Seriously! Hot cocoa and fruit juice, pff! What is this; kindergarten?!
No, I’ll marry Hayden. But we’ll spend our honeymoon making love every night in a hot tub full of coffee.
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The correct choices are coffee or Kahlua.
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Coffee does not have a good name to start with, and therefore there’s nothing to be defiled.
I loathe coffee, so obviously YOU wanna marry it. 
Seriously, even the smell makes want to gag. No sarcasm. The one time I drank any I was literally vomiting in under 5 minutes. 
I’m a quick learner, so it isn’t possible ANYMORE. The smell still sucks, though.
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I didn’t even know that this was possible. I guess the college student in me is just too used to chugging down hot cups of coffee every morning lol.
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This discussion probably should go in the “Beverages you want to have less often” thread.
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I think a way to intercept this could also be to let you choose for your MC how they react to someone. I always get confused when my character is revealed to be drooling after some dude I just met, when you could ask “so what do you think about x” and have us pick instead. There are a million reasons for the MC not to find someone attractive regardless of orientation, in fact I tend to not like the characters written purely for it because they’re so often smug about it when I didn’t want my character to react that way in the first place 
I am guilty of this too, but I think the problem here is definitely that anytime there’s a non-romanceable NPC, people go “oh my gosh why can’t we romance ____ yet, pleeease make it happen”
I don’t disagree though 
it would be nice to have more close friendships, most of the time it feels like there’s a layer missing and secrets unshared if you’re close with someone and don’t romance them, and you often have to choose between spending time with RO or friends, etc. I really like the way I, The Forgotten One is doing this so far. You’re not stuck with just the RO and the friendships do feel like they’re really important.
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Games with older protagonists and the option to play as an older person. I’m finding it increasingly hard to identify with the struggles and dreams of MCs who are canonically half my real life age. Mostly it’s the lack of confidence and their inability to speak their mind I can’t relate to, as well as the “dating and courting” stages of relationships often taking way too long until they arrive at the physical intimacy stage. I don’t have the time nor the patience for this. Let me please play as the grumpy, jaded person that I am and let my ingame age reflect that.
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Ha, I’d like some of that too. I may not be as jaded (at least in my protag choices), but I do like being able to play someone who’s established, confident, middle-aged, and maybe grumbling about their damn right knee again. And “I retired from this dangerous/complicated line of work, but I’ve been pulled back in for one last job” would be a nice fresh premise to set it up.
I do wonder how tricky it would be to make age something the player could choose. It would be very easy as a cosmetic option that gets referred to occasionally and/or changes your starting stats. But I think it would be much harder if it significantly affected the protagonist’s perspective on the world on a regular basis; that’s a lot of variable-checking and inner voice differences to avoid jarring tonal shifts. Hm. It would be an interesting challenge, though!
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Yes, agreed.
But I’d take anything at this point, even a purely cosmetic option, over playing another 18-20 y/o.
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I hope other people feel the same! Given that my upcoming game’s protagonist is several years out of college and through a few promotions at work. I’ve written them as sort of late thirties, but it’s never specified in the text.
Of course, now I’m thinking of a D&D-style game where the whole party is made of grouchy retired adventurers who had to come back together to finish dealing with something from back in the day. I don’t think I could write someone over 60 in a really convincing way that speaks to people more familiar with that age group, but I’d love to play someone else’s writing of such.
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I tried to start exactly this as a my first ever try at tabletop GM’ing.
Unfortunately, it fell apart due to my friend group not being able to have time off at the same time, as well as me wanting to use GURPS, which is not a great system choice for a first-time GM and a bunch of time-starved players.
I have considered making it into a CS game, but I already have too many WIP ideas floating around.
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I struggle to identify with people even 2/3 my age. Which is approximately the same age group. And I also couldn’t really identify with people my age when I was that age. So maybe 18-20 year olds are just not easy to identify with…
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Yeah, but that’s a totally 18-20 y/o way to feel. Doesn’t everyone at that age think they’re different? Personally, I’ve outgrown this feeling, but I couldn’t pinpoint when exactly it happened.
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I would love a game where you get to make your own fighting style
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Although I’m not that young anymore, I actually enjoy the escapism of my main character being younger than me. But what I would like to see is more COGs and HGs where you follow the main character over a longer period of time and they get to to grow significantly older and you can watch their life change in significant ways during that time. Like in Life of a Wizard, where you watch the MC’s life go through different stages and taking on roles like student, adventurer, Royal Wiard and maybe also get positions like becoming the Archmage or the Archbishop and maybe also getting married. Although I would really like it if more authors made “Life of…” COGs or HGs like that, COGs and HGs that which had at least some of that scope and where you can witness similar changes to your character’s life, instead of either keeping most or all of those changes outside to the story, would be something that I’d really appreciate.
But I agree that
would be a really fun concept for a COG or HG, particularly if it’s either like “let’s bring the all gang together” or like this kind of “supergroup” of retired, badasses, I guess. But I think, for me, anyway, that this would be most fun if it was either done as a part of, maybe finale to a particular series or a follow-up to a series or another COG or HG from the same setting where your character and other companions did their share of “heroing” which they will be famous for when the story starts.
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I was able to enjoy many games for the same reason for a long time, but at least for now I’ve grown tired of them, and I’d rather read something I could relate to more age-wise. My preferences might change again in the future, who knows. But right now I don’t even have the chance to try something else in the meantime, because there’s barely any games with older PCs.
While I liked the first part of Life of a Wizard (the story lost me after the resurrection), it didn’t really reflect the aging process sufficiently in my opinion. Just like @fade explained it earlier. I still liked it, but I never had the feeling the protagonist’s aging was truly reflected in their thought process over the course of the story.
Edit: Forget that, wrong story! lol (for some reason I was thinking of “A mage reborn”)
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As someone in this age range I dunno, but I definitely look back on middle school and early high school and think “wow, I wasn’t mature as I thought I was” (I pretty much always thought I was more mature than my classmates), so it probably holds true for most young-ish ages.
As for options I want to have more often: calling characters out. I’m just a little sick of having to put up with every jerk that crosses my path because they’re the authors favorite. Ugh.
More characters who fall into a trope that is most often used for one gender (like Big Strong Woman instead of Big Strong Man, Magical Boys/nonbinary people instead of Magical Girls). Not just because it feels like such an interesting dynamic to explore if it’s considered rare in-world, but also because I find that male ROs and females ROs tend to fall into like…the same tropes over and over, you know? Doing the opposite of what’s “expected” kind of forces you to explore that.
I think I mostly notice because I tend to play pan(romantic) MCs (as I am irl). I don’t have a preference in real life, but I tend to always romance male ROs because it’s very rare that a female RO is the type of character I like to romance. Non-binary ROs are, of course, a rarer thing but I find they often fall into either “flamboyant theatre kid” or “bright, cheerful ray of sunshine”. The former can work for some MCs, but I think we need more variety on that front.
More polyamorous options in general.
More acknowledgement of gender in-game. It feels weird when people only ever use your pronouns and no gendered terms (I’m including specific gender-neutral terms like monarch in this as well). I just feel like it makes it more real.
More trans characters, whether ROs or not! I love them because I tend to relate to them the most, being trans myself, and I want to see more trans stories.
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Thank you!!! This is how I feel, exactly. All this pining bullshit makes me roll my eyes. Maybe because I’m older (and jaded and grumpy, like you), or maybe because I’ve never really bee the shy type (in most cases), but I find it hard to relate to these “romances” where the MC sits around feeling their heart go pitter patter but won’t actually say something to the RO and the RO is either too stupid, too anal, or too mental to do the same. I’d like some grown-ups, dammit. And if they are fantasy races, can we have them act more mature instead of like moody tweens?
I’d also like to see ROs that are not just tropes. Let the characters be more like “real” people than one-dimensional cartoon characters. Sometimes, I read the dialog from the MC or the ROs and all I can think is that people do not talk like this. I’d also like to see the ability to have the MC call other characters on their bullshit–and vice versa. If my MC is acting like a tool, then someone should say something about it. If a RO is acting like a tool, then my MC should be able to point it out and ask wtf their problem is.
I’d also like to see more games where I’m not forced to create a one-dimensional cartoon character for my MC. People typically don’t have one single skill, but so many times, unless you force your MC to focus on one skill, you can forget about skill checks. And then you die or get a shitty outcome.
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Ah, I second what a lot of people have said in the thread above about older MCs although I’m not old by any means, I’d take playing a much older MC over a younger MC any day.
This sounds amazing. I’d give anything to read a tongue-in-cheek adventure where the characters aren’t wide-eyed youth desperate to make a name for themselves / whining about having the weight of the world on their shoulders, but instead are a bunch of very reluctant/cynical old people who complain about aching joints and having their sleep interrupted. “Saving the world? Heck, what’s the point, just give me my morning paper and coffee” vibes.
Couple of months ago I started writing a medieval tavern / alehouse game where you play as a grizzly jaded tavern keeper. Listen to your customers’ absurd woes, provide offbeat wisdom, brew shitty ale, break up fights (or get into them), gamble, and evade taxes… That sort of thing. Too many other ongoing WIPs on my plate right now to do it as more than a hobby project, but I’d love to get round to it properly one day.
One other question I had while reading this chain of comments though, is how old is “old”?
- As long as they’re not a snotty teen
- Anything beyond college age (e.g. ~22 and above) and I’m good
- Late 20s, early 30s, enough to be bashed around by life a bit
- Late 30s, early 40s, i.e. when it becomes clear that most of your childhood dreams will not come true
- Late 40s and above
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Edit: Oh snap, I really, really agree with this.
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Darn it! I was still hoping that I had a chance. 
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