I think time should be a factor in gaming. If you could start your character as a child and allow them to do different things that would determine what kind of skills they would have in the future. As a child, strength is not going to make much difference, but they could choose to learn how to do different things. They may learn the art of swordplay or how to theive or the ability to notice things. At least this would give the player a background into their character as well (ie, not really a task for us Game Designers to put a background story in
). The child grows older, and at the players choice can go off to seek wealth or glory.
There would have to be a lot of fun stuff to do in the childhood though, because otherwise it would be crap, and nobody would want to do it
. This is getting back to that "child scene" in the game that someone suggested to give the character attributes. That was only a scene though, and time didn''t have any concequence on the games mentioned there
.
Time would be interesting for an sim where you control a party. You would be like the god (god-games
) and could make decisions for your party, and when they geet too feeble, you can get some new members. This could give you the ability to recruit fresh young warriors to your group, but would mean that there are some who lack experience.
Just a rant
-Chris Bennett ("Insanity" of Dwarfsoft)
Check our site:
http://www.crosswinds.net/~dwarfsoft/Check out our NPC AI Mailing List :
http://www.egroups.com/group/NPCAI/made due to popular demand here at GDNet :)
I just lost a really long post to this... damn reset feilds button!
.. Was it Duncan? I don''t think so 
