loftar wrote:As for aging, I'm not really thinking of anything too fancy at the moment -- just keeping track of how old a character is (probably in relation to the amount of time logged in) and in one way or another killing it off when it reaches an age advanced enough. As for "families", I don't currently see anything more elaborate than the current lineage system, which will certainly, on the other hand, have more of an ingame effect in the future. We will certainly add such things as graves, ancestral worship, shameful executions, and other things along that line. Significant advantages should be obtained by having many powerful ancestors, as long as you work to keep your ancestors happy.
There can probably be some fun being had with the mechanism of killing old characters off, as well. It would be hard for me to imagine that we'd just kill people off when they reach a treshold age; rather, once we get a system for buffs/debuffs in place, we'll probably use it to implement illnesses (which should be the main negative aspect of using leeches for healing, for that matter), and aging might make it easier to contract weird and/or hard-to-cure illnesses. Thus, it may be possible to extend your character's life more or less indefinitely, but in the end, you may have to do it by bathing in the blood of 100 virgins and like methods.
(Note that dying of old age would probably be only very little related to keeping powerful players down, since the tradition/change slider works as it does -- it would, however, add more incentive for players to be traditionally aligned)
Sounds like there will be a lot of murderous, full trad old men roaming the game.
Which is awesome as hell.