My intended story involves something of a prologue session or two in which the characters are youths to be followed by something when they are older. Notionally the characters would be two lifepath characters for the prologue session and three lifepath characters for the regular time.
How would you suggest handling this for character burning? - bear in mind a standard period of time needs to pass between prologue and main campaign so if you were to be strict about it then it’s not sensible for some characters to have a 2 year life path and others to have a 6 year.
Im not sure I care to be so strict as that but I am hoping someone has a more elegant way to handle it.
You can give the players a few years of practice after the prologue. Be sure to place restrictions on their time. They don’t get to practice for 20 hours a day unless they’re rich recluses. They’d have jobs, family, obligations, etc.
You can dictate how much time per day they can practice and in general what types of skills. This isn’t adventure time, either. If they were adventuring, you’d play it out. So point them to the proper types of skills — academic, craftsman, artisan, etc.
I guess part of it comes down to whether the idea is to:
burn 3 LP characters, and then “pull them back” to what they would have been at 2 LP
or
burn 2 LP characters, and then burn/add on the remaining lifepath after the prologue, based on how the prologue went.
Either of these would work well.
If you’re going with the first option, of players burning 3 LP characters and dialling them back to their 2 LP equivalent, then you know what their ages would be when the game launches after the period between the prologue and “chapter 1”.
Quite often, the range of years a lifepath covers can “soak up” that difference.
E.g.
a Peasant Born ->Farmer -> Midwife is 26 years old, and would have been a farmer from 9-16.
(EDIT: Or, you know, what @luke said. That would work very well.)