Do you have an allowable age limit for the PCs of your games?

The thing is that I mostly just run games where it wouldn't be appropriate for little kids to tag along. I could probably be convinced to budge on the 15 cutoff, but I'd have to have a really good reason for it (and the okay of the rest of the group).

And hell, if everyone gets the itch to play a kid, I can always run a one-shot of something like, I dunno, magical kids ver. Double Cross or one of the pokemon/digimon type games.

The height of my eyebrow gets exponentially higher at 12-below.

>if everyone gets the itch to play a kid, I can always run a one-shot
Done that one. We played 11-year-olds. Spend the whole game stealing pies and beating up bullies. It was great.
Until the body-snatchers showed up.

Characters can't be younger than 18, but generally no upper age limit.

Can I play an one year old clone?

Even in medieval games? You would often be considered a man or woman well before 18.

If it made them functionally an adult, probably.

Though itd depend on IU legalities related to that.

I havent gm'd a fantasy game before desu. I've only gmd modern or futuristic, and the pc's tend to at least start off working for semi/sometimes actually legit companies.

If you play OP pic related or a kid that would realistically be in the situation, that's fine. If you try to play my pic related you're going to get -.-ed at unless we're all lolicons.

that;s way to old for fantasy setting where people as young as 13 can make a name for themselves.

The training of a Medieval knight was usually begun at the age of seven (7), and it was claimed after twelve, the boy is fit only for a priest. When a young nobleboy made 13, he was expected to serve his master on battlefield as a valet. At 17, he would serve as a fully armed man-at-arms.

You could be a soldier as early as 15.

You should be working since you were 7.

And those characters would be completely ruined if titled by a moon word? Bullshit senpai, you haven’t come up with/seen any good characters that are kids if calling them a loli or shota would nullify them.

Loli and shota have sexual connotations, user.

You fucking what

To a lolicon and you.

Still waiting for how referring to a supposedly good character as a loli/shota makes whatever good characteristics they have completely irrelevant

It's never come up for me but I wouldn't allow any younger than 18 unless

1) it's a race that reaches adult earlier than humans

2) the player is younger than 18

Depends on the game. Generally 12 is probably the lowest I'd allow, and anyone wanting to go below 16 would definitely raise a few questions.

>Do you have an allowable age limit for the PCs of your games?
Depends on the setting. Both the game's setting and where the game is set in space and who plays.

In general:
Online: 10 - 12 (Any gender combination)
Offline: 15 (21 for crossplaying)

Protip: Never let couples play characters who're also a couple-but-younger/genderbent.
For whatever reason that tends to go wrong.

In my games the players could roll characters as young as, say, 12-15, if they are human, since that would agree with real life history. I don't know how young I'd go for the other races.

However, none of my players ever play a young character (25 being the youngest), so it doesn't come up. I wouldn't add any mechanical penalties, but it would affect RP social encounters; young ones don't command as much respect or authority when it comes to dangerous work and politics.

I usually run Savage Worlds, which does have a background Edge for playing "Young" characters. I generally assume this means young teens but it could be lower I guess. None of my players ever pick it.

I won't veto it out of hand but the moment a player starts pulling typical Veeky Forums loli garbage then that character is fucking done.

15+
Any lower than that and describing their deaths is going to make me very uncomfortable

I rather think that if a player would refer their PC as a loli or shota, the character will almost certainly be terrible in a multitude of other ways as well.

No one has ever wanted to play someone who isn't an adult

It’s amazing how this question brings out all the blatant That GMs, made even worse by the fact that they think themselves “right” or “good” for eliminating character options.

Only thing that could be lower are the ones that allow it but force shit stats on their player’s character. Just imagine that self-satisfied grin. Disgusting.

Can you play a baby? Why would you want to, there's nothing you'd be able to do.

No younger than 16 for me but just about this

I really couldnt care less, but if the character turns out as usless as a normal human in a super campaign, more likely than not the need for a new character might arise.

Thus you are flawed, and hopefully you recognize this so that it will not hamper your career as DM.

You're a trash person with trash opinions.

Nah, he's pretty right, only reason youd disagree is if you're a fag or a pedo

Hey there kettle.

Lolita is a term explicitly taken from a WESTERN novel about a young girl engaging in a "consensual" sexual relationship with a 40 something year old man

Shota is short for Shotacon which is a genre of japanese animated pornography that revolves around prepubescent young boys.

We use these words just as easy short hand and as a nudge and a wink to each other, but at their root they are sexually related.

No one is ever too young for the mission

You’re a faggot, user.

Dohoho

Avatar was a campaign explicitly about exceptional young people, ALL of the characters were teenagers.

My rampant thirst for cock, whether it exists or not, has nothing to do with the etymological facts at work here. Facts are facts regardless of opinions and I'd expect for that autism to be respected here of all places.

Most people would be very young, 1half of the people would be no more than 15 years olds, for an average population of 20 when rounded . 8 years old is the minimal age to be hung for theft. 12 years old is the minimal to serve in a jury with your ideas having legal repercussion.

Marriage is ok at 14 for males, 12-14 for females.

Full armies could be lead by princes as young as 16.

The joke

Your head

Seriously way to sink your own ship nerd

But a child is weaker than a full grown adult. This is fact. If the GM wants to enforce lower statistics to reflect this, it is within his right.

GURPS allows you to build your child characters as if they were adults, however their "final" stats are reduced accordingly. You could have an abnormally strong child simply because the adult version of the character will be abnormally strong, too.

WORDS MEAN THINGS YOU PHILISTINE, REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

A GM is well within his rights to restrict character options for any reason. This does not in any way or form make him a That GM.

Anyone who disagrees is a That Guy who should be fired out of a cannon.

Rule 0

All well and good but the kind of GMs patting themselves on the back itt would make your character a functionally crippled invalid, and that does not a child make.

A knife in the back is a knife in the back, whether it’s the fresh-faced loli or the grizzled old sensei holding it.

Youngest character I've played was 12, but he was a Kobold so no one really noticed until it was brought up IC.

Eh, an inflexible GM is rarely any fun. There should be logical reasons for character restrictions beyond "cuz I said so".

However given all the baggage child characters have I don't fault anyone for banning them and sparing themselves a headache. Toph Bei Fong works in an all kid party, not a normal adult one. To say nothing of the creepy perverts who make up the bulk of people who want to play as children.

>A knife in the back is a knife in the back, whether it’s the fresh-faced loli or the grizzled old sensei holding it.
While I kinda agree with you in general, this is actually not true. Try to stab a large piece of beef or pork with a knife. It's not butter, it's hard to do. Not to mention that a loli could be too short to reach the neck, for example, and that a person with a knife in the back will usually not just die instantly.

It’s actually really damn easy to kill someone with a knife in the back if you know where to stick it. And a loli is more than strong enough to push a blade where it needs to go.

But these things are beside the point; a child is still an able body. And is arguably better suited to some tasks than adult, additionally.

>a goddamn one-woman mountain that tosses boulders like it’s nothing
>doesn’t work with an adult party

I just can’t

I usually restrict characters to an age between 16 and 120, but I have allowed players to play outside that range if I know and trust them enough and their pitch is good.

except that you actually need strenght to get that knife to go through clothes/potential armors and bones

PCs are supposed to be at the maximum of their physical and mental capacity. Therefore, they should be somewhere between 18 to 50 (if 50 to 60, physical stats should reflect ageing). That said, exceptions do exist. But I must say that the question of age was never really discussed in any group I have been since everyone played adults.

Because she's 12, and therefore no adults would take her seriously or respect her input on anything. But because the character is so powerful, then the player would continually try showing up the adult party members who again would just ignore it or try shutting it down. This leads to everyone getting frustrated.

If you're playing an adult character, you really aren't going to appreciate the guy playing a pubescant girl insisting his character has a higher power level than you. At least if you're playing standard high fantasy stuff.

>It's literally never come up

I was going to say that, but I remembered a time I was running a White Wolf tabletop game and a player took a flaw to make their character a child. So I guess the answer is there is not an explicit lower age limit for me. If someone wanted to play an actual infant I'd be nonplussed but I might roll with it and see what they did.

Dude, you don't know what you're talking about. Killing a person is not just approaching them, taking your knife out, sticking it precisely where you want and looking at them collapsing instantly. Even if you manage to sneak up on them and you're in a good position to stab them, most wounds in the back won't instantly incapacitate them, they will have plenty of time to strike back or shout for help. And stabbing a big burly guy with clothes on is a difficult thing to do, as I already said. Finally, even if they do just fall dead, you might want to catch them so they don't make lot of noise.

I would not allow a playable character under 16 or over 70 (in human terms anyway) to be made by the same rules. I'd still allow them with applied age modifiers.

Case-by-case basis > rules

you still can in the UK (well, 15 & a half technically)

Does it means playing such a character would be a straight disadvantage?
Or do you compensate that with something else?

google them. do it from your work computer: image search, no censorship.

I play warhammer, so players roll for their age. 16 is the lowest it goes for humans.

Not him but for humans it would definitely be kind of a handicapped character choice. Adolescents and younger are fairly nimble and can fit into small places but lack strength, have underdeveloped problem solving skills, poor risk assessment, lack real world experience, and are often ignored in social situations. They get sick easier but that's off set by their ability to jump back from injuries quicker than adults. If I was doing DnD spread real quick it would look like:
Str -2
Dex +2
Con _
Int -2
Wis -2
Cha -2
+2 Stealth

There are reasons why children are only given the responsibilities and expectations of adults in only extreme or desperate circumstances.

>It's literally never come up... but then I play with semi-normies
Ditto.

I've run games for decades and no one has ever tried to make a character that wasn't in the general range of late-teen to middle-aged.

I DID play a 15yo in one game but that was a game of All Flesh Must Be Eaten where we were boy scouts in the zombie apocalypse.
We all just used adult stats anyway.

I once played a plant girl who seemed like she was somewhere around 7 years old and was actually only 2 (but obviously developed differently from humans), and was superhumanly resilient and flexible/acrobatic, in addition to having crazy plant magic. Does she get your okay?

How modestly did she dress?

the kind of player who'd specifically use those words to describe their character (and the kind of character they'd specifically describe with those words, natch) is not the kind of player you want actually playing that character.

I played a game where a friend played a 6 year old kid and I played a Cambion who got out jewed in a contract and was forced to protect her until she reached the end of her natural life.

Sure, but you could compensate it instead of having a straight up worse character.
I don't know, give him an insolent luck, enemies being careless because "he's just a kid!", things like that.
> Home alone, fantasy edition

Or give him a strong pet to act as his bodyguard or something. Like a savage kid and his mother bear/wolf/gorilla. Or a orphan with a golem built by his father to protect him from beyond the graves.

What about that character but wearing actual clothes

16 or the racial equivalent thereof. I might be persuaded to go as low as 14, but only if the person doing so specifically cites Conan of Cimmeria being 14 when he participated in the Sack of Venarium, as this will tell me that they are cultured and learnéd, to know a relatively obscure fact about Conan that is only brought up in the written stories, not the movies.

Ran an all child party once. All 12 & under. It was a cosmic horror game about a fear demon chasing the group around a small town and they had to band together to stop it.

Everything was going well, they'd found the demons lair and actually defeated it. They just needed to escape and they were home free. Then the only female.player in the group, Bev, playing a 12 year old girl, decides the only way they can band together to find a way out of the lair is to all fuck her character, lose their virginities together and thus become 'connected' or some shit. Instead of telling Bev to lay off the crack pipe the other players instead all proceeded to ERP fucking her , with the fat kid of the group describing himself as particularly 'thick.'

I had fuck all idea what to do and just called the session there. We haven't played since.

I'm sticking to D&D next time.

Nope.

In a Wild West setting, I like the idea of kids tagging along. And it might be quite realistic.
In a Zelda setting... Well, Link was 7 years old in Ocarina of Time.

honestly, as much as I want to agree with you on the "I want to play any character" front, if you play a child it should be in full conscience that you're playing a... well... a child.
so no, there is no particular reason that a child would have any advantage over an adult and, as such, playing one should feel as playing a child. a bit more defenceless than an adult.
and, as a final example, have you ever seen monster modifiers? young is always a detriment to the base monster. which one is scarier? a very young dragon or a young adult one?

She usually cloaked herself in leaf growths vaguely resembling a bushy sundress, in imitation of human fashion, but didn't always wear anything at all. She doesn't have genitals and is kind of halfway between having a human body and a dandelion stem. When her people reach puberty, they begin to transform into a non-motile (but telepathic) tree, and it's in that stage that they reproduce via a sort of mystic pollination. But in their immature, anthropomorphic form, they have no real sex characteristics beyond male or female countenances.

well, what a train-wreck.

Lolicon and shotacon are shorthand for loli complex and shota complex. In Japanese, a complex or -con is used to usually describe someone with an attraction or overly interested towards said complex, such as being called a mothercon could mean you wanna fuck your mom or motherly women, or it could also mean you are way too reliant on your mothers attention, like bring a mommas boy, and being a siscon could mean you wanna fuck your sister or it could mean you just spend way to much time hanging around or thinking about your sister, which is why overprotective brothers are sometimes called siscons.

That doesn't take away the sexual connotations though, mind you.

Star Wars d20 actually had modifiers for children; since the first one came out around the time of Episode I, this makes sense, since they needed to stat out 9-year-old Anakin. They went:

>Child (Ages 1-11): -3 to Strength and Consitution; -1 to Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma
>Young Adult (Ages 12-15): -1 to each

That was for human ages, of course. Presumably they assumed that the Gamemaster would prevent a character from playing a 3-year-old, which is why they made "child" cover ages 1 to 11.

Any bonus to Dexterity due to being "nimble" would be offset by the fact that children and young teens generally aren't as good at hand-eye coordination; in part because their bodies are literally growing faster than their brains can keep up (adult humans have an instinctive knowledge of how long their arms, legs, etc., are; with children, they have only a best guess due to growth)

Normally no, but if someone asked this I'd say 25 at the youngest.

Pic.

Did you seriously not realize that he was describing the childhood half of Stephen King's It? The novel?

Lay off the drugs, king.

To think, someone out there RIGHT NOW thinks female characters should get -4 strength but would be outraged to hear their OC donut steel loli character is getting twice that.

I played with some stranger who did exactly that and needless to say the DM "accidentally" killed off his character ASAP. And since we could only have one character in this campaign, he had to leave. He wasn't invited back.

>that image
Had the exact opposite problem. My 15 year old character is a fucking retard AND a double fucking amputee. He rolled nothing below a 14 in any stat.

>we could only have one character in this campaign
That sounds like a fairly terrible rule.

Nah, it was a game of survival. The plot was basically a bunch of normies from our world get isekai'd into a Hunger Games slash Survival Game Show slash Big Brother world and have to make it to the end. Isekai is our group's favorite genre apparently because the one we're currently doing is an all-male, all-human one involving a kpop boy band getting transported into a Legend of Zelda-esque world. More fun than it sounds.

>young is always a detriment to the base monster
Yes, and as such you're less likely to meet one young alone, compensating its weakness with other variables like numbers.

It's ok to play on the defencelessness of such a character (what if the wild child is caught without his mother bear?) but we're talking about PC, and PC should not be reduced to some sort of semi spectator mode.

Or maybe I should talk about the player rather than the character. Cripple the character all you need, but give the player something to play with. In some system or campaign, narrative elements (not being perceived as a threat for example) could be enough, but in I think finding solutions to make such characters work is fun in itself.

I think if I wanted younger characters I'd just tell everyone to shoot for that. I don't really see the worth in mixing up the ages.

If you tried to use a loli image for your character, called them a loli or acted creepy about it in any way I would kick you out faster than you'd believe someone could.

I do think young characters in X setting is one of the best game concepts, though. I haven't been able to run it much, because it's hard to get players for it, but I prefer it over almost anything else.