The Pipeline - An Alternative to the Funnel

I ran some friends through The Portal Under the Stars and one of them didn't like it. Like, really didn't like it. The primary complaint was not feeling any sense of attachment to the characters because they were randomized rather than created or chosen. They ended up with one survivor, and it was a character they didn't like and didn't really want to play.

I wonder if we can keep the qualities we like about the funnel but alleviate this problem.

3d6 down the line, the classic method of determining your ability scores. Since the beginning, people have been trying to exert some influence on the pure randomness of the results this gives. Early revisions of The Big RPG Everyone Plays allow various ways to adjust stats after generation, recent editions take a rather extreme approach and generate higher averages and let you choose which scores the higher and lower numbers go into. In modern gaming, there is more choice than randomness in character generation.

It's safe to say this friend of mine is a modern gamer. That isn't a derisive term; it's understandable that you'd feel cheated if you're used to having so much control and the rug gets pulled out from under you. If you generate a character with all -1 and 0 modifiers, you really feel like you deserve a re-roll.

Hold on... if a character dies you roll up a new one, right? Why don't we just do that? We can explicitly tell our players that this is in fact an option. Let players get their guys killed and effectively get to re-roll their stats. This is the idea behind the Pipeline.

In a funnel, it's common wisdom that if your party starts to run low on members you have them come across reinforcements one way or another. If they completely wipe, the B-team shows up to come looking for them. In a way we're already kind of doing this; there will always be more shmucks to replace you, so the key difference between a funnel and a pipeline is party size. For instance, in a funnel you start with 16 and end with 4, in a pipeline you start with 4 and end with 4.

There are some design changes that come with this. Pipeline adventures will have to look more like 1st level adventures than meat-grinder funnels - though death is still expected, players don't have 4 actions per turn to overrun threats with. In essence, you are effectively running a normal adventure but with two minor changes: you start at 0-level, and you are going in expecting to roll up new PCs mid-game.

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There are some obvious and seemingly problematic conclusions to draw from this which need to be addressed. Let's strawman address them.

Won't the players just get endless attempts, throwing peasants at the problem until it's solved?

Funnels aren't designed to be failed - as mentioned above, common wisdom tells you to give the players another chance with reinforcements. This extra chance is usually more than enough to complete a funnel, so what's the difference? The fact that players keep getting new guys until they get one they like is a feature, not a bug. The trick is then keeping that peasant alive.

But that means they get endless rerolls of their stats. They'll come out more powerful.

They do and they might, but it's not at zero cost. I'll address that again below.

Alright, so what about the fact that they can spawn in endless weapons and trade goods by sending in new peasants?

Keep track. Make them track their inventory and then let them fill up every slot with garbage if they want to. Not only that, but keep track of every death, and have those deaths affect the town - losing 30 residents including 6 farmers to a violent incident in one night is going to have a huge impact on even a city, let alone a small village.

So you expect the players to spend the time sitting there and rolling new characters mid-game?

Yes. That's the punishment for death. That's the aforementioned cost. Everyone else plays on while they do this, and the new character shows up when the player finishes generating them rather than instantaneously when their predecessor dies. You've only got so much time in a night, so they player who gets 8 characters killed either misses a lot or gets real good at rolling them up quickly. DCC characters are easy, you can create a 0-level in five minutes.

How does this help your friend enjoy DCC?

Maybe it won't but they get to re-roll as much as they feel is worth their time (hopefully alleviating that they didn't end up with any that they liked), and they get a more intimate experience with one character at a time instead of a squad of 4. It's closer to the current modern experience, while still letting you retain that first-session "death is cheap" feeling and keeping randomized characters.