Now that Wizard World is just waiting for feedback, it’s time to move on to my next project!
During my vacation I read Dungeon Crawl Classics (which I’ll definitely be running soon). One of the many awesome ideas I want to steal is the idea of starting with several very loosely defined characters and gradually letting fortune whittle them down.
I’m thinking of fully embracing that concept; perhaps even having the initial characters defined by nothing but a name and (former) profession. The whole group is thrust into a grand melee of some kind (dungeon crawl, siege, battlefield or the like). As the characters take their first actions in the fiction, the player rolls for both outcome and stat:
On a 5- things go wrong and now your character is injured. If he was already injured, now he’s dead. Good thing you have a bunch of characters.
On a 6, determine which stat is appropriate to the action and assign -1 to it.
On an 7-8, the action is partly successful and assign a 0 to the stat.
On a 9-10, the action is fully successful and assign a +1 to the stat.
On an 11-12, the action was a spectacular success and assign +2 to the stat.
Once a stat has been defined you go back to the usual 10+, 7-9, 6- arrangement.
I really like the idea of character creation being part of the action rather than a separate system. Heroes are defined by their actions!
I’ve thought of doing something similar, but instead of having stats or keeping track of character sheets just having each player control four characters. Maybe randomly roll occupations from DCC and then asking each player to define one trait of one of their characters, and one trait of one of the characters of the players on their left and right. Then the GM defines the traits of the characters who are left. A trait can be used to get a +1 to a roll, but otherwise every character just straight up rolls 2d6 to accomplish things. On a miss, a character can get injured, or an injured character can get killed. Once a player is whittled down to one character, they take that character’s trait and write up a whole character.
You should check World of Dungeons and the hack someone made for it called World of Dungeon Crawls, which adds a character funnel to WoDu.
/sub
Yeah, Patrick Henry Downs, that’s more or less where I was going. The core concepts are to be able to jump into the action almost immediately upon sitting down to the first session and to let your character(s) develop as a result of choices made and the luck of the dice.
World of Dungeon Crawls will be acquired this evening! Thanks for the tip Tim Jensen!
Tim Jensen Y U NO SHARE LINK?
I can’t find it. Perhaps it moved or disappeared.
All I have is this early version, and I don’t even know who the author is.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6472092/World%20of%20Dungeon%20Crawls.pdf
Yeah, that’s all I could find too. At least it gives you a good sense of where it was going.
EDIT: It looks good. I didn’t know World of Dungeons has higher XP amounts again than Dungeon World.
Tim Jensen that looks like the final version. I don’t remember making any edits before it went into the first issue of Grim Portents.
Have fun with it!