[daGob]

So this is more of an opening for discussion rather than as a specific question (aka I'd like to hear a lot of answers) but what do people do when they need to make characters that are children or would be unusual in some other similar way.  I imagine you might just cut yourself down to less BP or the like but there's more to character creation than that.

Other potential examples:
- incredibly aged characters
- characters with some sort of disease (is it a new disease, infectious, were they born with it)
- crippling injuries
- mental disabilities/injuries (addressed a little in some of the rules books but not enough how do you build on it)
- playing with metahumans (yes he's a troll but his mom is human so it might affect his stats like thus)

It's just something I'd like to play around with as I think it could add more depth and flavour to games as well as presenting PC's with possible moral dilemmas.

[Reaver]

I do what I do with all my NPCs. Wing It.


Most NPCs have a game life of 15 minutes of actual "game" time before the scene moves on, or the PCs got what they need, etc, so I don't waste any more time on them then is needed.


If for some reason the NPC is going to be spending more then the standard 15 minutes of fame (like the NPC is fill in for a archtype the table is missing) then I build him as per the rules given to the PCs.

[Bushw4cker]

I had a few players make teenage characters in one of my campaigns. I Just had them use regular 4th ed. Rules.

I've had few children in my games, one was a Mafia Don's son. 12 year old. The PCs troll adept accidentally shot him with an arrow. I didn't have any stats for the kid, so I just winged it.

I made a morbidly obese changeling physical adept named "Zip Code"
And a paraplegic street samurai named " Wheels"
I used regular 4th ed rules

Augmentation has some qualities for Mental disabilities

Changelings have qualities if you want to play around with Metahumans

Haven't had any Senior citizens for PCs yet..

I put very little effort in coming up with stats/gear for Non-important NPCs, and NPCs that are just Canon foder. I'll just write 4 all physical stats, 3 all mental, Armor 12 pistol, for like a Ganger.

[Bewilderbeast]

If you're talking about SR5, you can probably make these work for most characters with clever use of negative qualities and some roleplaying.

- incredibly aged characters: Poor physical stats, the Weakened Immune System qualitiy, the Unsteady Hands quality (the books specifically mentions advanced age as a cause of this NQ).
- characters with some sort of disease (is it a new disease, infectious, were they born with it) Weakened Immune System can easily be re-fluffed as HIV or something similar. Poor Body and Strength to represent physical weakness. For infectious diseases, you'd pretty much treat this as a toxin, I think there might be rules in the book for this somewhere but I'm not sure.
- crippling injuries Again, poor physical stats. Perhaps unsteady hands, Incompetent: Close Combat, Incompetent: Firearms, give them the equivalent of a cyberlimb with 1s in Strength and Agility to represent a particular limb that is crippled.
- mental disabilities/injuries (addressed a little in some of the rules books but not enough how do you build on it) Low Logic, Intuition, and possibly Charisma. Uneducated and possibly Uncouth NQs.
- playing with metahumans (yes he's a troll but his mom is human so it might affect his stats like thus) I don't necessarily think having human parents would affect a metahuman at all, but again, just keep stuff like Body and Strength at the racial minimum and maybe give them Exceptional Attribute: Charisma to show that they're "prettier" than the average trog.