Elemental Originality
I’ll be the first to admit that the Captain Planet reference is a little dated: Only ’90s kids will etc. etc. A different pop culture reference was plaguing Kineticist last time we saw her, but it was Captain Planet that set the precedent for me. Of course, your elemental touchstone might look a little different. There’s a vast sea of alternative media references floating around out there. Pokémon, The Fifth Element, Magic: The Gathering, The Wheel of Time, Fantastic Four… The list goes on. Just hit the TV Tropes page if you really want to dive into the wide world of elementally aligned super powers. Whether it’s real world neo-druidic beliefs or the rock-paper-slag system of your favorite video game, this stuff is all over the place. That represents an opportunity in terms of character building (I want to be a fire guy!) but a challenge as well (oh man, not another Human Torch ripoff!).
The real trick is making sure that you’re communicating your version of the trope to the rest of your gaming group. Your party members and your GM are going to come to the table with visions of Elsa, or Chandra Nalaar, or Storm dancing around in their heads. If that’s not what you’re going for, then get out ahead of it. You can try and explain the intricacies of your PC up front, but for my money, I think it’s better to lead the conversation with “my guy is like X, but different because Y.” Of course that’s a gross oversimplification. “My guy is like Thor, but more about lightning than melee” is not an especially interesting description. It is infinitely better than waiting for your pals to comment, “So you’re basically playing Pikachu.” Once that mess hits the table, you are never going to shake it.
So here’s the question of the day. What kinds of elemental themed characters have you seen in games? Were they like any existing pop culture characters, or did they manage to carve out their own identities without need to reference precedent? Let’s hear about your favorite benders down in the comments!
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Not a bender or elemental themed character, but i did play a character that the GM described as “Danny Phantom, but female and depressing.” It was for a Silver Storm Game in the new Mutants and Masterminds 3rd Edition. (Well, new in that it’s not the previous edition and it was kinda new when the Emerald City Setting book that had the quest came out.) My story was that I had been injured in the Silver Storm events, but as far as I knew I had been turned into a ghost or maybe even killed. The reality was that my body was in a hospital somewhere unable to wake up from a coma cause I didn’t know how to stop astral projecting myself.
Cue my character becoming known as “ghost-gal” and having various ghost hunters coming after me, despite being generally helpful. It was fun because I enjoyed the character and am obviously all about the drama, but Danny Phantom wasn’t exactly my inspiration for the character.
It’s especially tough with superheroes. Coming up with an original super shtick is friggin’ impossible. All you can do is try to do the trope with style.
Did the line about “Danny Phantom, but female and depressing” get on your nerves? I mean, did it cheapen the character for you, or do you think that was a useful way for your GM to get a conceptual handle on your PC?
Oh so he meant Danni Phantom (she is a real character and pretty much spot on for your GMs description).
Though that is in NO way a good reference point, as what you described for your character doesn’t really fit Danni.
Yours sounds more like the kid in Ghost in the Shell SAC that was hacking while in a coma, but he was not a “ghost”.
I can think of a reasonably good analogue, but I don’t know how to do spoiler tags, and it would be a BIG one for a movie, so…
My table is less aboot Captain Planet references, and more aboot Its’ Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Archer references.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYtjpIwamos
“Having someone who makes wild decisions that make no sense benefits nobody.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIgHHBUTA90
Also, why do you keep calling 4 Elements Monk “Kinitecist”?
I played a Pathfinder campaign where one of the player played Elsa. I mean, he changed the name, but otherwise it was Elsa. He had a screenshot from the movie as a profile picture, the character was a boreal bloodline sorcerer, and he played “Let it Go” over the speakers when asked to introduce his character.
Her sister also turned out to be my character (we both had, unbeknowst to each other, made a backstory that our character’s mother had abandoned them, and the GM had fun with that).
It was… Well, rather unremarkable if I’m being honest. He didn’t do a lot with the concept.
In another campaign though, he played Prince Charming from Shrek, and we had fun with that one.
Who didn’t want to play an ice sorceress after watching “Frozen” for the first time? Too bad though… You’ve got to take that sort of concept and twist it. “Elsa but psychotic” sounds like a fun starting point. She thinks her snowmen are talking to her, etc.
The only “element” based characters I have really seen were the water genasi and later evil water elemental cult leader Alex Jones, and also dorn, a hexblade of Titania who had a heavy plant theme, with his pact weapon being made out of shifting vines, and flowers bursting out of enemies he kils via smiting.
Did Dorn manage to escape the shadow of Swamp Thing and Poison Ivy?
Don’t have any good elementalist/bender stories but saw picture of waterbending squirrel (how do you post pictures?) and now I want to make a anthro-squirrel water bender
One of my initial tests when judging a particular magic system is determining how easy/difficult it is to build themed characters at low level (preferably 1st level). My second criteria is how competent such a character is.
Example 1, if you wanted to create a fire-mage using D&D 5e magic, you will likely find that there simply are not enough fire-themed spells, to stay true to your theme. A first level sorcerer could probably get away with 0: Dancing Lights, Fire Bolt, Light, Prestidigitation; 1: Burning Hands, Grease. But eventually, as you gain levels, you will end up taking cantrips or spells that don’t fit your theme. As far as effectiveness goes, it is nothing to write home about, but your build will most likely require the Elemental Adept feat.
Example 2, if you wanted to create a weather-mage using D&D 5e magic, you will similarly find that there simply are not a lot of low-level spells that fit your theme, and may have to resort to using classes and features to make up for it (such the Tempest Cleric). As far as effectiveness goes, you won’t have many (if any) cantrips that fit your theme, meaning that after you use your 1st level spells and features in the first two encounters of the day, your build falls apart.
Of course, some magic/game systems simply don’t allow for some character concepts. For example, in Burning Wheel, magical healing simply does not exist.
Personally, my favorite themed character is a plantomancer, a caster who strictly only uses magic to create or manipulate plant-life (which also happens to generally be the first test I make).
Once one of my friends make a character that was a homage to Kaminagi, some character from My Hero Academia. Like by the fifth session we still believed his character was some generic electricity user, that or Pikachu. When he said to us who his character really was we choose the make fun of him and act like we still were confused about his PC. We are a bunch of horrible people, not just me.
On a more personal, and less trolling , comment i like darkness. In many games that just means being a switch off for the lights, that is not the darkness i like. If you only powers is a blackout, size variable in function of your level power, i choose any other thing. The power over darkness i like is not just absence of light is darkness as a thing by itself. I like the power to travel across it, to make weapons solid like a nightmare, to summon the horrors that prowl the night full of scary things, to transcend the limitations of mortal flesh and being a Bodhisattva anointed by the Eternal Darkness, or to just have some kind of cool power that it’s not like a electric switch 😛
We had a warmage who was generally agreed upon to be the love child of Ghost Rider and Paul Bunyan, with a flame resistant steed and no great love for evildoers, flammable objects, or things easily broken with a measly little greataxe, forests included.
Babe the blue burning chopper sounds like a worthy sidekick.
Been a while since I’ve chimed in. Normally I’m the one who’s the elemental themed powerhouse in the group. I have always preferred to be my own identity, rather than use something from pop culture… Then again, that’s how I play all my characters.
He lives!
And yeah, I think most people chase that original character. The question is whether the rest of the dudes in your group will let you. Trying to make a unique dude only to be met with, “Oh. So you’re basically Electro,” can be pretty discouraging.
Well one time I was in a modern day Benders game. I went for something a little strange and made a Lightning and Earth Bender. If you know about your Benders you’ll be wondering “wait don’t you mean Fire and…” and no, I do not. They couldn’t have managed to make fire (aside from blasting things with lightning) if their life depended on it. It was a fun crazy character who was all about being as fast and flashy as possible.
Oddly enough, in D&D I always tend to dislike the elemental focused character options. Not because it’s “bad”, but just because this typically means “here is your spell list, now here’s a benefit that tells you to ignore 90% of that list, have… fun?” I just don’t much enjoy incentives as much as I enjoy feeling free to pick whatever spells I find interesting.
Also……HEART! =D
By your powers combined, I am Captain Pedant!
I need to go back and give Kora another chance. Only made it half way through the first season after loving Airbender. As such, I am unsure what you’re getting at with the earth/lightning combo. Is that completely unheard of in the setting? Did you choose it specifically for its originality?
Well aside from being the Avatar, normally nobody can even be more than one type of bender. But being able to be two was just part of our setting.
The notable thing is that lightning bending is in Avatar canon is just a very very tricky subset of fire bending. So for this character I went and flipped that around.
So yeah, I made a special snowflake in a game of special snowflakes. Because sometimes that’s just how I roll.
Though really it wasn’t so much about that as I just thought the combo was cool and flashy.
My last character was a fire bender, using the rules from 3.5s Tome of Battle. The Desert Wind school allowed for a lot of burnination, but I had to dip into other schools to fill out the full amount of abilities allotted.
I don’t think I actually based her on anyone concrete. She’s a Tiefling, quarter demon on her dad’s side. Very gruff, just wants to get the job done, but also a touch vain(very low magic campaign, and didn’t need to spend money on weapons and armor, so she spent it on finery). More like a typical bounty Hunter than a typical fire bender.
From the way you talk about her, it sounds like “fire dude” was only one aspect of a well-rounded PC. That seems like a solid way to escape the confines of the trope.
I’m playing a Pathfinder Kineticist who has managed to escape most of the “Oh, so she’s like [blank]” by virtue of being a phytokineticist.
There’s lots of material for pyrokineticists in fiction. Less for little faeries with symbiotic plant wings rooted in their shoulder blades, who primarily wield the tree bark that they grow and then fire off of their own bodies.
She works really well, though, because the party is basically team-druid (no actual druids, but we lean heavily towards the nature themes and plant focused abilities). This campaign has ensured that we’ve all learned the rules for entanglement.
Once in a Doomlord home-brew game, one sorcerer of the Crystal Horde take the motif up to eleven, every spell was a crystal version of another one, his weapons, armor and even underwear was crystal. He even use crystals for eyes after my Emerald wizard blow up his head with a Murderous material spell. Even his Horde companions where saying that he was kinda obsessed. Funny, annoying, we needed to defeat him like ten times until we kick him across a Dimension door.
On the topic of nonstandard elements
http://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/63.php
My warlock Cassia was broadly elementally aligned to Air, thanks to her patron’s penchant for sky-god imagery. This did lead to many Avatar references, but whomhas never seen the cartoon, I disn’t get any of them myself…
. . .
For a break from the Aritotelian standard, the setting I’ve been developing the last few years has its cosmology based on only three elements – earth, water, and air. I always did feel that fire doesn’t fit with the others, those representing constants in the natural world (and coincidentally, the three states of matter). And why should fire be the only one to get its own damage type? :p