Aging and Initiative

[Zvezda]

I spend the last couple of days generating important NPCs unsing the charactergeneration rules and various stuff floating on the net. Needless to say that I bend the rules or completely ingnore them while creating NPCs, nontheless I found an other bug in the system. The one is old and we all have encounterd it every now and than.

I love the PC generation rules of GDW, and I also like the fact alot that a musican does not fight as good as a trained military. I mean different levels of initiative for military, reserist, or civilian. Anyways, Initiative has been discussed elsewere. I also like the aging and the loss of attribute points. But here is the problem I came up with:

When the PCs age during the creation process they loose AGL, STR, and even INT but never Initiative! Though I generally tend to argue in favor of the basic rules, this seems somewhat strange. I therefor have decided to try reducing Initiative after the age of 33 by rolling one d6 against the Initiative level, success means that one point is subtracted for that term. For eacht addtional term +1 should be added to the dice roll.

Now what do you think? Too tough? After all, initiative is the one stat that decieds everything in the basic rules. Should there be a posibility to regain lost Initiative levels by spending secondary activities on them? Ideas?

[ReHerakhte]

Some interesting ideas there. Remember too that Initiative will increase slowly by exposure to combat during the game so having age-related losses to Initiative will not be as terrible as it first appears.

However I do think that 33 is too young to start losing Initiative. A hard rule that everybody suffers the loss seems too much too early simply because many of the personnel in special units of the police and military are in their late-20s and early-30s.

Perhaps the Initiative loss should also include the career type the person has so if they are a civilian they will suffer the loss but if they are in the the military or special police units (like counter-terrorist or SWAT types), they don't suffer the loss.

[Story]

Perhaps you should consider factoring INTUITION, which increases with age.

Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill.

Too Old To Fight, Shoot First

There's two bulls standing on top of a mountain.
The younger one says to the older one: "Hey pop, let's say we run down there and screw one of them cows".
The older one says: "No son. Lets walk down and screw 'em all".