Goodman Games

Well we went through the funnel a few weeks ago and only had a 50% mortality rate in the initial sample adventure. It gave the term meat shield an entirely new meaning - we mostly sacrificed our crappy characters so that the good ones would survive by having them go out front or check for traps or whatever. All in all it was a lot of fun and quite hilarious - most of the 1-3 hit point characters died horribly. The best part is that our surviving guys now have a believable backstory rather than something we just made up which is the coolest part about the 0 level funnel system.

We are continuing the play test tonight with our surviving 1st level characters so I'll post a followup with the results. We'll probably spend a bit of time on figuring out what are characters classes will be before we actually play.

Yaay! Good to see another new Playtester post a result!

Please do share your groups initial character choices. I like to see what is being favored by different players. So far Wizards dominate my group but Rogues are creeping up as second. Warriors next and Clerics last presently

Well we played again with a mixed group of 0 level guys and 1st level guys last session. Surprisingly, none of them died (we played in a Goodman Games DCC adventure (converted from 3.5 on the fly) called Mage Maze from DCC #29 The adventure begins. We made it part of the way through the adventure and found the bracelet we needed to escape the tower.

The only issue we had with mixing the 1st level characters and 0 level guys is that the 1st level guys kept pushing the 0 level guys towards the front of the group so that they could "prove themselves". It turned out to be a bit problematic despite the fact that nobody died simply because the higher level guys were trying to goad them into having their own "funnel" experience but the people playing the 0 level guys got a little testy about it at times. Once the first level characters got involved the encounter was usually over pretty quickly though.

My recommendation would be for Goodman to come up with some sort of blurb or advice on how to mix 0 level characters with 1st level characters in such a way or maybe suggest that everyone just start at 1st level at that point. On the one hand, if the 0 level guys don't go in front and get mauled (as is the intention with the funnel) then they just cower in the back and let the 1st level characters do all of the work. OtOH if the 0 level guys are forced to go up front while the 1st level guys "play it safe" in the back and use the 0 level guys as meat shields or cannon fodder it can cause interaction problems between the players. The session definitely didn't have the same light hearted feeling as the 0 level funnel game where you could laugh as your poor helpless 0 level guy with 1-3 hit points died horribly from something that wasn't terribly dangerous. Everyone was playing way more defensively the second time around.

We had a wizard, a warrior, an elf and a halfling as our main characters plus some henchmen and the usual 0 level pig farmers except for one who was a dwarf. The poor dwarf was the one that opened the doors just about every time and he got poisoneed by the needle trap and his CON was 2 or 3 by the end of the session but amazingly, he didn't die. The funniest moments were when the players of the 1st level characters started saying stuff like "raise the meat shields", "more power to the forward meat shields", "transfer power from the rear meat shields to the forward meat shields" and stuff like that - we got a good laugh out of those Star Trek red shirt type references.

Nobody died? I've never heard of such a thing. If the 1st level guys don't go to the front lines, the DM could simply rule that they don't get any XP for the adventure. That should cause them to mix it up a little bit more in the future.

Awesome! "Meat shields!"

Ah Fin! a part of me wants to agree with you but the DCC part keeps hearing the cover blurb screaming "Your no Hero!" Gotta admit this group (Who I now think of as "The Landing Party" Thank you Iguana!) Were just obeying that stern dictum it seems...

Maybe this is a time to discuss Alignment and the thorny subject of good & evil instead....


Naaaaah!

I have a Wizard that rolled a falling block trap off the groups first level thief (who made his vs Death roll thereby) who simply said "Ok your alive get up and find the trap better next time.." And WALK off leaving them lieing there on 1 hp...

The big issue is that we didn't want to ruin their funnel experience which is why we were pushing them to open up doors and go first and stuff - since its written into the rules, the 1st level guys shouldn't be punished for that but we honestly didn't know how else to play it (again, a rulebook blurb would help to clarify this situation). These two players missed the previous session and missed out on all of the hilarious 0 level death moments which was half of the fun of that session and helps to set the tone of the game (deadly dark S&S fantasy). We were trying to help them to let the laws of Darwin and survival of the fittest take over so that only the best one would survive and so that the surviving characters would have a decent and believable back story.

In the 0 level funnel sample adventure, we had one character die from opening the front door or reading the runes on it when she took one hit point of light damage to the face - she only had one hit point (poor Agnes the farmer LOL). Essentially, she had a flashlight shone in her face and died of fright...

In the first room, the spear traps killed two more guys and before we could even leave the room, the magic missile statue killed another and almost killed one more. In the room with the fountain, when we started pulling the crystals out of the fountain to flood the room below, I lost my second character from the fall but my surviving guy who had six hits managed to survive it and we had another guy or two die in the fall too.

Overall, it was hilarious and helped to build "character" and in pushing the 0 level guys to the front in the next session, we were merely trying to help them "get" that part of the game experience but they took it more like "you are trying to get us killed" (which we were LOL)...