Children NPCs, yay or nay?
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One of my take-aways (personal regrets) from being on Concordia is that the thread’s question of children NPCs also applies to pets.
Because I was a menace about my cat, and looking back I think it was pretty clear I more often than not failed to add much of substance to a scene with him involved.
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Hard nay. I don’t want them in scenes. I don’t want them on the game, period. No good comes from them.
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I generally agree with @third-eye in that I think, depending on the general setting, it enriches my immersion. People having families, children, parents… I like it the same way I like when there’s a broad age range, where you have PCs that are grandpa age, down to early 20s and everything in between. It’s a nice splash of diversity.
Even if you have a full PC cast of sexy 20-somethings, there can at least be a setting that feels a little more real.
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I like children in games. I don’t want EVERYTHING to be about them, but I like them. I even PCed a kid or two that was once an NPC when they came of age.
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For me, it’s safer to just avoid using Children as NPCs / PCs in a MU because it seems to always attract really crusty people before too long, and it’s just better to avoid that. Mentioning them in passing without them being present in a scene is fine, but them actively being a part of the ongoing scene / storyline is not (for me). Generic Example: A character has a photo of his kids from their first marriage on their desk, but doesn’t ever interact with them because the ex got full custody with no visitation in the divorce. The character might mention missing his kids in passing in conversation, but at no point do the children appear in the narrative.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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Mentioning them in passing without them being present in a scene is fine, but them actively being a part of the ongoing scene / storyline is not (for me).
to me, a child NPC being part of a scene is very different from them being part of an ongoing storyline. the latter implies an actual plot. the former can be a passing accessory or flavor to the scene.
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I think children npc really depends on genre of a game as well… in WoD, most situations you do not want kids anywhere near and be safer just to have them in the care of a trusted npc off screen. Don’t bring your infant to a Garou caern or around a mage chantry. There’s always a chance some spirit or rage or other magic accident might happen.
In pern games (especially games in 4:1 or 3:1 time), children existing and being fostered is pretty common for them to not always be around. Lords and ladies i haven’t really played but assume securing a heir is important but also a chore and so the actual kid doesn’t need to be present to be plotted about/around?
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@Roz There’s also the idea of a setting that focuses on children as the main character. That can be acceptable as long as the content isn’t horrible. Examples would be things like Kids on Bikes or Tales from the Loop. Both focus on kids as PCs, but in both cases they’re very Goonies / Stranger Things adjacent, so the worst thing that happens to the kids is minor injuries or getting chased by a robot bent on rewriting history.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@Roz There’s also the idea of a setting that focuses on children as the main character. That can be acceptable as long as the content isn’t horrible. Examples would be things like Kids on Bikes or Tales from the Loop. Both focus on kids as PCs, but in both cases they’re very Goonies / Stranger Things adjacent, so the worst thing that happens to the kids is minor injuries or getting chased by a robot bent on rewriting history.
There is something very offputting to me about adults whose escapist fantasies revolve around teenage/childhood glory days, so personally this is actually the scenario I would be least comfortable with on this thread so far.
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@Roz There’s also the idea of a setting that focuses on children as the main character. That can be acceptable as long as the content isn’t horrible. Examples would be things like Kids on Bikes or Tales from the Loop. Both focus on kids as PCs, but in both cases they’re very Goonies / Stranger Things adjacent, so the worst thing that happens to the kids is minor injuries or getting chased by a robot bent on rewriting history.
i’d say that’s a whole different topic. that’s children as PCs, not children as NPCs.
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Can’t think of a time that I’ve been thrilled someone brought along their virtual wish fulfilment pet I mean child.
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@Juniper FLARED unless you mean the base is covered in stickers and decorations
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It’s like a pun or something
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I think that child NPCs are like salt in food. The right amount of it makes everything richer and deeper, too little of it can be bland, and too much of it is disgusting–and of course, everyone has a different definition of “the right amount,” “too little,” and “too much.”
I’ve had great scenes with kid NPCs (the one with @Faraday’s character’s daughter definitely counts), and I’ve had scenes where it was definitely wish fulfilment with the perfect kid who we were all supposed to coo over.
I think that in most games with physical stakes (whether it’s a game set in wartime, court intrigue, post-apocalyptic, whatever, not just slice-of-life play), they need to be used very rarely, because there are definitely folks (myself included) who don’t want to see kids seriously hurt in their RP. But they can make great “why we fight” scenes if played sparingly and well.
I like having them as off-screen motivation until there’s the time when you get a break from the constant action and a cameo by a kid NPC can be used as a reminder to all of these hardened badasses that a) not everyone is like them, and b) the people behind the lines are (hopefully) worth fighting for.
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The kid can’t be OOCly annoying
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Don’t tell me the kid is cute, like don’t say "does x cutely’ or whatever. I dunno why that’s specifically so irritating to me. Show don’t tell, I guess?
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The kid has to actually act like a kid. There was this scene once that was otherwise a pretty well done scene, but it had a bunch of little kids in a choir that were singing angelically and playing instruments (or maybe just drums, I don’t remember), and I was thinking “those are not children, those are some sort of shapeshifting imposters” because there is no way you’re sticking a bunch of little kids up on a stage with instruments without a drum stick going up someone’s nose. If they’re singing, some of them are going to be shouting, others are going to be singing so quietly no one could hear them, some are going to be ducking their heads behind the ones waving enthusiastically or jumping up and down. If you haven’t taken the drums away from them yet two are going to start sword fighting.
It can be a pretty fine line.
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I may also have had a super skewed feeling towards children since I started on Ansible and other than a SUPER SMALL handful of staff-run Adult teacher/administrators every single PC was between 5-12 because it was battle school.
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@junipersky This sentence caused my IT-addled brain to glitch when I got to the word Ansible.
I was very confused as to what school was teaching children how to administrate servers through playbooks and felt sad that you had to deal with 5 year old plus computers for that class.
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Rofl
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@junipersky we were also roughly 12 years old when we played here though. I know not everyone was but a LOT of us were super young. Kids playing kids hits different imo.
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For me, it’s safer to just avoid using Children as NPCs / PCs in a MU because it seems to always attract really crusty people before too long,
This.
I like child PCs, actually. I’ve played one and had fun. I’ve played with them and had a lot of fun watching how my PCs respond to children.
The game I ran that was a success allowed child PCs. This was actually a deal between myself and the person who hosted it. He agreed to host on the conditions that I, one, allow them, and two, keep the banhammer in arm’s reach and not hesitate to remove pedos. He liked to play child PCs and wanted a game where he could play one and not have to spend a bunch of his hobby-fun-times fending off pervs.
Certainly it’s not cool to pass the fending-off-pervs responsibilities to players, and the fending has certainly got to be done, so it’s a gamerunner’s task. Avoiding this gross job by disallowing child characters is a reasonable solution.
I am with you on the complaints about the child NPCs and pets that get posed as immersion-breakingly unrealisticly angelic and perfect. Babies are cute but mostly they don’t croon cutely, they scream and puke at inconvenient times or are unconscious, and if your pet is a perfect circus-and-service dog you need the skill to train that.
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