DCC Level 0 Character Funnel is a Bad Concept

[CapnZapp]

My personal favorite funnel is "The Portal Under the Stars." IMO it's honestly the best intro to DCC both in terms of playability and setting expectations for the kind of weird stuff the game brings/encourages. Also it's pretty short.

The one I fell in love with was "Death-Slaves of Eternity" by Marzio Muscedere. Not only is it way cool, it also comes with a very neat solution to the "how change DCC to support an humanocentric setting with no Elves or Dwarves?"

 

[CapnZapp]

TLDR: DCC media focus so much on the funnel experience it fails to sell the game as something else to me.

The actual game rules are definitely not without their challenges.

I would probably not run my next OSR-y game using DCC. I hope I can transplant the goodness into a much more reliable rules engine like 5E and add funnels and Luck scores to that.

 

[CapnZapp]

Back in my day we'd roll four (or more!) sets of ability scores, scrap three of them, and choose the character with the scores that best represented what we wanted to play. It was done in 5 minutes, and that's all the character funnel we needed. Haha.

Well, the thing there is that most groups have an unstated agreement that you will likely not lose these characters.

But if there's no real risk of death, DCC contends there's no real heroism either.

The difference between your "funnel" and this funnel is that you don't get to decide.

And the difference between a system like 5E* and a system like DCC is that it's no big deal if your stats aren't perfect for the job.

*) Actually 5E isn't too bad - even if some players try to obsess over minuscule differences. A better contrasting example would be Pathfinder 2, whose balance is razor thin and where you can actually argue a single point makes a huge difference.

 

[Lanefan]

@CapnZapp - the way you approach and play/run DCC very much reflects the way I approach and play/run old-school D&D, only the funnel tends to be kinda less-formal and spread out over the first several adventures.

But you are bang on with your ideas about players needing a different (and, IMO, better) mindset than in modern D&D. Fully agree.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Many funnels begin by thrusting a gaggle of completely unremarkable villagers into a complete naughty word position.

If the system is decent, they will immediately die.

 

[CapnZapp]

If the system is decent, they will immediately die.

You have a strange way of enjoying role-playing games, but I'm not here to judge.

 

[Lanefan]

If the system is decent, they will immediately die.

Or will they?

Does it take making all potential foes that much more powerful than ordinary villagers to make a system 'decent'? Or can the power curve be flattened to the point where when three dozen villagers find themselves up against, say, eight modest but not-zero foes (in D&D, think Orcs for example) there's a reasonable chance of maybe six or eight villagers surviving?

 

[CapnZapp]

Going from 5e to DCC has been freeing.

Yes. I am very satisfied to have tested the game - it has made be a better gamesmaster!

And there are a lot of very cool DCC adventures (the ones written specifically for the DCC ruleset)

 

[CapnZapp]

Emphasis mine.

There's your problem right there! In DCC (or any funnel; you can do them in any RPG and are arguably even better in a straight B/X game) you aren't supposed to decide what you want to play before you start. The whole point is that you're just some person who has been dragged into this adventuring life. Surviving that funnel is all the backstory you need, and now you actually care about that PC.

It is very liberating if you have experienced a lot of the entitlement that ordinary D&Ders sometimes fall foul of. The notion that your character "should" have an 18 in some stat. The notion that unless you get to finetune every little detail the character is "unplayable". The notion that the character is a bunch of numbers that "belong" to the player.

Min-maxing a character over 20 levels is a substantial effort, so that must mean the DM won't take that away, or my participation is "wasted", amirite? (Far from every D&D group plays this way, and lots of groups don't need any help at all.... but many groups do contain at least some of this type of thinking...)

That, and now I'm slightly exaggerating, roleplaying isn't about collectively telling a story. Instead, let's assume and take for granted that my PC will reach level 20, and the actual campaign is just there to create the details on how that goal was reached...

What's so liberating about DCC is how you get reminded of how your character dying can be a valuable and important part of our shared story.

That the goal isn't actually to "win" or "complete your build". The goal is to collectively share an experience, and that this experience becomes richer, not poorer, if it not only contains triumphs and successes, but setbacks and losses as well.

 

[Distracted DM]

My claim to fame is that I ran a DCC Funnel for a geeky bachelor party and it was a hit. For DCC in general, I use the app to avoid looking up the various spell charts/crit/fumble charts.

App, you say?! I didn't know!