Aging and Death
Aging and death are very important in Mythmaster, because they act as anti-exploit mechanisms. If not for the diminishing returns and inevitable decline of aging, nothing would prevent players from using the character creation process to make 500 year old characters who have high scores in every skill and spell. It is important for the balance of the game that age, and its effects, are tracked carefully during character creation and beyond.
Aging
As you age, your ability to learn new skills diminishes and the dice you roll for skill points when you purchase a skill roll using Experience Points become smaller.
Additionally, aging and its consequences are built directly into the process of character creation, with aging events that begin triggering each time you iterate through a new life cycle starting with your 10th, and becoming progessively more dangerous every 5 life cycles thereafter.
Once you exit Character Creation, you no longer experience life events or aging events.
Aging Events
Starting with your 10th life cycle you must resolve an aging event every time you iterate through a new life cycle. After five more life cycles, the aging event is replaced with a more dangerous one. This continues every five life cycles, with each new aging event becoming progressively more risky, and progressively more destructive until eventually the aging events are so deadly that you cannot survive them at all.
Death
If any stat ever reaches zero, or if the maximum value of a derivative reaches zero, your character is dead. Additionally, death occurs when any derivative reaches -2x its governing attribute. In the case of Health (-2x Stability), the reasons are usually obvious, but in the case of Composure (-2x Social), Concentration (-2x Mental) or Stamina (-2x Physical), the cause could be stroke, heart attack or other systemic failure.
Death During Character Creation
The character creation process is designed to stimulate player creativity and build investment in the story of your character as they develop over time. Unfortunately, it is also possible for a character to die during character creation. This can be frustrating, and must be dealt with carefully by the Director.
First, it must be restated that rules for aging and death exist as an anti-exploit. If a character dies of aging during character creation, they may not continue. Period.
Fated to Die
Aging aside, a single unfortunate life event roll does not have to be the end of a character. If a character dies due to a life event during character creation, the Director has the option to offer the player the chance to play the last years of their life. Tell the player they can rewind the clock, but that the ‘die has been cast’ on their fate: sometime in the coming couple of years, they will die by assassination, or by plague, or by whatever ugly end was determined by the unfortunate life event.
The Director’s job then becomes to sternly but fairly kill them in the preordained manner. The Director should neither cheat nor use some arbitrary deus ex machina. Rather, they should work to fully and credibly unravel the events of the character’s inevitable demise. If the players are particularly ingenious, maybe - just maybe - the player whose fate was sealed can survive. But if not, they should feel their death was the end of a meaningful journey for a character they loved, rather than a random die roll and some wasted time.