Old Heroes Never Die - Running a game with older characters?

[JonGarrett]

So, I've had an idea for a little while where a group of older, retired adventurers who once travelled together are brought back together by something (the obvious idea being the death of another member, but I'm seeing if I can be a little more creative than that) and a problem sticks out;

Getting Old makes Martials even weaker and Casters even stronger, and that's not really a good thing for Pathfinder. So I'm looking for ways to...balance things back a little. I figure that older Martials will have picked up a few tricks.

So far, I've been plundering the wonderful Ancient Classes from Little Red Goblin Games, and to a lesser degree Mature Character Options from the Four Horsemen of Rogue Genius Games.

Does anyone have any resources that could be useful to me? For that matter, ideas would also be appreciated.

[Mysterious Stranger]

Most GM I know don’t use the age adjustments for starting characters. I let my players be any age they want, but they get no bonus or penalties from it. I also don’t let them start a year short of an age category to try to get the bonus either. Also consider that what is old for an adventurer may not really be that old.

The other thing you could do is to avoid the short lived races for the martial characters. An elf or dwarf martial character is going to still be young when the human venerable. A lot of the part human races had their ages adjusted to that of humans. You could revert back to the old categories for those, or at least adjust them. I could see leaving the adult threshold the same and moving up the other categories.

[Wheldrake]

JonGarrett wrote:

Does anyone have any resources that could be useful to me?

Let's see...

- Dentures that fall out at the most inopportune times.
- A magical truss that you have to painfully adjust after combat or any strenuous activity.
- A hairpiece that you use to hide little notes to yourself, like "don't forget to oil your sword after bloodshed."
- A cane that you can use for tapping the floor ahead for traps... or just to bolster your failing eyesight.
- An ear-trumpet that you use after a strategic "Eh? What's that?"
- An eyepatch because, well, why not? Eyepatches are cool. Plus, you'll be ready when you find that pesky Eye of Vecna rolling around in some mouldering tomb.
- A young, earnest henchman who is secretly your own great-grandson, hearkening back to your early days raping and pillaging.

Was that the sort of thing you were looking for?

[lemeres]

Well, the immortal spark ability of aasimar seems like it would be useful. It basically lets you ignore being middle aged, since you get lesser age resistance as an SLA (ignore middle aged penalties, and it lasts 24 hours)

If you use the original age listings for aasimar (where the starting age was 60), then you could have the character be anywhere below 200 years old and still not feeling a thing.

This could be useful for a martial character. You can keep with your theme by making the aasimar an old friend of a now wrinkled old caster. Make them old party members who decided to join back together because a new crop of trouble has risen up (or an old crop has brought its ugly head back up).

[Andarion]

This is my suggestion, take it or leave it.

The thing that brings them back together is the child(ren) of a former member finding them after their parent has died.

This at least gives the option of having the martial character(s) starting at a younger age and not having a penalty, while also giving a story hook.

I can see this not being exactly what you are looking for since it sounds like you wanted an ALL older adventure party, but this is at least an option.