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[Deboche]

Undoubtely, The fun point on this system would be adding variety to the game, and make it more real
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

You should post it here. Suggestion threads are supposed to develop the idea somewhat.

[GoblinCookie]

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. 

[Dirst]

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.

[LordBaal]

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.

[Deboche]

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.

But yeah, most of DF isn't realistic anyway nor should it be.

[Rubik]

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.

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

[GoblinCookie]

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. 

[Putnam]

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.

It's 100% possible and not complained about by the game at all to have materials with completely impossible properties. Hell, the game even has a few.

Netherwood is obviously magical, with its temperature always at the freezing point of water at 1 atm pressure.

Adamantine has impossible elastic moduli:
1. They're impossibly huge. Taking the in-game values as-is without sanity checks gets a divide-by-zero error in the equations; assuming the speed of sound is finite in the material, which is reasonable, the values can at most be about 3 exapascals, for a speed of sound of sqrt(1/3)c.
2. They're all identical. This is completely impossible. The bulk modulus, young's modulus and shear modulus are all related by the equation K=(EG)/(3(3G-E)); plug this equation in and you'll find that there is no value where K, E and G are all identical.

These aren't really problems because both of them are fantasy materials.

[Rubik]

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.

Well, 'philosofically' speaking, what happen is that 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. There isn't anything apart from that

just look it up on wikipedia if you want, the animal it's being researched at the moment, but we already know what does it exactly do

The idea I was trying to transmit was that two very look-alike creatures, being two types of jellyfish , or dwarves and elves, can be almost identical with the actual more general raw system, if we solely observe their aspects, but they can be expected to have different, abstracted biology.
In an elegant way to avoid overexplaining complex medical details, with the method I propose, you could define that biology affecting their ''vitality'' (overall energy, more propension to learn/change atributes, etc.) , and the fluctuations of it over the lifespan of each creature, which, as I already said, is different in each species

So this idea, in essence, only gives more realism, more tools to the modding community, and adds a possible placeholder for many aspects of the game, probably magic and the health system mostly

[Qyubey]

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.

[LMeire]

Technically speaking, "old age" isn't really a cause of death by itself. Rather, any time someone in that age bracket dies of organ failure it's labeled as "old age". The age itself doesn't kill anybody and theoretically someone could live forever on transplants as long as nothing happens to their brain.

So maybe have old creatures have a chance to get random medical problems until it's too much?

[Putnam]

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.

[Qyubey]

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.

[Rubik]

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.

A lot of more mental diseases, organic failures for all organs, including muscle and skin
Im very reticent of adding cancer, but that's for personal matters, so that could be included too, althought it would mean your dwarves are gg, based on the technology they had at the moment

check this link out where they talk about medicine and health, something that ties really close to aging and growth

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30097.msg400782#msg400782

[Gargomaxthalus]

     As far as the whole real world mechanics of aging goes, these are the specifics 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, 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.