I think personally, if we're talking real life age and not character age, if they can understand the concepts and not be rude about anything, and play as a team for the story, I'd be perfectly fine with a 14 year old playing. in game age, I figure it'd be fine so long as the bloody lad there can wield a weapon and stay alive ay?
surprised that nobody has mentioned that there is an important consideration here for the race you choose.
a 14 year old Dwarf or Elf is probably about 10 in human years, and too young to be adventuring.
a 14 year old human is on the cusp, but being magic rather than martial can be explained through story.
a 14 year old orc is probably the equivalent of a 25 year old still living at home with their parents!
Probably because the context is that she's specifically a bit too young to be adventuring according to our norms. You're not wrong that race Generally matters due to different rates of maturation, but in this specific case, it's part of the premise that the characters is a bit young to be adventuring.
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I ran a game with an 11 year-old character in it. It was Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I made sure the player knew the general vibe and content of the campaign, and we character-built as a party, so everyone else was aware of her choice as well, and it honestly went amazingly. The player was committed to endearing her character to the other adult characters, played her as desensitized to violence, had a big arc in which she discovered Frulam Mondath was her mother, and was generally an integral player and character for the story. The age difference added an interesting and playful dynamic to the story and opened lots of doors for rp.
After that experience I decided that, as long as i trust the players to make good decisions, i'll never bar someone from playing a child in a campaign of mine. I'm running a campaign set during a zombie apocalypse that has mostly young people, and two pre-teen characters, in it, and it's going great! Basically the best thing is to make sure everyone, and i mean EVERYONE, involved in the game is agreeable to having a child in the party and won't be Weird about it, and you're good to go.
(the HotDQ character was a feylost high elf sorcerer who accidentally crossed into the feywild as a child and, also accidentally, found her way back to the material plane after following visions she was recieving. 1st level sorcery for someone with that backstory seems like a perfectly reasonable power level to me. )
Who are the other PCs and players, are they a pre-existing party with a new player coming in that wants to play this?
Would I be good with it in the party I currently DM for - sure, it would probably work fine and could contribute to some fun sessions - especially if the person playing "character" is good at RP.
Again, context - are you asking because you're the DM or player - has an existing DM vetoed it and did they say why?
My first question would be "why is it necessary for this character to be 14 instead of 18?" Is being 14 actually essential to the character?
In a way, I thought it was.
I had envisioned the character as being an orphan. Her parents had getting themselves caught up in a bad situation, where a group of bandits had taken over their home, and killed them when they tried to defend it. Even those bandits couldn't bring themselves to kill a baby however, and she was found by a group of adventurers (who kill the bandits) and taken to the orphanage, where she grew up.
The orphanage is attached to a religious order. It's a dedicated and well funded orphanage, where the children are very well cared for, but, because it is attached to a relgious order, the children raised there are typically expected to go on and became clerics. This is fine for most, but the character doesnt belive in that faith, and finds it very stifling. She is a Draconic Sorceress, who is not allowed to use her magic, and is often bullied by the other children because her Draconic ancestry manifests itself as patches of blue scales on her back, arms and legs.
Every so often, when they are passing, the adventurers who found her as a baby visit the orphanage to check up on her and see how she is getting on. They usually bring her trinkets, and tell her stories of their exploits, and she looks up to them - considering them heroes.
On their last visit she asked them to take her with them, but they said no - telling her it was no life for a child. This angers her (the fact that they still consider her a child), and later that day, she is bullied again by a group of the other children. She is still angry about being told by people she looked up to and idolised that she was a child, and the bullies only make her mood worse, to the point that she casts Thunderwave and then runs off.
She doesn't meant to hurt them, although it turns out she does (unknowingly).
She finds a barn to hide in and spends the night, and by the morning she has made up her mind. She is not going back to the orphanage and the bullies and the punishments that's surly waiting for her because she used magic when it was forbidden. Instead, she is going to become an adventurer - and not only that, but she is going to become rich and famous and prove to everyone that she is not a child.
Of course by "everyone" she really means those specific people.
So being 14 (a child) was kind of important to the original idea of this character.
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I think you'll find it easier to see what can change and what can't if you boil it down to the basic elements. I'll do it here:
She's living with other children.
She's bullied by them for an aspect related to what will be her main source of power as an adventurer.
She can't immediately leave to pursue her dreams, and is frustrated by this.
She eventually manages to leave for her adventure, and experiences a period of growth and maturation as a result.
Earlier, I said I'd be fine with you playing a 14yo with some caveats. I stand by that. However, I don't see anything there that requires her to be 14 at the start of the adventure. I'm going to tread on the toes of the younger participants in the forum now, but...18 years old are still pretty immature. You don't become mature until your mid-20s. At 18, people are still immature with a whole load of stuff to learn.about the world and how it works. It's just that at that age, we convince ourselves that we are wiser and more knowledgeable than we really are - but an 18 year old generally is much closer to a 14 year old in terms of maturity than a 30 year old.
So with that in mind, just have her locked up in the orphanage for a few years. She tried to escape a few times but gets caught. At 18, she finally escapes or is let out, and goes on her adventure. You can still have your maturation aspect to the character, you don't even need.to change anything about the story really, but you get to drop the caveats that come from playing minor. Even though I play clean games and avoid tables with dirty stuff...I'd be happier with such a character at my table.
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I'd have to say having a character of that age in my current game would be a flat no.
If the game you're in is not structured around characters being that age range, such as doing a hogwarts/strixhaven style game where all characters are 1st year students, then you have certain, hopefully unintentional, advantages and disavantages that come into effect as you might find monsters and npc's not seeing the 14yr old as a threat so giving you a round or more of not being targeted in combat encounters or merchants and npc's ignoring or not taking that character seriously in some non-combat or social situations. These are all things the DM would likely have to take into account which is one more thing for them to worry about.
Also on a personal note, I've never felt teenage/young adult characters in fantasy/sci fi film, tv or litreature to be particularly compelling characters and I find they do more to highlight the ineptness of the villains than anything else which, and I hate using this phrase.....breaks the immersion. But then again, I am a chap in his mid 40's so I am probably not the target audience for such things.
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My first question would be "why is it necessary for this character to be 14 instead of 18?" Is being 14 actually essential to the character?
In a way, I thought it was.
I had envisioned the character as being an orphan. Her parents had getting themselves caught up in a bad situation, where a group of bandits had taken over their home, and killed them when they tried to defend it. Even those bandits couldn't bring themselves to kill a baby however, and she was found by a group of adventurers (who kill the bandits) and taken to the orphanage, where she grew up.
Every so often, when they are passing, the adventurers who found her as a baby visit the orphanage to check up on her and see how she is getting on. They usually bring her trinkets, and tell her stories of their exploits, and she looks up to them - considering them heroes.
I kind of love this backstory.
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"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
I'd have to say having a character of that age in my current game would be a flat no.
If the game you're in is not structured around characters being that age range, such as doing a hogwarts/strixhaven style game where all characters are 1st year students, then you have certain, hopefully unintentional, advantages and disavantages that come into effect as you might find monsters and npc's not seeing the 14yr old as a threat so giving you a round or more of not being targeted in combat encounters or merchants and npc's ignoring or not taking that character seriously in some non-combat or social situations. These are all things the DM would likely have to take into account which is one more thing for them to worry about.
Also on a personal note, I've never felt teenage/young adult characters in fantasy/sci fi film, tv or litreature to be particularly compelling characters and I find they do more to highlight the ineptness of the villains than anything else which, and I hate using this phrase.....breaks the immersion. But then again, I am a chap in his mid 40's so I am probably not the target audience for such things.
It seems that quite a few people are saying something very similar.
Seems like the way around this would be to have the character be older, as I mentioned a little earlier, when I was thinking of ways to make it work.
The comment made by Linklite seems to be fairly decent.
She's living with other children.
She is raised in the orphanage after being found and taken there by the adventurers who killed the bandits responsible for her parents deaths.
She's bullied by them for an aspect related to what will be her main source of power as an adventurer.
The other children bully her because she has Draconic ancestry and patches of blue scales.
She can't immediately leave to pursue her dreams, and is frustrated by this.
When she is 14, she asks the adventurers who rescued her to take her with them, while they are visiting the orphanage to check up on her (which they do from time to time), because she wants to escape the bullying and is feeling stiffed by the relgious order that runs the orphanage.
They refuse, telling her it's no life for a child. This angers her and she feels let down by the people she had looked up to and idolised all her life.
She gets into a fight with some of the other kids when they again try to bully her. This time she let's her anger get the better of her and she casts Thunderwave before running off.
She hides in a barn over night (unaware that she's hurt anybody), but is eventually found and taken back to the orphanage, where she's watched more closely and give more studies and work to do, as a punishment for losing control and injuring the other kids.
(Fortunately, none were killed).
She eventually manages to leave for her adventure, and experiences a period of growth and maturation as a result.
As an adult (21/22), she has moved from the orphanage to being a novice of the relgious order that raised her. They are grooming her to become a cleric, which she doesn't want to do - but can't see any way out of.
The night before her initiation as an acolyte, she runs away to live the life she has wanted to live since she was 14.
Having been raised in an orphanage attached to a relgious order, and then by the order themselves as a novice, she doesn't have much experience of the world outside of that, and the stories she's was told by her rescuers during their visits when she was younger.
(They haven't been to check up on her in many years).
So she has a more immature outlook on life than the typical 21/22 year old.
She's still only level 1, because she never really got to practice using her magical abilities much, or to experience combat or anything like that. So her experience of all of that is zero.
And she doesn't actually know all that much about the world, as all her education comes from the faith teachings of the order.
Although she knows lots about religion, having studied it for a large portion of her life - and more specifically, of the order and faith that she grew up in. Although I'm not sure how a DM could tie that into their story.
Not sure if that's even more acceptable.
I don't know if any of that would make her more acceptable, since in that case, I'd be playing an immature and inexperienced adult. One that's running away from her obligations, because she can't seen any other way out of them, rather than just an orphan running away to become rich and famous.
A person of 14 is only considered a “child” by modern standards. In a pseudomedieval world a14 year old would likely already be married and either have or be expecting a child. Remember, Romeo was 15 and Juliet was only 13 and their being married and his already having blood on his hands was considered normal as recently as Shakespearean England. In a pseudomedieval world, a 14 yoar old would have already aged out of an orphanage years before.
My first question would be "why is it necessary for this character to be 14 instead of 18?" Is being 14 actually essential to the character?
In a way, I thought it was.
I had envisioned the character as being an orphan. Her parents had getting themselves caught up in a bad situation, where a group of bandits had taken over their home, and killed them when they tried to defend it. Even those bandits couldn't bring themselves to kill a baby however, and she was found by a group of adventurers (who kill the bandits) and taken to the orphanage, where she grew up.
The orphanage is attached to a religious order. It's a dedicated and well funded orphanage, where the children are very well cared for, but, because it is attached to a relgious order, the children raised there are typically expected to go on and became clerics. This is fine for most, but the character doesnt belive in that faith, and finds it very stifling. She is a Draconic Sorceress, who is not allowed to use her magic, and is often bullied by the other children because her Draconic ancestry manifests itself as patches of blue scales on her back, arms and legs.
Every so often, when they are passing, the adventurers who found her as a baby visit the orphanage to check up on her and see how she is getting on. They usually bring her trinkets, and tell her stories of their exploits, and she looks up to them - considering them heroes.
On their last visit she asked them to take her with them, but they said no - telling her it was no life for a child. This angers her (the fact that they still consider her a child), and later that day, she is bullied again by a group of the other children. She is still angry about being told by people she looked up to and idolised that she was a child, and the bullies only make her mood worse, to the point that she casts Thunderwave and then runs off.
She doesn't meant to hurt them, although it turns out she does (unknowingly).
She finds a barn to hide in and spends the night, and by the morning she has made up her mind. She is not going back to the orphanage and the bullies and the punishments that's surly waiting for her because she used magic when it was forbidden. Instead, she is going to become an adventurer - and not only that, but she is going to become rich and famous and prove to everyone that she is not a child.
Of course by "everyone" she really means those specific people.
So being 14 (a child) was kind of important to the original idea of this character.
This is a pretty cool backstory. It also sounds like the origin story for a significant portion of the X-men, which I don’t mean as an insult, the X-men are fricking cool.
You should try and get the whole group (and DM) on this page. Play a team of 16ish kids who just ran from the orphanage. It’s as good a campaign start as any, and as a DM you can make up families (extended, long lost families) for each of the orphans and have them play different roles in the story. Lots of room for a story here.
In the real world-equivalent time period (level of technological advancement, if you prefer), 14 is basically an adult, albeit a young adult. Women were having babies and running households just past puberty, and I have known many young women who were well past puberty by that age. CeNedra, in the Belgariad left home at 15. The Queen of Bear Island in Game of Thrones was that age or younger. There are plenty of examples for men/boys as well, the one coming immediately to my mind being King Arthur.
I was 14 when I started DMing. I was less mature and not as knowledgeable, but my players still enjoyed my game and style of play.
If neither the DM nor other players have n issue with this, then there is no issue.
I have made a character based on this discussion thread, after considering all your thoughts and comments. Although this version of the character has been aged up a bit, after listening to what a lot of you were saying about child characters. You can find the post that I made about the character here. I have posted it on the Story and Lore subforum, because it is about her character, not just a general question.
I really like the idea of the character having been rejected from the adventuring party in the past and then joining when she's older. That seems like it's just dripping with unique and fun little interactions.
Maybe the party isn't exactly the same as it was then. Maybe someone died! Maybe there was one hardass who was responsible for swinging the vote against the young Sorcerer, and now that person is gone, or simply had a change of heart. Or maybe they're still here, but the Sorcerer managed to convince them she's ready -- at least for long enough that now they're on the road and it's kinda too late to go back.
So much potential!
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surprised that nobody has mentioned that there is an important consideration here for the race you choose.
a 14 year old Dwarf or Elf is probably about 10 in human years, and too young to be adventuring.
a 14 year old human is on the cusp, but being magic rather than martial can be explained through story.
a 14 year old orc is probably the equivalent of a 25 year old still living at home with their parents!
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I think personally, if we're talking real life age and not character age, if they can understand the concepts and not be rude about anything, and play as a team for the story, I'd be perfectly fine with a 14 year old playing. in game age, I figure it'd be fine so long as the bloody lad there can wield a weapon and stay alive ay?
thats just me though!
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Probably because the context is that she's specifically a bit too young to be adventuring according to our norms. You're not wrong that race Generally matters due to different rates of maturation, but in this specific case, it's part of the premise that the characters is a bit young to be adventuring.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Does it matter?
I have no problem with teenage player character starting at level one.
I ran a game with an 11 year-old character in it. It was Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I made sure the player knew the general vibe and content of the campaign, and we character-built as a party, so everyone else was aware of her choice as well, and it honestly went amazingly. The player was committed to endearing her character to the other adult characters, played her as desensitized to violence, had a big arc in which she discovered Frulam Mondath was her mother, and was generally an integral player and character for the story. The age difference added an interesting and playful dynamic to the story and opened lots of doors for rp.
After that experience I decided that, as long as i trust the players to make good decisions, i'll never bar someone from playing a child in a campaign of mine. I'm running a campaign set during a zombie apocalypse that has mostly young people, and two pre-teen characters, in it, and it's going great! Basically the best thing is to make sure everyone, and i mean EVERYONE, involved in the game is agreeable to having a child in the party and won't be Weird about it, and you're good to go.
(the HotDQ character was a feylost high elf sorcerer who accidentally crossed into the feywild as a child and, also accidentally, found her way back to the material plane after following visions she was recieving. 1st level sorcery for someone with that backstory seems like a perfectly reasonable power level to me. )
:)
I'd ask for more please.
Who are the other PCs and players, are they a pre-existing party with a new player coming in that wants to play this?
Would I be good with it in the party I currently DM for - sure, it would probably work fine and could contribute to some fun sessions - especially if the person playing "character" is good at RP.
Again, context - are you asking because you're the DM or player - has an existing DM vetoed it and did they say why?
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My first question would be "why is it necessary for this character to be 14 instead of 18?" Is being 14 actually essential to the character?
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In a way, I thought it was.
I had envisioned the character as being an orphan. Her parents had getting themselves caught up in a bad situation, where a group of bandits had taken over their home, and killed them when they tried to defend it. Even those bandits couldn't bring themselves to kill a baby however, and she was found by a group of adventurers (who kill the bandits) and taken to the orphanage, where she grew up.
The orphanage is attached to a religious order. It's a dedicated and well funded orphanage, where the children are very well cared for, but, because it is attached to a relgious order, the children raised there are typically expected to go on and became clerics. This is fine for most, but the character doesnt belive in that faith, and finds it very stifling. She is a Draconic Sorceress, who is not allowed to use her magic, and is often bullied by the other children because her Draconic ancestry manifests itself as patches of blue scales on her back, arms and legs.
Every so often, when they are passing, the adventurers who found her as a baby visit the orphanage to check up on her and see how she is getting on. They usually bring her trinkets, and tell her stories of their exploits, and she looks up to them - considering them heroes.
On their last visit she asked them to take her with them, but they said no - telling her it was no life for a child. This angers her (the fact that they still consider her a child), and later that day, she is bullied again by a group of the other children. She is still angry about being told by people she looked up to and idolised that she was a child, and the bullies only make her mood worse, to the point that she casts Thunderwave and then runs off.
She doesn't meant to hurt them, although it turns out she does (unknowingly).
She finds a barn to hide in and spends the night, and by the morning she has made up her mind. She is not going back to the orphanage and the bullies and the punishments that's surly waiting for her because she used magic when it was forbidden. Instead, she is going to become an adventurer - and not only that, but she is going to become rich and famous and prove to everyone that she is not a child.
Of course by "everyone" she really means those specific people.
So being 14 (a child) was kind of important to the original idea of this character.
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
I think you'll find it easier to see what can change and what can't if you boil it down to the basic elements. I'll do it here:
Earlier, I said I'd be fine with you playing a 14yo with some caveats. I stand by that. However, I don't see anything there that requires her to be 14 at the start of the adventure. I'm going to tread on the toes of the younger participants in the forum now, but...18 years old are still pretty immature. You don't become mature until your mid-20s. At 18, people are still immature with a whole load of stuff to learn.about the world and how it works. It's just that at that age, we convince ourselves that we are wiser and more knowledgeable than we really are - but an 18 year old generally is much closer to a 14 year old in terms of maturity than a 30 year old.
So with that in mind, just have her locked up in the orphanage for a few years. She tried to escape a few times but gets caught. At 18, she finally escapes or is let out, and goes on her adventure. You can still have your maturation aspect to the character, you don't even need.to change anything about the story really, but you get to drop the caveats that come from playing minor. Even though I play clean games and avoid tables with dirty stuff...I'd be happier with such a character at my table.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I'd have to say having a character of that age in my current game would be a flat no.
If the game you're in is not structured around characters being that age range, such as doing a hogwarts/strixhaven style game where all characters are 1st year students, then you have certain, hopefully unintentional, advantages and disavantages that come into effect as you might find monsters and npc's not seeing the 14yr old as a threat so giving you a round or more of not being targeted in combat encounters or merchants and npc's ignoring or not taking that character seriously in some non-combat or social situations. These are all things the DM would likely have to take into account which is one more thing for them to worry about.
Also on a personal note, I've never felt teenage/young adult characters in fantasy/sci fi film, tv or litreature to be particularly compelling characters and I find they do more to highlight the ineptness of the villains than anything else which, and I hate using this phrase.....breaks the immersion. But then again, I am a chap in his mid 40's so I am probably not the target audience for such things.
I kind of love this backstory.
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"real life is a super high CR."
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"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
It seems that quite a few people are saying something very similar.
Seems like the way around this would be to have the character be older, as I mentioned a little earlier, when I was thinking of ways to make it work.
The comment made by Linklite seems to be fairly decent.
She is raised in the orphanage after being found and taken there by the adventurers who killed the bandits responsible for her parents deaths.
The other children bully her because she has Draconic ancestry and patches of blue scales.
When she is 14, she asks the adventurers who rescued her to take her with them, while they are visiting the orphanage to check up on her (which they do from time to time), because she wants to escape the bullying and is feeling stiffed by the relgious order that runs the orphanage.
They refuse, telling her it's no life for a child. This angers her and she feels let down by the people she had looked up to and idolised all her life.
She gets into a fight with some of the other kids when they again try to bully her. This time she let's her anger get the better of her and she casts Thunderwave before running off.
She hides in a barn over night (unaware that she's hurt anybody), but is eventually found and taken back to the orphanage, where she's watched more closely and give more studies and work to do, as a punishment for losing control and injuring the other kids.
(Fortunately, none were killed).
As an adult (21/22), she has moved from the orphanage to being a novice of the relgious order that raised her. They are grooming her to become a cleric, which she doesn't want to do - but can't see any way out of.
The night before her initiation as an acolyte, she runs away to live the life she has wanted to live since she was 14.
Having been raised in an orphanage attached to a relgious order, and then by the order themselves as a novice, she doesn't have much experience of the world outside of that, and the stories she's was told by her rescuers during their visits when she was younger.
(They haven't been to check up on her in many years).
So she has a more immature outlook on life than the typical 21/22 year old.
She's still only level 1, because she never really got to practice using her magical abilities much, or to experience combat or anything like that. So her experience of all of that is zero.
And she doesn't actually know all that much about the world, as all her education comes from the faith teachings of the order.
Although she knows lots about religion, having studied it for a large portion of her life - and more specifically, of the order and faith that she grew up in. Although I'm not sure how a DM could tie that into their story.
Not sure if that's even more acceptable.
I don't know if any of that would make her more acceptable, since in that case, I'd be playing an immature and inexperienced adult. One that's running away from her obligations, because she can't seen any other way out of them, rather than just an orphan running away to become rich and famous.
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
A person of 14 is only considered a “child” by modern standards. In a pseudomedieval world a14 year old would likely already be married and either have or be expecting a child. Remember, Romeo was 15 and Juliet was only 13 and their being married and his already having blood on his hands was considered normal as recently as Shakespearean England. In a pseudomedieval world, a 14 yoar old would have already aged out of an orphanage years before.
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I don't know how old he was, but a teenage thief character that comes to mind for me is Phillippe “The Mouse” Gaston n the film Ladyhawk from the 80's
The Mouse couldn’t have been older than 16 in Ladybawk, maybe younger.
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This is a pretty cool backstory. It also sounds like the origin story for a significant portion of the X-men, which I don’t mean as an insult, the X-men are fricking cool.
You should try and get the whole group (and DM) on this page. Play a team of 16ish kids who just ran from the orphanage. It’s as good a campaign start as any, and as a DM you can make up families (extended, long lost families) for each of the orphans and have them play different roles in the story. Lots of room for a story here.
In the real world-equivalent time period (level of technological advancement, if you prefer), 14 is basically an adult, albeit a young adult. Women were having babies and running households just past puberty, and I have known many young women who were well past puberty by that age. CeNedra, in the Belgariad left home at 15. The Queen of Bear Island in Game of Thrones was that age or younger. There are plenty of examples for men/boys as well, the one coming immediately to my mind being King Arthur.
I was 14 when I started DMing. I was less mature and not as knowledgeable, but my players still enjoyed my game and style of play.
If neither the DM nor other players have n issue with this, then there is no issue.
Thanks again, everyone.
I have made a character based on this discussion thread, after considering all your thoughts and comments. Although this version of the character has been aged up a bit, after listening to what a lot of you were saying about child characters. You can find the post that I made about the character here. I have posted it on the Story and Lore subforum, because it is about her character, not just a general question.
You can also see her character sheet, by going to: https://ddb.ac/characters/102007486/fVA4cq.
I know I have changed the characters age, but I have tried to keep as much of the original idea as possible.
Thanks again everyone.
Forge.
A caffeinated nerd who has played TTRPGs or a number of years and is very much a fantasy adventure geek.
I really like the idea of the character having been rejected from the adventuring party in the past and then joining when she's older. That seems like it's just dripping with unique and fun little interactions.
Maybe the party isn't exactly the same as it was then. Maybe someone died! Maybe there was one hardass who was responsible for swinging the vote against the young Sorcerer, and now that person is gone, or simply had a change of heart. Or maybe they're still here, but the Sorcerer managed to convince them she's ready -- at least for long enough that now they're on the road and it's kinda too late to go back.
So much potential!