One of the things I really like about Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) is that it knows what people want from a TTRPG — enemies to fight, treasure to win, tales to tell. The ruminations of dragons, the schemes of nobles, the endless wars of the numberless gods — distractions from the adventure. DCC promises to give you all the good parts you remember from when you played D&D when you were a kid, and nothing that would slow you down.
You roll dice, you move on.
That doesn’t mean there’s no story; it’s just that they’re the kind of stories that fit into a night or two of playing.
But the most special of the cool things about DCC is their preferred method of character generation. You can roll one up the normal way — roll lots of dice, pick out the best ones for the character you want, head into danger with the character you want to play, totally in control of what happens.
But DCC asks, “what if… none of that?”
Most people don’t remember the original D&D character system. You rolled three 6-sided dice six times, and then filled out your character sheet by going down the line with what you rolled, no swapping, no extra dice, no best two out of three. STR/INT/WIS/DEX/CON/CHA — six rolls of the dice and you played what you rolled. Most characters were fighters, not having the stats for anything else. Some special few would be wizards or clerics; nobody would start their adventuring life pulsing with power. That would come later; with gear and levels. But that first level 1 party, shivering in the rainy woods, wondering why they weren’t sleeping safe and warm in their own beds, hiding from the band of orcs they’d stumbled upon, not knowing if any of them would survive to see the morning. That just doesn’t happen anymore.
D&D these days, well, you have your backstory, your goals, your plans, your likes and dislikes, decent starting gear and a bit of gold left over, maybe some spells. You expect to have a long career ahead of you and to never meet anything you can’t handle until you retire, lords and ladies and others, to your castles.
DCC says, roll up a dozen or so characters entirely randomly. This table tells what race and profession each has. This table tells what gear they have. They’re level 0, they don’t have to worry about what class they are. You can name them if you want, but you shouldn’t, because you might get attached. You see, most of those characters are going to die.
It’s called a Level 0 Funnel. An adventure for absolutely unskilled characters. The idea is that each player takes three or four characters and puts them in front of them. The DCC book says that players should only play the one closest to the center of the table, and when that one dies, the next one in line grabs everything from the body of the first one and takes their place. These characters have health in the single digits, most of them. Few have any armor. Some don’t even have real weapons.
There’s no set up to a funnel, no meeting at a tavern. The characters have been summoned somehow by a danger they must face, and it is right in front of them, and to back down is certain death.
I’m going to run a level 0 funnel — Sailors on the Starless Sea. I played this back in February at CaptainCon. I 3D printed up a bunch of NPCs for the players to choose from. The character sheets are special ones I found on DriveThruRPG; they’re scratch off. When a new character steps up, you scratch off their race and profession; the other stats are hidden. Are you strong? Dextrous? You don’t know! Players scratch off the stat when they need to use it. Strength check? Okay, reveal your strength. 5? Bad luck — better see if anyone else can help you open that door.
This particular adventure starts out simple, but ends in a very different place. Those adventurers that survive and hit level 1 at the end, they will have backstories and personalities and stories to tell that are entirely unique to them. They’ll never be farmers or merchants or barmaids again. Now they’re warriors, mages and priests, and they have faced down cosmic threats and lived — just barely — to tell the tale.
I’m pretty pumped.
Apologies for the long comment, but the note about “Original DnD Rules” triggered some fond memories.
We sometimes used to play DnD Basic using the exact rules in the book just for giggles back in the day. We also had a lot of extra made up classes like “Farmer”* and “Goober Mage”** to add to the sillyness of it. One upside to those rules is that you can create a character in about one minute flat.
I ran a Keep on the Borderlands session where everyone rolled characters following the default rules. Each time the party would head off to the caves and (mostly) get butchered like pigs, whoever was left alive would gather up all the gear and head back to town to sell it and gather new adventurers. One character from that session was a Mage named “Gurglethunk”*** that only had one hit point. A Barbarian*! that got psychotically lucky rolling for stats was generall the last one left standing. However, on his fourth trip back he got killed by a Kobold, and that was the end of the session.
We also used to do this PvP thing where three or four players would roll 3d6 straight down the line, and then roll to see what magic item they had from “Grandma’s Closet” using the table at the back of the Rules Cyclopedia. If it was OP, great! If your class couldn’t use it, too bad. Whoever lived through the round got a level (with random hitpoints of course) along with all the loot, and then everyone else would reroll. We would keep going until someone got powerful enough that it was clear no group of level one characters would ever be able to beat them, and that person would be declared the winner.
*Who could only adventure in the winter, but also needed very little XP to advance due to being severaly underpowered.
**A Mage with absolutely terrible spells that were worse than useless. However, if they ever made it to level 8 they would get one spell so dangerous that there was an entire secret order devoted to making sure none ever made it that far.
***The sound we expected him to make as soon as he got in a fight…did not buck our expectations!
*!A made up DnD Basic class based on the AD&D one from Unearthed Arcana.