Took A Level In Badass / Tabletop Games

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• Most any RPG character will level up through the course of the game.
• One of the oldest tabletop games in the world: Chess. The pawns, if they reach the other side of the board, immediately become promoted into any piece, most often a queen (sometimes a knight, if need be, although puzzles where a rook or bishop can win but the other pieces cannot are popular and quite clever).
• If you're playing Deadlands, death can be step one to taking that level. Just ask Abe Lincoln who came back from the dead to run the Union's monster-hunting agency.
• While no Dungeons & Dragons Prestige Class is explicitly named "Badass", there are many, many candidates, such as:
  • Heir of Siberys — Eberron dragonmark, turned up to eleven.
  • Extreme Explorer — Kind of like being Indiana Jones, really.
  • Archmage — is able to sacrifice high-level spell slots to get things like six fireball spells per day 2 Time Stops (9th level spell) a day at the cost of a 9th level slot (and it can be done 5 times).
    • It also makes blasting a bit more viable. Imagine what it does with the actually worthwhile spells...
  • Pyrokineticist — Kill It with Fire, psionic fire in this case.
  • Risen Martyr — "Hey look, I died, and now I can do all this awesome shit!" That's right, folks, D&D includes a prestige class that makes you Jesus. Subverted in that the powers gained are pretty modest, and it doesn't say much about a person if dying is a positive career move.
  • Increasing in level in any class arguably makes one more of a badass (that 1st level wizard having troubles fighting kobolds? He's instantly killing Pit Fiends now). It's just that the badassness is split out over twenty levels, which generally makes the shift somewhat gradual.
  • Incantatrix, Planar Shepherd (which deserves special mention for being the only prestige class that's strictly better than just taking more Druid levels), Dweomerkeeper, Ruby Knight Vindicator, Jade Phoenix Mage, Survivor... There are too many to list, but here's a discussion of particularly badass levels.
  • If none of the official classes are badass enough for you, try these fan-made rules.
  • 4th edition D&D goes so far as to build this into the classes twice over. First, at level 11, you get a Paragon Path that lets you take a level in badass... then, at level 21, you get an Epic Destiny, which is a second level in even more badass. Epic Destinies include the likes of Master of Moments (you gain control over time), Undying Warrior (there is nothing in the multiverse that can kill you), Parable (you realize that all of reality is but a story... and you ascend to become its author), World Tree Guardian (you are responsible for protecting the spirit of the world itself from harm), Chosen (your god makes you it's avatar within the world), and Demigod (you become a lesser god).
  • One famous example in Dungeons & Dragons cosmology is the case of Glasya, the daughter of Asmodeus, the Overlord of Hell. Originally portrayed as a glorified erinyes with the attitude of a rebellious teenager (and, at times, a Spoiled Brat), sometime during the 3.5 Edition she came to an understanding with her father, was granted a great deal more power, and gained the rulership of the sixth layer of Hell. Now, she's as powerful and cruel as any other ruler of Hell, and truly is her father's child...
  • The whole bard class took one between 3.5 and 5th edition. While classes fluctuating in power between editions is nothing new. Bards went from a class that required multiple books and good game knowledge to utilize well (which is to say about mid tier), to what's often considered the best class in the game. First they became full-casters (which allows them to cast spells up to level 9 instead of being limited to spells of level 5 and below), then they got magical secrets, a feature that allows them to take a couple of spells from any other classes spell lists. Combine that with having a lot of skill proficiencies and a feature that lets them get a bonus to ability checks they are not proficient in (which includes skills that a character can never be proficient in like initiative),bardic music being changed into the much more versatile and easily applied bardic inspiration and a group of subclasses that lets them specialize a bit (like shoring up the bards mostly mediocre physical fighting skills or getting them even more spells to use) while not losing their inherent versatility and you have a class that can do almost anything when built well and is still a massive asset when built poorly. A far cry from the Master of None that many used to consider the class to be.
  • In 5th Edition, with the release of Tasha's, there is now Sidekick classes that can be applied to any CR 1/2 or lower creature. The options are the bard-like Expert, which has a dash of Rogue and is very helpful, the Spellcaster, who can pick from the following subclasses — Mage, which uses Wizard spells, Healer, which uses Cleric and Druid spells, and Prodigy, which uses Bard and Warlock spells — with the ability to cast up to 5th level spells and can gain the ability to not lose concentration on a spell, which no player class has, and finally the Warrior, which is reminiscent of a Champion Fighter with a dash of Barbarian, and unlike Expert and Spellcaster, it can be applied to those who can't talk. In short, that lowly town guard, and the mule that they ride on, could potentially gain the power to take on a dragon. It's not good to laugh at the mule now — he'll be the one filling the coffins with bodies, 4 of them.
• Most kinds of Exaltation are the epitome of taking a level in Badass, taking a mortal with promise and making them a powerful demigod. There are exceptions, but in those cases (Such as Alchemicals and Liminals) the Exalt comes into existence as an Exalt. Many mix it with something else, though:
  • Lunars — Kindness. Sort of; they are Stewards, bound to protect, but in Creation Good is Not Nice...
  • The Abyssals and The Green Sun Princes — Jerkass. Well, their job description can be summed to "go murder and/or corrupt Creation".
  • The Solars took a collective level in Badass when the Jade Prison broke. For better than 15 centuries, spanning the Shogunate, through the Scarlet Empress's reign, there were roughly twenty Solar Exaltations active in the world at any given time. Two years after the Scarlet Empress disappeared, that number shot up to 150. All of a sudden, the idea of a Solar Resurgence isn't that crazy, even in the face of the Wyld Hunt.
• The Free Council in Mage: The Awakening. They began as the Nameless, a disorganized bunch of people who didn't fit in with the established Atlantean Orders. Since they were the Butt Monkeys of magical society, the Seers of the Throne tried to recruit them with the promise of Better Living Through Evil. The outcome was a lot of dead Seers and the creation of the Free Council as a formal order, and ever since, the Council built up a reputation for innovation and really cool Magitek.
• In the Old World of Darkness:
  • Mage: The Ascension: The Void Engineers were forced to take several levels in badass, since they were the only members of the Technocracy who could fight the umbra-corrupted mirror versions of the Technocratic Union from space.
• Warhammer 40K — the original Space Marines took a Level in Badass and a Level in Kindness. When they started in Rogue Trader, the Space Marines were said to be the mightiest warriors in the Imperium and much feared throughout the galaxy as unstoppable, cannibalistic, psychopathic savages in graffiti-ridden armor with pointy noses. In reality, they had an underwhelming Toughness of 3! That meant they were no tougher than your average human or eldar or whatnot. Their "Beaky" power armour was also weaker, it was 4+ compared to the current 3+ (though you could buff it to a 3 if your Space Marine found some Flak armour to put under it back then). Also every character had to roll to see what equipment they received, if I remember correctly — your Space Marine could end up packing a measly lasgun or autopistol if he rolled low enough. Finally Space Marine stats topped out at 6 in everything, the same level of potential any ordinary human could achieve in a career of almost the same amount of time and Marines would lose out in comparison with quite a lot of aliens. Now Warhammer 40k has made Space Marines distinctly superhuman in stats (especially in the RPG-oriented games) with alot better equipment, not mention that they're nobler, more disciplined and have gold-trimmed armor with more intimidating helms.
  • The Imperial Guard took a whole bunch of levels in bad ass this year after they got a new codex that's actually good. Also an example of Throw the Dog a Bone since IG and IG players were Games Workshop's favorite Butt-Monkey.
  • Space Marines also took a few levels in badass with their Fifth Edition Codex, the most notable being the Captain's Weapon Skill boost and the Chapter Master's Call Orbital Bombardment ability.
  • The Eldar got a significant boost with the rules changes in the Fifth Edition rulebook that combine with existing powers to make their Falcons tougher than Land Raiders.
  • The recent wave of updates to extremely old codexes (most notably the Dark Eldar, who have not received a new book in over a decade) resulted in many taking several levels in badass. Most notably the Grey Knights, going from an extremely small and elite group of special forces space marine taking massive death tolls to banish even the smallest of greater daemons to badass demonhunters whose very existence can make demons cower (and their leader carved his name into the chest of a daemon primarch). Some of these were considered well deserved and long overdue (notably the Dark Eldar, which was praised as being both flavorful and balanced) others were not.
  • In-Universe, the Tau. When first found by the Imperium, they were plains-dwelling stone-age hunters. Imperial standard doctrine is to eliminate any native Xenos species to prepare the planet for human settlement, but a huge warp storm destroyed the fleet and cut off T'au from Imperial contact for 6000 years. When the warp storm cleared, the Tau were found to be a highly-advanced spacefaring species with a small empire. The Exterminatus order still stands, but as for actually doing it...
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The Lizardmen have taken about a million of these since the destruction of the Old World. Being muscular reptilian killing machines, they were always quite awesome, but now they're "daemons of order" made of pure Azyr magic. The Slann, with their ability to see everything that goes on in the Mortal Realms (something not even Tzeentch can do), have turned the entire Realmgate Wars into a gigantic chess match between the Seraphon and the Chaos Gods. The Seraphon are The Dreaded to the newly daemonic Skaven because during the End Times, the Horned Rat went up Sotek the Snake God and got smacked down so hard that individual Skaven have nightmares about how the Lizardmen used to inflict genocides and atrocities on them, as a form of racial memory.

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