yyj wrote: ↑Wed Apr 07, 2021 2:07 pmI think in the long run this ruling is better and disagreeing is not being rude. It's just pointing out how this rule isn't causing a problem directly for most people that already play on the server.
I play a young PC that has been apparently grandfathered and I wouldn't mind people telling me she has to be 25 years old now, this barely affects my roleplay at all and I cannot see this affection anyone else's negatively.
At the risk of being excessively blunt: That's your flawed perception, not objective reality.
To be clear: During my time on BG, I have never made any PCs that weren't
at least a year or two above their racial default (or a decade or two, for elves), because I didn't feel comfortable making them quite that young when I had a few years on each of them.
Regardless, some of my most inexperienced PCs have been in the 19-20 range (or racial equivalent), as their motives for venturing out to the Sword Coast seemed fundamentally incompatible with any greater age:
- Kana Tannard, the Helmite paladin wannabe who had wanted to leave her village and become a paladin since she was a little girl, started out as a 19-year-old fighter.
- Caili Wender, the sheltered Waterdhavian merchant's daughter trying to get out of her parents' shadow, was 20 years old at character creation.
- Berred Notter, the physically inept gold-blooded paladin of Tamara seeking to claim his heritage, was created as a 19-year-old.
- Pixanie, the perpetually oblivious feytouched warlock, was also created as a 19-year-old. Her backstory never fully crystallized before my hiatus, but a popular theory was that she was raised by fey as part of a pact made by one or both of her parents, before finally being dumped onto the Sword Coast when she came of age. (Not that she had a clue why or what happened. Due to her terribly stunted mental development, her characterization is probably the closest I've come to being part of the issue these rule changes are trying uselessly to correct, but I would have to question the sanity of any PC that expressed any serious romantic interest in the Avatar of Accidental Mayhem.
)
Several other human and half-elven PCs were kept closer to my real age (and, consequently, remain
definitely grandfathered) both because it simplified their characterization and because it justified their lack of experience in their chosen professions:
- Nelee Aseph, the nervous wreck that is my Amnian air genasi Silverstar-in-training, is 23. This helps justify her quirk of being a complete, gibbering mess, as she still doubts any shred of her competence that she can't attribute to Selune.
- Shali Menner, my first PC, the brass-blooded farmgirl-turned-adventurer, could realistically be any age. However, her initial enthusiasm to become a master sorceress was surely reinforced by her relatively tender age of 22. (Really, considering some comments throughout this thread, and the fact that the SRD puts sorcerers in the 16-19 range, she might've started out too old... but it works a little better when you consider the influence her draconic blood might have had once it started waking up.)
- Amaetha Saelith, the wood elven Cormyrian druidess who came to the Sword Coast to help with the devil invasion at Dragonspear, was only 131, and propelled more by her desire to repel the devils than any real competence on her part.
- Vilmar Dall, the half-elven Waterdhavian archmage, could realistically be any age too... except for his limited initial proficiency, and the fact that he managed to accidentally torch his deceased master's dwelling at the age of 22.
- Ditto for Jando Flomen, the half-elven swashbuckler from I forget exactly where. He was 23 at character creation, and fairly inexperienced for someone who had supposedly spent the bulk of his adult and adolescent life as... a pirate or something. I don't remember the details.
- Cald Hanicen, the half-elven ranger from not-sure-I-ever-even-specified-where, was also 23, and also surprisingly inept for his years of experience.
- Hugishnak Tenck, the boisterous half-orcish shaman/barbarian... probably had no real need nor justification to be 24. But he was, so he's technically grandfathered too. (On the other hand, being a half-orc, this technically puts him in his thirties or forties.
- Fon Frihzes, the mad water genasi frostmage, may technically be 25, but as I recall, genasi have a higher default age than humans. Admittedly, he's possibly in the "doesn't need to be that young" camp, but he really ought to have had more starting levels if he were any older.
- Before going on hiatus, I had toyed with the notion of fabricating an excuse to convert an NPC I'd grown fond of into a low-level PC. Said NPC was a 21-year-old street thief from Zazesspur who happened to get mixed up in an offscreen DM campaign before promptly growing on DM and player alike; if it weren't for the fact that I'd already set everything up for her eventual arrival on the server (going as far as to sneak her into a custom starting position, because plot hooks), I would now have to retcon nearly a year's worth of characterization on the technicality that she wasn't in the BG vault yet. That being said, I'm not sure her old friend is still actively being played, so it reduces the amount of mileage I could get out of that concept.
(On a sidenote: Man, that campaign was fun. In trying to verify her age, I got treated to a showreel of many of our best moments and read through them for hours... I wanna do that again sometime. Half a year since it wrapped up, and it's still the single best D&D experience I've ever had. 
)
Although I've thoroughly derailed my attempt at writing this post, I
think my point was supposed to be that a lot of
legitimate characters
don't work with the new age limits. Even if we decide to completely retcon all established lore and say that people aren't treated as adults until their twenties (when the PnP minimum for a human is 16, not the 15 that keeps getting thrown up), 25
would not work for anyone trying to roleplay their initial lack of experience. (And let's face it, all of my most compelling characters have consistently been the inexperienced youngsters; who here remembers Siril? Ollandor? Mainda? Silia? Ilhara's the oldest viable character I've had, and I've wondered for a while if ~220 years might have unnecessarily overshot my target of "probably in her late twenties or early thirties".)
KOPOJIbPAKOB wrote: ↑Thu Apr 08, 2021 4:27 am
All facts and reasonable arguments were brought up before me. A disruptive, immersion breaking rule. Roleplayers lose experience, rule breakers will just headcanon any age they prefer.
What I seriously don't understand is DM team's adamant position about it. My first post in the thread didn't contain any strong arguments against because I knew everyone will be against, and so it happened. Not counting DMs,
100% of the respondents voted against it. It's not a controversial change, not even wildly controversial, it's a hard "No" from the community.
It doesn't matter what good intents DM team had in mind, this thread speaks for itself. When the whole community votes against, all you can do is acknowledge this mistake and revoke the disruptive change. Instead, the DM team starts defending the change, riling up the disagreeing people even more by the "We know better than you" and "We can't tell why, but it's for your good" arguments. You stand against the majority of the server, lobbying the change that
potentially reduces your workload at the expense of RP experience of the whole server.
p.s. I don't have anything against the DMs personally, you are doing a lot of great things at the same time (take another ruling about polymorph and pvp). But this particular change is imho a huge mistake that is not too late to fix.
Shockingly, there actually
are a few non-DMs trying to support this change, as evidenced by the post I started replying to last night.
The worst part? The justification given for this change, the one you mention in your post? It doesn't make a lick of sense.
I cannot for a moment imagine that this will
reduce the DMs' workload. Unless things took a
drastic (I really cannot emphasize this word enough) turn for the worse since my departure from the team, the volume of people who should now be expected to defend themselves against accusations of illegally playing sub-25 PCs will far outweigh the volume of people who currently need to be policed, with a near-zero effect on the group they were actually targeting.
There's bound to be a
lot of grandfathered PCs, and without some kind of publicly available database to track them, any individual player would be well within their rights to report a large swath of them. (Case in point, me and my zillion grandfathered kids.
Not that their age is often explicitly discussed, beyond a vague reference to being in their early twenties for those of them who have bios, or the one time Shali RPed her birthday.)
