@mietze said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:
@Ominous why do you want to encourage a greater age range of PCs?Are there special story incentives to be had?
Verisimilitude. A server where everyone is in their 20s starts to make me feel like the server's big secret is we're actually playing in the Logan's Run universe.
Let's take your example of a 40 year old in your game being considered nearing the end of their useful life.
Where did I say that 40 years old is the end of a character's useful life? I threw 40-something out there because it is an age where a person could reasonably be expected to have lived through several kinds of serious shit and thus have the necessary experience to survive said shit. 40-somethings correspond to a Sergeant Major for enlisted or a Lt.Colonel to Colonel for officers in the Army - people who have seen multiple deployments and could reasonably have fought in two separate wars, which was what my example was about in order to contrast against the 19 year old private whose toughest fight has probably been some stupid high school throw down.
Why do you want to incentivize playing a PC that the society at large will consider a has been or being good for little else than being a plot dispenser. Do they have special built in roles/powers/niches? That to me seems like a better way to encourage more age diversity than extra XP, as well as making those PCs valuable and so theres reason to include them while all the 18-late 20s pcs are getting hitched and pumping out offspring on a L&L game.
Why would people be considering them has-beens when they're the ones who will be landing some of the deciding blows on the dragon that 's attacking the town with their high sword skill? They're the ones with the positions of authority and stats to back that up to make the NPCs listen to them when they roll their Leadership check.
I think age diversity for age diversity's sake and offering people a handful of extra XP just doesn't work very well, because again, absent some kind of built in recognition many people just don't want to create a pc that has had most of their fun adventuring and development behind them before they even hit the grid, and numbers on a sheet seldom means you are included more in play or otherwise.
Why is their adventuring behind them? Hell, in Ars Magica you adventure and research all the way up until the Wizard's Twilight consumes you in your 90s to 100s.
It does not really help to close the gap on play power differentials between PCs either (if that's desirable). But building in non xp incentives might. Maybe people can't manifest major magical abilities until they're 30. Or older pcs have more social influence (based on mechanics) that majorly kicks ass if they are called in to assist on a task, ect.
I don't see how it doesn't, but OK.
Honestly, the whole idea comes from this - I hate xp voting. It's a popularity contest or a test to determine who has less of a life/attention-required job and can RP 24/7 to farm votes. My solution is for xp to be a set amount every in-game month. This creates two problems - Dinosaurs and Age/Ability Discrepancy. New players will never be able to catch up to old players in this system - the dinosaur problem. The Age/Ability Discrepancy is 'why does my recently created 30 year old character know less than a 20 year old character simply because the 20 year old has been played since they were 18 and my character was just recently created?'
The solution? When you roll a character it calculates the amount of xp the character would have earned had it been played from the minimum starting age to the age you are rolling it at and gives it to you.
No more dinosaurs. No more superhuman 19 yo prince(ss)es that can solve all the problems in a PRP by themselves. No popularity contests or "who can RP 24/7 to farm votes?" determining xp. And no power discrepancy except for that which a player is willing to accept. You want to start out with lots of maxed out skills? Can do! The only limiting factor is they're going to be an older character.
@mietze said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:
@Ominous when you start with a bigger chunk of XP in CG it can give a short term boost (depending on how rapidly XP in game is earned and how), but yeah, it doesn't last forever and is not much of a incentive, and you're still going to be smoked by the 18 year old that's been on the grid playing for a year. So it really doesnt help bridge the power differential that builds up in a game over time. And absent other incentives I think that is probably why people tend to gravitate towards younger PCs, because it doesn't feel like their older PC gets any benefit from not being 20, because they do not perceive that part of the PC to be particularly valued.
That is literally impossible in my system. A character that starts playing at 18 will never, ever catch up to a character that starts out at 19 let alone a character that starts out at 40. They earn xp at exactly the same rate. I think you missed the key component of my proposal:
@Ominous said in What is the 'ideal' power range?:
The latter option for me; though, I would have it tied to age. I have for a few years now supported the idea that xp should be awarded as an equal amount to everyone every in-game month. When you roll up a character and decide on an age that determines the starting xp you have to invest in your starting skills. If you want to play a character who has top of the line skills, he/she can't be a smooth-faced youth who just left the farm yesterday to seek adventure. He/she is going to be the grizzled badass, 40-something veteran of two wars, a coup attempt by the royal vizier, the attempted ending of the world by a chaos cult, and that one time a dragon attacked his/her unit, killing all but 10 soldiers.
