Undead and level loss

I always disliked level loss. Not because I didn't like bad things happening to my character, or loosing that level I worked so hard to get. No, what I hated was all that math. It's not that it was difficult, it was just long. Especially in later edition with those skills and feats and bonus.ability points, it was a mess to recalculate. And, to compound it, most of the time that someone lost a level, it was in combat against the undead. Having to recalculate your sheet slows down combat considerably. So how do we fix it without removing the fear from the undead? Age.

The editions of D&D that I have played always had some sort of age chart which give you the maximum age for your race, and the bonus and penalty in each age bracket. Why not use that? It's thematic, as encounters with ghosts have been known to leave victims with white hair, etc. Also, it translate directly to something the characters can see, which is always a big plus for me. Since the effect is not disassociated, it does not break immersion the way losing a level can.

We do run into some problems with the aging instead of level loss mechanic. Longer lived race are less affected by aging. We could increase the amount of years they age compared to humans and others, but I am reluctant to do that since I can't explain why an elf would be proportionally more affected by a ghost's touch then a man. Ultimately however, I don't think this is enough of a problem to scrap the idea though, since the aging is a side-effect. What kills you is usualy something else, like fangs. The aging is long term effect, like a scar that just won't go away. The second problem we encounter is that a missing level is much easier to recover then lost years. There are no ready made spell to rejuvenate people, nor any magical items (to my knowledge). This means that aging can be quite a permenant setback. But on the other hand, it is a great motivator for people to 1. Be afraid of undead, and 2. Search for way to removing aging. That quest for the location of the fountain of youth sounds much better now that the party's fighter is 60 years old. As for how much aging is good aging, I'd guess 1d6 years per monster HD would be a decent guess. Undeads are long-term scary again, and not because of math! it