So, Prospero asked the million-dollar question there about people and their character ideas. It's a good one to think about, a little, though working up a whole bunch of excitement behind a concept might be a little premature. But there's a question yet unanswered, for me--young characters.
Teenagers, really. I hate 'em, generally, and while I've enjoyed some teen drama shows/comics/what have you, most Mu* teen characters just bug the piss out of me. There are a few exceptions who actually manage to act somewhat like teens rather than playing adults freed from normal senses of responsibility while expecting adult authority. Of course, my not liking them is not reason enough to ban the whole species (and spray lest infestation return) but I do think it is a question to address.
In the 19th century, the idea of an idealistic 'childhood' was a thing somewhat newly manufactured, and there were a large number of children and teens working full-time jobs in horrible conditions as a part of the dark underside of the gleaming new industry. Adulthood came at a somewhat younger age, in that social sense. Still, teenagers are not the equals of adults--and I propose we handle it thusly: Create a Youth background which kinda sucks. Maybe +1 Con or something to represent youthful spryness, with no bonus feats or skills. Limit age to be above 14 or 16 no matter what.
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But ... there are so many great Victorian youth characters! I know you hate them, but the Artful Dodger and Oliver are just great characters and they're certainly younger that 16. And writers like Nesbitt wrote entire fantasy tales about Victorian kids adventuring in other worlds. I mean ... Peter Pan! Come on!
As you say, kids are doing a lot of very adult things in our genre. They're working in factories, and so on. It sucks to be a kid, but they seem perfectly playable to me.
Now, that being said, I think a "Youth" background is a perfectly good idea, and I can happily work one up. And it would have a lot of negatives to it, because kids are just not as strong, tough, or well educated as adults, nor are they likely to be taken seriously (Charisma) nor do they have much practical Wisdom.
But all that being said, I think if someone wants to play a really sucky 12 year old, they should be able to do so.
I know there are many good young characters in our fiction today as in fiction of the 19th century. Most of the young characters I run across in fictional representations tend to be very very special, however--Harry Potter special. People tend to app for characters like that. They annoy me. It's a pet peeve.
The reason for wanting to limit ages to 14 or 16 or whatever is not so much specific annoyance with anyone being younger (kids are kids, really) but more that people very, very rarely app characters like that with any noble intention of playing a young person and instead aim much lower and squickier.
But I think a Youth background that works a bit like the Beast Folk background would appease my concerns with supercompetent youngsters and reduce the overall teen content slightly. Obviously teenagers do not come with preinstalled night vision, but some kind of stat balancing act that probably should ultimately leave them a little behind the adults, but not completely in the dust.
The two things I would include in any Child Background would be the Small size (kids old enough to be taller than 4' should just be made as adults) and an advantage when it comes to Terror saves. Children can get scared, but they recover from such things quicker and aren't as wedded to grown-up perceptions of reality. In game terms, they would treat Terror saves like Fear saves. (No going psychotic and insane for Child heroes. But they can still get panicked and run off.)
Coupled with ability score penalties to virtually every stat, and the lack of another Background, this should deter all but the most determined. And we can still have Wendy, Dorothy, Lost Boy, and Alice characters.
One approach I really really like towards age and people's apparent inherent fondness for the youthful dewy eyes is the xp bonus. I.e the older the character, the more points they get to start out with. And vice versa, too. They did that on HM, with great success afaik: the medium age for most characters was ca 35.
If you want to keep away the potential flood of Hulk Hogan-style 70-year-olds with bulging physiques, perhaps balance it out so that at some point the intellectual side gets the benefits while the physical starts taking hits, maybe?
Something like that. Basically yes to giving younglings drawbacks, and if we give the older ones bonuses I think we'll be certain to have good demographical balance.
Not really a kid fancier myself (gracious that sounds pervy) for many of the same reasons Baba gave up there, although I do concede the point that they can be chock full o' interesting RP to people other than myself. I can't think of a good (read non-personal) reason to disallow 'em either, so as long as we keep the Victorian ideal of what a child is in mind ruleswise, we'll probably be hokey-dokey.
The way I'm envisioning it is there are three broad categories available:
L. L. Fauntleroys - born to the Quality and as such are probably spoiled beyond comprehension at an early age. Could be due to being dressed-up like muffins for the first eight years of life. Probably the applications we'd want to scrutinize the most.
Bitter Droogs - the kids of the poor who, despite gaining a small break in the British Factory Acts of '47 and '78 (which lowered workdays to 10 hours for women and children 18-years or younger, although the minimum age a kid kid could be set to work was still ten until 1891) were worked into an unhealthy adulthood and an early grave. How fun.
Merchant Spawn - the chitlins of the embarrassingly-small middle class. Very likely the most interesting concepts would come from this batch, since they've got a variety of directions to go ranging from occult bookshop helper to Artful Dodger. Might want to make them the only variety.
It actually just so happens that in True20 "Worlds of Adventure" there is a setting devoted to suburban horror. It's called "Razor in the Apple" and you play kids fighting monsters from under the bed and inside the closet. It's sort of The Goonies RPG and actually rather brilliant.
Anyhow, this is what I would like to propose: let's just not have children characters right now; put the age at 18+ and treat everyone as adults. Then let me stew and mull over how to do kid characters in an interesting way, and when I have something I like I'll throw a draft out, we can playtest it, and unleash it later on the game as an "Expansion."
Until then, I already have so many things on my plate -- finishing magic, invention, and the steam tech catalog being priorities -- that I don't want to add another topic to that list.
Ultimately, having given it about 3 seconds of contemplation, simply not allowing child characters in the first place is a brilliant idea. I think everybody else has touched on the reasons I don't like 'em (and I've seen some pretty hoary things in my days staffing WoD MUSHes) and, uhh... yeah. No kids for now, thanks!
I would like to humbly suggest that I'm staunchly against all absolutes. Certain rules exist to be bent to some modest degree, and a compellingly-written child character could be allowed to fly. Let's just make it as rare as it ought to be, so that really special things are, perforce, genuinely special.
Y'all seem to be convinced that people making children characters will, by and large, do so in order to participate in "squicky" (by which I take you to mean immoral, unethical, or illegal) behavior. But this behavior will be prohibited by our game policies (I presume; I'm not going to write those), so I don't really agree that we should ban such characters for that reason.
Frankly, I would love to see someone playing one of the Baker Street Irregulars or the Lost Boys, one of Fagin's gang of urchin-thieves, or one of the boy inventors like Tom Edison, Jr.
I just don't have time to come up with the rules for Kids yet, and that's why I ask we put it off.
Whatever my own opinion might have been construed as, let's just call this aspect of character creation a 'not until further development' thing and worry about it later. I think it's pretty clear that we have few absolutes involved in this endeavour.
I apologize, I was more or less responding to BYs, "people very, very rarely app characters ... with any noble intention of playing a young person and instead aim much lower and squickier." And AC more or less agreed with that.
Offense was not intended.
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