aging

Aging

Aging is applied at character creation and every time a character ages 1 year (naturally or unnaturally).

Some important notes:

Note the aging step's position on Character Creation. It is important to apply aging in the correct order.
Ability score changes are cumulative.
Aging cannot cause scores to be bypass racial mins/maxes, nor do they cause scores to go below class minimums.¹⁾ Ignore any aging modifiers that would violate this, but during character creation you should consider all modifiers together.²⁾
The only time a score can be raised above 18 via aging is WIS, and only in humans.((DMG 13. Since only humans lack racial min/max, they would be the only race capable of aging up their WIS past 18.

¹⁾

DMG 13.

²⁾

For example, if the Young Adult loss of STR would put a character below their STR minimum, but the Mature gain of STR would put them back at their minimum, the new character should be at their minimum (i.e. both the -1 and +1 should be applied). But if the character hits Mature during play, the +1 STR should be applied even though the character didn't lose the -1 during character creation. Put another way, there is no need to track being “in the hole” for aging, and there should be no occasion for a player to note on their character sheet that they “owe” a point of STR.