Children Player Characters and Skills

[ZorValachan]

Children don't have occupations...they are um..children. has anyone came up with a BTS-2 way to given children characters skills?

With BTS, I gave them half-skill programs from high school, and limited them to choosing only skils that made sense for a kid to have. But in BTS-2, skills are all based off an occupation. The Ordinary People P.C.C doesn't give any suggestions.

Maybe something similar to the Autistic Psychic Savant, where in needed times they get a 82% to do something?

[mrloucifer]

I have an NPC if a 13 year old latent psychic. I used the "Normal people" stats notes fro the HU GM guide for her physical attributes and skill wise I selected skill based on general education or what she had access to (Her father is a retired Psi-Mechanic due being crippled by a monster, so she steal his old gadgets and sneaks out at night to fight monsters since latents can use psi-mechanic items).

So i gave her the basic math, english, wardrobe and grooming and other basic skills along with Lore Demons/monsters due to her family history nad access but they all started at level one with no additional bonuses.

I guess its a matter of using logic in what she has access to as a typical teenager in a psyhic family who recently begun to develop psychic talents herself.

I have yet to dare making a 6 year kid who claims "I see dead People" or anything like that. Anything younger than 12 shouldnt be out dealing with monsters in my book

[ZorValachan]

No one 'should be' dealing with monsters. But monsters don't abide by rules, lol.

Basically when rolling stats, one of my players rolled a 4 for I.Q. I was already being lenient with 4d6, remove the lowest. Our group is very much against trashing a character because of rolled stats. Everyone has had to suffer a bad roll or two in our 20+ years of gaming. I was doing BTS 1st edition when we started making the characters, but after reading some intriguing things about how ISP varied on threat and other things to keep the supernatural in the 'quack realm' of normal society.

Everyone there had played the BTS-1 scenario with the babysitter club some years ago (so had already been introduced to the idea of playing a kid BTS style). Instead of being a Forrest Gump adult, the player asked if she could play a kid and agreed to lower all her stats and skills to fit an 8 or 9 year old. The Character will be the granddaughter of the group's parapsychologist. She will grow up into a major Psionic user, but the grandpa failed miserably to try to prove psychic powers in the late 70s and early 80s, so in some twisted way sees her as his way to redemption in the scientific community. The group starts out just getting in tune with their psychic powers, they don't even realize (yet) about monsters being out there.

I'm intertwining it with Rifts. Each player has 2 characters 1 for each game. The little girl sees life through the Rift's Mind Melter's eyes as dreams and he sees her's in his dreams. So while there is no real 'rift' in space to connect the 2 games, there is one in time that has potential to alter both games in small ways. I'm also going with BTS is Rifts history. BTS-CE-Rifts. Her being a child nowadays and whatever horrors that affect her during BTS may lead her to be a subject to all those great miracle experiments on slowing down aging during the Golden Age, allowing her to show up in later any CE games I have going (if she survives).

[mrloucifer]

Children in the real world have to deal with arguably worst monsters more than most adults do. Their inability to defend themselves is what makes for such a compelling game. What's a kid supposed to do when the creature in the closet comes after him? Sure maybe they can get the parents help however what then if the creature attaches itself to a teacher, school bully or worse one of the parents? In a game of Little Fears I ran eventually the creature became a metaphor for parent abuse. It was an amazing game. To this day the group still remembers it fondly. Only problem with kids is if run without proper maturity it will be a horrible experience for those at the table and insulting to real life problems. Player discretion is definitely advised.

I wrote my entry with little explanation when I say I dont use 12 and under. I would love to do more of what you mention above but I dont think either my players or myself would be able to pull this off properly.

So I have contented to using 12 and unders as NPC that may be a catalyst to an adventure but have stayed away from PC's playing them.

[ZorValachan]

Before play actually started, the group did a couple of adjustments. The 8 year-old became the daughter of the psychic diviner Archaeologist, who is a professor at the same university as the parapsychologist.

I liked the idea of wardrobe & grooming and we gave her a handful of skills we thought a kid would have. We altered the 'psychic autistic savant' and made it a 'psychic child savant'. She pulls the blanket over her head and gets the 'invisible to supernatural' ability and similar minor changes to make it more 'child' and less 'autistic'.

She also has dreams which link to my Rifts game (as I said earlier). With the archaeologist father it is actually working quite well. The game started with most of the people just learning their powers and he is struggling with protecting his daughter and using her unique abilities of insight. The two players are doing a great job. When the player of the kid has a question of 'how would a kid behave or think', she thinks about her own 8 year old son's ways of thinking.

It's all quite amusing also, as she likes the dreams with the big talking doggy (Rifts dog boy), but has no concept that she is looking through another person's eyes in these dreams. And on the Rifts side of things, that character wonders why she dreams of being in a 8 year old body that's not hers

[mrloucifer]

I like it!

[Lord Z]

The player is definitely making the character concept work. That part about the big talking puppy is great imagery.

In the past, this is how I've handled child-characters. I roll up the characters as normal using 2D6 instead of 3D6. The kid gains the extra die sometime during his or her teenage years. I hand-pick a few appropriate skills. Lastly, I roll 4D6 or 5D6 for PPE. I sometimes give these characters O.C.C. or P.C.C. abilities depending on the game -- but not a full class with skills. They gain experience as per normal classes, but without skills those experience levels don't mean as much. Floating somewhere around the web, I have a kid-specific character class called the "Young Dollmistress." I've never had a chance to play-test this method, so don't take me too seriously.

[ZorValachan]

yeah, same group did that teeny bopper game about 10 years ago. was really fun, they had 1 'girl' too many and not enough 'items' to go around, 2 characters fought over the crown.

It was the start to a game where they were all grown up. Sadly it didn't last very long, but it was funny. The girl who lost the 'battle' for the crown repressed the trauma of not being most popular so much that she became the nega-psychic in the group

[Lord Z]

Therumancer, I enjoyed reading your post. You made an original proposal, and you supported your proposal well with relavent examples and solid logic. There was one problem. It belongs in a different thread. This thread is about "Children." Your post was clearly about teenagers. I was thinking more along the lines of a ten year old (or less) child. You seem to be assuming that we are discussing characters no less than fifteen years old, adults by the standards of most cultures around the world.

I mean come-on, the Scooby-Doo gang and Buffy as children? Even in the original episodes, Shaggy was growing a beard. More relavent examples would have been Encylopedia Brown or Ender Wiggens who I think were about twelve years old, but those characters were exceptional prodigies even within the context of their own stories.

You might be a little too biased based upon your replacement character story, and I appreciate that you qualified your own statements that way. You had a bad experience, but it was due to a bad player rather than a bad character. Aren't most of the bad players who see who disrupt and aggravate actually playing adult characters at the time?