A Classic Family Game

This past Saturday was Free Role-Play Game Day, or Free RPG Day. This is a fun little event that happens every year. A bunch of publishers chip in and build a box of sample modules and other bits to help promote the hobby. Stores all over get copies of the box and run events over the course of the day. People can show up and play in games, get free copies of some books, and spend the day talking to people about games.

I spent my Saturday at my local game store, Epic Loot in Centerville. Every year they put together a great experience where people can come and try new games, meet new people, and spend their time enjoying themselves. They set aside their large game room and reserve tables for this. I was going to run 3 games for them.

I got my adventures ahead of time and read through and prepared to play them on the day. I was excited to see that one of my games was the adventure from Goodman Games line of Dungeon Crawl Classics. It was a fun adventure that should take around two to three hours. And it was a character funnel.

If you don’t know, a character funnel is a very deadly dungeon where players get two or more randomly generated characters and go into an adventure where it is designed to kill them. The extra characters are so they can keep playing after death. I had a ton of fun reading this and was excited to see how the game would go.

When I arrived Saturday morning and went to my table I met my first group and was immediately nervous. My players were a family. A father and his two kids, a son and a daughter. In itself this was not a problem. My fear came from the ages. The children were roughly four and six. I was about to run a four and six year old through an adventure that was designed to be punishing, difficult, and to murder their characters. I wasn’t sure how well they’d take it.

We introduced ourselves and the dad told me that they had seen him playing with his group the night before and wanted to try a game. When he learned about Epic Loot’s Game Day he decided to come down and try out a game with the kids. Normally, an admirable goal and one I would have welcomed heartily.

I didn’t want to shoo them away and I didn’t want to tell them they couldn’t play. I decided to go with tact. I explained the system and the game to them. I told them what would be happening and how the game would work. I made sure to stress the lethal nature of the adventure.

The dad said they’d be okay and the kids were excited to play. With that covered we rolled up two characters for each of them. (Due to age, I’m not going to use their names or share any of my pictures from that sessions.)

DCC funnels are a fun experience. You get a level one character that is completely randomly rolled. This includes traditional things like the hero’s statistics and hit points, but also throws race and equipment into the hopper. Being level zero, they don’t even get adventuring classes. Which is why we had a party consisting of a gypsy, a farmer, a blacksmith, a glove maker, a baker, and seamstress. The racial makeup included a human, two halflings, and three dwarves.

The daughter had the strongest characters with the best stats and full hit points across the board. The son was the weakest with the lowest stats and two characters with a single hit point each. They entered the dungeon and everything went well for them until they got to the first trap.

We were all having fun and the daughter managed to have one of her characters set off the trap. She died instantly in a single dice roll. I held my breath. How would she react? We’re we finished playing now? Was this the end of our time together?

Now, I realize there was an easy fix for this. I could have not killed her character. I could have run the adventure on easy mode, let the characters live, and let the kids just win. I thought about it. I really did. Ultimately, the reason I didn’t go with it was that I had made a big deal about how hard the dungeon is, how hard the encounters are, and how deadly it is. I felt that if I’d gone through all of that and then let them all just win it would diminish the experience. A funnel is a specific kind of things and I wanted to give them that. Also, the next slot had a session of Dungeons and Doggos and I figured they could have the fun family friendly session there.

I made sure to highlight that they each got two heroes for when one of them died. I even pointed out how in a funnel when I was a player I lost all of my characters but someone who still had extras gave me one of theirs. I’d hoped that I had seeded enough of an upside that losing a character would be easy or at least, not hard. I really hoped that the dad would be the first to lose a character so the kids could laugh about it. Unfortunately, it was the daughter.

She laughed. She thought it was funny that she’d died. With that out of the way we moved on. Over the next two hours I killed five of the six characters. They were killed by traps and monsters. In the end the final room, the son had one of the best moments I’ve ever had playing an RPG. He saw an army of soldiers coming to destroy him and asked if he could run over them using their helmets as stepping stones. I let him roll for it. He failed. He managed to survive one more round because I made some remarkably bad rolls. Which I didn’t fudge. In the spirit of the funnel I rolled everything in the open. He managed to force his way through the army, the only one left, and face against the warlord. He raised his spear and hit. The warlord staggered. Swung back and missed. The son raised his spear, his family cheering him on, and struck the warlord in the chest killing him instantly.

He won.

He defeated the enemy and with the last line of story from the module asked if he could go on and face the next threat hinted at in the last line.

There’s a second adventure in the module. The dad took a copy and promised them they could play it at home with mom.

I was glad I was there for it. I’m glad I let myself run the adventure. I’m glad I didn’t let them win. I maybe let a couple of things go their way that might not have otherwise, but I didn’t let them win.  In the end we all had fun. The kids laughed for a few hours. Dad got to play games with his kids. I maybe helped get two new players into role-play games.

I always have fun on Free RPG Day. I have many stories from all the years I’ve taken part in this event. However, I think this will be one of the better memories for me. Because of who it was and how it went; how badly it could have gone.

To that family, if you’re out there, thanks for letting me play with you.