i was skimming CNN, and came across a story about a study that shows an increase in the number of minors committing sex offenses. there's a debate about whether the increase comes from increased sex/violence awareness in minors, or if it's a result of better reporting and tracking measures. there's good arguments on both sides, but the whole idea got me thinking about what life is like for kids in SR.

in the US, and in much of the first world, kids are important. we try to protect them, in a physical sense and and a mental/emotional sense--not just our kids, our own biological younger family members, but all kids, everywhere. the entire basis of the MPAA rating system is the concept that human beings of certain ages should not be introduced to certain ideas or images.

this value is not shared by large portions of the rest of the world. kids form a large part of the 'military' forces in the brushfire wars raging in Africa. kids work in sweatshops around the world. kids form a huge part of the global slave trade. granted, there probably isn't anywhere on the planet you can go where parents won't protect their own children (except maybe SPARTAAAAAAA), but the idea that all kids are worthy of protection by sole virtue of their age is fairly unique to the first world. and i'm not describing some dark cyberpunk future, here. this is the real world. this is how things are, and how they have been for tens of thousands of years.

so, how do kids fare when we are discussing a dark cyberpunk future? prior to 4th edition, the only time anyone was likely to play a kid was if it was an otaku. and people complained about it, because the idea of a 12-year-old kid running the streets seemed incongruous. but is it? kids start joining gangs, in real life, at around age 10 or so.

the key concept, here, is teenagers. before the 20th century, or so, teenagers simply didn't exist. as soon as you became physically capable of handling an adult's job, you became an adult. you didn't get nine years to shrug off your childish things. i think that in SR, teenagers have largely disappeared again. they're an endangered species, surviving mainly in corporate enclaves, where they can be protected and sheltered from harsh realities.

of course, what really makes things interesting and weird is the fact that those enclaves are so very close to the street. a runner who started out as a company man will see a 12-year-old ganger as a kid. he won't be as quick to draw down if that ganger attacks him, he'll probably take the soft option. a runner who started out as a ganger, though? he'll see that 12-year-old as a threat to be taken seriously.

so if a 12-year-old can be a ganger, can't he be a runner? i would say probably not, for the simple reason that most Johnsons are corporate (or at least have corporate sensibilities). if your mage is 12, you couldn't bring him to the meet. not to mention the fact that it's hard to augment a kid; any cyberware you stick in them, they're likely to grow out of--which would be messy, to say the least. so kid runners would be pretty rare.

but not so rare that you couldn't toss one at your runners as an NPC, just to shake 'em up.

The restrictions on child labor are almost complete a creation of the Progressive Movement, something which in the dark future has lost completely. All of the reforms the Progressive Movement made, from public edcation and child labor protections all the way up to social security and medical aid for the elderly are gone.

There's no 8 hour work day, there's no 40 hour work week, there's no minimum wage, and if you want to hire 8 year olds to operate looms you just do that.

---

So yeah, a 12 year old can be a runner. People may not take her seriously, but only in the way that you don't take a child soldier from the LRA seriously - you seriously suspect that they'll get distracted and kill a bunch of extra people instead of completing their mission.

-Frank

that depends on how you want to reconcile these ideas with the existing material. SR was written by people who think of kids as kids, rather than as mini-adults, and it shows in the setting--with the minor (ha!) exception of otaku, kids are never presented as viable runners. it's possible to ignore that, because the setting information also never explicitly states that kids aren't viable runners.

personally, i'm thinking of writing up a kid runner right now. but if somebody else feels different, there's a good explanation for why, in their game world, kid runners are rare or unheard of.

Never seen City of God, I take it?

[/edit] I wrote an SR story with kids in it: Countdown[/pimp]

Awesome thread.

Here's what I think.

Yes, kids join up gangs reeeal early. Especially in Shadowrun. GMs totally should have punk-ass 12 year olds come up to runner and jam a gun in their face.

But here's the problem. Kids can carry guns and kids can shoot guns, and guns can kill you. But what else can a kid do? Can he make elaborate plans? Determine what's best for him medium-to-long term? Negociate - knowing when and how to make compromises?

Few precocious kids aside, the answer is no. Kids can point and shoot. Kids can execute orders. But they can't lead, can't make good decisions. CERTAINLY not enough to be a shadowrunner. Kids, by definition, have like zero life experience. They don't have enough background to make real decisions.

Even a kid brought up in hellholes like the Barrens, Kowloon, El Infierno, etc, who may be petty big survivors and pretty tough, cannot perform duties of a grown-up.

The increase in the number of child sex offenders is a matter of increased reporting but I wouldn't call it better reporting. Uptight reporting would be more accurate.

Twenty years ago, if Timmy and Tammy (or Timmy and Tommy) were caught playing doctor in the garden then people would just say "kids will be kids" and the parents might sit down and have a lite version of "the talk" to help satiate curiosity.

Today, if Timmy and Tammy are caught playing doctor the police are called and their sent fro Juvie for incest and, depending on the jurisdiction, statutory rape. It is really a matter of the extreme uptightness about child sexuality resulting in the criminalization of normal healthy exploration, for the most part.


Child Shadowrunners might be rare, but I won't completely agree that this will be certain. I would assume that child gangers and child soldiers would both be common, with both enlisted at very early ages, particularly if they are orks or trolls due to their quicker physical development.

I'm also going to assume that a number of skilled gangers and soldiers eventually graduate to become Shadowrunners or Mercenaries and among these will be some child gangers and child soldiers. Child soldiers in particular will be the most likely to go AWOL simply because of the condition under which they live and those who do go AWOL would have little to offer in way of skills, other than their military abilities.
However, I would also assume that being a Shadowrunner or mercenary generally requires a superior skillset and most children, even gangers and mercenaries, will not have the talent or the drive to develop a superior skillset in adverse conditions (most people won't, in general).

The only child runners I ever made was a ten-year-old ork who was taught terrorist tactics and murder by her hardcore Human Nation parents and then murdered them after she goblinized because she bought into the crap they were spewing about how orks were evil and thought it was what she was supposed to do. In this case, she has a superior skillset because she was trained from birth to be a soldier in a race-war by crazy but skilled people.

Such training-from-birth and other forms of indoctrination are the best way to create a skilled child shadowrunner, much like the movie Soldier. If one wanted to create the perfect assassin and had unlimited resources, one would not pick a military sharpshooter but instead one would pick a baby and school that baby in combat from the very beginning, creating an agent who wouldn't be taken seriously due to age but who is still extremely deadly. As such, the number of child shadowrunners really depend on the adults around the children.

I would presume that most homeless/squatter children in the barrens join a gang at an early age, around seven or eight, simply to survive. At that age, they would be employed as couriers, for the most part, but they would also be encourage to commit easy stick-up jobs and easy murders, those that do would right more quickly than those that don't.

I would argue that internationally there is an effort to protect children by the UN. Lots of nations have signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

This is where lots of Americans begin jumping up and down and go, "nyah nyah nyah the UN sucks anything they do doesn't count STARVING STICK FIGURE CHILDREN BLEAARGGHYYYhhh EEKAA EEKAA EEKAA DOOODDAAAHHHHHH SHUUGGHHHHHHHBUUURGGGHHHHH vote republican!"

That being said, the UN (and UNICEF in particular) *has* accomplished some things to the end of protecting children even if the record isn't perfect. The UN is largely responsible for many successful immunuization programs around the world. UNICEF made ORS widely available around the world, a measure which both saves lives and is extremely cost effective.

So, things aren't perfect, but it's certainly not all hopeless either.


Of course, UN bashing can be fun. Like when some double digit IQ guy from Utah claims that the UN wants to take away handguns from private citizens in the US and totally missing the point of disarmament because he dosen't actually know about the negative impacts of landmines in developing countries around the world or the history of the genocide in Rwanada and erroneously thinks that this is somehow all about him.

While this is true of the modern UN, the Sixth World UN is a megacorporate lap-dog that primarily exists to legitimize certain actions by the CC.

A child born and raised in the Barrens would realize the need to do whatever is needed to survive.

Although a 12 year old might not be fully developed physically or mentally they still may have several skills useful to Shadowrunners. Give young kid some training in thief and acting skills and he could be useful for gathering Intel.

Need to kidnap a wealthy execs kid. Need someone to fit through those narrow openings. Equipped with radios and pure instinct, immune to hackers, undetectable by scanners, cheaper than drones. Kids the under looked commodity can pick pockets, cause distraction, lay down cover fire, and go overlooked by them corporate adults.
Call Dodger's Orfinatarium to hire a qualified kid today. . . Looking out for kids for 150 years.

I think that the question to ask is why would childhood survive in the lower to mid teirs of the corp landscape either. After all its like FrankTrollman said, Labour Laws are a thing of the past, if its cheaper to hire a bunch od 6-8 year olds to run a sweat-shop type factory then its in the corps best interests to do so.

No, I'm not sure that childhood as we know it today would exist anywhere outside of upper management and other rich families that can afford to simply give money to a freeloader.

Middle management has the ability to acquire a number of comforts despite lacking the raw power that upper management possesses.

~J

SR also seems to have a healthy non-corporate middle class.

there was an ep of The Unit where a drug/weapons dealer employed child soldiers. the protagonists managed to capture the dealer without engaging the child soldiers--but it was clear they would have, had another option not presented itself.

and yeah, like Wounded Ronin said, there are militia in real life that are manned mostly by kids. there's no reason (aside from questions of conscience or reputation) why you can't slap an AK into a kid's hands and emplace them for an L-shaped ambush. it's not like they're going to be significantly less effective than a bunch of untrained gangers.

An AK is a weapon so simple that a child can use it. And they do.

-Frank

heheh. that was an awesome movie.

In the "developing" world laws against the exploitation of children are largely ineffectual, particularly in places with economies that are so craptastic that children are the only viable commodity.

Pragmatic jurisdictions would legalize but regulate all forms of child labor including the UN's "worst forms" of child labor, simply because a legalized and regulated system is far safer than an underground system controlled by professional criminals who risk severe jail time.

...The original KK (SR1) was fifteen when she started running (& it showed). Like your average teenager, she tended to be a bit impulsive. The team's mage always kind of looked out for her, even though as a combatant she was very dangerous.

Leela was 18, when she started but has the personality and outlook of a 13 - 14 year old. She is a total genius when it comes to music, various sciences (like chemistry, physics, structural engineering), and demolitions. Leela actually became the grounds for a new Flaw my GM wrote up called Young Looking. I expanded on this in my campaign and wrote up a flaw titled Childlike Nature.

My newest 'Kid on the block", the little con artist adept, Da Brat doesn't quite remember her actual age (15, 16?). She's been living on the streets for a good part of her life. She started as your typical gutter urchin but after discovering her unique influence abilities worked her way up to become quite the operator and a pretty good street fighter to boot.

Yes, playing younger characters can be a challenge since they usually can't get into clubs & bars in better areas of town & wouldn't really want to in the bad parts. And yes, they usually are not taken seriously by others, even their own teammates (which was a bad thing to do in Leela's case). However, if they can prove their worth, as a couple of my characters have done (Da Brat is still waiting in the wings), they can be valuable members of a runner team.

Think of having a thirteen year old who can booby trap grenades and make "Play Dough" sculptures out of C-12 (with a radio detonator surprise hidden inside).

On kid runners. One issue with allowing that is that it should be modeled in the skills/stats of the char. You can give a kid an AK, but if a PC wants to play them they're going to try and convince the GM to give them automatics 6 with an assault rifle spec. And that will be annoying. Also I'd think a campaign will lose a little bit of it's edge or rationality with kids present. I suppose it wouldn't have to, but it would tend to.

Also remember that the concept of "kids" in the sixth world is a little messed up as metahumans mature at such different rates. By the time an Orc is old enough to drink they're middle aged.

But I do think the topic is interesting. In virtual realities they touched on children in corps (where they are raised to be the next generation of loyal corp employees.). And I imagine kids in the barrerns aren't that different from kids in the other crapholes of the world.

However what happens to kids who don't fit those situations? I imagine parents hooking up their babies to a trode rig to get them to be quiet and to play with Virtua Nanny (british looking of course). I doubt as the current generation of short attention spanned medicated kids starts breeding we'll see less chemical parenting. Hypospray type dispensers probably make it easy and fun.

"WWWWWWAAAHHHH I WANT THE COOKIES I WANT THE COOKIES"

*pssshht*

"Ooooh. pretty lights"

"Yes dear now come along."

and of course you don't have to bother with the whole pregnancy thing. Just have your kid grown in a vat and pick them up when they're ready.


Long story short I imagine it's a weird world for kids with lotsa disfunction.

I can't really see kids being shadowrunners till they are in their mid to late teens. They may be effective at killing and things at 12 while they have combat drugs, but they lake the karma to be true shadowrunner caliber till they get a few more years. If you were playing a low powered game with 250 or 300 bp's then it would be quite possible to be 'children'.

Also I don't think kids would really exist even in middle and upper class. By the time they were in their teens they would be training for their future jobs. Corp sponsored schools would just be elaborate brainwashing and training for whatever position the child showed an aptitude in. They would probably be treated as adults and not as kids.

Well, our experience here in Toronto the last few years is that ganger shooters, most of them teenagers, have very little accuracy beyond a few feet in front of them. Bystanders get hit more often than the intended target.

We're not talking Torronto, or even Brooklyn. I see SR gangers as being more reminiscent of those from South American Favellas, but with better funding - very scary indeed.

Getting good at a skill isn't only practice, but also learning appropriate techniques. If you focus on the target and not on your front sight, you'll never be as good as someone who actually knows how to use the gun. And ultimately, learning without a teacher depends not only on practice, but the creativity to try new and varied techniques, something not especially common in our species any more, it would seem. A gang that had some ex military folk would be able to bring people up to a reasonable level, but without someone to educate them, the school of hard knocks will only get you so much.

I'm going to disagree. Modern shooting techniques were not developed from thin air, they were actually developed in combat or in response to things that happened in combat. The life of an SR ganger is so much more kill-or-be-killed than that of a modern ganger that natural selection dictates that those who live long probably have superior skills. Older surviving gangers would then teach the shooting skills that they developed to the younger gangers.

Child soldiers don't really equate to child runners though.

Children will get used and abused by people inclined to do so, becasue it's easy to do. So yeah, they recruit them as soldiers, but it's a long way from that to a person with enough strength of character and the independance to strike out on their own and start running the shadows. And a child who does show any kind of professionalism is likely going to be very indoctrinated into their surroundings, and more likely move up in the world they already live in, rather than become runners. It takes adult cynicism to decide that risking your life for a few nuyen and an employer who will screw you at the earliest oppurtunity, just for some notion of freedom, is better than the alternative.

Not a hard and fast rule or anything, but I still think child runners would be a rarity at best.

...Leela was one of those "few", since she was removed from her original surroundings (at the time, against her will). She became a very valuable member of the team she hooked up with due to her ability to adapt and her extensive urban guerilla background from her days in Zagreb.

In many ways, a resistance operative is similar to a Shadowrunner in that both live under the radar and frequently are involved in acts of sabotage and subterfuge, as well as information gathering.

One interesting cultural bit is that full-immersion VR games might finally make the game trained kill-bots that everyone is so afraid. If you've been playing Battlefield: Corp Wars in VR since you were 8, there's probably a lot of skill transfer when the activation code comes down outta the pipe and all those little kill-bots come online.

I mean, the tech for mind-changing computer VR programs has been around since, what 2040?. And the Corp Wars game franchise has been going strong for 8 years now, with over 50 million players worldwide. Think Jim Jones meets WoW, with a lot of dirt cheap black market AKs.

Anothing thing to consider is that a child that grows up in that kind of environment is going to have serious, serious mental problems. Child soldiers are not alright after they stop fighting. People aren't machines. A kid that kills is gonna have serious issues growing up, which may preclude him from having a clear and rationnal enough mind to become a shadowrunner (or anything, for that matter).

I think you're underestimating both the resilience of the human psyche and the level to which the bar of "alright" will have fallen by the 2050s.

~J

and if they become runners, it's not like they ever leave that environment. 'Nam movies aside, PTSD often doesn't really start setting in until, y'know, post-stress. the life of a runner isn't all that unstressful.

There's no such thing as an ex-runner. There's always some loose end that you thought you had tied up but didn't.

...hehhehheh...

Just like there is no Ex-CIA, UGB, or MI-6 Agent...

Always something left in the corner of the closet...

If we wanted to be funny and parody society rather than be realistic we could claim that young gang bangers are t3h d34dly because they play violent first person shooter video games that make them into lethal killing machines.