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Hello,

I was thinking of doing a campaign with my players play as kids and then later play as adults. I was wondering if anyone else had this idea and how people suggest handling advancement. I think kids should be very limited in what they can increase but I'm not sure.

We had a discussion on running a kid-focused campaign last year that you might find useful. The idea was more to nerf kid players vs. adults and xenos and such, with a relatively simple "kid level" grafted over the normal character rules. If you took such an approach, you could play with the same characters through, and have them nerfed as kids and then remove the nerf once the story jumps forward to adulthood.

Anyway, here's the discussion from last year: viewtopic.php?t=9494

If I ever do a campaign or a cinematic with players-kids it will be only with kids .... all players will play a kid and it's gonna be a survival setting. This will work.

Arthur.

if it were me i'd be tempted to port over some rules from Tales from the Loop. character creation in that system is really powerful for creating kid PCs that feel like kids. PCs are living in but are not really a part of the adult world, grownups are basically a different species. the systems/character sheets aren't that dissimilar between TFTL and ARPG.

Sorry to necro, but I've been giving this some thought as well. My thought was to start with kids, then have almost episodic adventures (roughly once a year, game time). I think there are three big considerations:

First, you want to define "kid." There is a huge difference between a 10-year old and a 13- or 14-year old adolescent.

Second, once you've made that choice, you have the basis for whether you want to go "weaker than by-the-book PCs to BTB PCs" or "BTB PCs to "stronger than BTB PCs." For my ideas, I'd start with capable adolescents, and every couple of years give them a stat-bump and a skill bump (maybe two), until they are fully adult. They'd end up exceptional adults, if they survive that long. For example, instead of being hunted by xenomorphs, they could become the hunters, as in some of the novels.

Third, you want to decide just how dark to make things. In the absence of short-term agendas that encourage the PCs to fuck each other over for a percentage (which, BTW, is one of my favorite parts of cinematic ALIEN adventures), if you want to keep some of the psychological horror, you'd need to go pretty hard into human darkness, I think. I'm not so sure how deep I could go without squeamishness.

Jeff Lemiere’s sci-fi comic Sentient had kids as the cast, onboard a starship. Maybe some ideas could be scavenged?