Why is 16 always the default age very young and or edgy people choose for characters

Why is 16 always the default age very young and or edgy people choose for characters

>tfw gm won't let you play a ten year old
WHY
H
Y

16 is a reasonable age. For instance, 16 is the youngest age someone in my country can join the armed forces.

10 is just creepy.

16 year olds are much more physically and mentally developed than ten year olds.

Generally if it's a small group, most people I've been with don't really mind the age of a character. We had an 8 year old who had a gimmick that when they cried they healed people. It was a story intensive pathfinder game most of the time, though as time went on and the group grew larger and larger, with more DMs, they eventually told the guy to make the character older because it was creepy despite none of those connotations ever coming up.

Some people just don't like children when they're trying to write Zack Snyder tier DARK AND NEVER BEFORE SEEN shit I guess.

I'd imagine 16 or 17 would be a reasonable age for someone leaving their home to start adventuring or join the local militia. It also helps for non-human races like Thri-Kreen where the average lifespan is 30 and fey creatures like Pixies and such were they reach adulthood at age 2 or some crazy young age.

>>tfw gm won't let you play a ten year old
>WHY
>H
>Y
There is no good reason to want to play a child. Assuming you're even open to taking hits to your stats for being a child, you're now automatically a weakness in the party. Nice job.

The only time I'd let someone play a child is if I know them personally and trust their PnP skills, and I know the group is ok with taking hits to efficiency for roleplay. The trick here is the only people who I trust to play it well would think it's stupid to play a child when they're old enough to be or are already parents.

Now could you stop posting this fucking thread over and over again?

Odds are you've finished growing, though that's not always the case. Building up muscle after this won't stunt your development.

There's nothing wrong with child characters.

Usually they would be prodigious in some way to meet the level of the party, but even that isn't a must. My opinion on this is as irrelevant as any other user.

Nah

16 is generally accepted as "adult enough" for most purposes, culturally, if not legally.
Even in the US, where there's weird arbitrary age limits, 16 is legal age of consent in most states and can emancipate themselves to count as if they are age of majority for the purposes of living alone.

I have a question Veeky Forums

If someone wants to play a 10-year-old or similar "way too young but somehow mature enough to risk their life adventuring" character...

...is it ok for me to make a PC who is in a sexual relationship with that character?

Or as the DM, to make an NPC who is attracted to them?

16 is the age where personal independence and being a dumbass shithead coincide for the first time as in many countries it's the age of being able to start doing 'adult' things legally.

You've also got most of the physical development required of an adult done, if not the mental development. That I believe is at it's peak at about 23-25 biologically.

yes, I was a fucking twat as a teenager. As were most of you, even if you don't realise it

Sixteen is probably the youngest you can be and still be taken seriously as close to adult in skills and abilities. Ten year olds are just uncomfortable - you don't want them to be forced to go insane because of Lovecraftian horrors, or get their head knocked off by an orge. If you seriously push for 10, something's really weird about you unless you really do want serious penalties and to be more of a mascot than an active character. Pic related.

That is, assuming you aren't a particularly short-lived race. Then you might be an adult at eight.

Sexual? No, that's just weird, /ss/ be damned.

Romantic? You could work with that, especially if it's played off in a more cute manner. "I'm gonna marry Cleric-chan someday!"

Why, though?

If someone is mature enough to face down dragons and kill orcs, they're mature enough to get plowed by fat dick.

Okay, treating this as an honest question rather than the obvious trolling attempt it is.


A 15/16 year old is a relatively stable and emotionally mature person. They're generally inexperienced and naive, and so will make mistakes. They're hormonal and so may think with their privates. But overall, they are done growing mentally and just need life experience. There isn't much difference between how a 16 year old and how a 60 year old thinks, just experience to know what to do.

A 10 year old is still growing. They are emotionally and intellectually immature, and so they look at the world in a fundamentally different way. They generally haven't gone through puberty, generally haven't ever needed to display independence, and generally don't have a good idea of how the world works. While a 16 year old might be naive in how the world operates ("Why not just employ everyone?") a 10 year old just won't even thinking about such things.


There's nothing wrong with a game involving 10 year old children, but it requires a fundamentally different mindset and so is better for a specific focus of a game - a game about playing small children, as opposed to a game about playing adult adventures where a small child happens to be.

>10 year old girl/ gay

Okay, even weirder.

There's a large body of difference between mature enough to fight and mature enough to actually have definitive sexual feelings. The latter comes with puberty; the former might weight until your twenties or thirties, or when your family gets cut down in front of you.

Now stop, before Chris Hansen gets here.

What if I want some now and then here and there MC action for flavor?
What if I'm a very young half orc or giant, but still bigger than a full grown man

16 is the perfect age to play a genius that's perfect in every sense and still have a world of possibilities ahead.

Unlike us.

>family gets cut down in front of you at ten.

Wasted trips, I tell you.

16 is the age where you're just old enough to be forming your own opinions but not old enough to have any idea what you're talking about.

Deadlands has rules for playing a kid.

A kid is functionally different than an adult, a strong woman is possible, a woman that can wrestle a man and win is possible, but some 10 year old is never going to be able outmuscle a healthy 20 year old man, plus their bodies are still growing so they have fairly poor coordination, and every single kid without exception is an idiot who has a terrible wisdom score.

Then I guess it's okay, but you'd have to ask your DM.

The big thing about anime kinds of action heroes is that the plot kind of revolves around them, which isn't good for a tabletop game. Many hijinks will not have time to be noticed, growth and learning will be skipped over for getting things done or focusing on other characters, a bumbling attempt to get a girlfriend will be glazed over.

That's why we have fantasy, user.

>What if I want some now and then here and there MC action for flavor?
This sentence is very poorly thought out.

>What if I'm a very young half orc or giant, but still bigger than a full grown man
Why yes user, I do see your thread about the giant child conversation. How nice of you to make two threads about the same issue!

Size doesn't matter. Mental maturity does. You'll notice that everything I mentioned here is about mental development. It doesn't matter if the immature character is twice the size of a man, or half the size of a halfling. If they are intellectually and emotionally immature, then it runs into the same problem as playing a 10-year-old human child. With the same concerns and recommendations.

And sure, you could play a kid in a D&D game. But you aren't going to be playing a standard PC. They aren't going to be a participating party member, and (if played accurately) won't really be doing the same things as the rest of the party.

Never understood why this is really a thing.

Unless the setting itself has reasons as to why the fuck a 16-year-old would be doing anything other than living a normal life with his parents of whatever job they happen to have--dirt farmers, wage slaves, what have you--then our group pretty much recognizes that people can't be expected to be taken seriously as adventurers unless they're somewhere around 19 or 20 at the earliest.

You can admire someone super successful who's younger than that, but when you meet them, unless they have charisma through the fucking roof, you're still going to notice that they're still just a goddamned child.

This is the only thread I've made. And I never implied that children should be the same thing as adult party members
If the child can keep up with the adults physically at least then I don't see much of an issue game play wise and the rest depends on the individual player

>16 year olds are done growing
>white people actually believe this
lmao lmao lmao

Keep telling yourself that, manlet king

lmao @urlife whiteboy

It's not unreasonable to have people of that age want to strike out on their own for independence without regarding the consequences. I've seen it happen quite a few times myself.

That's all well and good. My primary complaint at this point is that I've never heard of an instance where the GM actually had the world behave as if the character in question was exactly what they are--a child.

Hell, it can even be more subtle in regards to the less "realistic," fantasy settings. Have NPCs refer to your child character as the squire of one of the older characters or something like that.

I guess I just don't get the /a/ mentality that a teenager makes a good protagonist. If I had players try that, I'd suggest to them through the world itself it's not necessarily a good idea.

Not entirely shut them down, but give them a similar experience as people expecting their ladyknights to work just as well as their male counterparts when I explicitly said that the setting was based on 14th-Century France, social and sexual taboos included.

That's the fault of a GM then, not the character.

you used to

No one in this thread has posted a compelling argument for not boning children in RPGs.

RPG's are a social activity.

>you're now automatically a weakness in the party.
This isn't an MMO, mate.

God I love that image.

Didn't people start working at the age of 14, 13, or even 4 and 3?

But I just wanna be the very best.
Like no one ever was.

Children were expected to be assisting as soon as they were physically capable, although that's not quite the same as the child labor of the industrial era.

Are you old enough to carry a bucket or a shovel? Then you are old enough for a proper job! What? You weren't spawned to play all day long.

How old are you? Do you not remember being 16? 16 is the first time you can be cool again after puberty. It's also adulthood for many cultures across history.

why don't i get to play a character that is eh one hundred and fucking
fifty two

15 and younger would be creepy.

If you aren't a squire before 12, then you aren't good for anything but a carrera in the church.

16 seems "adult-like" to the very young.
The edgy players are making self-inserts

Pedo detected. Stop posting this thread over and over, pervert.

>mfw my setting follows a 36 17-18 year olds, to 20-ish year olds and a 30 year old
>a crap ton die and are replaced with more 17 year olds

*Two twenty-ish year olds

OW?

I've been wondering - why the fuck people come for advice on Veeky Forums about their personal issues?

I mean, yeah, OK, if the question was "I want to play a 10y/o, but I don't want disadvantages for it, what system allows it and how?", it would be a reasonable Veeky Forums topic.
But this is just plain complaining, and allowing other people to shove their personal beliefs onto you - something they shouldn't have a hand in.

Literally for what purpose?

Also, for people who say "10y/o is an unreasonable age" - need I remind you that before the end of the 19th century, it was commonplace for children to be employed in tin mining and lead mining, some of the most hazardous professions, with a ten hour workday?

Just because current-day society constantly increases the "reasonable age", due to the fact that minimum required education is constantly increasing, doesn't mean it was that way before.

Also, if we're talking mental maturity of children, then yeah, I agree - immature characters have little place in adventuring. No one wants to play an immature character like kender. Seriously, if you just replace the word "kender" with the word "children" on picrelated, it would make just as much sense - you won't even notice the difference.

I think 10 is rather young.

I'd say 13 at the very youngest. A 13 year old might be a young shithead and not particularly tough, but this is usually when the more mature or prodigious kids start to become tall poppies.


For example, me, at 10 I was about 5'5 very sensitive and pretty damned retarded in some ways.

At 13 I was 6'2 starting to get muscular and still pretty retarded. But I was big and stronk.

Yes at 22 and 6'4 and still pretty retarded, thaat didn't change but my point is 13 works, ten really doesn't.

Also 16 is a fairly optimal age for a lower limit because even the stragglers tend to have at least some maturity by then.

You just got someone in Beijing browsing Veeky Forums black bagged OP

Don't be such a pedo.

Because Veeky Forums is about /traditional gameRS/, not /traditional games/.

Excellent post user.
I largely agree.

On major disagreement:
>if you just replace the word "kender" with the word "children" on picrelated, it would make just as much sense - you won't even notice the difference.
I notice the difference.
Children are actually an improvement over kender and make more sense as, irl, people are biologically programmed to think kids are cute.

Now to answer your question:
>why the fuck people come for advice on Veeky Forums about their personal issues?
Because they can’t or won’t talk to actual people.
Heh
>Literally for what purpose?
I come to Veeky Forums to discuss and/or be entertained.
If there are no interesting threads and I have no topic to start one, I leave Veeky Forums.
Some others refuse to do so and start pointless threads in bored protest.
Some don’t care about the threads they start and only do it so they can claim some hollow victory in getting others to talk about it. This gives them a sense that they are manipulating others, which is false as you cannot truly “manipulate” a thirsty man to drink.
Some have a somewhat legitimately Veeky Forums related issue and are incapable of starting an OP that will spark discourse because they have been trained on meme imagery and greentext.
Some just want to bitch and don’t care to who.
And some are sad, pathetic fools roleplaying as trolls who roleplay as anonymous gamers who roleplay, possibly as trolls.

No
It's about a war though...
Imagine a clusterfuck of a dense jungle and everyone has automatic rifles and a single use rocket launcher

Nah

Because D&D and its ilk advise 15 as the ideal starting age for self-taught adventurers like barbarians and sorceresses, and people just extrapolated from there.

>...is it ok for me to make a PC who is in a sexual relationship with that character?