Boss Starting Age

When joining a new game you will be able to specify your Starting Boss Age between 20 (the default) and 50, in increments of 3 years. For every 3 years you choose to add, you will receive 1 free Experience Point to allocate to any Skill or Ability of your choice. Adding the maximum 30 years to your starting age would give you 10 Experience Points.

In addition, many of the advantages available to you from your chosen Boss Character Background (see the page of that title within this section) will also be improved by starting age, although you will have to use common sense and logic to decide which of these might be affected.

Whether or not to buy Experience and improved Background advantages with Age is a very important decision to make. Making your character already middle-aged when first you join the game will result in him being a more powerful character in a variety of ways, but it also severely shortens his possible life span in the game.

Bearing in mind that your character will age one full year for every 52 days of real-time play, any character beyond the age of 35 has a chance of developing a terminal illness at any time. The older your character is, the more likely this is to happen, and the earlier in the game this is (a brand new game starts in the year 1920), the more likely it is to happen due to the primitive nature of medical science in that decade. It is entirely likely that some Boss Characters starting play at the age of 35-50 will die of a terminal illness within just a few short weeks, real-time, of joining the game, and the older they are, the more likely this is.

On the positive side, even just 1 Experience Point provides a significant boost to a particular Skill or Ability (which range from 1 to 9, average 5), while 10 Experience Points is a massive boost - equal to the game experience another, younger Boss might accrue only over many real-time months of play. And of course there are more dangers out there than the risk of developing a terminal illness... dangers which a more experienced, older Boss might have more chance of surviving, perhaps?

Choosing a starting Character Age for your Boss is something not to be taken lightly, but it can be summed up in simple fashion: if you decide to start older than, say, 32, then you are taking a gamble. Simple as that. You will enjoy the benefit of having a more experienced, more powerful, character from the start of the game, but you should not expect him to survive for the whole length of time that you might hope to be active in that game. His death could occur a lot sooner than you would like, or he might survive to a ripe old age of 90 or so. The gamble is yours.