Getting Too Old For This ... Stuff
Why do adventurers retire? Few campaigns reach the point where characters proverbially hang up their swords and open taverns so this may be a question that a lot of people don't think about.
A little more than four years ago, Eris Lis, M.D., began writing a series of brilliant and informative posts on RPGs through the eyes of a medical professional. Following is the eighth of them, which appeared here on January 26, 2013.
Why do adventurers retire?
Given that few campaigns reach the point where the characters proverbially hang up their swords and open taverns, this may be a question that a lot of people don't think about. When we imagine our characters, it may be hard to visualize them giving up the adventuring life. Adventuring is probably something of an addictive lifestyle: high risk, high reward, wealth and fame. It would be hard for a lot of adventurers to give up... particularly those who are borderline psychopathic, severe narcissists, or impulsive folk who never really considered that they can save some of their money for the future, which describes a lot of the characters who I've seen run amok on the gaming table. I've always imagined that a lot of adventurers, perhaps even most, don't retire, but keep hunting for treasure until one day their luck runs out and they're killed. What about those who do retire, though? Some probably give up the life at the end of their grand quest, meaning, of course, the end of the campaign. Others might retire because they feel they're rich enough, or its time to go teach at the college, or their church is ready to have a new high priest. My assumption is that most give it up simply because they're getting too old or too chronically injured; even with magical healing, you have to imagine that decades of recurrent intensive injury start to add up physically and emotionally.
Today, I asked myself one question: what sorts of health problems do older adventurers develop over time? I knew this was a good question because I had no clue what the answer was. How might we go about finding an answer? I thought it might be interesting to look at one of the populations in the modern world which might be analogous to adventurers: soldiers. I did some quick poking around in the literature and found an article published in the journal ofMilitary Medicine in 2012, entitled, "Temporary Disability Retirement Cases: Variations in Time to Final Disposition and Disability Rating by Service and Medical Condition," by Amanda Piccirillo and colleagues (volume 177, issue 4, page 417, for those who want to read the original). They recently published the results of an interesting study where they examined why American soldiers went on temporary disability leaves and some of the reasons why those temporary leaves turned into permanent retirements. Here's some of what they found.
The authors looked at something I'd never read about before, known as the temporary disability retirement list (or "TDRL"), which is a system used to track soldiers with medical conditions which can be expected to fluctuate with time. To be added, soldiers have to have been enlisted for a minimum of twenty years (meaning that this population could have some vague similarity to veteran adventurers) or else have a relatively severe disability (which might make them analogous to extremely unlucky junior adventurers). After a maximum of five years, a soldier is removed from the list and either declared fit for duty, or retired or otherwise removed from service. Specifically, the authors looked at people who were taken off of the list over a four-year period. I won't get into the bulk of their analyses from the paper, as most of it isn't relevant to this discussion, but here's what they say about what sorts of disabilities these "old soldiers" developed, and what happened to them. The article discusses the army separately from the navy and marines; I've combined the numbers for the sake of simplicity.
Two percent of people on the list were under 20 years old; a bit more than 20% were between 20 and 24, about the same were between 25 and 29, and 16 percent were forty or older. About 31% of injuries were deemed "combat related." The average soldier remained on the list for 28 months (for the navy) or 22 months (for the army), with 3% of army and none of the navy people returning to active service. People were more likely to end up "permanent" if they had illnesses affecting more than one body system. Eighteen percent of individuals had musculoskeletal injuries; 15% had psychiatric diagnoses; 9% had nervous system disorders; eighteen percent had health problems categorized as "other," which sadly weren't further explained in this paper (but presumably included things like diabetes, heart attacks, and other problems of general health).
This is, admittedly, some very limited data; we don't know, for example, how many of the musculoskeletal patients took retirement because they developed age-related arthritis versus those who lost a limb to a land mine. We don't know, from this, whether patients with psychiatric diagnoses left the service because of trauma-induced disorders versus how many of them developed schizophrenia, just as they would have in any other lifestyle. As a result, we won't try to draw any especially detailed conclusions from this data. We can note a few things, though.
1) Relatively few people give up the "adventurer" lifestyle before the age of twenty.
2) The most common reason for people to retire for medical reasons was musculoskeletal injury, with psychiatric issues being the next most common (and that's a whole other lengthy discussion that I won't get into right now).
3) In absence of magical healing, most of the people who are hurt badly enough to temporarily retire are never able to get back to it. From this study, though, we don't know how many of these patients wanted to get back to work and how many were eager to retire.
4) Only about one-third of people retired due to combat-related issues, which presumably means a lot of them left for other reasons: they got sick, as opposed to injured, and couldn't keep up with the lifestyle.
Does any of this translate into why adventurers retire in your game world? That's up to you. Food for thought, though.
