I've seen a lot of groups who are primarily gamists that go for the XP and abilities and the killing and the loot rather than go to indepth with the roleplay aspects of the game. I blame World of Warcraft.
In any case, that's neither here nor there. I bring it up because such groups often ignore new abilities when they level up and how their fellow party members might react to seeing the new abilities in action.
In our groups, it gets roleplayed out quite often (some examples below) and I was wondering if other roleplayers out there did anything similar.
- When my wizard was 2nd level, our party traveled through a cave and my character picked up some bat guano. One of the other PCs said something about "wizards and their fetishes" to which I responded simply, "quiet you, I think I might be on to something." Later on, when we were 5th-level characters, we were faced with a small hoard of charging orcs. For the first time, I cast fireball, killing the whole lot of them before they could cover half the distance. All the other characters (physical combatants all) lowered their swords and axes in surprise and turned to look at me. All I could think of to say was "guano certainly is a fetish NOW."
- We had an extremely rough battle against a powerful melee brute of a monster that nearly killed us to the man. Though many of us went down multiple times, we managed to prevail. In the very next encounter (after leveling up) I cast fly on myself and started pelting the enemy with fireballs. The rogue simply asked incredulously "You can fly!? YOU CAN FLY!? Why the hell didn't you do that before when we were getting mauled by the dire bear!?"
- After listening to the annoying monologue of a most hated foe, our party fighter charged him like a bolt of lightning (in mid-sentence), tripped him prone, and then decapitated the guy with a critical hit/power attack. Having just picked up Greater Trip he declared simply, "Whoah! Did you see that move? I'll have to try that again!"
I loved reading that. That put a smile on my face. I'd love to see more of that in my games.
To answer your question, yeah, we tend to be a little videogamish in that regard, but it might possibly just be due to a more high-magic style, or perhaps a different way of thinking. My cleric with points in spellcraft and knowledge: arcana would *expect* the wizard to fly or throw fireballs, rather than being surprised. That's just how we play it, with our knowledges rather deeply, too deeply, ingrained into our playstyles, I suppose.
I much prefer your method, though. That makes for some great storytelling. :)
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lol aye, good read :)
With myself and a fair few of our players the problem is shutting us up *before* we get the ability..
''SOON I'll BE ABLE TO KILL TWICE AS MANY ORCS!''
''Dude, I can solo you next level...''
''THREE MORE LEVELS AND WE'RE COMING BACK FOR A REMATCH!
To be fair, we've always done this - even before PC's became a common house hold item.
However, this isn't ingame. Ingame ability development occurs along side the story so it explains itself..(i.e, in your example, the Fly spell would have been gained after down time and research - generaly for us, even automatically aquired abilities require the support of the story/actions ingame) ..and characters react according to their personality.
I've seen a lot of groups who are primarily gamists that go for the XP and abilities and the killing and the loot rather than go to indepth with the roleplay aspects of the game. I blame World of Warcraft.
When i first started play, at age 8, with the red box set: Exploration/map, Loot, monster killing, and new spells is what got me hooked. The role-playing at that age was just the annoying pushy dungeon master :)
I have to remind myself ever once in a while, that new players are not in it for the Role-Play. There in it to play a board game, and have fun. This is what gets them started, and then the role-play you easy them into is what hooks them for life.
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Recently, one of my Summoners 'leveled up' and I wrote a scene where his Eidolon started acting weird. The Summoner incanted some words and tossed some herbs from his spell component pouch, and his Eidolon burst into flames and burned away, and the new form (since he'd gained some new Evolution points, and re-assigned some previous ones) burst forth from the ashes of the previous body.
If the Eidolon had been suffering some sort of level drain or long term disability (disease, curse, ability damage, etc.) I probably wouldn't have been able to get away with that bit of flavor text, or the new Eidolon would have had the same impairment as the old one, but it occured between outings, so it didn't have any impact other than adding some 'color' to the scene.
We used to, back in ye olde days, play out the training montages, from when you had to hire trainers and spend weeks 'leveling up,' but as of 3rd edition, we switched to the more 'video-game-y' scheme where 'leveling up' could happen during the adventure. It would be neat to bring some of that back, but it's purely a player choice, now, and not something suggested by (or required by) the rules.
We dont make a point of doing it but it does happen quite abit LOL. In the game I am rumnning at the moment when the cleric spent most of the first session shooting things with her crossbow then part why through the next session she unleashes a spell that fells the critters in one go the rest of the party just looked on in disbelif before the ranger said 'why the hell havent you done that before' He then went on a mumbled rant about 'casting spells of utter destruction no I think I will pop a bolt in its ass, BOOOOM no I think pop, pop is better'. It was very funny even the cleric had to laugh.
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I did something similar in my first Pathfinder game (it actually started with the Beta and then moved onto the final rules).
My character was a Fighter but he had a decent Intelligence, enough that he had some extra languages and enough skill points to put some in Cross Class skills. I took Thassilonian as a language and Knowlegde (Arcana). I explained that my character took part in a battle beneath the great Thassilonian ruins and was left for dead, when he miraculously survived and awoke he had this extra knowledge in his head.
During the actual game, Caleb suffered quite a few near death and unconscious moments, and this actually played into my plan. After each such incident he started to exhibit changes - claustrophobia, occassional static electricity putting his hair on end, and finally his eye colour changed from brown to blue.
It was at this point I started to slowly start exhibiting the benefits of my character's most recent class - Sorcerer with the Elemental (Air) bloodline :) Basically I explained to the GM that an elemental had invaded my mind in that original battle and with every near death experience it was gaining more conscious control over my character. I had the idea of it eventually becoming something akin to a symbiot, with the ability to occassionally take control in times of stress (and exhibit the more powerful abilities).
I used the sorcerer spells sparingly initially and so the other players were getting very suspicious and worried as the display of power grew more frequent and significant.
I chose to leave the group before completing the Adventure Path and so never got to finish that character's story. But I enjoyed what I did play of it.
Great idea :) I love it when people come up with that sort of thing.
My group could stand to do this more often. There've been a few such moments (like when the shadowdancer's shadow companion appeared and I started a conversation about whether or not it was undead; he convinced me it wasn't). This sounds like it's a lot of fun!
I've played lots of Draconic bloodlined half-breeds, niche subsystem classes, and a fair amount of core class variants, on top of lots of multi-classing. I get the "You can do whaaaat?" look fairly often...
My last character in 3.5 was a human female, dragon-descended Sorceror6/Duskblade 1, with the Dragonscale Husk armor variant, claws, and a tail attack. She was a lot of fun to play, especially making 4 attacks per round with the help of the Fist of Stone spell. Useless against boss-type creatures, but awesome for mopping up minions and smaller stuff.
Some really obvious ones like a new spell level or a new special ability are sometimes commented on in game. But most of the time I dont think they are actively identified for fear of breaking the 4th wall. I often find one of the hardest things to do is explain complex game mechanics from an in game point of view, so I'd definately like to see more of it, but it's not easy.
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We don't tend to do this--like BenignFacist said, we frequently go the "And at this level, I'll be able to..." route. I agree, though, it would definitely be cool if we had more in-game reactions to powers and abilities.
Our big reactions come mostly when players don't quite understand their spells/abilities all that well. Recently our 4th-level cleric (read: FOURTH LEVEL!) responded to a situation by saying, "I cast True Seeing!" Which naturally prompted a chorus of "YOU CAN DO WHAT???" "What, I can do that, I've done it before!" "True Seeing is a really high level! You can't cast True Seeing!" "No, I can! Oh, there it is! Reveal True Shape!" *Facepalm*
In the campaign my friend is running, we recently had a neat scenario. Our sorcerer "levelled up" and chose fireball. We got into a big battle on a river where our boat was being closed on by warriors in dugout canoes. He pointed at the canoes and shot a fireball.
The reactions of the party were awesome. Several people turned and looked at Aramek (the sorcerer) and said "Since when can you do that??" or some thing like that. The Lawful annoying ranger started screaming at everyone to stop gawking keep firing arrows at the warriors, etc. It really was a huge moment for the party! Typically, we don't playout his new spells so dramatically, but fireball is a very dramatic spell!!
I have to disagree with what lazarx said. I've seen really good roleplayers reduced to noobs at the table because WOW has affected them so much that they no longer think clearly as players. They view everything as nothing more than a boardgame with more complicated rules and it pisses me off because that's not what a "roleplaying" game is.
I'm suddenly getting an image of that now 4th level Wizard thinking he's mastered that Fireball spell and flinging the bat guano at the badguys... with no spell going off.
Badguy: "What did that guy in robes just do? Looks like he threw somethi- Ewww! It hit me in the face! It hit me in the face! What is it? Get it off of me! Get it off of me"!!!
I'm suddenly getting an image of that 4th level Wizard thinking he's mastered that Fireball spell and flinging the bat guano at the badguys... with no spell going off.
Badguy: "What did that guy in robes just do? Looks like he threw somethi- Ewww! It hit me in the face! It hit me in the face! What is it? Get it off of me! Get it off of me"!!!
It was from such an incident that the stinking cloud spell was discovered. The wizard in question used a LOT of bat guano.
An interesting event happened with my first psionic character.
At the first level had a fight against nine skeletons. My psion had only powers that affect the mind and was useless in the fight (I had to fight using a stick that I found in the forest!)
We were almost wiped out (I was the only one to stand up, part by luck and partly by being an Elan and use all the power points to avoid damage).
Then I reached the third level and chose Energy Missile as new power (I was a Kineticist) and feat Privileged Energy [fire], which increased my potential damage to 3d6+6 . The next time we encounter a horde of skeletons, I literally fried them before they reach our group.
The reaction of the warrior who was in the midst of an charge against them was: OMG! Who are you and what you did with our partner?
(The guy even more funny was the DM. He rolled the dice aside and said: Wait a minute .... HOW?)
This was at a time when we had gone through quite a few huge battles without leveling, and the DM tallied it up to realize we actually had earned two levels in this time. I had planned on putting my monk into one psychic warrior level, followed by Elocater, so I got to do both in one shot. I had some splitting headaches prior to leveling, and trouble sleeping. Once I leveled I started levitating without noticing, and would use powers "involuntarily" in combat.
My former roommate's sorcerer had this running joke where whenever we got attacked he would try to jump up and fly away to escape the fight, then begrudgingly participate when he couldn't. When he could finally cast fly he tried this and, in his "surprise", crashed into the ceiling of the cavern.
I miss that campaign...