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if you had one in real life you would probably live forever or a lot longer.
But in the game, you die of age. you can be in perfect health and still die of age in PF. And it's a random dice rule.
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Reading too much into this would result in a body horror of Akira-like proportions.
How about that in Pathfinder, it's very possible that your life doesn't run out due to cells dividing, there really may be a trio sitting around, cutting the thread of life of the people going to die of old age, or a massive citadel, situated on a far off demiplane, filled with hourglasses measuring out the allotted time of all the mortals in the multiverse.
There already is. I read through the planes book, the inner sea gods book, the book of the damned etc books.
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I feel like this is one of those moments that real life should affect the game. After all, just saying “you die and there is no reason at all for it” doesn’t make for a good story.
Obviously you can make things work like you want in your games.
Mixing Pathfinder mechanics and how things work in the real world, picking which you like best depending on how it works out ends up with absurdities.
In this particular case regenerate though what it effects (which is what any other body part would apply to) would apply to) and telomeres are not on that list.
Beyond that, the causes of senescence are certainly not completely understood. Telomeres are believed to play a part, but they are definitely not the only mechanism involved.
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Note that despite its name, the ring does not grant the regeneration ability. The ring simply heals a living wearer by 1 hp per round. This does not even prevent the wearer from being killed simply by hit point damage in combat, for example.
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Things blatantly work differently at the chemical and cellular level, since you can't just heal away fatigue or the internal damage caused by poisons, or the various types of ability damage caused by purely physical effects with simple healing spells.
I suppose one could argue that healing a specific structure in a cell would require treating that cell as a separate creature from the person wearing the ring, but then there's a bunch of other conflicts and things that don't make sense. I'd say that a given spell can only heal something its caster is aware of. The person who crafted that ring of regeneration knows what skin and bones and blood are, at least to some extent, but not what telomeres are. So if you really want to have a scientific explanation, it's possible that a ring of regeneration works the way it does because the person who crafted it doesn't have a microscope and doesn't know the exact process by which the skin is being regenerated. You could even make an argument for it reducing the overall integrity of the existing creature if it works like a skin graft or something.
Or, you know, magic runs on storybook rules. Or magic runs by laying alternate possibilities over top of existing reality and so only does exactly what you tell it to, or any of a million different things.
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"...only damage taken while wearing the ring is regenerated."
Aging is not damage as defined by the games terms, hence it is not affected by a ring of regen.
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Actually, it would be just as reasonable to posit that the stress induced by regenerative healing would actually accelerate the aging process. Is the healing perfect, or just good enough to keep you going? Is this a tanstaafl situation?
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Do you want Inevitables? Because thats how you get Inevitables.
By this logic, shouldn't you de-age somewhat every time you get healed?
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This white gold ring is generally set with a large green sapphire. When worn, the ring continually allows a living wearer to heal 1 point of damage per round and an equal amount of nonlethal damage. In addition, the wearer is immune to bleed damage while wearing a ring of regeneration. If the wearer loses a limb, an organ, or any other body part while wearing this ring, the ring regenerates it as the spell regenerate. In either case, only damage taken while wearing the ring is regenerated.
Things a RoR doesn't stop:
* Old age (because that's not the result of hit-point damage.
* Dropped to negative-CON. Congratulations! You're dead before the ring can help.
* Getting your head chopped off (this is considered automatic death for humanoid creatures; e.g., vorpal weapon, etc); sole exception that makes sense is that the RoR is in an alternative slot (unremoved headgear, headband, earring, nosering, implanted, etc) -- then you can be the "You gotta be effin' kidding" spider-head monster from "John Carpenter's 'The Thing'".
* Regeneration a limb (or anything else) that is chopped off that the ring was attached to. In fact, if you take the ring off the severed limb's hand and put it on another finger, it won't work because the act of removing it loses the magical connection and "resets" it, and after resetting, it'll only real subsequent "taken" damage. But: if you are able to reattach the limb (with ring unremoved) and somehow (?? Pearly White Spindle ??) get the healing started while holding the limb to the stump, the ring should slowly finish the job.
IMO, these things are overpriced; they cost four and a half times as much as a Pearly White Spindle ioun, and take up an item slot clamoring for attention elsewhere in just about any build concept.
Things blatantly work differently at the chemical and cellular level, since you can't just heal away fatigue or the internal damage caused by poisons, or the various types of ability damage caused by purely physical effects with simple healing spells.
I suppose one could argue that healing a specific structure in a cell would require treating that cell as a separate creature from the person wearing the ring, but then there's a bunch of other conflicts and things that don't make sense. I'd say that a given spell can only heal something its caster is aware of. The person who crafted that ring of regeneration knows what skin and bones and blood are, at least to some extent, but not what telomeres are. So if you really want to have a scientific explanation, it's possible that a ring of regeneration works the way it does because the person who crafted it doesn't have a microscope and doesn't know the exact process by which the skin is being regenerated. {. . .}
So if you want a Ring of Regeneration that prevents aging, you might have better luck if you time travel to Starfinder time to get one, that somebody with the proper scientific understanding could have engineered properly.
well, this has the makings of a joint punitive expedition by both.
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There are people on Golarion who cheat death all the time: alchemists who pick the eternal youth grand discovery. Have a steady stream of inevitables been attacking Artokus Kirran in Thuvia for the last 3,000 years?
Punishing characters via the milieu for selecting class abilities seems odd. I realize that most campaigns that reach 20 are over, but an epilogue of, "Inevitables rain on you until you die," is unsatisfactory.
There's a scene in the Pathfinder novel Death's Heretic where the protagonist, who is a human servant of Pharasma who hunts her enemies and has been granted immortality, works with an Inevitable who does hunt immortals. He tells him that eventually he'll be at the top of his list, and he'll come for him, too.
So they presumably prioritize those who are the oldest, but I would also guess that they have limited resources and don't mindlessly throw them away on powerful mortals who they can't beat. They might not like immortals violating cosmic law, but they aren't going to attack if they can't win, and against a smart and well prepared wizard, they can't win.
There is also an inevitable write up in one of the APs, I think it's the anti-tech trading one in Iron Gods, who explicitly work through agents for this sort of thing. So I imagine lots of inevitables pay off agents and assassins to spy or carry out risky missions, only handling the important ones that they also think they can win on their own.
There are people on Golarion who cheat death all the time: alchemists who pick the eternal youth grand discovery. Have a steady stream of inevitables been attacking Artokus Kirran in Thuvia for the last 3,000 years?
Punishing characters via the milieu for selecting class abilities seems odd. I realize that most campaigns that reach 20 are over, but an epilogue of, "Inevitables rain on you until you die," is unsatisfactory.
I'd say there would be an in-setting explanation to prevent the 'Inevitable Rain' if you obtain immortality via class feature. If you're a lich or some other ritual/shortcut, you get prioritized on the 'Rain List', and since there's no short supply of lunatics, the 'Rain' never gets to the true/legit immortals.
Another explanation could be that this 20th level capstone ability is more or less a partial ascension to divinity, or the start of that process, which creates a flag in Axis or a memo of sorts for those 'cosmically licensed individuals' to be allowed to exist, in which case the Inevitables back-off or don't get sent in the first place.
I wonder what level you have to be for Marut Inevitables (nominally CR 15) become basically Tomes of Experience for you? I suppose that if you managed to survive the Inevitable Rain for a while, you would reach this point even just from defeating Marut Inevitables, and after this they would be only dangerous if they happened to hit simultaneously with something more powerful. To get back to the original topic, by the time you get this far, the cost of a Ring of Regeneration might not be so unaffordable, but you might have found something that is a better deal.