I'm not sold on the fact that I thing attention spans are less than what they were and they may not get over 1.
I doubt attention spans are actually any shorter.... but I think "the information age" has veered very hard toward rewarding a short attention span and not rewarding longer ones, so I'm not surprised they
seem shorter. That and of course the classic, "Back in
my day we walked six miles through the snow... uphill... both directions!" The grass is always greener in old people's memories, yours and mine no doubt included.
You know the zero level harp is a very good idea. two things for me it might not solve
1) the big rule book intimidation factor
2) the complexity of the game...still
On point two, i'm sold on the fact a 10 or 11 year old can read and understand HARP.
Big rule book intimidation factor, I dunno what to tell you. However, not only do I agree with you on point 2, I think one of the benefits of 'zero level adventures' is that it takes some of the complexity
out. After all, most of your choices are made by being _____ profession from _____ culture. Spread out the free ranks,
with a max skill rank of 3 (well over 50 DPs worth of ranks/talents IIRC.) Okay, you have 50 DPs to spend, still subject to the rank limit,
which has already been hit with free (cultural/professional) ranks in most important skills. But note that well over half of "character development" was not spending DPs, but
just 2 choices, profession and culture.
Sounds to me like chargen will be
1) Pick race/profession/culture, put those ranks where you want them
2) Spend 50 DPs, which I suspect will mostly be talents, with a few frills around the edges to make up what professional/cultural ranks didn't quite cover to your satisfaction.
You're done. By the time you roll your first
1st level character at age 13, you've done the above a couple of times and learned a lot of the HARP system 'by osmosis'.
The biggest obstacle I see to the idea is expanding the low-level end of the bestiary to include more things that zero level characters can face and overcome.