Born Winner
Basic Information
A Born Winner is a character who is innately more powerful, smarter, and all-around better than the people around him. He did not have to actively work to be as good as he is - he was born this way.
See Also
Because Destiny Says So
Can't Catch Up
Characterization Tropes
Hard Work Hardly Works
Muggles
Puny Earthlings
The Only One
Sources
Bibliography
Game and Story Use
- Maybe the Born Winners are the descendants of powerful spirits or even gods.
- Very appropriate for a Heroic Age story, where basically every great hero is a demigod or touched by the divine in some way.
- If you can come up with some justification for this trope, this might explain why the typical player characters are so much more powerful than most people around them.
- Conversely, maybe Born Winners exist in a setting, but the PCs aren't among their numbers - and the campaign is centered on trying to take the Born Winners down a notch. This can be very satisfying when done well.
- In science fiction, the Born Winners could be designer babies: the children of a financial elite, turned into a genetic elite.
- In fantasy, they might fit a role similar to the Nephilim.
- The Dragon-Blooded and Sidereals of Exalted fall under this trope. The other Exalted do not - the Solars and Lunars get their Exaltations during their Crowning Moment of Awesome as mortals, while the Abyssals get theirs during their Start Of Darkness.
- These are just people with PC class levels … or built on more points than mundanes, depending what systems you use.
- Actually, welding the idea of PCs to real life … perhaps these "high point characters" have been hijacked by some kind of external power that is able to edge around the rules that govern most people.
page revision: 4, last edited: 08 Dec 2020 10:31