RPGaDay 2019: 12 Friendship

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.