After getting some feedback from Dev and Chaos, I've decided to reinstate the age limit. So from now on, you cannot play a character that is below 13 years old (excluding Mechanations, as long as they look old enough) unless you have permission from Dev or a GM to do so. If you currently have a character that is below this age, you must either get permission from us or adjust their age to at least 13.
The reason for this is due to the recent increase in players who have been playing child characters and I feel they have so far demonstrated a poor understanding of how kids act, what kids can do, etc. and thus cannot be simply trusted to play those characters.
To get permission from us, you'll have to tell us about your character and we'll then ask you some questions about your character to determine if it's acceptable. Of course, if you get permission and then we find that you do a poor job in the game, we'll take this privilege away.
As for where you can get permission, you can contact either Chaos or myself by:
- Sending us a message using the BYOND pager. (Slydria or Black Chaos X)
- Sending us a PM on the forums.
- Adding us on Skype (slydria or insaneteacher) and sending us a message over there.
As someone who once played a ten year old, I'd like to show my support for this decision due to one very simple reason: people do not understand children. In short, I agree completely with Sly's judgment that most people cannot be trusted to play child characters. And as an uncle who spends a lot of time with the kids (Presently aged 18 months, 7 years, and 14 years old, respectively, but I also used to babysit extensively when they were as young as 2 and 9) one cannot begin to imagine the "what the actual fart" that goes through my head when I see some child characters portrayed specific ways.
To give just one example, not that long ago, there was a six year old with two guns, ICly. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together can likely see why this is bad on so mnay levels, especially from a physicality standpoint (Forget having the strength to pull the trigger, which takes significantly more muscle than you probably think, but imagine the goddamn recoil! The recoil alone would break their arms and send the gun flying back into their skull. If they used both hands. And this six year old was dual-wielding. Like frigging seriously.) When pointed out that this character was not acceptable and that their age would need to be increased, their profile was changed, with a very butthurt annotation that ("Apparently I -need- to be this age, ugh-"
as if being a six year old gunslinger was SOOOOOOOOO paramount.
Done right, a fairly young combattant isn't implausible (just look at all the martial arts training for youths IRL, for example. I, myself, too Jiu-jitsu lessons when I was 9, and while I would never win in a raw contest of strength against an adult, I at least knew some equalizing tools, like how to use the size difference to my advantage) so long as they remain ICly inferior to their adult counterparts, for obvious reasons. However, the community has shown me that they really can't handle doing child characters right.
Not everyone is the same, sure, but there's one very important thing that most people are prone to overlooking. A child's emotions are more purely expressed, while an adult's are typically more subdued. Adults use logic to reign it in so as to not pick fights or cry over every little thing, as an example. While this does mean that a legitimately angry adult who snaps will have an outburst far more fearsome than any tantrum a child could throw, it's worth noting that children are more true to themselves and their feelings, and will not bottle things in to the extend that an adult would (if at all!) As it stands now, most child characters come across as far more calculated and mature than their own freaking parents, and that, right there, shows that there's an issue with the portrayal of children in roleplay that needs addressing. (Now, it's not literally impossible for this to be a one in ten thousand kind of thing, but the extent I've seen this to just screams "everyone wants to be a special little snowflake" and just reeks of bad tropes/cliches.
TLDR version: 100% agreed with Sly's reasoning, and that's coming from someone who has a character who began their RP career at the age of 10.
Requesting sticky (and maybe lock).