As previews emerge from the Dungeons and Dragons 2024 Player’s Handbook, team Wargamer has been discussing the changes big and small we want to see in the new edition of the world’s most popular roleplaying game. While our ideas and hopes for the new core books are pretty diverse, there’s one that we all agree on – the canonical lifespan for the Tortle is a travesty and must be fixed.
The Tortle is not one of the core DnD races – or species, to use the new terminology – appearing in the 2024 DnD Player’s Handbook, but we’re prepared to wait. The DnD 5e Tortle‘s lifespan is unconscionably brief, and whenever the new Tortle’s background emerges, we will stand in judgment.
Wargamer’s DnD expert Mollie Russell discovered the dark truth of the Tortle lifespan while roleplaying Ortle, a Tortle Circle of Spores Druid, who had spent 10 years searching for his lost parents before he began his adventuring career. After an expedition into the Feywild, which seemed to last just a few days, the GM revealed to the party that they’d been gone for 10 years. Which prompted the question, how long do Tortles live for anyway?
Canonically, the Tortle’s average lifespan is just 50 years. 50 years! At 25 years old Ortle is already middle-aged, and his parents are – statistically – close to death. Boo, we say. Boo! This is unacceptably tragic.
Not only is this sad – and it is very, very sad – but the ludonarrative dissonance is appalling. Chelonians (turtles, tortoises, and terrapins) are amongst the most long-lived vertebrate species on earth. Aldabra giant tortoises have been documented living for over 200 years – the hard part of documenting their lifespan is that they far outstrip the human ability to keep records.
Does the Tortle’s lamentably brief existence have any gameplay effect? Rules as written, no. The last DnD edition when a character’s age impacted their DnD stats was 3e. From a game design perspective, that’s probably for the best: most players choose their DnD class and character because they want to embody a heroic fantasy archetype, so tying any of their capabilities to the (imaginary) age of their character is needlessly fussy.
That said, I do like the idea of aging characters to death with negative energy magic, and value a solid rules framework that tells me, as the DM, how to strip characters of their physical attributes with every year they are magically accelerated into the grave. But that’s because I’m a horrible person, not because it’s the foundation of good game design.
And let me be very clear – if those kinds of rules were in place, I would be profoundly unhappy if they made the party Tortle age to death before the humans. Sort it out, WOTC.
Also, while we’re complaining about stuff – the DnD monster entry for cats in 5e doesn’t have darkvision. Absolute shambles.
The new Player’s Handbook is fast approaching on the DnD release schedule, and we’re twitching to get our hands on it come September 17. To make sure you don’t miss any of our DnD coverage in the run-up to the release, follow Wargamer on Google news.
Source: Wargamer
