Welcome to Guidance, Private Sanctuary’s source for tips and techniques for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, written by Everyman Gamer Alexander Augunas. Today, we’re going to be talking about ageism in roleplaying games.

I try to keep my rambling on this topic short, as I could go on FOREVER about this one. Today, I’m going to talk about one of the big “isms” that exists unmolested in roleplaying games. That “ism” is ageism.

What is Ageism?

Ageism is discriminating against people based upon their age. In today’s article, I’m going to focus on youth ageism. Let me begin by telling you a story about when I was 14.

When I was 14, I walked into my local Walmart to buy a video game. I think it was Nintendogs. (I was young and stupid, I’m allowed to make an occasional bad choice.) I paid for my game in the electronics section and walked out of the store to meet my mom, who was waiting in the car. As I was walking out of the store amidst a dozen other people, I and I alone was stopped by a Walmart greeter who asked me rather rudely to see my receipt. I opened the bag and showed him. He read it two or three times and checked it against my game before begrudgingly allowing me to leave. As I walked out of the store and rounded the corner, I saw that the greeter had stopped a second person, another unaccompanied teenager. In that moment, I realized that the only reason I had been stopped was because of my age. The greeter had assumed that if I was in Walmart alone, I must have been some punk who was trying to steal things under his nose.

That was the first time that I had ever been discriminated against, and living around Philadelphia, it happened a number of times later. I learned that I had to walk, speak, and act older then I was in order to get adults to leave me alone, to the point that for a long time people assumed I was 18 when I was really 15. Although not every kid wants to be perceived as older because they want to avoid being accused of shoplifting when they go out to buy a mostly harmless game about raising virtual dogs in a Gameboy, it is a common for children, especially teenagers, to try and act older than they actually are. And that’s because we as a society condemn things that are youthful.

Condemning the Young

As a fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender, I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve had to defend myself for enjoying “a kid’s show.” I also can’t begin to tell you how many eye rolls I’ve gotten for playing Pokemon in public, or how utterly shocked my students (and  fellow teachers) are to learn that I play Minecraft. These are all things that are associated with children, whether you like it or not. And to be associated with children is generally a bad thing in American culture. We call these things “childish” and equate them with negative concepts like, “immature,” “simple,” and “boring.” We don’t act as though we can find value in things we associate with children, like they’re things that can and will be discarded when the child reaches some magical state of enlightenment called “maturity.” And honestly, this happens because we as a society teach our children that things that it says are immature need to be cast away if one is to be respected.

And because our society doesn’t really respect the young, we constantly objectify them. Objectification is the treating of a person as a thing without regards to the person’s dignity, or the innate right to be valued and to receive ethical treatment. According to philosopher Martha Nussbaum, a person becomes objectified if they are treated in the following ways:

• As a tool for another’s purpose: This is called instrumentality, and it means that the person is considered to have no value aside from what it can do for another. In the context of children, children are typically used to inspire specific emotions or to create the illusion of a living environment. For example, if you want to tell a story about a family, you need children. But those children aren’t really characters; they’re just the children that drive along the parenting plot. They are instruments to the adult character. The Walking Dead gives us an excellent example of this in Carl Jr. I actually stopped watching TWD because of how ridiculous the writers were with this character; he only exists so the adults have someone to lament about. Someone for them to mourn as if he was a tragic soul for living in such dire times. But he does (and says) virtually nothing of importance throughout the whole ordeal! The only child on the show is virtually meaningless. (Contrast Carl Jr. with Clementine, in the Walking Dead video game, to see what I mean.)
• As if they lacked agency: This is called inertness, or the idea that someone is unable to make any sort of independent decisions or does nothing of value. This is the child who has no other purpose than to be captured and saved, to act as nothing more than the carrot in front of an adult’s nose. For example, Mrs. Brimbsbi’s children in The Secret of NIMH have no agency. Mrs. Brimbsbi doesn’t even tell them to take care of the house while she’s gone or to watch over her sick son; she just leaves. The children do nothing over the course of the movie, have no personalities, and have no purpose than to allow Mrs. Brimbsbi to be a mother.
• As if they were owned by another: Commonly in “adult” programing, children are scarcely given names or identities beyond who their parents are. A great example of this sort of character is Walt from Lost. He has absolutely no identity or personality aside from the fact that he is Michael’s kid, which also goes hand-in-hand with the fact that Walt is a tool to show Michael’s lack of effective parenting skills. He has virtually no interesting bits of character background aside from this aspect of his “personality,” and the show even goes so far as to remove Walt physically from Lost in order to further Michael’s angst.
• As if they were interchangeable: Children fall into EXTREMELY stereotypical roles in media. This is an extension of the “bully because …” phenomena that plagues cinema to this day, which happens when an antagonistic child has no real justification for being antagonistic. They bully the main character because … reasons. In truth, children are often written to be so utterly bland that you can replace one child with another with virtually no effort. Bethesda Studios is a master of this practice. In games like Skyrim or Fallout 3, there are literally two voice actors for children (one male, one female) and two character models that MIGHT have alternating skin tones  and hair styles to try and disguise this. But in every situation, even when the character is important, every child acts exactly like every other. This is very obvious in Skyrim, where there is a quest where you meet a boy who is trying to summon an assassin to kill his orphanage’s matron. The other kids are excited but spooked about his attempts and the summoner … has the exact same attitude the whole time. He’s not scared and he’s not depraved. He’s nothing except a child’s voice actor doing the same voice with the same tone a hundred times over, reciting lines that all sound identical.
• As if they were permissible to damage or destroy: This is the hardest aspect to prove with children, as our culture is EXTREMELY protective of harming children, to the point where so much as showing a kid bleed is probably enough to earn an R-rating in America. And yet, in their own way, a refusal to allow to be damaged or destroyed in any situations is remarkably similar to when it is permissible to do so. In this manner, we often remove our child characters from real consequences. We prevent them from learning or growing. We essentially leave them stuck and refuse to allow them to live realistic lives, which is essentially destroying what it means to be human for the child. I admit that this one is a bit of a stretch, but I personally think that it qualifies.
• As if there is no need for concern for their feelings and experiences: So we went from the least common to the most common in a single line. Children are NEVER allowed to be validated in their feelings and experiences in the media. They are restricted to petty and immature emotions that form stereotypes rather than rounded characters, and anyone who has ever taught children before knows that even the youngest child is a character. They have feelings and emotions and experiences that are as profound as those of any adult, but we teach them to discard their problems because they’re not “real problems,” or they’re not “adult problems.” We tell them to grow up or that life is hard. We don’t say, “I sympathize with what you’re feeling.” Empathy is validation. Validation is concern.

Labeling of the Young

As you can see, society focuses on shaming the emotions and experiences of the young by claiming that they’re some sort of subpar version of real, adult emotions and experiences. This occurs when we label something as being “childish,” or being “for children,” as opposed to adults. In this way, we paint things that society deems immature as “negative” and extol the things that society deems “positive,” which typically amounts to whatever is flying around in the world of adult popular culture. If you’ve ever wondered why kids are so fast to try and “grow up” and do adult things, it isn’t because they necessarily want to BE grown up, its because they really want the acceptance of doing something that society won’t shame them for. They don’t want to do “childish” things because they’ve learned that being “childish” is a bad thing. If kids are “growing up too fast” today, its due to the simple fact that we teach our children that the things they like NEED to be discarded for things that the majority group (adults) like.

So Wait, This is Still a Pathfinder Blog, Right?

Yes, it is. It is important to bring up what ageism is and how ageism manifests in our society because of the real topic of this article: TTRPGs are incredibly ageist.

Think about the video game market. How many well-known video games that aren’t directly marketed at children feature child protagonists? Now, let’s refine the search. How many of them are American? How many of them are human? With only those three parameters, the only characters I could think of are Ellie (Last of Us) and Clementine (The Walking Dead). Now, for the killer filter: How many of these characters are Playable? The number drops in half, for only Clementine is playable, and she is only playable in her game’s sequel season, after she had developed a strong fan following.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the case with all video games. Japanese video games are VERY famous for including plenty of playable human children in their games. By including Japanese games, I could add the entire cast of Golden Sun, the entire cast of Earthbound, Link in roughly half of his depictions, and a rather large number of Final Fantasy characters to that list. So is this a case of “children can’t be interesting characters,” or is this a case of, “Americans refuse to acknowledge the value of the experiences and emotions of children?”

Ageism in Pathfinder

Now, let’s look at Ageism as it applies in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.

Game Mechanics

Dungeons and Dragons has a LONG history of excluding children from its game mechanics. Aging mechanics have been in the game since 3.5 at the least, but it was never deemed “necessary” to have anything resembling young character rules. Pathfinder didn’t abolish this trend at first, but it did write a young template and the de facto assumption was that if you wanted to be young, start with a human and apply this template. Didn’t work perfectly, but it was something.

Then Ultimate Campaign was announced and I got SO excited at the announcement of young character rules within it. Inclusion! Huzzah! And then the rules were published and I wasn’t so excited. The rules themselves were discriminatory. Whereas a Venerable human (someone who is 80+) could be a monk if I wanted him to be, a child has a specific restriction that basically removes the child as a PC option. Children specifically cannot take levels in player classes; they have to stick to NPC classes. So if you are a PLAYER and your PLAYER CHARACTER so happens to be a child, you’re not REALLY a PLAYER because you’re not allowed to take any levels in a PLAYER CLASS. That is HUGELY discriminatory.

Justification-wise, the idea is that children are inexperienced and therefore they wouldn’t be ABLE to train enough to take levels in a PC class. Considering that the starting age rules in the Core Rulebook are optional anyway (they even state themselves as such), then why should I be forced to abide by starting age restrictions on my class even though no Adult character REALLY has to play by them? And to make matters worse, the rules basically say, “Well, if you gain a level in a PC class you stop being a Youth. Oh, really? I can’t be young AND extraordinary at the same time? I’m just “an Adult?” That line in particular makes me VERY annoyed.

Another common response I get when I mention all of this is, “Well, if you don’t like the rules, don’t use them.” I don’t, but just because I don’t use these restrictions doesn’t abolish the fact that those rules, as published, are discriminatory against children.

On Ability Modifiers: The question of whether or not the young character ability score modifiers are discriminatory is an interesting one, and its one that I’m personally going to answer. “No,” on because like the older character rules, they have both negatives and positives. There are pros and cons. The bonuses and penalties differ, but because there are both upsides and downsides to being young, young characters are treated equality to older characters in this regard, so it is acceptable.

Adventure Paths

I own about 30 volumes of Adventure Paths from Paizo. I own Council of Thieves, Kingmaker, Serpent’s Skull, Carrion Crown, and Jade Regent. I went through every volume and double-checked every last NPC in each of my 30 volumes. (Yes, it took forever.) Out of all 30 of my books, I encountered a single young character who was mentioned by name. That young character was Pervin Elkarid, from Ravengro in the Haunting of Harrowstone. In this one village our young character gets nothing more than a single sentence compared to the three or four that every other character detailed in the book gets. Here’s Pevrin’s writeup:

Pevrin Elkarid, the oldest son of the owner of the Laughing Demon, has taken the role of Post Boy for the last 3 years, charging 1 cp to transcribe fine copies of a post and then ensuring that the copies are posted for at least a week.

The paragraph continues, but it focuses on the Posting Pole, the place where Pevrin works. With nothing more than a single sentence, Pevrin is reduced to a tool (a Post Boy) with no agency, only has his relationship to his father as a character trait (ownership), and is treated as though he is essentially valueless to Ravengro (interchangeable). And this was literally the only young character that I could find in any of my Adventure Path volumes. “Children” are mentioned, but they are faceless “décor” rather than actual additions to a living, breathing world. They are so interchangeable that their identities aren’t disclosed. Instead of being allowed the smallest of additions like an actual name or a personality, every child in every settlement beyond Ravengro is a background set piece that is expected to scurry around and do all of the stereotypical things that children do, but mysteriously vanish whenever anything bad happens.

Pathfinder Society

I will be the first person to admit that my experience in PFS is extremely limited. They have hundreds of scenarios and I’ve played through two of them, so I can only share what I’ve seen in my two sessions of Pathfinder Society.

Of my two sessions, there were actually some children in one of them, Risen from the Sands. In Risen from the Sands, there is a gang of street urchin children. They’re called the Ten Fingers Gang (or something like that). In the adventure, you need to find them and get some information out of them for your seedy patron, and you learn pretty quickly that they’re street thieves.

For the record, making a gang of independent child thieves is not making an interesting child characters. That is a HUGE stereotype, the stereotype that without adults children run amok and become amoral criminals, that no child is a good person unless an adult is there as supervision. And aside from the gang’s name, none of the children are given even the slightest hint of a personality. They’re essentially the Lost Boys from Disney’s Peter Pan. Yeah, there are a bunch of them and they all have different, quirky outfits, but they’re all basically the same kid ten times personality-wise. Just like you could make anything that fox-kid says come out of bear-kid’s month with no repercussions, these kids had absolutely no individual personality traits.

The Importance of Including Children

The reason that this issue, the issue of ageism in our roleplaying games, is if the games that we love are going to survive into the future, we need to help foster that next generation of gamers, and we can’t do that if we’re teaching those gamers that being young is wrong.

Our culture teaches us that youth is weak. That youth is fragile and needs to be protected. That youth can’t understand and can’t compete. That youth needs to be coddled and eventually replaced with adulthood. But what we keep forgetting is that young things grow stronger. Young things adapt. Young things grow and change. Young things survive. If we refuse to allow children the opportunity to be accepted for who they are and to label things as undesirable simply because they are enjoyable to people who are younger or older than us, we are allowing our own creativity to stagnate and our own games and media to join us in the grave.

Improving Inclusion in Roleplaying Games

So what can we do to be more inclusive to children? Well, a good first start would be to get more artwork featuring young people into our products, specifically young people as heroes. That means less of the artwork in Ultimate Campaign, where young people are being kidnapped or trained, and more of the artwork in the Advanced Class Guide, specifically the wild child brawler archetype. We need more artwork of young heroes.

Along this line, the REAL thing that would help a lot is getting a child iconic for a base class. Having a child iconic would not only give Paizo a chance to show off what a young hero can look like in their campaign setting, but it would also give them excuse to write a backstory for a character like this. We need children with fleshed-out backstories in our roleplaying games. Finally, it would give Paizo an excuse to have more children in their artwork, which is another thing we need.

Finally, young characters need to be altered so they are no longer discriminatory and the rules need to be sanctioned for Pathfinder Society, at the very least, for the Kids Track. Why tell a kid that she couldn’t play someone like herself? Part of the fun of fantasy roleplaying games is being able to put yourself in a fantastic setting. If the kid wants to play as a kid in the KID’S track, let her, and don’t penalize her for it.

And that’s all I have to say on ageism, for now. I’m curious to see how others react to this article. Leave your comments below; I’m looking forward to the discussion for this one. Have an awesome week, and I’ll see you next time!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex’s favorite color is blue, his favorite Pathfinder Race/Class combination is kitsune rogue, and this article has gotten him all worked up.