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Middle aged/older characters?


shaobadman

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Do these exist on the server anymore? Is there even a place for them?  I try to keep a good variety of ages between my characters and have some in their 30s/40s, made in 2017/18 when it was more "acceptable" to have and RP on them. Now a middle aged character can be anywhere in public, nowhere particularly youth-oriented, and be called out on their age because they're so rare in the city.

 

I've been back for a month now and there's more characters under 20 than I can count, an okay amount of characters in their 20s (which used to be the norm) and hardly anyone above the age of 30. Even years ago there weren't too many but the average age was still around mid-20s. At that point, I had a South LS group (people living in the same building) with good variety in age and it was enjoyable community (and mildly criminal) RP.

 

I'm still having a rough time adjusting to the weird factor of Los Santos being dominated by teenagers (and young adults at a stretch), even my main character (late 20s) has almost a decade on most people they meet (I /examine all my taxi fares). The entirety of LS feels like a uni city even though it's meant to replace LA.

 

Since you can't really break the status quo or force people to diversify, I'm wondering if it's a waste of time to have a character in their 30s/40s, or if I should be sending one to a life sentence in prison just to get some RP on it. I genuinely enjoy being on an older character from time to time but people that age can't keep talking to teenagers/very young adults - aside from the obvious issue of it being creepy and awkward, a 40 year old only has so much to say to 16 year old kids without being their parent, relative, mentor or some other age-relevant relationship. So far it seems like it only really works as a background/novelty character.

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Oldest character I've RP'd was in her 80's. Youngest was 16 so - take that how you want. ULSA has a lot of middle aged rp'ers with our professors and whatnot. My I currently have a character who's 34, and one who's 50. They definitely exist but most people like the "youth" experience and rp that since it's what they know and what they are familiar with

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You find older and middle aged characters usually only where it is actively enforced - legal factions and a small selection of businesses around San Andreas. The playerbase has this mindset of anything beyond 30 years being boomer age and overall less appealing opposed to living the high life in full beauty of ones (early) twenties. This may also be due to the lack of experience or guidance - one may be in their late teens or early twenties and thus have a feel for how one would act in their late twenties, but thirties and beyond seems to be new lands and the unknown.

 

On top of that, most people play what is experienced or started at a younger age - street gangs starting at ones teens, university students in their early twenties or generally people coming into the job market in their early twenties starting their selected profession. 

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8 minutes ago, Jorgensen said:

I think it's just a thing of people not really wanting to RP flaws with their characters. I could be wrong. But, yknow. It's just a vibe I get.

 

Evident in the average young middle/upper class character's attributes which almost looks like a love poem about themselves, right down to the pleasant smells.

 

4 minutes ago, celestialrage said:

They definitely exist but most people like the "youth" experience and rp that since it's what they know and what they are familiar with

 

I think it's also what they're into or how far they're willing to go to put in effort. I'm not even 25 but I have several characters older than me because it's far too monotone to RP my own age and do that all round. Understandably though, that's not everyone's flavour, and familiarity's easier.

 

1 minute ago, orca112 said:

The playerbase has this mindset of anything beyond 30 years being boomer age and overall less appealing opposed to living the high life in full beauty of ones (early) twenties. This may also be due to the lack of experience or guidance - one may be in their late teens or early twenties and thus have a feel for how one would act in their late twenties, but thirties and beyond seems to be new lands and the unknown.

 

On top of that, most people play what is experienced or started at a younger age - street gangs starting at ones teens, university students in their early twenties or generally people coming into the job market in their early twenties starting their selected profession. 

 

Not doubting you, I just find this odd because when I joined GTAW in 2017 it seemed like a much higher standard of RP than I was used to and before then I could never think of creating characters of different ages, with flaws and actual background stories which are unfamiliar to me but figured out through RP. This server helped me do all that, but the active player base has quadrupled since 2018 and it seems to have found its own footing with the average character and looks quite set in that way unless it's just some trend.

 

ULSA completely makes sense, I think it's great that there's a place for late teens/young adult characters to congregate, but everything else (including south LS) is predominantly teenage and I'm wondering if this is a phase or if it's been stuck like this for years and has no sign of changing, because in my mind the server's setting becomes this weird anomaly of a county where 30-40 is seen as old, not just in young circles but everywhere. It's a little demotivating to essentially be limited to an age range, where going for a higher age turns interaction/RP into hard mode.

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You’ll find older characters apart of illegal factions, plenty of them. A lot of legal role players (outside of GOV factions) will tend to play younger characters. It’s a matter of having something to do on your character; If you have a defined goal, you have a viable middle aged character, but if your character relies on club RP to fill time, they gravitate towards the younger characters.

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8 minutes ago, slick! said:

You’ll find older characters apart of illegal factions, plenty of them. A lot of legal role players (outside of GOV factions) will tend to play younger characters. It’s a matter of having something to do on your character; If you have a defined goal, you have a viable middle aged character, but if your character relies on club RP to fill time, they gravitate towards the younger characters.

I checked out south LS several times this last month (excluding Rancho), and unless I was severely unlucky, the majority seemed to be teenagers, early 20s at a push. I wanted to avoid being the gimpy geezer that talks to teenagers.

 

It might be confirmation bias, though. I'm at a stage where the influx of teenagers is still a shock to me, that I feel like I'm seeing them everywhere.

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1 minute ago, shaobadman said:

I checked out south LS several times this last month (excluding Rancho), and unless I was severely unlucky, the majority seemed to be teenagers, early 20s at a push. I wanted to avoid being the gimpy geezer that talks to teenagers.

 

It might be confirmation bias, though. I'm at a stage where the influx of teenagers is still a shock to me, that I feel like I'm seeing them everywhere.

 

Gang factions are the exception because gangs are made up of young hooligans. Illegal factions covers as a blanket term, meaning OCG factions as well.

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2 minutes ago, shaobadman said:

I checked out south LS several times this last month (excluding Rancho), and unless I was severely unlucky, the majority seemed to be teenagers, early 20s at a push. I wanted to avoid being the gimpy geezer that talks to teenagers.

 

It might be confirmation bias, though. I'm at a stage where the influx of teenagers is still a shock to me, that I feel like I'm seeing them everywhere.

There's plenty of older characters RPing in illegal groups within OCGs and DTOs, as it suits their theme. Not as common in street gangs. Try those areas.

I've seen a lot of 30-50 characters in the past month than the past 2 years on this server.

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The problem is to me primarily twofold:

 

1) There's barely any middle-aged characters so if you play one, you still have to engage in activities and RP surrounded by people decades younger than you. This leads to the second point.

 

2) People RP older characters (particularly males) for comic relief almost exclusively, unless their faction dictates their age. This is in part a consequence of the first point because older characters need to insert themselves into age-inappropriate contexts to find RP.

 

It's all a repeating process: there's no stable population of older characters that aren't based around factions (and often glued to their job), which discourages people from playing more of them because they won't have peers to interact with, etc. etc.

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