Starting a party of newly-created adventurers off was never easy,
especially back when everyone had to have their own reasons to just happen to
be in that particular tavern when the merchant comes barging in the door,
saying he was robbed. This is doubly difficult if your players are of the “extra
special” kind, with unique circumstances and strange NPCs and none of it goes
with anything else and you have to struggle to make some kind of connection,
however tenuous, to get the party started.
When the hobby was young, no one in Lake Geneva cared how
they all knew each other. They had willingly skipped ahead to chapter five when
they all agreed to help out the merchant, for suitable compensation, of course.
It was also assumed that, once the merry band of psychopaths
got together and killed some shit, they would grow to love one another in the
classic spree killer/couple killer idiom; great minds think alike, and all that
jazz. It’s one of the reasons why the thief became the rogue and stealing your
party’s loot became a no-no with every edition going forward.
A good game from a good company. |
During the lean years, when everyone else was making better
D&D than the people who owned the game, a company called Dungeon Crawl
Classics, came out with one of the first Old School D&D clones, a
deliberate throw-back to the first edition of the game, with a few notable style
twists. It’s very much worth checking out for all kinds of reasons, but the
thing I want to talk about is probably one of the best ideas to come out of the
Old School Renaissance: the funnel.
I first heard about this at a Pop Culture Association/American
Culture Association National Conference some years ago, before I was fully back
in the hobby. The Pulps Studies scholars had made friends with the Game Studies
scholars and we were talking D&D and someone suggested we just play. So we grabbed
an empty conference room, handed out characters and went for it.
It was pretty cool, to say the least, but we were discussing
this idea of the funnel and it was like a light went off in my head; players
roll up not one, but four characters who are ZERO level. Minimal hit points, no
skills, no real stats, nothing else. Just an occupation and maybe, if you’re
lucky, a tool to go with it. Cannon fodder.
The idea is simple: all of these zero level characters are
from the same place. They all, together, as a group, banned together to investigate
some thing that has happened to threaten the safety of the village. Orcs
raiding, daughter goes missing, livestock being murdered, you get the idea.
These zero level characters, out of a sense of little more than civic duty,
agree to hurl themselves into danger and possibly—make that, certainly—death. In fact,
that’s the point. With an average of 2 or 3 hit points, a single hit from a
goblin sword is lethal. Oh, sure, three or four zero level characters with
rocks and sticks can overcome a goblin, but not before it kills one of the
group.
That’s the funnel. It's a game of attrition, like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory Tour. Start with a lot of zero level
characters, and at the end of the adventure, you have a few left. They have
survived the harrowing ordeal, but at a cost. They watched their friends die,
they felt a sense of helplessness when they couldn’t do something, and felt a strong
sense of accomplishment for having stayed alive.
Those survivors, then, become the players’ first level
characters. If a player has more than one zero-level character, they choose
which one they want to use. Their background is a shared thing, and now when
they leave the village and strike out on their own, there’s all sorts of
compelling reasons why they are adventuring together in the first place.
It’s a cool idea, right? And I can tell you from experience,
it’s a hum-dinger way to start a campaign. The game I am currently running used
a funnel to get the group together, and it was glorious. For starters, there’s
a kind of freedom in not getting too attached to these smaller characters, even
though the players all picked favorites anyway. But as a DM, it’s okay to kill
these guys. In fact, it’s expected. So you don’t shirk from the crocodile
damage when it does eight points, twice what the zero-level guy has, and you make
it a spectacular death with the character getting pulled into the swamp,
kicking and screaming.
The players, weirdly, loved the deaths, as much as they
loved staying alive. Probably because it’s kind of a rarity in D&D. As
their ranks thinned out, they started focusing and taking more time to plan and
scheme.
After it was over, while we were all brainstorming on
background details, everyone’s bonds, ideals, and flaws all revolved around the
loss of their friends, or how important friendship was to them, or how they
care only about the friends they have and everyone else comes second, and they
are playing those details, as well. It’s been glorious. No inter-party
skulduggery; they all saved each other’s lives before they learned how to
fight and cast spells. No one else gets them like their buddies do. It’s their
friendship that keeps the party together.
There are some great examples of funnels out there, but I
found this one to be particularly helpful: Fifth Edition Funnel. You can also pick up a copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics and convert their funnel system to your own needs. I recommend starting your next campaign with it, just to shake things up, but also to nip inter-party squabbling in the bud.