How about we make it to where when a creature is really old, they become weaker and get grayer hair.
Or like tissue variations over time that already exist, such as wrinkling and graying hair (which, again, are already in the game).
It's a nice idea but needs to be approached carefully. Not all creatures age the same way, of course.
(http://cdn.lookanimals.com/pictures/www.yeepet.com/blog_image/201302/BlogImg1_1360210196.jpg)
So a dwarf could, for example, come of age at 12, be at his peak at 100 and die at roughly 150-70. I don't know what would be ideal.
And also, what you see with athletes is that they tend to keep their raw strength into their 30s and 40s even as their agility goes.
Finally, marathon runners have a really low heart rate and usually have higher longevity. So a lot of factors play into this.
The possibilities are endless, and would add a lot more to the game as a whole in all the mechanics, if this was made goodI agree and I imagine something like this will definitely be implemented, given ageing and dying are such key motivations within the game. I'd love to have Gandalfs be possible - old looking wise and knowledgeable person who's physically undiminished.
I only hope that it's flexible enough so that creatures modded to live 500 years instead of 150 would "age" slower.If such implementation ever gets done, it will certainly be that way, looking for how things like adulthood and gray hair and wrinkles work in the game right now. Most likely tags would be used to determinate whenever a entity would start to become older.Don't want to have to redo my raw modifications to account for decreasing strength with ageSpoiler (click to show/hide)
Though said dwarf might be too old to keep up with the daily routines of an active squad, he could still possess a dangerous level of skill to overcome his declining physique. I'm picturing something like Sean Connery and his deadly left thumb in Presidio.Argg so i'm going have to retype everything!!! 6 or so of my custom species have powers that change over time!! ARRGG!!!
Ah cool thanks well, if it every does get implemented (and I hope it does!) it would be very cool that said, I could no longer laugh at the 165 year old legendary Ax wielder sending Goblin limbs flying.
Lt. Col. Alan Caldwell: Now, are you sure you want to have a fight? Because I'm only gonna use my thumb.
Bully in Bar: Thumb?
Lt. Col. Alan Caldwell: My right thumb. Left one's much too powerful for you.
Though said dwarf might be too old to keep up with the daily routines of an active squad, he could still possess a dangerous level of skill to overcome his declining physique. I'm picturing something like Sean Connery and his deadly left thumb in Presidio.For sure. You can see that in sports to a degree. Olympic sprinters have really short careers because once the physical explosiveness is gone that's it. But in sports that require a lot of skill like boxing, football(soccer) and so on, experience and technical ability can carry a high level career into the athlete's 40s.
Undoubtely, The fun point on this system would be adding variety to the game, and make it more realYou should post it here. Suggestion threads are supposed to develop the idea somewhat.
Funny enough, I've been thinking exhaustively on how to implement this , because it's something I had never thought about DF, and it's a core mechanic on the whole realism and inmersion arc.
I'm fairly new to the forums, so please bear with me and tell me: Should I start another thread where I put my own suggestion, or Toady might read it even If I post it in this one?
Sorry if I sound weird, English is not my mother tongue
Exactly, when I talked about modders, what I had in mind were the elves of The witcher, The saga of books from Andrzej Sapkowski (read it if you really want to find an awesome magic system).
In this universe, elves are really long-lived, and they start degrading closely before death, but when they become adults, they become sterile, and so, they cannot reproduce.
This particular flaw, was the one I was thinking off when I wrote the suggestion.
You would be able to govern the statistics of health from your creatures in the raws
In the particular case of this elves, if you were to mod them in-game, apart from their different vitality from that of humans, you would add a probability of [STERILE] upon entering certain age, and with some differences in age, they would all become sterile, affecting gameplay and roleplaying
And If AI ever gets this good, a probably result from this particular effect would be that a rival civilizations end up killing all the elven children completely eliminating their ability to produce offspring
But I'm thinking out loud, what I mean Is that the way to add a versatile and satisfactory aging system would be to rawify their vitality as species, with rises, peaks and declines, and add specifical sindromes or medical conditions to happen in certain times of their life.
Thinking out loud again, this wouldn't need to be used only for showing the decadence of a species.
If you were to get creative with this system, you could make it so that a mithical creature, in the course of their lives, suffer great decline of their health, only to ''become young'' again, some years after, rejuvenating cyclically for all eternity.
You could make a race of humans that, because of an hormonal thing, would become really prone to lewdness shortly after entering the 69 year of their life.
The possibilities are endless, and would add a lot more to the game as a whole in all the mechanics, if this was made good
Yeah, I guess that dwarves could not even age like humans do. Perhaps they don't become significative weaker up right before dying or something.
What I mean is that aging doesn't necessarily affects all races the same.
No, dwarf fortress is a fantasy game. Don't confuse the excessive atention to detail to stric adherence to reality because as far as I know df demons, goblins and elves dont make sense biologically speaking either.Yeah, I guess that dwarves could not even age like humans do. Perhaps they don't become significative weaker up right before dying or something.
What I mean is that aging doesn't necessarily affects all races the same.
No, aging with affect all creatures in basically the same fashion provided that their internal body structure and metabolism is essentially the same. Aging is driven by inefficiencies in regeneration within a creature's cells, cells are subject like everything else to entropy so it is not possible to simply keep the same cells forever, even if you can regenerate less often by lowering your metabolic rate. The more efficiently the regeneration process works the slower the creature will age, if dwarves live longer than humans then it means that their regeneration is more efficient assuming their metabolic rate is the same. That means that it cannot actually happen that dwarves don't become significantly weaker until right until they die since the slower you age the more time you spend at each 'stage' of old age.
No, dwarf fortress is a fantasy game. Don't confuse the excessive atention to detail to stric adherence to reality because as far as I know df demons, goblins and elves dont make sense biologically speaking either.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy game. Impossible biology comes with the territory.I'd even go as far as to say we have no idea what is possible and impossible in biology since we've only seen one specific planet's example. Scientists love to infer way too much from the meager sample they have, like when they assumed there wouldn't be many planets in space until they actually found them. It's too hard for them - and humans in general I guess - to admit they don't know something.
Exactly, when I talked about modders, what I had in mind were the elves of The witcher, The saga of books from Andrzej Sapkowski (read it if you really want to find an awesome magic system).
In this universe, elves are really long-lived, and they start degrading closely before death, but when they become adults, they become sterile, and so, they cannot reproduce.
This particular flaw, was the one I was thinking off when I wrote the suggestion.
You would be able to govern the statistics of health from your creatures in the raws
In the particular case of this elves, if you were to mod them in-game, apart from their different vitality from that of humans, you would add a probability of [STERILE] upon entering certain age, and with some differences in age, they would all become sterile, affecting gameplay and roleplaying
And If AI ever gets this good, a probably result from this particular effect would be that a rival civilizations end up killing all the elven children completely eliminating their ability to produce offspring
In the case of elves along the lines of witcher all you would do is use the same system as you use for human menopause and simply add that in without also adding in a death from old age. Granted such a system makes absolutely no biological sense at all since we end up with an ever increasing dead weight of elders eating up the food supply of an area so that over time the population's physical ability to reproduce goes below the total surplus that is needed to support an increased population, we end up with the opposite of the normal arrangement by which the creatures physical ability to reproduce is kept in check by the finite surplus.
In other words, witcher elves would never happen in the first place and would not survive if they did happen. Elders in a creature with extremely long lives or no limited to lifespan at all will tend to outnumber the young by a vast margin. As a creature goes into a new area the resources available to the creatures increases in a square but witcher elves reproduce only in a linear fashion (1-2+3+4+5). The larger the area is, the slower they are to exploit it's resources and the discrepancy increases exponentially.But I'm thinking out loud, what I mean Is that the way to add a versatile and satisfactory aging system would be to rawify their vitality as species, with rises, peaks and declines, and add specifical sindromes or medical conditions to happen in certain times of their life.
Thinking out loud again, this wouldn't need to be used only for showing the decadence of a species.
If you were to get creative with this system, you could make it so that a mithical creature, in the course of their lives, suffer great decline of their health, only to ''become young'' again, some years after, rejuvenating cyclically for all eternity.
You could make a race of humans that, because of an hormonal thing, would become really prone to lewdness shortly after entering the 69 year of their life.
The possibilities are endless, and would add a lot more to the game as a whole in all the mechanics, if this was made good
None of your examples make any more sense than witcher elves. :)Yeah, I guess that dwarves could not even age like humans do. Perhaps they don't become significative weaker up right before dying or something.
What I mean is that aging doesn't necessarily affects all races the same.
No, aging with affect all creatures in basically the same fashion provided that their internal body structure and metabolism is essentially the same. Aging is driven by inefficiencies in regeneration within a creature's cells, cells are subject like everything else to entropy so it is not possible to simply keep the same cells forever, even if you can regenerate less often by lowering your metabolic rate. The more efficiently the regeneration process works the slower the creature will age, if dwarves live longer than humans then it means that their regeneration is more efficient assuming their metabolic rate is the same. That means that it cannot actually happen that dwarves don't become significantly weaker until right until they die since the slower you age the more time you spend at each 'stage' of old age.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy game. Impossible biology comes with the territory. It'd be nice if there was some kind of system that modders could use to express their ideas about life cycles.
Personally I would lean toward a caste-like set of life stages. Make the young adults more impulsive, dial down the healing rate for the elderly, etc.
I thought it was fairly obvious that the idea of defining the 'rises, peaks and declining' points was an abstraction for how the different species' organisms worked, in the sense that, although the raws from similar creatures( humans and dwarves) show that they are physiologically similar, they may have as well have completely different biological systems, subject to different evolutional outcomes
I mean, Dirst and LordBaal say that DF is a fantasy game after all, so some biologycal technicalities could be adressed as magical and not worry about it, and that's perfectly fine, given the game we are playing. But that's not even needed, because in our very home world, most creatures don't even follow our biologycal functions as their rule.
For example, I talked before about the option to hipothetically include the tools to designate a creature that suffers a cycle of aging and 'becoming' young again, right? I was just rambling there, but a couple of days later I remembered the existence of a type of jellyfish called Turritopsis nutricula.
This animal basically does exactly what I said before, he gets old, and instead of dying, it 'retracts' itself to its polypal form, ready to grow and get old again, repeating this eternally, and becoming esentially inmortal
Translating that to DF, If I were to create The Turriptopsis nutricula and another normal jellyfish in the game, they would both be something similar to blobs composed mainly of water, but one of them would have a biological life completely different from the other jellyfish, becoming inmortal, what means that different creatures that resemble the same can have vastly different biology, something that could be defined using this system,
It's pretty absurd to assume that the our world's Human biological aging system should be the rule of thumb for all the world's creatures in all the posible universes, as Deboche says.
There are a lot of things we don't know
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy game. Impossible biology comes with the territory. It'd be nice if there was some kind of system that modders could use to express their ideas about life cycles.
Personally I would lean toward a caste-like set of life stages. Make the young adults more impulsive, dial down the healing rate for the elderly, etc.
Toady One has been pretty sharp to make sure everything is scientific in many respects, for instance making sure that all the elements values are as their real-life counterparts.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy game. Impossible biology comes with the territory. It'd be nice if there was some kind of system that modders could use to express their ideas about life cycles.
Personally I would lean toward a caste-like set of life stages. Make the young adults more impulsive, dial down the healing rate for the elderly, etc.
Toady One has been pretty sharp to make sure everything is scientific in many respects, for instance making sure that all the elements values are as their real-life counterparts. There needs to be in vanilla certain life stages for creatures, aside from the default baby/child stages. For instance tadpoles need to be a distinct caste that transforms into a frog caste while butterflies need to have the same arrangement with caterpillars. Old age on the other hand does not work that way, old people are not a clearly distinct group from young people instead they get gradually older and things get worse basically at an irregular rate between individuals.
I guess however the starting scenarios release will come in handy here since it would allow a social category(s) of elder to be created by an entity in the absence of any clearly establish biological category in the raws, this would allow them to be exempted for certain labours that are coded as being unsuitable for elders to do. Mechanically the actual abilities of the elderly deteriorate gradually as they get older in a semi-random fashion based upon their actual defined death from old age point but the AI operates according to them being in the social category of elderly.I thought it was fairly obvious that the idea of defining the 'rises, peaks and declining' points was an abstraction for how the different species' organisms worked, in the sense that, although the raws from similar creatures( humans and dwarves) show that they are physiologically similar, they may have as well have completely different biological systems, subject to different evolutional outcomes
I mean, Dirst and LordBaal say that DF is a fantasy game after all, so some biologycal technicalities could be adressed as magical and not worry about it, and that's perfectly fine, given the game we are playing. But that's not even needed, because in our very home world, most creatures don't even follow our biologycal functions as their rule.
For example, I talked before about the option to hipothetically include the tools to designate a creature that suffers a cycle of aging and 'becoming' young again, right? I was just rambling there, but a couple of days later I remembered the existence of a type of jellyfish called Turritopsis nutricula.
This animal basically does exactly what I said before, he gets old, and instead of dying, it 'retracts' itself to its polypal form, ready to grow and get old again, repeating this eternally, and becoming esentially inmortal
Translating that to DF, If I were to create The Turriptopsis nutricula and another normal jellyfish in the game, they would both be something similar to blobs composed mainly of water, but one of them would have a biological life completely different from the other jellyfish, becoming inmortal, what means that different creatures that resemble the same can have vastly different biology, something that could be defined using this system,
It's pretty absurd to assume that the our world's Human biological aging system should be the rule of thumb for all the world's creatures in all the posible universes, as Deboche says.
There are a lot of things we don't know
The philosophical question is: is it really the same jellyfish? Or is it a child of the original jellyfish that happens to have been concieved when the original jellyfish was dying and then devoured it's own parent's corpse, creating an illusion that the original jellyfish was immortal. Actually the way that actual creatures are conceived is kind of similar when seen from the longer POV, the individual organism grows old and dies but somehow the offspring always start off as young again even though the parent was aged so the species is immortal. The interesting thing is why DF elves do not actually exist, if the individual organism can produce another organism that is younger than it then why it can it not replace it's own tissue in the same manner? No magic therefore is actually needed in order to get an immortal creature, all it has to do is replicate the same miracle it manages to pull off in reproducing other individuals on itself.
Really, the game needs more actual medical problems. The only causes of death right now are various thermal issues (dying of heat, cold, solidifying, melting, evaporating, condensing), brain damage, bleeding to death and suffocation.
Really, the game needs more actual medical problems. The only causes of death right now are various thermal issues (dying of heat, cold, solidifying, melting, evaporating, condensing), brain damage, bleeding to death and suffocation.
What medical problems though? Aside from alcohol poisoning.
I feel like procedural diseases and disabilities are something Toady has planned.
As far as the whole real world mechanics of aging goes, these are the specifics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere). Particularly robust telomeres would result in a longer life with visible "aging" beyond one's prime occurring late in the process. You could also theoretically repair them in order to delay the aging process. But more importantly, have you seen the Titans and Forgotten Beats? Many of them aren't even biological in nature. Toady One has modeled certain aspects of the game, such as minerals, so precisely so that he can anchor the game to reality, which helps make the utterly bizarre creatures and systems seem special even within their own reality . It's a means of giving the player an understandable connection to the game world, a frame of reference by which to judge the bizarre.
Toady has expressed an interest in creating entire multiverses, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse), not just singular worlds. This means that you need to throw away all of you preconceived notions and let your imagination run wild when if comes to DF. Flat worlds, cubic worlds and all sorts of other seemingly impossible things are very much on the table. The HFS isn't going to be replaced with just one thing that will be the same in every generated world, and it would be absurd to expect the creatures of any giving world to follow any one paradigm or set of paradigms. ANYTHING is possible no matter how absurd, that's the beauty of magic.
Considering the upcoming myth arc involves setting parameters for each race upon creation (curse of death, can die to x things) it might be easier than you think to implement an 'old age' parameter during creature creation. Have it randomise a number of years where age really starts to take a toll and an age where the creature dies. Then each individual creature can just have those values slightly randomised, so people can reach their peak at different ages, and live different lengths of time. Death by old age could only occur if the creature possesses the curse of death, but the curse of decrepitness could occur even to immortal beings! However, decrepitness is immune to certain creatures, like those made of metal and special undead like vampires. So when powerful beings feel their time approaching them, they may seek to extend their lives through magic, potions, replacing their mortal body, possessing another, or becoming a true undead.
It is a bit morbid to create things with their expiry date written into the code, but oh well.
EDIT: As for whether or not magical creatures like demons could be immune to decrepitness, I say leave it random. Having a demon seek a new mortal body is a common trope in fantasy, and if Toady does plan to implement proper souls and ghosts, possession of a youthful creature by an old, dead soul would be fantastic to occur. Maybe a demon's cult kidnaps a young child and performs a ritual to transfer the soul of their master into the child so he may live anew!
Also, soul jars to keep those souls handy until you can give them a new, ageless body.
Each day (whats a day in Fortress mode?) it checks every single creature and kills them if they are alive on or after that day.
The first one is faster and is what Dwarf Fortress uses. However, Dwarf Fortress also keeps count of the birth tick, so that age may be calculated as well.Each day (whats a day in Fortress mode?) it checks every single creature and kills them if they are alive on or after that day.
1200 ticks, but DF has death-by-old-age down to the tick.
Yes, but they're all from the planet Zeist and we don't talk about them.The first one is faster and is what Dwarf Fortress uses. However, Dwarf Fortress also keeps count of the birth tick, so that age may be calculated as well.Each day (whats a day in Fortress mode?) it checks every single creature and kills them if they are alive on or after that day.
1200 ticks, but DF has death-by-old-age down to the tick.
Mkay (what was this thread about again?), age effects. It should be pretty easy to set in some [when] functions that randomly determine if a creature develops an age-related complication on disease, based on the number of ticks 'remaining', in a sense. I suppose the question now is- should old creatures degrade in skill and competency? I mean, there's plenty of old men in fiction who are hyper-competent and powerful.
The first one is faster and is what Dwarf Fortress uses. However, Dwarf Fortress also keeps count of the birth tick, so that age may be calculated as well.Each day (whats a day in Fortress mode?) it checks every single creature and kills them if they are alive on or after that day.
1200 ticks, but DF has death-by-old-age down to the tick.
Mkay (what was this thread about again?), age effects. It should be pretty easy to set in some [when] functions that randomly determine if a creature develops an age-related complication on disease, based on the number of ticks 'remaining', in a sense. I suppose the question now is- should old creatures degrade in skill and competency? I mean, there's plenty of old men in fiction who are hyper-competent and powerful.
When an intelligent being gets older it should in some way become wiser so how would we represent that?Training mental skills. Wiseness is not an inherent property of old age.
When an intelligent being gets older it should in some way become wiser so how would we represent that?
That would work however, I was (almost) thinking that they should be a good teacher (Age would give a bonus to teaching skill) to younger generations especially if they have had children ( teaching children what to do and how to better pass on wisdom to the next generation) Also maybe a new wisdom skill which intelligent beings gain from completing a task (would have to be slowly earned) the skill could be a slight bonus to most skills. (to offset aging and the loss of bodily strength)When an intelligent being gets older it should in some way become wiser so how would we represent that?
Just make mental skills the last to go, unless they develop Alzheimers.
Id like to think wisdom as more than that as you can be dim yet wiseWhen an intelligent being gets older it should in some way become wiser so how would we represent that?Training mental skills. Wiseness is not an inherent property of old age.
That would work however, I was (almost) thinking that they should be a good teacher (Age would give a bonus to teaching skill) to younger generations especially if they have had children ( teaching children what to do and how to better pass on wisdom to the next generation) Also maybe a new wisdom skill which intelligent beings gain from completing a task (would have to be slowly earned) the skill could be a slight bonus to most skills. (to offset aging and the loss of bodily strength)When an intelligent being gets older it should in some way become wiser so how would we represent that?
Just make mental skills the last to go, unless they develop Alzheimers.
I can't even imagine how wisdom would work. Would there be a set of life lessons that the character would learn throughout life if they survived them? Would you be able to learn it from books? Try to pass it on to young people who don't listen? And is wisdom something you can define or is it subjective? Would two very wise people agree on every choice to make?What passes for sage wisdom in DF: "There are plenty of socks over here in the stockpile, why run onto a battlefield to get one more?"
And more importantly, how would it actually show up in the game? Would a very wise person not run towards the megabeast or what?
I can't even imagine how wisdom would work. Would there be a set of life lessons that the character would learn throughout life if they survived them? Would you be able to learn it from books? Try to pass it on to young people who don't listen? And is wisdom something you can define or is it subjective? Would two very wise people agree on every choice to make?
And more importantly, how would it actually show up in the game? Would a very wise person not run towards the megabeast or what?
Am I?That would work however, I was (almost) thinking that they should be a good teacher (Age would give a bonus to teaching skill) to younger generations especially if they have had children ( teaching children what to do and how to better pass on wisdom to the next generation) Also maybe a new wisdom skill which intelligent beings gain from completing a task (would have to be slowly earned) the skill could be a slight bonus to most skills. (to offset aging and the loss of bodily strength)When an intelligent being gets older it should in some way become wiser so how would we represent that?
Just make mental skills the last to go, unless they develop Alzheimers.
You might be over-estimating what effects the wisdom stat has.
I can't even imagine how wisdom would work. Would there be a set of life lessons that the character would learn throughout life if they survived them? Would you be able to learn it from books? Try to pass it on to young people who don't listen? And is wisdom something you can define or is it subjective? Would two very wise people agree on every choice to make?Hopefully wisdom will be a character remembering past experiences, if a bad scary experience they would do what ever they could to prevent being hurt that way again, like a phobia. If a glad happy experience they will learn to make the best of them.
And more importantly, how would it actually show up in the game? Would a very wise person not run towards the megabeast or what?
As for a "love" skill are you talking about a charisma skill? or something else entirely?I can't even imagine how wisdom would work. Would there be a set of life lessons that the character would learn throughout life if they survived them? Would you be able to learn it from books? Try to pass it on to young people who don't listen? And is wisdom something you can define or is it subjective? Would two very wise people agree on every choice to make?
And more importantly, how would it actually show up in the game? Would a very wise person not run towards the megabeast or what?
Well, I believely that eventually, 'wisdom' will be abstracted/reduced to certain levels of ability concerning different things, or explicit knowledge(secrets about people and things)
Some of those abilities(Imagine social abilities concerning, for example love) will have really low learning levels, effectively taking real in-game years to advance only slightly if being trained, and thus, accurately simulating those 'learning experiences' in life I talked in the previous post
I believe that a system like this would be quite precise, because, like in real life, we slowly train 'secondary' abilities , that take a lot of time for us to be fully understood, and we can try to teach them to the young people, like a lot of stories work.
Unfortunately, in real life, a lot of people have the student ability capped at dabbling
Well, I believely that eventually, 'wisdom' will be abstracted/reduced to certain levels of ability concerning different things, or explicit knowledge(secrets about people and things)The first thing I thought when I read this was that this would be a great way to have personalities be much more important in the game. Essentially you would become wiser the more attention you paid to whatever interests you. So for example, you could have an egghead librarian dwarf who makes terrible decisions when it comes to love and a family oriented dwarf lady who gets into trouble financially because she buys impulsivelly and so on. So wisdom wouldn't be a sliding scale.
Some of those abilities(Imagine social abilities concerning, for example love) will have really low learning levels, effectively taking real in-game years to advance only slightly if being trained, and thus, accurately simulating those 'learning experiences' in life I talked in the previous post
...
Unfortunately, in real life, a lot of people have the student ability capped at dabbling
Wisdom as I explained above, should be something an intelligent being learns. What to do if something happens, how to respond appropriately, whether to run and hide or to face it head on.But there lies the rub. Intelligent beings tend to learn different lessons from the same events happening, sometimes even opposite truths. A schoolyard bully hits someone. Different people will learn the following lesson from that event:
In my opinion it would simulate real life learning as best as a game can.
Hence why I say mental skills should just be the last to start degrading. It wouldn't require the introduction of an arbitrary 'Wisdom' stat, just use the ones we already have. Right now, all but one attribute does something, and most skills have at least some application.As for the phobias I truthfully had no idea how they would work however thanks to you we have a skeleton to work with.
Right now, the Attributes are:Spoiler (click to show/hide)
'Wisdom' as a concept is already covered by several existing stats like Analytical Ability, Intuition, Patience, and Memory - which affect tangible Fortress professions.
Regarding phobias and memories, that's a tricky concept because you need to build some kind of function that can take control of AI behaviour at virtually any time, so long as the pre-requisite conditions are met. Afraid of Creature, Fond of Building, Enraged by Item Type, etc.
What you're describing is an entirely new, overwriting behavioral system that would need creation and testing. Now, I'm not saying its a bad idea; learning your target is Afraid of Bees could be a vital method in helping your fight - similar to studying Uruk Captains in Shadow of Mordor. It'd give you a reason to talk to people and train social skills so you can learn the various traits of people you're interested in, giving more value to the conversation system. Traits kind of work like that now, but all they pretty much do is modify thoughts and certain skills when they are used - no assuming control of AI behavior. Potentially Toady could re-use some of the code involving when dangerous creatures cause AI to interrupt tasks though, but relate it to Phobias/Fetishes.
My problem with that system is that, during Adventure Mode, the more of these memories you have, the less control you'd be given. If you accrued enough memories of common creatures, you could potentially get thrown into a loop of the memories taking control and running out their behavior over and over. Yes that would be a worse case scenario however who has a traumatic experience with squirrels? Would make characters useless after a certain period of time. And before you say "Oh, they wouldn't all be that severe" -what exactly would govern severity of a memory? Health loss? Time spent interacting or fighting? These would need defining.
Right now, I can see is "If [OtherCreature] reduces [MainCreature] to [<10% Life] or [Removes a Body Part], randomly decide if it gets trauma relating to it" working. The trigger would elicit fear around that thing in the future, and maybe trauma could fade over time or with some kind of relaxing/counselling - turning it into a regular memory that gives bad thoughts. I suppose a memory system could be useful in the opposite sense: encountering a new creature might make you fearful and sloppy in your combat checks, but if you knew about it beforehand or were told about it you'd be fine (unless you then get trauma from fighting it). Perhaps even the Memory Attribute could govern how many experiences you can recall in total? A double-edged sword.
This doesn't really apply to the thread topic of 'Aging' though. Old People would probably know more topics, rumours, secrets, and whatnot.
Mkay (what was this thread about again?), age effects. It should be pretty easy to set in some [when] functions that randomly determine if a creature develops an age-related complication on disease, based on the number of ticks 'remaining', in a sense. I suppose the question now is- should old creatures degrade in skill and competency? I mean, there's plenty of old men in fiction who are hyper-competent and powerful.