DCC Level 0 Character Funnel is a Bad Concept

[CapnZapp]

Exactly. It fully embraces Appendix N Sword & Sorcery pulp fantasy. It’s not a game, generally, about selfless heroes saving the world with no expectation of reward. It’s a game of hired thugs slaughtering men and monsters for gold. Magic is dangerous and corrupts. The gods are cruel and fickle. It absolutely nails that aesthetic.

Or, in other words:

Sword & Sorcery

 

[CapnZapp]

Yeah, but in this case it's random stat generation, random HP, random classes, and random chance of survivability.
If everything is that random, I'd rather just drop a few Plinko chips on the Price is Right and let Bob Barker tell me what character I'm playing.
In the case of the funnel I played there was zero player skill involved. You rolled a die to see what mutation you got, rolled a die for your character to see which one randomly got killed by the BBEG, etc.

I guess you can always ignore the consistent message you're getting from multiple posters:

That the funnel is often much more fun than dropping Plinkos.
And more richly rewarding: the funnel is not just about random distribution or even chiefly about that.

The funnel is a great way to start off the campaign with party members that share a common trauma, that already from the start have a couple of battle stories to bond over. Personalities created by fire, personalities that not only know success, but bitter failure and loss as well.

If Bob Barker can give you that, great!

 

[CapnZapp]

You know what's a game I don't enjoy playing? Bridge.

You know what's an objectively great game? Bridge.

You know what would make bridge much more awesome?

A funnel to decide who gets a spot at the table!

 

[CapnZapp]

Yeah, I agree that the funnel of DCC is overstated. It really is an Appendix N type of game. I really wish the convo about DCC was more like "Step 1: Roll your unfortunate villagers. Step 2: play through this funnel to show how they became un-villager. Step 3: Play DCC."

You can absolutely do it that way.

What the actual "funnel" concept adds to this is:

A solution to the "I rolled 3d6 in order and now I suck" problem.

Another solution than the "generate four stat lines and pick the best" or "roll 4d6 drop lowest and then place stats freely" solutions, that is.

None of these solutions are necessarily better or more superior than the others, by the way.

But the funnel suits the OSR ethos - you can say with absolute objectivity that you're just a random villager that grew into a hero.

You didn't start life as a hero. The rules didn't ensure you became suitably heroic. You weren't given it, you took it for yourself. Nobody gave you any bennies that make you more special than anyone else.

Your heroism, along with a helping of courage and luck, is what separated you from the rest. Not that you, say, got to roll 4d6 where everybody else only got to roll 3d6.

That difference can come across as unimportant or like a mere detail, but it signifies the huge shift in perspective that's so central to these types of games.

 

[CapnZapp]

On the other hand, I also really enjoy spending time crafting characters I want. I have characters made that'll never get used but I had fun creating them. I have played and GMed games where death is pretty much off the table, and those have been very satisfying. I don't think it's fair to paint players who actually want their characters to survive as entitled, or wanting to be "the star." There's a myriad of ways to play rpgs and I don't believe DCC should be used to teach players to embrace random character creation and death.

Of course you can have a deeply narrative game where a character death would only be negative: a wrench in the works, something that only interrupts and delays the GMs and the players shared story.

For the groups that make that work, there is zero reason to have a funnel, and likely no reason to explore OSR games at all.

But many D&D players come at no death from a very different angle. Their characters are mostly or only an expression of player freedom; the ability to do what you want, the race to deal the most damage and so on.

For this kind of player, a player that suffers from "player entitlement", the funnel can be a GREAT antidote.

The point isn't to embrace randomness. The point is to get used to the idea that perhaps your personal experience isn't central to the game. The shared story is. Your character dying does not mean "game over" or "I lost" or failure. It means you actively contribute to a more rich story.

But certainly not every player is like that.

 

[CapnZapp]

Same thing at higher levels in DCC. You roll on a random chart and you accidently lop off your own head or get pulled into the Nine Hells. I don't like that kind of stuff being left up to chance. If dying is the result of a random chart roll, then what use is there in skilled play, good tactics, cooperation, or any of the other things we admire about this hobby? When the very things that we celebrate about the hobby don't matter, the feel turns into a parody of the game.

I don't think most groups play this strictly.

There's always a way to mitigate the calamity.

Remember the rolls are there not to punish you, but to stimulate and encourage a story.

The thing, though:

Is "I don't like it left up to chance" code for "I don't like the possibility of it actually happening to me"?

Not saying this applies to you, Retreater, but the point is to wrest control back from the players.

Regular D&D says you can die. And then immediately invent a dozen safeguarding mechanisms to ensure that doesn't happen in practice...

OSR tries to remove the pretense. If the game says there is a risk of death, then that needs to be something that can actually happen, and actually happen to you.

And still, OSR is the kind of game where if you say "I want my character back from the Nine Hells" the GM will say HELL YES and let you quest for that to happen!

Instead of complaining something happened to your character that you could not control, we accept that we aren't entitled to veto things happening... and then turn this calamity into narrative gold if you do lose your character, and even more narrative gold if you manage to save your character!

 

[CapnZapp]

What makes you think character death in the OSR-style of play doesn't impact the story? Of course it does. It's just not considered a fail state of the game as with modern games. One character dies and the player makes a new one. But, importantly, that death effects the story. It always does.

Quoted for truth, as the kids used to say

 

[CapnZapp]

I don't own the DCC rule books and haven't read them, but an old friend from high school, who lives out of state, will give me a break from DMing when he is in town and has run some games for me an my group.

When he ran a DCC funnel game it was a revelation. It was an absolute blast. A sinkhole opened up under some villagers home and he went to spelunking in it an never returned. A group of villagers was rounded up to attempt to find out what happened and hopefully rescue the missing villager.

Thanks for sharing

 

[CapnZapp]

A good chunk of DCC's page count is because the spell failure tables with every spell.

Yes.

For me, unfortunate. That each and every spell was almost its own mini-game, and that you could almost never count on getting a spell result you could actually use was one of the biggest causes of us abandoning the DCC system.

I absolutely understand the criticism against regular D&D: spells have no uncertainty. Tools that always do what you intend them to do are not called "magic". They are called "tools".

But DCC severely overcompensates by randomizing ALL the parameters. If they focused on randomizing one or three variables that could have been something.

But DCC turns spellcasting into a chaotic fiddly mess - an utter trainwreck, to be honest. My players found that they hesitated using magic since there was always great risks involved. And in the end they often ended up not using magic at all.

I fully understand that part of this is because they're stuck in the rational solution-focused competitive mindset so common with D&Ders, and that they were unable to "let loose" and "don't worry be happy".

But part of it is also bad design. Not every parameter needs to be randomized at the same time to achieve the goal of making magic more mysterious and less "scientific", less reliable, less of a dependable tool.

It ended up as one of our biggest hurdles to DCC adoption.

 

[Retreater]

Instead of complaining something happened to your character that you could not control, we accept that we aren't entitled to veto things happening... and then turn this calamity into narrative gold if you do lose your character, and even more narrative gold if you manage to save your character!

I'm very rarely a player, so perhaps it's more difficult for me to get into the player mindset.

To me, the randomness reminds me of when I was in middle school and my character got access to a Wish spell through a Deck of Many Things. I Wished my friend's character into a woodchuck. There were lulz.

Random charts seem good for that old-school mentality where you enjoy seeing terrible traps and awful spells destroy your friends' progress in the game - because "at least it's not your character."

As one of my players commented last session "It's not 1974 anymore." I don't need adversarial charts of terrible, random things to do to characters, like a game system that uses Grimtooth's Traps as its core resolution mechanic.

Put this way. I love classic arcade games. I can happily play Galaga for about 15 minutes to see if I can beat my personal record before I lose my ships, but I'm not going to lose myself in it for hours like I would Skyrim (or my wife does with Breath of the Wild or Baldur's Gate 3). DCC seems like one of those classic arcade games.