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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8685812" data-attributes="member: 4937">Balancing characters across different ages and different life experiences is always hard for any system, especially since you are introducing two competing paradigms - balance and simulation.&nbsp; The game generally wants to make starting characters balanced with each other to avoid spotlight stealing and predict correctly how much challenge starting characters can face.&nbsp; But logic dictates that a 6 year old and a 32 year old are probably not equal in skill and ability.&nbsp;&nbsp; Traveller's character burner system is probably one of the stronger attempts to simulate life experience but even then it has problems.&nbsp; Point buy systems generally run in to hard versions of the same problems that all point buy systems face in pricing out point, which in this case is &quot;How much benefit do you assign to growing older?&quot;&nbsp; How many points does each extra year of life add, and what exactly are you risking?&nbsp;&nbsp; Quite often, in point buy this has to be a wash as if you aren't risking anything then being older is simply straight advantage, but if you are risking something then essentially, it's color (points lost here match points gained there, so you could have built the character that way without explicitly saying you were aged).&nbsp; In class/level-based systems, the problem tends to be throwing off the power curve where for different levels the ideal age would differ and so it turns into a metagame choice.Plus, rarely in an RPG (except maybe Pendragon that is built around dynastic play) do you see the in-game story cover multiple years of play so aging rarely has an in-game effect.I've played around with allowing players to start as higher level characters with the cost being they've aged but there is just no great way to balance it, even using NPC classes.&nbsp; As such I tend to stick to all starting characters are young adults with no significant prior life experience.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8685812, member: 4937"] Balancing characters across different ages and different life experiences is always hard for any system, especially since you are introducing two competing paradigms - balance and simulation. The game generally wants to make starting characters balanced with each other to avoid spotlight stealing and predict correctly how much challenge starting characters can face. But logic dictates that a 6 year old and a 32 year old are probably not equal in skill and ability. Traveller's character burner system is probably one of the stronger attempts to simulate life experience but even then it has problems. Point buy systems generally run in to hard versions of the same problems that all point buy systems face in pricing out point, which in this case is "How much benefit do you assign to growing older?" How many points does each extra year of life add, and what exactly are you risking? Quite often, in point buy this has to be a wash as if you aren't risking anything then being older is simply straight advantage, but if you are risking something then essentially, it's color (points lost here match points gained there, so you could have built the character that way without explicitly saying you were aged). In class/level-based systems, the problem tends to be throwing off the power curve where for different levels the ideal age would differ and so it turns into a metagame choice. Plus, rarely in an RPG (except maybe Pendragon that is built around dynastic play) do you see the in-game story cover multiple years of play so aging rarely has an in-game effect. I've played around with allowing players to start as higher level characters with the cost being they've aged but there is just no great way to balance it, even using NPC classes. As such I tend to stick to all starting characters are young adults with no significant prior life experience. [/QUOTE]

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