Time and Aging Characters

[Kailia]

I use real world time to dictate my character. When I made K'ailia during open beta which went to live launch, she was 16. On January 20th which is also my real life birthday, I had her also age up to 17.

 

So yeah I do rp the passing of time. Which is why when 2.1 came out, I also considered the events of 2.0 also being the past, and the ending of 2.0 having us move into the seventh astral era, which coincided with the real world new year, meant the calamity for my character happened 6 years ago.

[Eva]

On January 20th which is also my real life birthday, I had her also age up to 17.

 

:offtopic:   Hurray for January 20th birthdays!!!  (is also Eva's and mine, and makes it easy to remember/maintain ages and things)

 

:ontopic:  Now that I think about this, our company held a night of remembrance on the one-year anniversary of the night the game went down, which we treated as a "six-year-since-the-calamity" event.  I don't think we held any expectation that every other RPer regard it similarly, but it's pretty tricky not to acknowledge the natural passage of time.

 

:semi-offtopic:   I will admit that this is also one reason why I seldom participate in forum RP.  Causality and events happening either in-game or in the forum thread having consequences which may impact RP in the other medium seems like it could lend itself to a lot of confusion and this is just my own way of sidestepping that particular obstacle.  I do enjoy reading the story threads and community forum RP posts though.  

[Chika Ito]

A lot of my friends do the 'one out of character year = one in character year' with Chika I don't mind this. I can handle realistic aging for her. She'll actually be twenty-eight this January. However when it comes to playing a child, or a teenager, part of me wishes to speed the process up a little for development. That is my personal opinion though ^^

[TheLastCandle]

I use real time, but in terms of growth - experiences can "age" a person well beyond his/her years. With my characters, I tend to explore that more than actual physical aging.

[Dravus]

I usually leave it vague as to the exact age of my character(s). It's a habit I got into after role-playing as a blood elf for years back in WoW. MMO's typically have rather confusing and often conflicting timeline issues to deal with and so I only really touch upon such things when strictly necessary. Simply describing a character as 'young', 'middle aged' or 'elderly' is enough for me. My characters do grow and age over time, though - but it happens in a way that combines role-play based progression with what is happening in the canon lore.

[Nero]

Seeing as how time in MMOs tends to advance pretty slowly, I generally just follow the timeline of the story and adjust accordingly, with the "current time" generally being whatever year the story line is currently caught up to. Sometimes this is stretched for convenience's sake when engaging in multiple RP storylines--having, say, five different adventures taking place in the span of about two weeks would be fairly ridiculous--but otherwise it seems pretty cut and dry to me.