with itself could be represented by the Ageing, +25% enhancement. In my opinion, this seems like a fair price.