Origin Stories: Druid
You guys ever see that really old movie Spider-Man? It’s got this part where our wall-crawling protagonist is just discovering his spider-powers, and that moment has burned itself into my geeky brain. That’s because for me, the fantasy of gaining super powers is all about that pivotal, joyful moment of discovery. It’s about super-powered fun. Who hasn’t wanted to web-sling around Manhattan? Or Hulk-smash an inconvenient inanimate object? Or fly up, up and away from your own mundane life? Woo indeed, Tobey Maguire. Woo indeed.
Unfortunately, that moment is tough to render in-game. It gets subsumed into your backstory, and we all tend to show up in Session 1 as reasonably experienced heroes. That allows us to get to those climactic moments of hero vs. villain action that much quicker, but I think it’s a high price to pay. That leaves me wondering how we might design campaigns to allow players to experience that moment of discovery. Some possibilities:
- Exaltation: If you guys know Laurel’s other comic, you’re probably familiar with the Exalted setting. If not, the quick and dirty version is that god-like power finds and binds itself to mortal souls during moments of great heroism. One popular campaign style in that system is to have everyone start out as mere mortals, only gaining their powers at suitably dramatic moments. That can wind up being a little dice-dependent, but it does allow the player and the character to experience the ‘suddenly I’m awesome’ moment at the same time.
- Preludes: Another technique with a White Wolf pedigree, preludes allow you to play out your backstory at the table. They’re generally short, taking up 10-15 minutes per player, and they can sometimes feel a bit railroady since they tell a story that’s already happened. However, they’re great if you want to zero in on the pivotal moments in a PC’s life leading up to ‘you all meet in a tavern.’ Gaining your awesome powers is exactly that kind of moment.
- Low-Stakes Intro: l lucked into this technique during a Curse of the Crimson Throne game. Laurel’s aehter kineticist was a professional thief in that campaign, and I opened on a botched burglary. Creeping in under cover of a noisy extra-marital affair going on upstairs, our lovable scoundrel was unlucky enough to execute his heist at the same time an enraged, pistol-toting husband came home. It was full-on shenanigans as the kineticist and a semi-naked philanderer both tried to escape the premises at once. It wasn’t a moment of ‘discovering your powers’ for the PC, but it did allow the player to introduce those powers in a fun, low-stakes scenario outside of the usual “have adventure, fight monster” style.
- Amnesia: Better suited to one shots and convention games than full campaigns, the amnesia start asks players to sit down without character sheets. They only discovery their identities and powers through play. For example, trying to open a jammed door is impossible for everyone at the table except the super-strength dude. The reinforced steel plating crumples under her touch, and so that player gets the fun experience of discovering her powers at the same time as her PC.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever had the chance to play out the thrill of gaining your powers at the table? Or is that always a backstory thing that happens off-screen? Sound off with your own techniques for foregrounding the “power-up moment” down in the comments!
ARE YOU THE KIND OF DRAGON THAT HOARDS ART? Then you’ll want to check out the “Epic Hero” reward level on our Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Like the proper fire-breathing tyrant you are, you’ll get to demand a monthly offerings suited to your tastes! Submit a request, and you’ll have a personalized original art card to add to your hoard. Trust us. This is the sort of one-of-a-kind treasure suitable to a wyrm of your magnificence.
I’ve had a player start as a barbarian and multiclass into sorcerer after a while. It came after a point where her character and the local flirt hooked up, and soon thereafter, both developed infernal sorcery.
The stay-at-home NPC took to the new powers a bit worse than the experienced adventurer. Suffice to say, she went a bit mad with worry about what the hell (sorry about the pun) sort of magic was awakening inside her and tried to conjure a devil in a big ritual with her new powers to take them away.
Barbarian/sorcerer saved the day, and got to have a nice moment of assuring the scared girl that she didn’t need a devil’s help. She had the barbarian’s already, and she wasn’t going to let anything bad happen to her.
Nice! Especially cool to see the multiclass treated as more than “I’ve got some new bonuses.”
Unrelated: Young Druid is super adorable.
We must never see young Fighter, lest he prove to be precocious and cute.
Ahem: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/the-handbook-of-heroes-13
Precocious, yes; cute, rather. Wholesome? Not really.
Young Thief (as seen here), is most certainly freaking adorable.
Wait until we see young Eldritch Archer (in fox or humanoid form)!
Wow. Those devilish STIs are nothing to joke about. (And the demonic one are even worse!)
It later turned out to be the barbarian’s fault.
She was the one with diabolists for parents, though she didn’t know that at the time.
The RP to Gameplay aspect of this is hard to pull off. I tried it once but unless you are playing in a world where the nuances of magic and class abilities are completely foreign knowledge to all players, it’s hard not to figure your class out after a few bright interactions.
I played a level 3 orc warlock who thought he was a wizard, but inadvertently took up a demonic pact. He had a crow familiar which was actually an Imp, and I made it a point to NOT get Eldritch blast, instead I grabbed Green-Flame Blade and Mending. My other Spell was Burning Hands, Command, Healing Elixir, Comprehend Language, Darkness, and Misty Step. Yes, this is the classic “Hur Dur orc wizard” build, except I at least tried to pick spells and abilities that would make him fairly viable even with a low casting stat. The real problem was that pretty much everyone else in the party noticed my lack of spell casting and my penchant of smashing things with my greatclub, a weapon wizards don’t actually get.
It doesn’t help we had an ACTUAL wizard in the party too, so it only took about one combat encounter for the party to figure out I was a warlock before my character did. And to be fair, he had his suspicions, but for personal reasons he was denying it a lot. Mainly out of pride as he doesn’t want to admit he’s a subpar mage and the only reason he has magic is through no effort of his own, but thanks to being gifted powers by his patron.
Honestly when it comes to magic powers, those are harder to fake unless everyone plays really dumb or you’re in a party of noobs. So trying to do the whole “I just discovered how to use my powers” things is harder to play around with if everyone else is even slightly competent at using different class abilities. Physical abilities are easier to roleplay your character picking up, but they also tend to be rather subtle or lacking in much major impact. My aforementioned warlock later took on Paladin levels which means he could actually use martial weapons and a shield, something he could not do as a chain demon pact melee warlock. No one really noticed though since being in the front of a fight was a fairly normal state of being for my warlock, now he just happens to have a better arsenal for it. And smiting.
Level-based games, and especially streamlined ones like 5e, are tough for this sort of thing. That’s because established in-game concept like “the warlock” are common knowledge. You come off as a comic idiot when you try to masquerade as another class:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/kid-up
In something like Mutants and Masterminds though, with it’s suite of highly modular powers, you have a lot more opportunity to discover your abilities.
I think we’re on a different trope than that though. The denial and insistence that “I’m a wizard, not a warlock” is one way to go about it. But if you RP’d gaining your Eldritch invocations, meeting your patron, or picking your spells by communing with a specific fiend, then your powers still feel special. And that’s what we’re really talking about here. Not just the need to fool the players at the table, but to make Eldritch blast feel like more than a heavy crossbow. Establishing your powers as more than “I’m a warlock,” but as an actually interesting story element.
I was rolled up a draconic bloodline sorcerer, who took only fire spells. I planned to have them be afraid of their newfound powers, and still learning to control them. Unfortunately, this character was used during a mid-level one-shot, which meant that I had fireballs and sorcery points to burn; rather than playing the timid, new-to-magic sorcerer, I ended up going full-on pyromaniac, bringing flaming death upon my enemies. I am now thinking paladins may be a better option for roleplay-exploring new powers, what with the don’t-burn-everything clauses in most oaths.
It helps that you gain your spells after level 1 as a paladin. That’s a built in excuse to discover your magic after character gen.
I recall a World of Darkness-type game where our were discovering strange and new powers in themselves…
But that was less “joy of discovery” and more “me being first to realize our characters were transforming into demons”.
Another – homebrew – game was all about discovering and honing new abilities in order to save the world, and that was pretty fun.
An especially memorable game, also WoD, featured a lot of self-discovery… Because our characters turned out to be cryptids that had been brainwashed to forget their true natures and had to band together to survive. I wound up playing a very gentlemanly Azlu. ^_^ Even managed to save a werewolf party member who was bleeding out by discorporating into a spider swarm and wrapping her wounds up with webbing. The paramedics were highly surprised…
WoD is very much in my mind with this trope. The “new monster” is the other side of the super power coin, bit discovering your nature is central to the werewolf/vampire experience.
The PbtA supers game Masks doesn’t play though this stuff, as such, but one of the last stages of character creation asks each character a question about the events that brought the team together, so you build up something of a shared prelude as you combine the answers.
Things like “what dangerous enemy did you defeat?”, “what were the signs that this was the start of something bigger?”, and “just how much property damage did we do?”.
But yeah, it’s hard to do a proper origin / ascension / exaltation scene… usually, we’d just treat it as initial backstory, and keep referring back to it in future. And it should come up again in future, because it’s not a proper origin scene if there’s no unfinished business involved…
It’s just a matter of choosing where the action starts. I bet you could replace that pseudo-prelude with an actual combat and get the full effect.
The big trouble is that “discovering your powers” is sometimes unfun for players. “Wait… Let me look at my playbook real quick. I think I’m allowed to do XYZ thing here.” Hard to build a spontaneous and fluid scene when you’re just getting used to your guy mechanically.
While I never had a moment that was completely like what you described, I did have something like that shortly around level 10 with my old bard Elliot the Unlucky. As you can tell based on his title, Elliot faced a lot, and I mean a lot, of bad luck. 1 in a thousand case instances of bad luck happened regularly to him, with enemies reliably succeeding on their saves despite the odds, him consistently failing his skill checks, getting criticized often, and so on. This was not helped by the fact that he was kinda at odds with his party, as the only good character out of a bunch of guys that started out neutral, before taking a downward swing over time. In addition, this was everyones first time with 5e, so there were a lot of jokes about bards being bad in game, and out to an extent as well. This is not too mention the fact that had lost his old male half elf body, and got reincarnated into a female halfling body, which was doing a number on his mental state. He had kinda been feeling powerless for a while. However, around level 10, first of all, his string of awful luck finally ended, which was amazing, as he no longer had to worry about enemies making every save, or critting him making him instantly lose concentration on his spells. In addition, he was finally really coming into his own as a spell caster with this coming to a point with my discovery of how awesome my absolute favorite spell is, animate objects, during an invasion of either waterdeep or neverwinter, i forget which, by a bunch of dragons. All the characters were separated and on their own, which everyone thought was going to be a bad sign for my guy, as even when he had decent moments before, that was from support moments, like with making an enemy miss a guy at low health with cutting words, or bringing a guy back into a fight with polymorph. Now though, for the first time, I whipped out Animate objects, and felt the true power of a full spell caster in 5e. First dragon I saw, I tore him to pieces with a bunch of pots and pans from a nearby store, followed by another soon after. I saw a bunch swarming elsewhere dimension doored over there to where an ally was struggling with a bunch of cultists and he just ran in and destructive waved the lot of them, knocking them all out and letting my pans take down the remaining, before then bringing that ally and myself to another ally with another dimension door. I just kept having clutch moments, using my spells to their fullest and it felt like I was truly enjoying the most out of this character for the first time, like I wasn’t just constantly struggling to be relevant, and it felt amazing for both me and him. From there on out, those moments didn’t really end, and my character went from struggling against his allies to being a true frontman for the party both in universe social situations, as he was now a lore bard who didn’t constantly roll 1s, in combat as he kept on throwing out battle shaping spell after spell, and for just general utility as he was both a full caster who i spent a lot of spells known on utility stuff for and a guy with incredible ability in a lot of skills, and it had all started with this shining moment. While it wasn’t like he suddenly got these powers out of nowhere, it really felt like that for me and him, and I loved it.
Like it really was a big change, as before then since around level 3, he had just been really struggling to just be useful in fights, as he was just always cced or knocked out, or the others killed the enemies before he could do anything, or the enemies just made there saves, it was just ridiculous, like the last 2 boss battles before this fight really showed this, as in one he was just cced the entire fight, because he could not roll above a 5 no matter what, despite the fight taking place across an entire large building over around 10-12 rounds, with him being cced first round, and in the fight before this the others, who were more focused on high damage, rolled better on inits, and just nuked the boss hard with good rolls, so that when my guy got his turn, his support spell didn’t really help at all, as the boss was already basically down. Like that whole moment I talked about above was like if one of those comic relief characters who rarely had any successes and was more just their to laugh at as they failed, suddenly turned into the main protagonist. It was just such a huge swing as his bad luck ended and he got to really use his spells.
Interesting to me that this was your first foray into 5e. I guess it’s easier to have this moment of discovery when the game and it’s powers are still new to you as a player.
Hmm, never experienced something like this as DM or player. I guess that the White Wolf Préludes technique would make the most sense.
Every PC in 5e has to have a Personality Trait, Ideal, Bond and Flaw (and the XTG expands this with class-specific traits like a paladin’s Nemesis or a warlock’s Binding Mark). The probability is high that at least one of those quirks is “playable” as a short introduction scene.
It would most definitely be “railroady” as the event in question already happened, but with the player designing that event for their PC, I don’t think it would cause much of a fuss.
As an interesting point of comparison, it’s actually possible to die during character gen in Traveler. Those random rolls can be a bugger!
In terms of D&D though, there is such a thing as a “zero level character funnel” out of the OSR community that seems to hit this moment.
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/11kobh/the_zero_level_funnel_have_you_used_it_what_do/
You only gain your first character level after you survive the first adventure. It gives you that “before I was famous” type feel, and I think that’s part of the appeal for me.
Whoa, I have difficulties picturing that. Is there a d100 table explaining your current status and 1=”Dead, roll new character”?
This 0LVL-funnel sounds fascinating. I don’t know of any zero level rules in 5e, so I guess homebrew it is:
Everyone has only their background, background gear and race, everyone has 1d8+CON (min1) HP and all attributes are 8 (-1) with the exception of attributes connected to skills in the background, which are 10 (0). Conduct during the funnel (physical solutions, stealth, arcane, tactical etc.) allow further specializing as a class/subclass connected to that style of play (fighter/rogue/bard/wizard/ranger etc.)
I only know what I’ve heard as far as Traveler goes. Apparently its character gen is straight up bonkers:
https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/death-during-character-creation.195966/
I can’t tell if Wizard would be giddy or annoyed that her character got her parents offed by bandits, was discriminated against in her youth, got coerced by the Ratfolk mafia to do their dirty work, only to die pathetically in an ally from a drug overdose, all at char gen.
O, it’s definitly true. When I did try Traveller my first two characters died during CharGen. The same with Twilight 2000, which was from the same company, and had a similar system and CharGen. On the other hand, the whole CharGen gives a feel for what kind of person your character will be.
I remember making two characters for the original Traveller.
The first died pretty early in character generation, I think during a second tour of duty in the navy.
The second one survived character creation, but failed to muster out of the navy until he retired (you had to roll after every 4 year tour to get out of the navy) at the ripe old age of 70, a highly decorated Admiral with his own personal ship.
I think the game master gave up on running that game after character generation for the other players resulted in mostly death or uninteresting characters.
Well that’s too bad. I like the idea of giving up some control during character gen. It strikes me as an interesting RP challenge. But if the system refuses to cooperate….
Always been a question for me – when your relationship with your deity hits the points of being able to serve as an agent on this plane with divine magic – what makes a Cleric vs an Adept? This does also somewhat get into the perennial question: “Besides a person with a character sheet, how’re you hitting level 15 when the average is 3?” admittedly.
Not that all characters need a ‘what makes you special’ more than ‘what did you do with it’ either.
The metaphors always break down when you look at the mechanics too closely. Rather than worry about it, I tend to apply head cannon to the problem.
“I’m one of the chosen ones” or “adventuring levels you up faster” or “slaying monsters passes their power into me” are all viable. It’s just about picking one and running with it in your own fiction.
Have you guys done a blog about the use of the Insight skill in 5e? I find it rather ambiguous. Or maybe I’m an idiot. Probably the latter.
Do you view the 5e “Insight” as substantially different than the 3.X “Sense Motive?”
I don’t think I’ve done a comic on either explicitly, so onto the list it goes!
I’ve only played 5th so I cant say. But in my EXTREMELY limited experience, insight is usually used to determine if someone is lying. Theres situations that I could foresee that make using this skill tricky for a DM. At the risk of making this comment overly long, I’ll give some examples.
Let’s say an NPC is being completely truthful, but for some reason a player thinks they are lying. They roll for insight and roll low. What do you, the DM, tell them? Or would you even let this situation happen? This also has the potential to create an interesting dynamic where the players dont trust this NPC even when they are telling the truth, sort of like the trope where the mean/evil looking guy is actually good, a la Snape.
Then what if you have a lying NPC and the player rolls low? Do you tell them “they are telling the truth”? Would that not make the players pretty much know it’s a lie since they know it was a low roll? Would you I stead just say “you are not sure”?
I’d also like to propose alternate uses for insight. It’s a wisdom skill, and I interpret wisdom as “street smarts” or “experience”, where as intelligence is “book smarts”. I have in the past had players roll insight when trying to figure out how a mechanism they are not familiar with works. The player is drawing from past experiences or knowledge to deduce how something operates.
I would use the magic words, “As far as you can tell…” It keeps it nicely ambiguous about whether the NPC is actually truthful, or if the roll just wasn’t good enough, without really revealing any information one way or the other. Especially if the roll was ~10-15 where it’s really not obvious to the players whether it should succeed or not.
What if it was a 5? Too low to ever have succeeded.
Well, that’s where the ambiguity is important. “You don’t know any more about this character’s motivations than you did 30 seconds ago” doesn’t say anything about whether there is more that they could have learned. And if they end up distrusting a friendly NPC because of it, then that’s perfectly fine by me. Maybe if they really latch on it’s a sign I should add some shady background for them to discover and feel right about.
I ask for my players’ modifier and roll behind the screen for this reason.
That’s a very interesting idea
Personally I like to give the same answers on a given sense motive/insight result in both the cases where the target is lying but rolled higher or is telling actually the truth. If the NPC isn’t lying I roll the dice and do the math anyway but it’s just for show.
So a real low result get’s a “you don’t know” but with a 5+ they get “you think he’s telling the truth” or “he seems to believe what he says” whether he actually is or not. I find that the desired effect of the player doubting even a true statement on a poor roll happens all on its own, so I just focus on not giving the game away by giving identical answers in both cases.
I also like using sense motive or insight like skills to give them information about NPC motivation or emotions, for instance “He said that because he is afraid and lashing out” or “when he mentioned the knights name you noticed a hint of envy”.
Toby Maguire?! Nicolas Hammond…
I have not in fact seen that really old movie. I suspect I need to do some YouTubing.
Two origin story comics in a row? Wowzers! Although the titles are inconsistent between them.
I assume that’s young and adorable Druid in her… Young(?) Years?
Changed. Somehow didn’t make the update between the back end and the actual title.
Backstory reveals wise, we’ve had one much as described in the climax of Return of the Runelords. Spoilery stuff below, so be warned.
In essence, every player was given the task of writing up a small scene of how they got their campaign traits for that particular Adventure Path (a pseudo-feat ability that tied you directly into the story in a minor or major way), that we then got to ‘view’ as a group. For my Ratfolk Wizard, the scene occurred a short time after his actual backstory that set him on the path of wizardry, an incident that blasted his eye off and made him half-crazed. It was a simple scene of him researching and practicing magic in front of a ancient Thassilon ruin – a scene that would be foreshadowing for the climactic events of the past, present and future and a good backdrop for his party’s success and the climax of the campaign, where he reaches level 20.
In other words, it was performed not unlike the flashbacks/backstory segways in the Glass Cannon/Androids & Aliens podcast, as well as the TAZ DM-narrated story scenes). I’m not sure if it was of the DMs own design or written in, but it made for a wondrous tie to the very start of the game.
I still hold out hope of returning to that campaign. TY for the spoiler warning.
Maybe it’s weird, but my groups rarely address the initial reaction to getting new powers in-game. Sometimes, if/when we reach a milestone level where there’s a significant increase in power etc, we’ll address it then, but still very rarely.
Kineticist… This is really my first time really looking at them despite you having them in the comic already. They’re very interesting, particularly since they’re the only class in Pathfinder or DnD other than Warlocks in 4th edition DnD that uses Constitution as their primary stat and their primary attack is a ranged touch attack.
They’re a weird one to grok. Doubly so since the SRD presentation is fuggly. But if you read the class guide they can do some interesting things, and they are much harder to build than to play. Do recommend the effort. They are quirky enough to be interesting, and as you say, the flavor of these mechanics is fun to noodle with.
Trying to build one now and you’re absolutely right on how difficult it is to build them.
Are you using one of the guides? That’s how I began to wrap my head around ’em:
http://zenithgames.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-comprehensive-pathfinder-guides.html
A thing with backstories is that they have one slight yet major problem to them – they rely on the PCs surviving to tell them, or the DM revealing them before said PCs snuff it.
It’s very easy to create an epic backstory that you’re excited to explore for a particular PC… Only for them to be squashed at the early levels by bad luck or similar ‘pointless’ deaths. You might have tied yourself in to the BBEG from the start, only to have died to a Goblin crit at level 1. Perhaps you were secretly working behind the party’s back for a justified, tragic reason… But nobody will know, because a monster perma-blinded your entire party and you don’t have any curing spells for it, making you sitting ducks for every monster in the dungeon.
Campaign traits in APs in particular suffer this problem – they tie your characters to the plot from level 1… But if a PC dies halfway through the AP, that campaign tie becomes implausible if not impossible (e.g. if it related to you being from a town the PCs started in, but never return to after a few books).
And the replacement PC is suddenly shunted into the plot and grieving group, sticking out like a sore thumb unless expertly back-storied in to be relevant and not too jarring to the party that needs their 4th.
Luckily, this problem can be solved if the party has access to raise dead or similar spells, making death a monetary problem rather than a story one. But groups that start from level 1 have that period of weakness, where death is very likely to come for them – from higher-level spells they cannot counter or cure, overwhelming encounters before their combat builds get those crucial feats or abilities to truly function, the fragility of early PCs and the lack of resources (monetary, equipment, consumables or spells-wise).
One solution, though not always applicable: Raise Dead et al exist in those worlds, even if the PCs don’t have access to them yet. A NPC with access could offer to use it for the PCs – either in gratitude for what the PCs have done so far, or in exchange for certain favors that further the plot.
That certainly works, though most parties at low level might not be happy with being about 5-10k gp in debt to an NPC.
There’s also, for Pathfinder, one surprisingly cheap option any group can get from a shop or local druid merchant – the Salve of the Second Chance. For only 1600gp bought (or 800gp crafted), you can get a PC, companion or NPC revived! …with the downside of them getting assigned a random race. Which can be… disruptive, to say the least, as Fighter already experienced. Though if you do it on a specific lunar cycle, you get two rolls!
And in cases where your PCs got offed by a death effect, or don’t wish to second-guess the result of a reincarnation, or want to get rid of their old age penalties, there is cyclic reincarnation, which pretty much just makes you return to your youth in a ‘different-but-similar’ body.
Cyclic reincarnation: We got someone else to play ’em in season 2.
I did address this a bit in this one: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/starting-level
I don’t think back stories are a problem in general. It’s just when they’re overblown, affecting the world more than the PC. “I was an evil general” is harder to deal with than “I got my powers during an orc raid.”
I pulled off “amnesia” for a campaign that lasted multiple years IRL. This was a Final Fantasy based game, so at first he seemed like just another tarutaru white mage – pretty common in the setting, though he was notably more powerful than average. In truth, he was essentially a sendling of a god – in other words, a divine golem – who sometimes showed hints of power and otherworldliness, such as bleeding light instead of blood when heavily wounded, but no one (in character), not even him, guessed his exact origins until the endgame.
Did you build the character mechanically, or did the GM hand him to you? I ask because I think that the usual amnesia backstory — Read: no backstory — is slightly different than mechanical amnesia, where you have no idea what your powers are until you discover them in-game.
Ascension: Turn an NPC on a PC and give him a power-up. Like getting an exaltation mid-campaign, or re-discovering their powers. Think of the blond girl, whatever her name is, of The Seven Deadly Sins. During the final battle of the first season she discover her powers.
Once during a game a NPC that has been around got his girlfriend killed, a pc, by the bad guy. Then this guy discover not only that he can do high end magic, he also almost turn Apocriphal, think god-like mage, while trying to revive her girlfriend. Oh, and he almost broke the universe trying to do that in a scene more like the near second impact of Rebuild of Evangelion 2 or when Father suck everybody souls in FMA than an Exaltation. He end up doing more damage than the bad guy, not reviving his girlfriend and joining the party to try to undo the damage to the very metaphysical weave of existence. But his player got a shiny new pc after getting his prior killed 🙂
Hey Colin, the Amnesia system, as you said, is used in one-shots and conventions, but there is also a game… Nibiru? Maybe? I think to have read that your pc stars without memories and you discover things about them as you play them. So, apparently, the system can be used in normal games too. If that game, i barely recall, even exists :/
Neat:
https://www.geeknative.com/69687/nightmare-fuel-a-review-of-nibiru-a-sci-fi-rpg-of-lost-memories/
Sounds like level-up is a constant process of self-discovery. I suspect I’d dig that one. Yh aks for the recommendation!
You like it? Okay, glad for you 🙂
I don’t know if my group will like it, i haven’t even read the book to make an idea about it. Oh, well, i have some spare time. If you make an online game of it, count me out 😛
When I told Laurel about it, she got all excited for the possibility of using some of the concepts for Exalted. Learning about your past lives has applications in Creation.
Well, is always good when you can finally use a concept you got hanging around in your mind. Relating that game to the past lives in Exalted is something i have not think of. Quite smart of her 🙂
I would be interesting to know what she thinks of the Age of Sigmar RPG, Soulbound. After burning the old world, because copyrights, they now have made a game in which you play as chosen of the gods empowered beyond the mere scope of mortal, servants of great renown to defend the people and turn back the forces of darkness and evil gods 🙂
Wait a minute. Where i have heard that concept before? 😉
The easiest way to do this is to play with a group of complete amateurs. The group I currently DM for is all completely inexperienced with D&D, and as far as I can tell only one of them has cracked open the PHB outside of a session. Most of them don’t really have any idea what their abilities are, or how they work, which can be a little frustrating sometimes but also gives us that cool sudden power-up feeling in the middle of a fight. Last week I blew our Druid’s mind when I told him he could turn into animals. I think the pause in combat while he went off and read the Wild Shape rules was worth it for that “I can do WHAT?” moment. The week before that it was the Barbarian discovering he could rage… If I can get the Paladin back for another session, I’m sure he’ll be shocked to find out he can cast spells and smite stuff now. It also helps that we’re at low level and progressing very slowly, so they really have time to get comfy with their new abilities before they get more stacked on top.
Hey, if you can present it such that the PCs are as surprised as the players, I think you’ve got a dynamite setup.
Do you explain why they are getting powers at a certain time? Intuition? Divine intervention? “The training suddenly clicks?”
Not really, it was a case of “we’ve finished our first adventure, you guys level up, go read your abilities for the next session” and then nobody did that. For one player who was absent, I did text him a short dream sequence explaining his magical powerup, which was really fun for me. I’ve got a few ideas for similar stuff for next level, like a mentor NPC showing up for the one player who’s picked out his subclass in advance.
The aasimar race from Volo’s Guide to Monsters get some powers, such as the light spell, at first level, but get their most dramatic abilities at level 3, when they can take on an angelic form and gain a variety of abilities. Our party’s monk took advantage of this, with his backstory including him discovering he had the ability to cast light, somehow, and with him finding and honing his other powers throughout the campaign.
Nice! That’s a clever way to do it, as the natural progression of level-up becomes an excuse to explore heritage.
We did a cyberpunk psionics game, and session one involved our characters blacking out, having weird visions and waking up with powers. Since I was playing a soulknife my vision consisted of these weird sword coming to me, then I woke up clutching it.
My girlfriends character woke up to her brand new eidolon on her chest, staring down like a dog waiting for her to wake up. Despite him being a horrifying little bigger, she immediately ran with treating him like a dog. (For refrence, imagine a centuar but dog instead of horde, emaciated torso, and two heads, one of which has its eyes and mouth stitched shut.)
Those two had about the easiest time adjusting to the new situation.
Well that sounds awesome. If I’m hearing you right, it sounds like the entire campaign premise is “why did we get these powers?” Was that a fun one to explore for you?
It sure was. My character was goofy and a bit pop culture obsessed, so naturally he ended up confiding in friends and loved ones as soon as he could (wanting to avoid certain superhero tropes) and was one of the first to hit the public eye (in disguise) and was given the name “Sword Guy” by witnesses. Not a terribly imaginative title, but hey its accurate.
Too bad it sorta went on hiatus before we got too far into figuring out why.
Ugh! Hiatus is the worst! You hold out hope of returning to the story, so you can’t even ask your GM for plot details.
Although you start playing a fully mature and trained knight when you start the GPC (or most other campaigns, in Pendragon, it beeing a generational game, after a while you go on to play your son, or other, younger than you, relative. And he has to be knighted, which happens in a ceremony that more or less defines most of his rights, duties and alliegences for the comming years. So that is rahter a big occasion, and can, and often will, take a whole session, in which he is made aware of what it is to be a knight.
I once had a con scenario that started the night before the players would become knights, while they were holding their vigil in a remote chapel. Thye had to bring a letter to King Arthur, although their own liege lord was not a friend of the King. It put them in a kind of limbo, in which they were forced to do knightly things, but without the offical sanction that their not-yet-attained status of knight would have given them. Was a proper learning experience for them.
That “learning experience” is key for me. The PCs are learning about their world at the same time as the players. That makes a natural doorway into the fiction as you identify closely with the feelings and experiences of your character.
I played in a game that used the amnesia trick to great effect. The game was Immortal, and the GM made all of our characters for us. The fun was not only in discovering our powers, but our identities. Turns out we were all horrible people in the past (I was Torqumada from the Spanish Inquisition; another character was the high priestess of a voodoo/Lovecraftian cult; etc) who had used the immortal reincarnation trick to mask our past identities. And as we reawakened (often struggling to figure out who we once were, and whether we still wanted to be that person), we also found out that there were a lot of people out for our heads.
It fit extremely well with the game system. Wouldn’t work for most others.
… Actually, thinking it over, it might work in other game systems. Would take some tweaking.
Well that sounds suitably dramatic. Did you redeem yourselves, or did it turn out to be an evil game?
It was not an evil game, though calling it a redemption track isn’t quite right, either. When the High Priestess was found by the remnants of her cult, she jumped right back into it, but mostly to have a power base to fight back against the groups that were hunting her down. My own character was taking a more scholarly path to figure out what was going on. (Finding out our past identities was just the first step; we still had to figure out what we’d actually done, and why.)
Unfortunately, real-life events kept us from finishing the game, but it was quite a ride while it lasted. Assassins being chucked out the windows of the train we woke up on; the creepy Dolly Madison truck driver claiming a “phantom limb” where his arm used to be, perving on the guy who missed the first session (to make up for missing the train assassination attempts); being chased through the back alleys of New Orleans by cultists who’d found what were thought to be safe houses. It was a constant mix of crazy and creepy and noir.
The amnesia worked because it was a fundamental part of the game, and the GM took constant advantage of it to throw more and more stuff at us. Also, we weren’t squishy level 1 humans, so he could go a bit crazy with stuff. Amnesia for a level 1 D&D character seems much less viable just because of the mechanics of the system. You can’t really pull out all the stops, to have fun with it.
One of the fun things about Pokémon Tabletop is getting to pull out a mid-battle evolution with the accompanying new stats, abilities, capabilities, and moves. (Brings some actual tension to fights vs. the fisher with six Magikarp too.)
What triggers evolution in combat? Do you get to activate it via items, or is there some kind of Gyarados check?
Either you
A) knock out an opposing Pokémon and that puts you over the exp threshold and you evolve your Pokémon as they switch to their next one.
Or
B) once you hit the level where you could evolve, you prepare your pokemon’s New character sheet, hold it in reserve, and then swap it out later at an appropriately dramatic moment, healing back up too.
It would appear that magikarp is a bard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ohk5Swy-04
This is a situation where multiclassing is really nice, since you do develop new powers during the adventure itself. But I had a bit of a moment with my Magus/Bloodrager/Cleric BEFORE any of that multiclassing, when she was just a Magus. She hadn’t done great in her first dungeon crawl (hadn’t done super-bad, but she rolled very poorly and did almost get killed once). But for some reason, during the first real fight of Level 4, something clicked and all of the Magus bits came together and she just tore through a bunch of enemies (getting half of the party’s kills in that encounter). So that really did feel like a student finally graduating from apprentice to independent artisan, which I think is kind of similar.
In a campaign that’s about to start, one of the PCs did pick up a new class and have a very large alignment swing (LN to CN) right before the plot begins (her Oracle powers came in and made her realize that the academy raising her was evil, so she went rogue), so there will be a bit of post-powers-coming-in roleplaying with her, I’m sure.
As a matter of fact, I think it’s for a very good reason. That’s the level where you get an arbitrary amounts shocking grasps thanks to Spell Recall. Suddenly you can nova more than like, twice per adventuring day.
It was the same story in my megadungeon campaign. My bladebound buddy was shooting a bow like a wimpy wizard until dervish dance turned on a 3rd level. Then he was suddenly “worryingly overpowered” until the martial classes caught back up at 6th with their second iterative attack.
Magus is painfully fragile those first few levels, then it turns on in a big way around 3rd or 4th. It’s awesome that your character arc aligned with the build. 🙂
Curiously, I don’t think it was specifically Spell Recall (although that didn’t hurt). It seemed to be more of a new understanding of the ways Spell Combat could be used combined actually enhancing my weapon with arcane pool and gaining the ability to roll attack rolls higher than a 6. The fact that we were facing a bunch of weak enemies (as opposed to 2 or 3 strong/medium enemies) probably helped as well, so I could do things like “Burning Hands this bunch, plus melee one of them.”
Spell Recall is indisputably nice, though. Coming in alongside second-level spells doesn’t hurt either.
Some years ago I ran a character in a Planescape campaign whose identity had been altered by a powerful curse – a result of his family’s unfortunate involvement in the Bloodwar between the Abyss and the Nine Hells. At the beginning of play, Sarkoth was a 1st level elf wizard, and ran an adventurer’s shop in the city of Sigil. Over the course of the campaign, through many adventures, quests, happenstance incidents, and study of lore, his true nature of was revealed to be that of a gold dragon. Though there were moments of great fun in the arc of his story, there were also many challenges, mostly mechanical and systemic, as to how to quantify and manifest the changes resulting from the various curse removal components. I engaged in many discussions with the GM to try and provide both ideas and /or solutions for the problems that arose. Some we solved to our satisfaction, some we did not.
As I’ve mentioned in a couple of other places, I’m running a paladin with the sorcerous dedication in PFS2. So when I picked up the dedication feat, the next session some monster, I think it was a zombie of some kind, jumped out at my character when he didn’t have his sword in his hand. I described my character throwing up his hands and a blast of fire shooting out and hitting the monster in the face. Then after that, I got to describe my character staring at his own hands and wondering, “How in the lamb’s blood did I do that?” Absolutely perfect IC discovery-of-powers moment, I was so pleased that everything worked out.
Very cool! This stuff is great when you surprise the players as well as the PCs.
For example, I just had a Starfinder session where our soldier picked up a level in solarian. The dude described a little red bead of light circling his head, and we all assumed that it was an ioun stone or something. Imagine our surprise when he pulls a friggin’ lightsaber out of his forehead. Great moment.