What is the virtue of a character funnel? Why is it a good thing to do. I must admit I’m perplexed.
I find a first session funnel to be a great way to kick off a campaign and give a reason for the party to come together. It helps create a party backstory that the players feel, because they lived through it.
For example. Start with a town. Say you have four players. Each player rolls up four level-zero characters. They have stats, species, and background and some equipment that fits with that background. So you have 16 members of this town. A good sample of different members of this Depending on the players, I'll have them come up with a few short phrases or sentences describing their ties to the town and relationships to each other. Maybe a player has their four characters all being part of the same family. Maybe a character is an outsider that found acceptance by the town. Whatever. Just something to create a sense of why there are at the town and how they relate to the other characters and the town itself.
Then the orc raid begins, or the zombie horde arrives, or some destructive monster with a deadly CR arrives. Maybe a group of drow arrive create chaos with fire, etc., and drag off a number of young villagers as slaves and 16 PCs are the posse quickly formed to try to rescue them. The session should be deadly enough that a good number of those 16 PCs are going to die.
From the survivors, the players select their main PCs. They now start the campaign with shared motivations and a meaningful call to adventure. It also gets the experience of PC death out of the way so that players understand that it can happen and see it as part of the story.
It is not a better style of play or the best way to start a campaign, but it is an approach that my players and I have enjoyed. And it works just as well in 5e as DCC. To make it work with published official WotC adventures, I would have to homebrew the first session in a way that strongly hooks into the main adventure. But it isn't that difficult.
The downside for some players is that they are not starting with fully fleshed out characters with deep backstories. There is some randomness in what character they will end up playing. But with my style of DMing, if someone is unhappy with their character, I'd let them roll up a new one as long as they hook it into the party and the party's motivations in a meaningful way. That really is no different than more traditional, non-funnel campaign starts. For a funnel to be fun, it needs player buyin and part of that can be the DM making it clear that they don't have to stick with a surviving funnel character if they are unhappy with the options.
But I don't find it to be much of an issue with 5e. Unlike DCC, I'm generally following the 5e rules for character creation, just not selecting a class. Personally, as a player, I like to also limit backgrounds and randomize what background I get. As a DM I might also create some custom backgrounds, based on the rules in the PHB, to fit the environment the players are starting in. It is also a good opportunity to let players create their own backgrounds, using the rules in the PHB. One cool result of this is that players engage in their backgrounds far more than what I typically see in 5e games. Since 2014, I can't recall any player ever engaging with the custom background rules in the PHB and creating their own background, other than when I ran a 5e funnel.
The thing with this is players don’t create characters, the DM allocates them. Then, without builds or backstories, there is no reason for the players to be attached to them.
In my funnels that player do create their level-0 PCs. But even if allocating them, the funnel experience itself is what creates the back story and makes players attached to the survivors. But yes, because less time is spend creating the character (whether allocated a level-0 character or creating one) it is easier to deal with a characters death, because you are not as invested in the character.
Still, even as a player in DCC funnels where the DM just had a bunch of pregens to randomly select from, I still got invested in the character almost immediately. I still played them as people who wanted to survive. Some people explain DCC funnels as edge-lord meat grinders. While that can be fun and I would be up for it, that just hasn't been my experience and I'm often scratching my head when reading other threads discussing DCC funnels. DCC funnels have been some of my most enjoyable games and can be as emotionally impactful as more traditional approaches. It also made me more interested in games like Call of Cthulhu that focus on a a model of heroism with a much greater emphasis on PC mortality.
Should they survive, they can then be developed into full characters.
Exactly.
