I was toying with the idea of starting a campaign where the PC are all teenagers... at least in terms of the age appropiate to their race.
Certainly, the character creation concepts presented in the PHB and DMG suggest that most PC's enter the 'adventuring life' as adults, with a significant background and backstory predating their appearance on 'the scene'.
But having the players start at an earlier age presents some challenges. The greatest of which would seem to be the role of parents and/or guardians in the PC's life... I mean, it's hard to imagine the following exchange...
"Hey Mom, Billy, Mandy and I are going to run over to the Goblin camp today, to kill a few of them and take some of their stuff... OK?"
"Sure sweetheart, but be sure to be back in time for dinner, I've got a Hippogriff in the oven and you know your father likes to have all of us at the table when he gets home from the mines.... and take the garbage out before you leave... and that room of yours better not look like a wyvern sacked it..."
Other than having them all start as orphans or refugees... any suggestions on how to approach this?
Or is it a non-starter... should I just go with the standard "enter the profession as an adult" route?
I've done it a few times (starting as young as 10-12) and depending on your group it can be a lot of fun.
However, I didn't have the PCs go off to do dungeon delving, they were solving mysteries around town and interacting with rival "gangs". They were occasionally hired by the local rat catcher when the local rats were bigger than usual (and then investigated why the rats were so big).
They also had a couple of "real" adventures but the adults never believed their tall tales.
I started them off as 0 level characters and only did it for a few game sessions but it helped them build a history.
The biggest difficulty is the racial age difference, but the age at which a character physically matures in 5E is not defined anywhere (socially accepted as an adult is a different story). I just house rule that in my world, all PC races mature at approximately the same rate.
Parents are like any other bond. Your adventurers should have these ties and be part of the world.
You can run this as straight up kids, a la Ocarina of Time or final fantasy 2 or Avatar the Last Airbender or Harry Potter or or or or. But you want to keep the stakes appropriate to genre and include some trashy teen romance.
I usually assume that by the time an individual is in their teens, they've begun an apprenticeship or have become laborers and don't really have guardians as such. It's not like there's general public education. Any child getting educated is either noble or at some academy/temple/guild. 500 years ago, people married in their mid-teens.
I don't see the need to change any rules for it. Any potential issues are just backstory. It would be interesting to have parent/child adventurers. Or Junior didn't want to be a farmer so went off to find his own way. Junior was abused and fought back, killing his father, and now he's on the run from the authorities. The only limit is one's imagination.
Sure it cna work.
You just need to have players who can remember what its like to be teens (or are teens) and you need to focus your own adventure creation there.
I'd recommend watching teen adventure shows like Buffy and getting ideas from them.
Oh and the "kids of the famous heroes" thing is a thing that works in all genres 
I like the level 0 idea and rollplaying the background as a 'character class' could make some interesting roll-playing. Criminal, urchin, sailor, entertainer, charlatan and noble seem all obvious choices. Sage artesian, soldier and hermit might be a bit trickier as they seem (to me) to require the character to be older because of study/training/isolation time. Acolyte and Folk-Hero falls somewhere in between.
In a world where the children usually follow the careers of their parents, obtaining a skill or two from their parents through aprenticeship, working with or just plain osmosis is a real possibility to give the kid characters some useful adventuring skills.
Kazadvorn wrote:
In the game I'm running for my kids we actually discussed this at our first Session Zero. (I'm breaking it up, since they are actually 6 and 9 years old.)
For us, They will be in their early/mid teens and their first adventure will be a training expedition with their mother. Part of the reason for the mother's involvement in our game is that I didn't want to force them to play as adults or orphans, further, they are actually learning the game as we go, so having me play a more experienced character with them gives them a "safety net" of sorts. I'm hoping it will encourage them to take daring risks, knowing that if they really get their buns in the fryer, she will step in.
For adult or teen players familiar with the game...
There's something going on that the adults don't believe or care about. The youths decide to take matters into their own hands. Maybe they have a FRIEND who's an orphan and they disappear. No one cares, but s/he is their friend and they know s/he wouldn't just up and disappear on them. The adventure leads them away from home, making parents not such a mitigating factor to fun, without killing them off.
I like the 0 level thing:
You choose your race.
You obtain your "biological" feature (like ability score increase, resistance, teifling spell, elf trance, etc...
The trained abilities (like the drow spells, elf weapon profiencies, dwarf stonecunning) you only choose 1 or 2 or those. The DM will have to determine if some abilities are considered biological or social learning. if some ability get develop later (like a dragon breath, can a 12 years old dragon born use it, or must he wait his 16th birhtday for the fire lung to develop and be able to use it fully? or maybe does a 12 years old dragonborn can use it but it's not as powerfull and deal damage only at half distance? or deal half damage?
Then you choose your background (acolyte you got raised by the church, sage, you got raised in a pensionate, hermit, you live with your parent who was an hermits, criminal, at a young age you join a criminal gang) and leanr 1 skill and 1 tool/language from them.
you don't choose a class (level 0) (if the player want to become a sorcerer, sorcerer is a biological class, so maybe give him 1 or 2 cantrip and the wild magic property on the cantrips)
so your profiency is +1 (compare to the +2 at elvel 1), if your not profient with any weapon, then you only have your stat to use your weapon etc...
Then go on your adventure, lie to your parent/guardian, or sneak out or simply steal your dad sword and outrun him and go join the adventure.
Once you reach level 1 (gather 100XP? 200 XP?) then you can choose your class. you gain your second background skill and tool/language, and you gian teh missing racial feature (you mgiht even be able to change some of those feature, if your dwarf never finished his stonecunning training but the thinker gnome show him to craft a automaton animal, then your dwarf doesn't get stonecunning but learn the thinkerer abilitie. This part will have to be left to the DM judgement (a human cannot learn to use a breath weapon because he got raised by dragonborn, but might be able to learn to hide behind natural feature if he receive trainign from wood elfs)
The body grow faster when face to stressfull, demanding situation (see those story about those young 7 years old girl getting pregant because there body develop faster since they have to take care of there brother and sister since the parents are lazy drunk gambling all there money) so after a dangerous adventure like this even the undevelop biological feature (like the dragonborn dragon breath) should be fully develop.
For player who are interested in magic, then offer then a chance to learn some spell. liek I said for a sorcerer, you have 1 or 2 cantrip that you can cast 2 or 3 time per day with a roll on the wild magic table? for a wizard you need to find a book then you can try to read it and cast some of the easier to understand spell from it (the cantrips you can prepare 1 or 2 cantrip) Once you reach lvl 1 if the player is not interested anymore, by focusing on his martial path, he forget about how to use his magical knowledge.
Just a quick idea, you can probbly make it way better.
Yes. Because it's exactly what I did for my current game. They're 19ish, so just recognised as adults in the world.
I even started them off without class levels (although knowing what they wanted to play, so they had: ability scores, 4+CON mod' Hitpoints, two proficient skills and proficiency in weapons such as "punching!" and “wooden sword”).
(Added two tool pro' or languages later to bring them in line with what you get from backgrounds)
I described it in a previous thread, but I'll copy/pasta it for your convenience...
Me wrote:
akr71 wrote:
bawylie wrote:
OoftaMeg wrote:
In medieval Europe you were generally considered an adult by age 12-13, and required to serve in the king's armies, participate in manhunts for dangerous criminals, etc., so what is "age appropriate" is a culturally driven determination. What matters here in game (which follows a more modern rather than historical view of age-appropriateness) is that NPCs will treat the PCs as "kids". There is no problem with that. In fact they may all come to be viewed as prodigies, rising to power while still so young, and they likely will be underestiumated by the world a large. That's a role-playing opportunity.
@Kaz re Harry Potter
I don't think those are tricks. And you're just a tad reductive. Harry is an orphan but his parents' death motivates him. That's not the end of his bonds though - he has a surrogate family he despises, and is constantly reaching out for other surrogates - people to care for him. So it's more than "he's an orphan." It goes somewhere.
If you read (or reread idk what you've read/seen) you'll see these parental bonds are recurring. Even if the parents are in absentia, they're still all a major part of the protagonists' lives.
Frodo is also an orphan. And much is written on the families of Samwise, Merry & Pippin - but they're also absent.
So I think overall, it's a matter of figuring out what role these parental bonds play emotionally, and then logistically.
Kazadvorn wrote:
bawylie wrote:
The flip side is that normal people tend not to be adventurers. Adventurers are driven by need. Comfortable people have little - few needs.
Kazadvorn wrote: