Have you guys ever managed to make the old "my guy was super-powerful in his backstory" trope work? I'm talking about the kind of PC who gave up godhood because [insert backstory malarkey here] and now has to reclaim their lost power from level 1.
The appeal is obvious: You get to do the "prince to pauper" shtick, watching a Kuzco-type character learn humility. But it's also a wildly over-the-top backstory, putting a low-level dude with a pointy stick and a towering ego at the center of a GM's presumably-already-established setting.
So here's my question for the GMs out there: If you encounter this type of character out in the wild, how do you accommodate it? Is it possible to do this kind of PC without overshadowing a campaign (or the other party members)? Or is it better to ask the player to reconsider the concept altogether?
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This could work in 1e, when level drain meant exactly that: it was an actual level, and permanent. So your 15th level wizard could be knocked back to 1st (and all his kit stolen), so he'd have to start all over again. Except with a career-load of enemies and contacts.
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It's built into the Strange Aeons AP, where the PCs start out in an asylum, with several years of missing memories.
Which is one of the easier ways to do it, your memories are scrambled/lost. So as you level up you aren't learning new things your remembering them so you don't just get "power attack" you remember days of repetitive stroke, stroke, stroke in the training yard drilled into your body.
Actually remembering said past though is more difficult to justify since as mentioned above there isn't really a mechanic any more to not have those levels. You either need to justify it e.g. "divine stripping of power" or "Big fish in a small pond" Your impressive for your small town of NPC levels but in the adventuring world everyone is that impressive. Alternatively it can work for campaign starting at higher levels.
I never bothered, but I see a few ways (beside the mentioned "I forgot everything"):
1) You want to keep a low profile to avoid raising a world-spanning threat too soon.
2) Your actions had ill side-effects in the past, so you vowed to restrain yourself. Only over time you become confident to use them again.
3) You decided to be a mentor of your fellow adventurers, so you try to stay in the background and let them grow.
They all become difficult to justify when a party member (including you) dies because you didn't use your superior powers. But it allows your GM to infrequently permit you to use these powers, when it helps the story.
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I made this sort of thing work once, and not work once. The time it worked (3.5e), the character's backstory was that he was a 20th level wizard who was part of a group of wizards of all alignments (the Circle of Magi). The evil wizards framed him for the murder of one of the wizards, magically stripped him of his powers, and turned him out into the wild as an old man (~60 years old). The character took all the age penalties and started over as a 1st level wizard, collected a group of adventures, and spent the campaign slowly (and secretly) building up power and influence so he could confront his accusers at the very end of the campaign in an epic battle that resulted in his death, along with the deaths of the conspirators. It was a cool concept that provided a story arc for the entire campaign.
The time it didn't work one of my players wanted a character who for some backstory demigod-like reason stole a piece of the soul of every thing he killed, giving him access to some of their memories and the ability to speak with their voice. This was literally decades ago (2e), and I let him go forward with these abilities, but I was never able to really make it work in game as it really didn't fit well into the campaign (IIRC I was combining Against the Slave Lords and Against the Giants). Eventually he just dropped those abilities from the character and we just ignored that part of his backstory.
I made this work in a gestalt 5e homebrew campaign where I had a GMPC acting as a storyline guide.
I was a Paladin, a Prince, and the son of a Solar. I was on a quest to find, and assemble, the pieces of an ancient sword... and I had to complete this quest before the "great eclipse". I started at level 1 like everyone else, but I had better gear [being a prince has its perks, like the funding of the palace]. It was largely irrelevant, though... my gear, that is.
Campaign was great, party worked really well together, and I was never overpowered compared to anyone else [although, I may have had something to do with that]. My backstory ended up helping more than hindering, and all was good.
GURPS: Special Ops has this concept baked in. On the basis that Special Ops characters (SAS, Delta Force, SEALs, etc) are only 300-point characters because they're training all the time, those skills and stats will atrophy pretty quickly. So you can be an ex-SBS marine on 100 points, if you left the job 20 years before.
The closest I have come to that is my Dragon Sorcerer whose Backstory was a Golden Dragon who took a bet to live as a human for one year.
This is kind of the android life cycle.
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A phoenix’s resurrection can be messed with (one unique phoenix was resurrected near the huge demon portal thingy on Golarion; turned her evil), so if a phoenix had Tengu (or some other PC race) DNA mixed in by a crazy wizard during the self resurrection, it is actually supported in the canon that they might resurrect wrong, as a member of that species.
There are 3 or so ways to mimic phoenix powers through class (archetype) options that are specifically themed after the phoenix, so you leveling up would be you regaining your former powers, until you get self resurrection, and when you die, you self resurrect as your true phoenix self (it is believed that same unique phoenix I talked about earlier, would return to normal if she could be slain, and thus self resurrect again, it’s just she got a power boost, and no normal phoenix can get the job done).
I'm now picturing a grumpy minimum age (or if GM allows it child) character going along with the party and continually ranting about (a) being treated like a kid "I may look like this but I am a 40 year old man blast it, you weren't even a twinkle in your daddy's eye when I was killing Balor's you snot nosed punks!" and (b) ranting about their spending 30 years mastering the arcane arts only to break their neck in a bad fall and having their phoenix blood ressurect them like this where their bodies too weak and pitiful to handle their true power.
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there is a game mechanic built for this actually, you could have been a target of this ritual.
A Hercules- or Thor-like story comes to mind. Hercules being maliciously stripped of his godhood by Hades's agents, or sometimes Odin gets mad at Thor he strips him of his power and banishes him somewhere. We only saw this happen once in the MCU movies, but Odin did this more than once in the comics.
I would stay away from Amnesia-related backstories, because then you'd have a level 1 guy with 40 strength and none of his Su/Sp abilities; that's how you end up with a Jason Bourne-like character who's basically Carmen SanDiego + Chuck Norris rofflestomping your encounters from the get-go but has no idea why/how.
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there is a game mechanic built for this actually, you could have been a target of this ritual.
Ha! That's hilarious. This trope is common enough that there's a specific mechanic for it.
I like that there's a built-in plot hook of "smash the maguffin" with that one.