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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9625971" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Are you familiar with the way old-school D&D tended to require that you burn through half a dozen (or more!) characters before you finally got one that would survive long enough to stick around a bit? Well, whether or not you are, that was a thing, and it was partially there to emphasize how dangerous the world is. Running things precisely like that is a problem now for a lot of players, because many folks who want to play old-school games don't have the free time to spend multiple months just getting past a character's first or second adventure. But they also don't want to give up the lethality of the world; to merely skip over that process would drain away a significant portion of the fun for them.Enter the character funnel adventure. Each player rolls up several characters, at least 2 but usually 3-4, sometimes more. The funnel adventure is, intentionally, brutally hard. It's fully intended that most characters won't survive. But when you do get to the other side--which should take no more than a couple sessions, perhaps three for a slow group or unusually long adventure--you have just completed what would have been a multi-month process of character-winnowing in a session to three.The existence of these funnels does absolutely nothing to people who don't want to use them. There is nothing you lose of DCC by not playing through them. But their presence neatly solves an otherwise thorny design problem that wasn't really a concern 50 years ago, but is a concern now.DCC funnels are one of my favorite examples of excellent game design, because I can with 100% honesty say they absolutely aren't for me. I don't like the lethality of early editions of D&D, which I find demoralizing and tedious. I have no interest in using funnels whatsoever, nor is this a design problem I would need to address. But I can see why the design problem really is a problem for the people who are looking for this kind of play-experience, and more importantly, I can see how this new technique is, objectively, a neat and tidy solution to a dilemma that looks hard to solve from first principles.I love giving it as an example very specifically because it's great design that isn't for me. I have no emotional attachment to it. I would never benefit from its existence, nor would I be impoverished if it hadn't existed. But I know that it is good game design, an improvement in technique, even though that technique doesn't do anything for me, personally. I have no dog in this race, yet I can still see that the newcomer has learned a useful trick her forebears didn't have.</blockquote>

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