Starting Level
We’ve talked about backstory before on this comic. A couple of times actually. I don’t think we’ve ever discussed this particular pitfall though. I am of course talking about the bizarre PC archetype that I’ll call the “overachiever.” This is a starting-level character that, like Antipaladin, has achieved a lifetime’s worth of adventure before settling in with a band of similarly low-level allies (usually to kill rats in a tavern basement).
The overachiever is often a deposed monarch, retired hero, or other VIP. In their earlier life they hobnobbed with the movers and shakers of the setting, rubbing shoulder with archmages and demigods. They once possessed powers that would beggar belief, but have somehow lost access to their former abilities. Overachievers regard their dealings with the party are a mere speed bump on the climb back to power: a necessary evil given their reduced circumstances. In other words, the current campaign is a mere footnote in the grand epic of their lives.
There are of course ways to explain your vastly reduced powers. Old age is a favorite, and I’ve seen it used to great effect with Pembroke the Potent on the Glass Cannon Podcast. (“I used to love teleportation in my youth. But what with this cushy faculty position at the Acadamae, I find that I’ve lost the trick of it.”) Magical power-sucking curses can also do the trick. (Thanks, Odin.) In the most extreme cases, the overachiever may even be a deity or ancient dragon locked in humble humanoid flesh. (Wave at the camera, Naruto.) But even though it’s clearly possibly to justify the archetype, you should think long and hard about what it means to be an overachiever.
When your backstory is more interesting than the current adventure, you’re setting yourself up for B-Plot status. That’s because RPGs are less interested in what you were than in what you might become. They’re about discovering the unexpected as you make interesting decisions. And if the most interesting thing that can possibly happen to you is a reversion to your pre-campaign self, then the story has nowhere to take you. Every choice is an anti-climax, and getting back to start is your ultimate mediocre reward.
Question of the day then! Have you ever encountered an “overachiever” out in the wild? Did they manage to side-step the pitfalls of the archetype, or did they plummet into the spiked depths of “my backstory is more interesting than the adventure?” Let’s hear all about those 0th level superheroes down in the comments!
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This is pretty much par for the course for any live-action Vampire game, Classic or New. There is a certain (common) kind of player who can’t handle the thought of not being the coolest, most powerful or most respected guy in the room, and it always starts with having been Prince of Very Important City several centuries ago, and then conveniently spending enough time in torpor to be down to four dots of disciplines and no social skills.
Yah. And while there’s nothing inherently wrong with the “I used to be somebody in another life” trope, it has a weird way of turning XP and character progression into a big fat conceptual problem.
“Lead armies”. Leading a small army of kobolds isn’t hard for a first level character.
“Slew kings”. King’s mostly rely on their bodyguards for fighting. If the guards were distracted, or the king was stupid, a few arrows would take his noble stat block out fast. Of course, it states plural; raise dead is easily within the King’s price range, so it’s possible Anti-paladin sniped the King twice before he wised up.
“And defied the gods themselves”. He’s an anti-paladin, all he needs to do the “defy the gods” is say “Nah bruh, I ain’t gonna do no hero, Imma be evil now LOL”.
It does sort of work as a 1st level backstory.
As usual, Lord of the Rings has a useful antecedent: https://66.media.tumblr.com/2ad311b1dffa3fb9c1f09cc3cddddd17/tumblr_misy45eoq71rioqcvo5_250.gifv
😛
I’ve played an overachiever. A deity in human form.
He wasn’t just trying to get back to the old status quo, though. He was a brutal and violent war god who’d been redeemed by a goodly goddess of magic. He still liked fighting, but figured that if he said “Hey, I’m good now” to his followers, his long history of brutality would overshadow that, and a lot of them wouldn’t really get the message.
He decided to reinvent himself by incarnating as a mortal, intending to live out a few mortal lifetimes cut off from supreme power until one played out where he could become a world-renowned hero that everyone looked up to. Then he would “Ascend” back to deific power and be a hero god without all the baggage of his backstory.
…The key, I think, being that he had something new to do to reach his goal, and that his goal wasn’t the same old same old, but rather was all about making something new of himself.
Right on. How’d it go with the rest of the party? Did your personal quest slot in with the campaign? Or did it wind up getting sidelined in favor of “the main quest?”
The party all shared a lot of the story. One was playing my character’s wife, who was in fact that goddess mentioned in my backstory. The other two were our characters’ son and daughter.
The family dynamic definitely ruled in that campaign. The daughter was very heroic and headstrong, taking after my character, the son was kindly and wise, taking after his mother. The main plot was all focused around divine conflicts, so the odd backstories fit right in.
When gearing up for a new campaign several years ago, one player had a backstory where he had been an elite warrior/demon hunter, who had been put into a sequester, a dream state where you do not age. It was decided that the sequester had been imperfect, so his power had been drained over the years. Personally, I don’t think that the backstory would have overshadowed the campaign; it wasn’t much beyond a sentence or two saying, “I fought big strong people”, so the backstory was less interesting, just powerful. However, the problem I did have was the whole power drain thing. The character was a fighter, so the idea that his XP could just be “drained” was just strange. It’s actually strange for just about every character, save for maybe cleric, druid or sorcerer, as they could defy their deity/nature, or have their sorcerous powers extracted; but even then, the other consequences, such as losing 90% of your health, attacks and skills going down, etc. are strange. I mean, I guess that you could be weaker after being asleep for years… but a lot of fighting is in the head, and muscle memory, so dropping more than a few levels in any class seems unrealistic. Fortunately, this player had created his character months in advance, and was very creative, went through another half-dozen characters before the campaign started, then through various factors another four during the campaign.
Yah. I think you articulated the main trouble with the overachiever: every excuse strains the suspension of disbelief. Everyone knows that you’re just tailoring that backstory to explain being stuck with 1st level powers.
I don’t see this as much, but I do see it. Once had a player pitch an Anima character who would begin the game with the Ki Ability Inhumanity. Inhumanity represents that point in your career when the phrase “human limits” stops applying to you. The example of an Inhuman task is running 100 meters in 2 seconds, or scoring 17 on 18 holes of golf. And he wanted to be there at First level. You might expect some grand backstory, right?
“I’m a bloodline.” was the player’s off handed answer to my “And why are you Inhuman?” Note that my question was not a veto, it was an opportunity for the player to elaborate, to pitch his character’s long quest of navel gazing or whatever. Instead, I got a half baked Naruto explanation (I know it was Naruto, that’s what he was watching at the time this game was going). So I said, “I’m gonna require more than that for Inhumanity”, and he got huffy and built a new character.
He later came to me very upset that I had turned down his character. I pointed out that Inhumanity is the kind of thing that marks the end of some character’s stories, and that it shouldn’t be casually given away in a game where no one else has it. It should be narratively important, have a certain dramatic weight to it. He then regaled me of this story of a grand noble family who hunted dragons and drank their blood to gain the ability to surpass mortal limits and how his Inhumanity would be a temporary thing unless he could find another dragon to drink. I nodded and said that would have been an interesting way to do it, but that’s not what he gave me at the time, so I turned him down.
Also, Anima Dragons are absolute beasts every bit as fierce as their Pathfinder cousins. A level one character who had one under his belt would have been completely laughable, even if he had help from his presumably epic level family.
I like your “dramatic weight” term. Being the “best X in the world” ought to fit in with the progression metaphor of RPGs and XP. Being the all-powerful thing at character takes a lot of the narrative power away from playing the game.
I do work to avoid a backstory of being over-powered, which isn’t to hard if you put your mind to it. For instance, I once had a high-hp character who spent 10 years fighting in the military; however, he didn’t do much beyond get hit, leading to low increase in martial abilities (from commoner to 1st level) but massive increase in health. Or the drow who spent 10 years in the Underdark; as a cleric, she spent most of the time fighting in the back (leading to 1st level hp), some time fighting in front (leading to drow weapon proficiency), but eventually renounced Lolth and only recently took up a new faith (leading to 1st level cleric). There are many ways to make a three-page backstory while still having a 1st-level PC.
But of course, if you still want to have a 50-page novella of leading an army against the horde of orcs, and defeating the Dread King with your bare hands… then just write a novella.
I should do a gag about training for X years as an elf vs. training as Y years as a human. I did the growth rate thing already…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/mature-for-their-age
…But learning new skills could be a good twist. Maybe humans have a magical aura where, if you adventure with them, their ability to learn quickly rubs off on you?
One fascinating thing about that: in the PHB and Morkenkainen’s ToF, it states that elves mature at the same rate as humans, but aren’t adults until they’re 100, which seems to imply that they’re physically adults once they’re 20 but mentally/emotionally adults when they’re 100. Furthermore, it states younger elves are more brash and faster and than their patient elder, so younger elves would pick thing up as fast, if not faster, than humans. So during a one-shot, I once player a 60-year-old level 20 illusionist, who happened to be an elf, and thus a ten year old girl in an adult’s body. Their were many magic illusory sparkle unicorns.
This bit is why I smooth out the lifespans in my games. Elves do live longer than humans, but not by a lot – maybe their life expectancy is 120-130 years, while for humans it’s a bit under a century. Same for dwarves and other usually long-lived races. Other races still don’t physically age the same way ; staying with the elf example, it would take a trained eye (or another elf) to tell if an elf is 30 years old or 75 years old, as they mostly age spiritually – death of old age for an elf isn’t so much the body failing as the soul slipping away.
Really long lifespan is reserved for non-player stuff. Fey, intelligent aberrations, and the like. Hence why they feel so alien. A being that has lived long enough to have spent as much time simply daydreaming as you could ever hope to live, is bound to think differently than you.
Also liches and stuff. Immortality is tempting for everyone, that way. It’s also why most liches are evil. They just go insane from their mind existing for a lot longer than it was meant to.
It just makes more sense in my head that way. And it conviniently deals with all the “uneven learning speed” issues.
While we’re on this tangent, who made up the age table for Tieflings in pathfinder? Why am i not considered an adult until my human mother is long dead of old age? How does this even work? Tiefling minimum age is 60. 60! I mean, the whole Elves aren’t culturally adults until 175 works when they are raised by elves, but the planetouched get this really wonky thing.
Personally, I like the difference in longevity, precisely because of the reasons stated above; it gives an alienness to the culture and individual you’re playing, allowing you to play as an elf, not a human with different stats. The above-stated Tome of Foes is good for this, with info on gnomes, halflings, dwarves and elves allowing for strange and alien cultures to be found within the #37th fighter PC.
I get your desire for alienness, but it conflicts with my desire for living parents. ;p
In addition to the other problems that lifespan imbalances causes, you have to remember that there’s only a few hundred years difference between people figuring out how to make steel good enough to make plates, and people making guns. Grampa Legolas is gonna have to update to an assault rifle before he dies. I dunno how you’re going to be a tradition-bound species when your neighbor has advanced from bronze to lasers by the time your kids graduate college.
I dealt with it in a setting I’m making by ignoring it completely. Elves are humans ridden by a spirit. Nature spirit makes a wood elf, spirit of light makes a high elf, etc. Then I liked the idea so much I did it with lots more species. Goblins are rats and spiders possessed by evil spirits, for example.
Wen Spencer’s Tinker/Elfhome series had a neat take on this.
If you’re immortal (or just very long-lived) you’re going to want to do the thing right… if the floor you laid is uneven or the door is hung crooked or the barn is too close to the well, you’re going to spend decades or centuries being annoyed by it.
So the long-lived races spend a lot of time planning and being picky–it’s not like they need to hurry.
Heh, seems I was ahead of the comic there.
As I said on last weeks, I have a standard rule on backstories and that is that the most important events in a characters life must happen at the table.
Now, I am flexible with this. obviously things like “whole family murdered” is going to be kinda important in a characters life, and I don’t intend playing it out at the table, but I encourage those sorts of plots to roll into the events at the table. So, if your characters family were murdered, I encourage the eventual discovery-and-retribution arc to be put on hold so I can tie it into events at the table.
Also, if you character is level 1, and still in the range of being one-shottable by a Kobold, I refuse backstories that would be physically impossible for such a character. Sure, I might allow the killing of a medium difficulty beast, if you can justify with a good story (highlighting the blind luck or unlikelihood of the event), but no first level Dragon slayers (you want to fight a Dragon, thats happening at the table).
No power-draining excuses? For example, if you had the Thor backstory show up at your table (e.g. “My dad took away my demigod powers.”), what would you say to the player?
It would depend.
Firstly, on the player them self, because i would be more willing to let something like that fly from a player I already knew and trusted, than if it came from a unknown new member.
Secondly, again, most important events in life must happen at the table. if their previous life was fairly low key, and can serve as a prelude to the table ‘main story’ fine, but the table story is not going to relegated to ‘just another tale of Hero McMighty’
And that is assuming I don’t fall back on my second rule of backstories: all people, facts, and events are as seen from the characters point of view, and the ‘truth’ might turn out to be different than what the viewer (ie: player) originally perceived. So while I might not contest the actual events described, the motives behind the other characters involved may be wildly different to what the player has claimed they are (since he can only attest to his characters perception of the other peoples personalities and actions)
I feel like the movie Thor backstory could fit this pretty well if the PC’s in-game arc is built around it. Thor the Level 1 Fighter has spent hundreds of years fighting all sorts of dragons and giants and whatnot, but he’s not used to fighting at this measly level, and so what separates this campaign from his previous adventures is that he has to come to terms with his flaws and weakness. Because otherwise the backstory isn’t really contributing to how the character acts, and so it’s basically pointless. (Unless major plot elements become connected to it, like his enemies from his demigod days come after him/the party.)
Another, similar version could be an ancient wizard from Atlantis or whatever who was in stasis for thousands of years and so ended up losing almost all of their magic power and resources. But the bigger problem is that the world is completely different and they have massive fish-out-of-water issues that are central to their characterization.
In short, it’s not enough to have an excuse for why they are Level 1 despite this epic backstory – you need that backstory to actually contribute to their character or story, or it is pointless and makes you sound silly.
So I think what your saying is that important stuff can happen in your backstory, as long as , #1 it’s merely a plot hook, so the key points of the story sans beginning occurs in-campaign, #2 that the plot hook can be put on hold so that the entire story doesn’t revolve around the player from the get-go, and #3 that if they’re level one, they can’t do stuff that would be physically impossible. That seems like a really good way to run it.
Most of my characters that have a backstory are either ones that I was basing off of a novel I’m trying to write or their backstory is fairly minimal. For example, Irlana’s parents died in an accident when she was little and she was raised by an awakened boar. Mazon the Inquisitor was rescued by an adventurer when she was little and she wanted to be like that person.
I think the most detailed backstory of my non-novel characters are my twins. They were born into aristocracy but had their lands, titles, and fortunes stolen. They vowed to get it all back and take revenge so they scrounged up what they could to hire themselves a teacher in various skills such as lock picking, pickpocketing, and swordsmanship.
Right on. I don’t think an involved backstory is a problem. It’s the “first level dragon slayer” that starts raising eyebrows. Having done mythic deeds while you’re still a low-level schmuck is all kinds of weird.
Yup. And a little boring too. If you can already do everything, what’s the point of playing?
I recently created a 1st level character for a 5e D&D game (set in Forgotten Realms). My character concept is a discount John Constantine (demonologist, exorcist, occultist). To do this, at first level, one might assume that I would be a spellcasting class. I won’t be, instead I will be a rogue (eventually taking not the arcane trickster archetype, but the revived rogue (UA play test). To do my powers of demonology and exorcism, I have chosen the ritual caster feat, gaining find familiar (for summoning fiends, celestials, and fey), and identify (to both identify and use arcane relics).
Anyways, to move this back on topic, according to my backstory, I as a child borrowed a wizard’s spell book and attempted to cast a spell untrained, which instead of simply failing ended up killing my character by unweaving my character’s mind, body, and soul (not unlike tugging at a thread from a knit sweater. Anyways the mage came back just in time to see my state of literal unraveling, and immediately cast a spell to capture what remained of my soul in a gem.
Awaking dead in the Fugue plane, my character was doomed to be disassembled and merged with The Wall as one of the ‘faithless’. Fortunately, with part of my character’s soul in the wizard’s possession, he was able to telepathically comunicate and guide me away from this dire circumstance.
Now according to the lore (that I could find), what generally happens in the Fugue Plane is that people who die are supposed to call out the name of their god (who will then escort them out), the faithless being people who have not worshipped find themselves unable to call out to any god (being unable to remember, let alone speak their names).
So what the mage does is leads my character away from the wall to find a devil to make a verbal contract to sell my character’s soul. During the I (say your name) part of the oath, the wizard utilized the demon’s Read Thoughts ability to trick the devil into invoking the name of a deity, specifically Leara, the god of trickery. Impressed with the cunning utilized by both my character to trick both Fiends and Gods (Kelemvor, god of death), the goddess granted me a boon of resurrection. However, with a part of my soul still in possession of the wizard, I now have more than one soul, which will explain my constant connection and affinity to the plane of death, and the revived rogue archetype features as I get them.
I guess what I am saying is I don’t think it is really that difficult to have an “epic” backstory at 1st level.
Fun character concepts! They both sound like a blast to play.
However, I think you’re conflating an awful lot in the word “epic.” What you’re describing with that fugue plane PC is a fairy tale protagonist. Through a little cunning and a lot of luck you were able to trick your way out of the land of the dead.
That’s a little different than wrestling demons, toppling kingdoms, and slaying dragons in single combat. One implies mechanical power. The other implies a plucky protagonist who had help and luck.
Im about to start DMing a new campaign, and one of my players (who is the DM for the campaign were starting to wrap up) is getting very invested in creating his new character. Fortunately, he isn’t doing anything that would actually net him substantially more power than any of the other players, but every now and again he has a backstory idea that I have to veto simply because its more exciting than the adventures he’s going to get into for a bit. I don’t mind some variant of “and then I ran the hell away from these guys who were significantly stronger than me”, but I draw the line at having stood and fought them.
It would be an interesting thought exercise to figure out where the border lies between “appropriate 1st level backstory” and “super-heroic backstory.” Some of these ideas can work for starting PCs, provided that you are starting at…6th level? 10th?
I played a character like that once, but I think I ran it well. Was 3.5, allowing Dragon Magazine content, so I was a human with Wedded to History. The campaign world was medieval earth but with all magic/folklore being real, specifically we were in medieval Ireland. My character had been born in Ancient Sumeria, and hadn’t ‘adventured’ full time since the Minoan Eruption of Thera circa 2,000 BC, which was the result of cataclysmic battle with BBEG of that campaign; surviving that had meant losing an item familiar and much of his power bound up in it.
After that he’d settled down, mostly being a philosopher and statesmen through the ancient Greek and Imperial Roman eras as his powers waned from disuse, retiring to a villa in Lusitania after briefly holding governorship there (Once he was the king of spain). As the empire crumbled and his servants left he just lived on, the crazy hermit in the mouldering ruins, until his wife (a Naiad whose sacred well the villa had been built around, thus Nymph Kissed as his other human starting feat) got sick of him dottering about and kicked him out to go find his human descendants. As the Iberian Celts had since moved on, he eventually found his way to Ireland.
Lots of old man shaking cane at ‘kids these days’ ensued, and he only rarely indulged in Baron Munchausenesque storytelling that nobody in their right mind believed from him, so he was mostly taken to be an old wandering madman with useful skills, rather than an unreasonable braggart. Until that one time he got in an argument with an old Bronze dragon and yelled (truthfully) “Show some respect for your elders!” and the DM after rolling a die in secret decided said dragon had actually heard tales of me as a Wyrmling from his mother, and therefore did show some respect.
Wandering ancient Greek weirdo? I hope you traveled via cauldron.
https://getting-over-it.fandom.com/wiki/Diogenes
No, but now I kinda wish I had. Would not at all have been out of line with his usual old madman aesthetic.
I had this only once, and it worked out quite good.
I usually GM KAP (King Arthur Pendragon) and it is fairly hard to do the previous life\backstory there, as most players begin as young knights. However, one time my wife asked me to do a demonstration rpg with a group of her friends, who were interested in RPGs and wanted to try it.
So, instead of the usual Arthurian setting, I did a port to a (in my eyes) more relatable medieval southern german setting. With pre-gen characters. And one of the characters was a fairly old knight, who had gone on one of the crusades, or at least to the Crusaders kningdoms in the Holy Land. Think of Cadfeal, but without the trying for redemption by becoming a monk thing. After about five minutes of play, the player of that knight latched on to this “When I was in the Holy Land” thing. Within the story it was not intended to provide for any major impact, just to provide some chrome. However, it enabled him to come up with plenty of believable altenative methods and facts, that would have been banned, or outragese within the “normal” medieval setting. And the group (all firsttime RPG players) ran with it, and came up with a very different, and more rewarding, ending of the story. So this tiny bit of chrome basically turned the whole plot around, and let us finish the scenario in an unexpected, but better, and more fun, way. Sadly, now that they had some idea about RPGs, they concluded that it was fun, but not a thing that they would want to more often.
For my wife and me though, the catch phrase “when I was in the Holy Land…” is still used whenever people are able to leverage some tiny things from their backstory into a meaningful contribution to the story.
I’ve always enjoyed that kind of mechanic when it’s baked into the setting.
For example, building a dude around this silliness…
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/general-feats/breadth-of-experience/
…Could be great fun.
“Oh, aye. I learned a thing or two about cooking back when I was a sailor. This was before my time as a barrister / butcher you understand.”
So I heard a story of what a player wanted, their character Mercules apparently helped bring together two gods that would sire the atlanteans. I told him about fluff and how although he wanted to bring the heavens down upon his foes heads with his hammer he might have to settle for a fluffed up shocking and thundering hammer.
I also told him to read Conan.
Heh. I think the right touchstone for that backstory is Pandarus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandarus
Actually, now that I think of it, that would be a great bard thing… to unwittingly bring together some divine lovers and have to deal with the fallout.
Closest I’ve come to it is my wood elf druid who was “lazy” and spent an extra 100 years wandering up and down the sword coast as a level 1 before the campaign started.
I might should do that comic. It is kind of weird to have people living for a literal century and only have human commoner levels of proficiency in any skill.
The problem I often find with people who are overachievers are the same problems of people who have 18 intellect but make stupid decisions: their actions do not reflect their experience. For a world renowned demon slayer you’d think you’d know that devils are immune to fire and poison. Or how such a big game hunter doesn’t realize how bad an idea it is to run into the middle of a wolf pack, alone, with no element of surprise. And then they shake their “I have years of experience” credentials as if that somehow makes them immune to their own faulty logic.
Or worse when they try and play the metagame card and say how your character would know something about slaying demons or hunting monsters when they don’t have a background in it. To which I would normally reply: Same way I heard of it in real life. Someone more experienced than me told me about it. Cuz it turns out education is the real over achieving backstory when you happen to have adventurous family and friends willing to tell you all the crazy stuff they have gone through.
I really struggle with obscure monsters in general. Take these things from Strange Aeons:
https://aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Oneirogen
The game wants you to discover what they are through play. So…what? The bard’s “identify creature” abilities just stop working temporarily?
I have never encountered a “Level 11+ badass” backstory on a level 1-3 character. That said; you can justify level loss any way you like. My DevoPal started at level 7 for some Storm King’s Thunder, went in pursuing the Ring of Winter because it’s a thread that I knew would come up in Tomb of Annihilation, then after it failed to turn up went into a depressive stupor and fell to level 3.
His notable backstory achievements include distinguishing himself enough when joining the military to be placed into the officers academy, surviving a dangerous fiasco of a mission (“I didn’ suhyive opuhration tadpole ta die heyuh!”) as a lower officer, being the 14th person to beat the Dwarven equivalent of the Kobiyashi-Maru (You need to beat it in a way nobody else has.) and being selected to be a Paladin as a result, being hazed by his fellow Paladins by being assigned to be an ambassador to Elven lands, (Elven diplomacy includes tragically few fist-fights and drinking contests) being a noble’s bodyguard, (High ranking nobles can select newer Paladins for body guards and often do as a show of authority) not breaking under Drow torture, (Thank goodness for the Regenerate spell) and escaping Drow captivity with several defectors and slaves. (Remember what I said aboot Drow society being a recipe for rebellion?) All of those seem reasonable for levels 1-6. The last two are the most extreme, but can be achieved with good Con saves, and a couple of good Charisma (Persuasion) checks respectively.
I think 7 –> 3 makes a lot more sense than 20 –> 1. It’s all about trying to achieve reasonable verisimilitude, and it sounds like you managed the trick.
I believe I am playing one right now. We are playing a Mage the Ascension game and I was reading through the book of merits and flaws, looking for something to help me get an idea. One of the Flaws is Child – Lose some attribute stats, social penalties and you probably end up having to go to school. However, the flaw had a link to “playing a child mage” and noted there were only a few story ways to do it. The last one was essentially an older mage possessing a child. Interest piqued.
I wrote an epic backstory of a man growing up after WW2 in East Germany, yearning to cross over to the West but frustrated at every tun. He finally got his goal and that moment showed him the truth of the universe. He was given the best of everything (because of disasters that happened and he got lucky essentially. Ironically, this thing that makes sense in canon and was a plot point of one of my last games I ran in this setting). His meteoric rise in strength, power and prestige made him arrogant and he decided to push the very boundaries of existence, only to be smacked down hard. His mind was cut from his body and wound up in a child’s body. The child had been in an accident that had left them unconscious with potential brain injuries.
The book explicitly notes that such a thing would degrade the possessor and so most of his knowledge was lost. Since their power works off knowledge, this weakened him immensely. The rest of the backstory was written with him scrambling to hold on to even a sliver of what he had while having to question if he’s just a memory or if he still has his soul.
I mostly used it to explain a background that would help me do research to reachieve what I once had and then wrote that this break forced him to find new ideas. Part of the story will be “do I want to go back to the way things were?” and possibly even rejecting his knowledge in favor of new solutions.
Neat! Sounds like this version worked similarly to a “visions of a past life” setup, and I think that’s a clever way to have your cake and eat it too with this archetype.
I’ve played this type of character before, but rarely so straight forward. My normal one which I have done like three times is a great evil that was overthrown and repented at the cost of their evil powers, or otherwise cursed to lose power and have to start over to learn morality.
I think my most egregious use of it though was in a Star Wars Saga Edition game, it was playing through the mod path that sees the pc’s working with Bail Organa to form the rebellion. I was playing a bounty hunter with some guilt issues that would translate to him wanting to join a nascent rebellion, so I determined that clearly I had participated in the culling of the Jedi. Even after specifying it was a padawan, and that an explosive trap was used, the entire party still gave me shit at the idea I had killed a Jedi at level 1.
Does it count an NPC king who got exalted by his bravery of fighting four Abyssals at the same time to save his people? I don’t think so, his exaltation was a flash of hope, his death a flash of soul-steel 🙂
Know i think about it, we haven’t got any overachiever. Once in Godbound a former godbound who have give up his word was promoted to PC but he got a new different one. Trying to learn this new word whit the complication of all the time trying to do things according to his old one was quite funny 🙂
Exalted is this but Justified. You Exalted because you were willing to try the insanely brave thing that required you to not bend your moral compass/survived the mauling and limped away bleeding but not broken/glimpsed the void and the cold inevitability of oblivion and accepted in your heart that the world was doomed. It’s actually required as part of your Exaltation story.
Well only in the case of Solar Exalted, i rather think. Sidereal Exalted exalt because Fate says so, Lunar because they survive, be either a beating husband or an avalanche. Abyssal are hand picked by their boss. Alchemical are made, quite literally. Infernal are again hand picked, and mainly because they failed to Gloriously Ego Exalt. Dragon-blooded exaltation is just an eugenicist lottery. Still you are right, the solar exalted at least need this kind of things by design. They are not only justified, they are required to have a level-0 overachiever backstory. And when you don’t need more reasons to kick glorious solar arse they come to you with a new one. Is by things like that, that i love to hate Solar Exalted 😛
Well, yes and no on the other Exalts. With the debatable exception of the Sidereals and Alchemicals, all of the Exalts are supposed to have a Big Moment. The difference between Solar, Abyssal and Infernal Exaltation is timing. Lunar Exaltations are focused more personally. Solars cause big change in the world and their story is focused on the world and how they change it. Lunars change themselves during the Exaltation, and the focus is on them. Dragon-Blooded get a quick burst of power and are supposed to have a hero moment, but you are right.
And it’s not like the Unconquered Sun has a history of not really vetting his Chosen that well. It’s not like one of them ended up working with a Deathlord after his Exaltation because Sol Ignis gives crap all in the way of instructions.
Well if you were busy with the Game of Divinity you too would give poorly instructions. Mine would be something along the lines of:
1) Use too much Orichalcum.
2) Don’t go mad, again.
3) Don’t screw things, again.
4) Remember items 2 & 3.
How to influence mortals and make vassals 😛
Seth Skorkowsky did a backstory video!
it’s pretty good!
I tend to go lean towards person raised in a small town in the middle of nowheres ville, lacking in most knowledge of the outside world. . .
While I agree heartily with the sentiment expressed by Glorthindel in that the campaign story arc should be the medium within which the PC’s achieve their heroic status, if the players & gm are experienced gamers, it also seems to me the height of tedium to begin a campaign with first level characters/novices and have to endure the unending tropes associated with beginners. Start the campaign with already experienced adventurers (say 3rd-5th level) and the gm can more easily adapt to an overpowered background.
I used to be an adventurer like you, then I took a specter to the knee.
lol
I think I’ve mentioned my fondness for “road-trip” backstories where getting from wherever the character grew up to the place and time where the campaign begins was an adventure in itself.
This doesn’t usually lead to power incongruities. Often the character and their traveling companions dealt with danger in the time-honored Brave Sir Robin idiom — they did a lot of fleeing, hiding, bluffing, or in extremis, pleading for mercy — but to them, it was still an exciting and terrifying odyssey.
“So I’m shivering in the mud under this dripping wet tree trunk, and right on the other side are those same three big green guys, but now they’ve brought frikkin’ WOLVES. They know we’re still around somewhere, but I guess the rain covered our scent, or maybe the wolves were just bored. I was sure if I even took a breath they’s all hear it. Can a person hold their breath for an hour? That’s about what it felt like.” No impossible heroism, but also not something the character is gonna forget any time soon.
The thing I’ve learned I need to watch out for isn’t that the character ends up way too skilled for their eventual stat block, but that they’ve seen more places and met more people than the rest of the party. It becomes easy for the GM to fall back on “New town? Yeah, let’s say Teague passed through here on her way north, and she knows the following people…” Fine in moderation, but done too often it can kind of steal the thunder from the party’s diplomats. If it seems like that might be happening, it’s usually enough to have the character duck her head into her cloak and say something like “Shit. I owe that guy money. Is he looking this way?” until the actual diplomats have done their thing.
While it doesn’t quite apply to D&D-type games, I once created a concept back when I wrote Pokemon fanfiction that leveling up is not permanent, but, like real-life bodybuilding, requires effort to maintain. A Level 100 pokemon is at the absolute peak of its physical abilities, but if it doesn’t train or fight to maintain that, it will slip down to lower levels. Player characters never experienced this because a) it wouldn’t be fun and b) they tend to have a lot of battles pretty frequently. But if they took a few months off from the competitive battling scene, their pokemons’ levels would slide. This was mainly an excuse for why characters aren’t walking around with Level 100s and erasing everything else, but I thought there was an interesting bit of lore to it.
In actual D&D, I tend to see level as more of a mechanical feature than an in-universe thing, and I back this up with the fact that the universe (AKA DM) kind of auto-scales things. Why are all of Town B’s guards four levels higher than Town A’s? They aren’t, not really, but the system does that in acknowledgement of the PC’s increase in level, to keep things even. If in the campaign I created the supposedly-invincible warrior guy is Level 11, that doesn’t mean that the world is full of creatures that easily outclass him, but that I have scaled his level down to make that effectively the max level for this particular setting. Pathfinder 2e seems to at least sort of take this approach, with level-appropriate enemies being roughly equal challenges, but with more abilities.
As for overachievers, I did once make one as a backup character. She was an elven Dark Tapestry Oracle who had wandered the arctic wastes for centuries, putting down all sorts of monsters that prowl in the near-eternal night of the winter season. Before her introduction to the campaign, though, some sort of entity ambushed her and nearly incinerated her with dark fire. Through her many powers, she was able to reform her body, but it took a terrible toll on her. She was now physically weak (low STR), covered in residual burns (Blackened Curse) and had numerous holes in her memory (why she can’t auto-identify high-level monsters). She was also prone to hesitation (Powerless Prophecy Curse) and had to keep continuous focus to ensure her new body did not dissolve, severely taxing her previously iron will (hence, her low WIS is actually a very high WIS with a permanent penalty on it). I think it was a cool setup (especially if that crippling attack could be tied to the campaign’s villains), but fortunately my main PC stayed alive, so I never found out.
I do currently have in my Pathfinder 2e campaign a Level 1 150-year-old elven veteran of many wars (like, he’s been doing it since before devil-worshipers took over Cheliax). I think I have a good justification in that he’s a doctor, not a warrior, so he has learned worldly wisdom from his experience but not a whole lot of fighting techniques. And, I mean, he does have the ability to fix a greataxe to the face in 10 minutes or less without using magic, so maybe he is a master doctor!
Lastly, I saw or heard somewhere someone’s explanation for why their old man Wizard was Level 1 – the old man is actually a much higher level, but he accidentally switched bodies with his familiar, and so the familiar-in-wizard’s-body is a Level 1 caster, while the wizard-in-familiar’s-body gives him sage advice and stuff. Thought that was a cool explanation.
Actually, now that I think about it, my earliest Pathfinder character concept ever was basically the Thor version of this. She was basically a really powerful outsider of some sort and she irritated her parents enough that they banished her down to the mortal realms for some “character building.” She was a spellcaster (I was new to Pathfinder so I never narrowed down the type; I’d assume Sorcerer or Oracle) with a very abrasive personality and a tendency to suffer comedic injuries and embarrassments. Might have been fun, but I went with my STR Magus concept instead, who ended up having a great character arc of her own.
The specific form of the word Antipaladin’s trying to use today is “led”, not “lead”. I don’t blame him, though — English homophones are at least a CR 7. That’s what we get for building a language by mugging other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary.
As for today’s question, I don’t think I’ve ever run into anyone who’s built a character with an over-inflated backstory. My group’s been good about that (our Barbarian had been a menial laborer for much of his life, our Monk was primarily a scholar before starting, our Ranger had managed to kill something monstrous but we agreed it was probably partly due to sheer luck, etc.). The Rogue’s got the most involved backstory, but I think I’ll be able to work it fairly smoothly into the game’s narrative (or, I will, as soon as they’re done being kidnapped by firenewts).
Laurel glares at me when I ask her to edit comics after the fact. 🙁
Oof. Gaze attacks from a spouse must be the worst — I glanced at a stat block once, and all the save DCs just said “High Enough”.
Legendary Resistance: ∞
I love the idea of starting the game at level zero. No PC classes, no powers, spells, feats, etc, just survive an adventure on your wits and earn that first level.
Unfortunately it’s an approach that isn’t well suited to a lot of games, because the different classes are so different in their approach and background. It works much better for a story like Scooby-Doo: a group of friends get into a weird situation and user whatever is available to survive. Maybe someone tries to figure out how to stop the idol’s power, and starts to learn about magic. Or picks a lock and becomes the rogue. Or grabs a big hammer, gets mad and becomes a barbarian. Even more esoteric things like sorcerors/warlocks can work like this, if they make a deal or absorb power they shouldn’t have.
I’ve often run into this problem with D&D stuff, especially with new players. I think it comes down to the feeling that one’s character is inadequate or uninteresting, or just hasn’t earned their specialness. “So I’m a knight, with all of this… knight stuff… shouldn’t I have at least done something to get here?”
I’ve got a character planned who sort of has this problem. She’s starting in the Old age category for her race but will be starting at Level 2. My explanation for this is that she’s never really been much of a fighter, being the slightly bookish older sister to a strong warrior type. But now she’s decided to put some of her knowledge to use but is going to have a bit of a learning curve when it comes to actually applying the stuff she knows.
I have a character in a long-running D&D 5e campaign who is a professional revolutionary. He’s supposed to be stupidly old (as in, at least one bring-back-to-life spell) and pretty famous for being involved in a huge number of uprisings.
Also, this works better because I don’t have a specific goal, nor did I need to be terribly powerful.
We did start at level six, but still.
However, it seems to have worked out fairly well; I conceal my identity around evil kings and KGB heads, and I got a kick out of trying to start any number of revolutions.
(I’m also the archpriest of two extremely minor gods, one of which is pretty much completely insane, whom we actually met in-game. My DM has threatended to make me actually take a level in Cleric [or warlock, maybe] if I don’t stop advocating them to evil KGB heads.)
Yeah, it’s kind of the B-plot of all my revolutionary tendencies, but since I’m one of the most proactive players, I have managed to make it closer to the A-plot in the two arcs we’ve been through. Both of them were perfectly fine revolving around killing a king.
…
Anyone else had this backstory-becomes-main-plot-driver issue?
I still remember the guy who didn’t understand the problem with his 1st level character having a backstory involving him defeating Demogorgon. Yes, he was part of a group that everyone but him died in the process of sealing it, but he was still alive to strike the final blow.
My Arcane Trickster Cleric was 673 years old, and she had been retire for about 50 years as she waited for the world to literally die, causing a significant decline from level 11-13 down to 3, when the world finally stopped dying and started back up again.
My Shillelagh Samurai worked as a Majordomo, well past his prime and coming up with unorthodox tricks to stay relevant at his master’s side, unfortunately his master passed away (cause unknown) and the progeny were not willing to keep this old man on retainer.
Derrik Darkluster had a storied career as a hero even before hitting first level, but it was generally all cunning trickery to get the bandits to fight among themselves or Thaumaturgy to intimidate them into surrendering without a proper fight, or even simply inspiring the villagers to stand up for themselves and wipe the bandits out themselves, which then got spun into outlandish tall tales of heroism.
He also specialized in more minor things, like helping old widows and counseling younger children against foolhardy behavior. (or at least advise them on how to do it smart and what pitfalls to watch out for)