Funnels: character creation through play!

Rules Discussion
1

[intro] Allright, I’ve finally been able to restart roleplaying. Currently running DND5e with a group, but it looks like theres more interested people where I’m at and I’m looking to introduce Open Legend when it fits. So I’ve been reading a lot of MCDMs work lately, their running the game series on youtube is really good and easily transfers to non-DND games. [end intro]
:sunflower:

However in Arcadia 9 theres an adventure called “Filthy peasants!” which is a short adventure for lvl 0 characters. All players play between two and four characters and most of the characters are expected to die during the adventure. So players start with rolling ability scores and choosing two options or so per character and then the adventure begins. In the article in Arcadia it mentioned this sort of character creation exists in other games also (dungeon crawl classics is mentioned as the origin).

So I’m highly interested in having this sort of character creation in open legend. And that’s the point of this topic. I haven’t looked into it any more than searching this place for funnel and reading “Filthy peasants!”. I acknowledge it would be much better if I could point to a funnel adventure so we had a common reference, I’ll try to find one.

But as a start, does anyone know of the funnel type adventures or other ways of playing through character creation? And has anyone tried to something like this in open legend?

Additions as I research:

I’ll collect links to funnels, explanations and tools I find here that are gratis and freely available.

The question

Seeing as I can rather easily set up a funnel type adventure or convert something from dnd (because I’m familiar with those rules). The question that remains is:
How to quickly create a handfull (3 to 5) of weak characters?

2

Create them as if they were companions, which would give you 20 (or 24) attribute points.

6 points is a 3 in a score.
3 points is a 2 in a score.
1 point is a 1 in a score.

If you are really wanting them to be weak though, and then be able to build up later… maybe considering them more like a summons might be better. PL 5 = 3, 2, 2 and PL 4 = 2, 1, 1.

Soo… how about to make things easier for this specific project, and give plenty of room for them to expand their characters that survive (potentially).

Just start a character with the choice to put scores into attributes as follows: 3, 2, 1

With so few attribute scores, their HP is going to stay pretty low regardless, making it deadlier, plus little to no armor, so defense scores will be low too.

part way through the adventure maybe they earn a feat, could pick a few 1 or 2 point feats for them to choose from, maybe even a 3 point feat, something that makes sense for them to develop. Weapon Specialization could make sense if they’ve been using a particular weapon, for example. Evasive footwork for someone that has managed to not get hit much, fleet of foot for someone that’s been moving a lot in stressful situations. Or just not worry about the feats at all until there is a surviving character.

Then, if play continues, you can give htem the additional points as if companion character (10 points used for the scores of 3, 2, and 1), leaving them 14 points to level up their attribute or add additional ones.

Then can slowly give the other teirs of companion until finally becoming a level 1 character.

2 Likes
3

The summon attributes sound like a great starter. For narrative flair I’d ban extraordinary attributes to start, but at that mid point when you introduce feats/real weapons/whatever, you could let players opt to have their character trigger some form of magic inside themselves and bring that in then.

Honestly I think I may use this to start my next campaign. I’ll need to go back through my Arcadia issues to read up on this

4

I’ve been toying with the concept of a level 0 character for a while now actually. I was planning to use it in a spooky October game where the players are teenagers in fleeing from a serial killer, a story as old as time.

So, in Open Legend you get 9 Attribute points and 3 Feat points per level. So, from a purely mathematical perspective, a level 0 character (being 1 lower than level 1) would have 31 attribute points (40-9=31) and 3 Feat points (6-3=3). If that’s too powerful for you there’s always level -1 with 22 Attribute points and 0 Feat points. After that point it gets tricky with negative feat points so I’ll stop there.

This is still very powerful compared to most of the other suggestions in this topic but if you want to keep it as close to regular character creation as possible then this is the way to go, I feel.

5

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.