I was finally getting a chance to look through my copy of Dungeon Crawl Classics that I grabbed from their latest Kickstarter the other night. And while my desire to actually run the game is pretty much zero (more on that probably later), I do enjoy their concept of having a first adventure with each player controlling several completely random Level 0 Commoners. That’s right, you have a single d4 hit points, randomly generated stats, and a randomly generated occupation that gives you a single weapon proficiency and some (potentially) useful equipment. Then you run them all through a dungeon as a mob and see who survives to become Level 1 and get a class. High mortality rate is expected and encouraged, and the phrase “wealth by attrition” comes up at least once in the book.
Now, I don’t know that I can ever see myself running the game, but that concept did fondly remind me of a Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 game that I played in back in my college days. My roommate at the time ran it, and we started playing as “Level ½ teenagers.” We knew what class we wanted to play and were essentially playing a diminished version of that class. We did not have access to the class’s full potential. We had a profession skill but just a few other skill points and access to only a few proficiencies from our class. It was enough to give us a taste of the class, but we were still very much “average.” When we finally finished our first couple of adventures, we graduated into full-on Level 1 characters and got access to all of our class abilities. And it honestly really made me appreciate that first level of play and underscored the fact that these were men and women who had received intense training and actually were a cut above the common man or woman. And I really learned to appreciate those first-level class features when I finally had access to them.
My old roommate and I now work together in the same building, and we got talking about that game again today after I shared some of my thoughts on the Dungeon Crawl Classics game with him. We both lamented the fact that there aren’t a lot of “big games” out there that provide for this kind of “level 0” play in any capacity other than a meat grinder to separate the lucky from the unlucky. This kind of play can be absolutely wonderful in regards to finding out who your character is and why he wants to walk this path that he is walking. You’re not built for adventuring like even a 1st-level character is and so your adventures need to reflect that. And when you’re not staring into the gullet of a dangerous monster intent on disemboweling you and eating your intestines, you can really get a measure of who your character is and what he or she might do given a certain choice. It also gave us a chance to actually play out things that are commonly only seen in a character’s backstory. We got to experience several formative moments and build bonds with the NPCs who served as mentors for our characters. But most of all, these adventures produced some absolutely wonderful and intense role playing. I don’t know that I’ve ever been more inside of a character’s head than I was in that game.
Now to be fair there are games that do those intense “session zero” games. The various World of Darkness lines include the “prelude” adventure as a major conceit, but that doesn’t capture the same feeling for me. The prelude is less about finding out who your character is and more about finding out what he is going to become by bringing the mortal character from the ordinary world into the realm of the supernatural. I vastly prefer figuring out where my character came from.
This conversation and reminiscing got me thinking about how Dungeons and Dragons in particular presented itself in terms of character creation. The game that my roommate ran used the 3.5 ruleset, and as such this kind of game could easily be run in Pathfinder as well. Earlier editions of the game might work, but proficiencies were handled in a kind of obtuse way in those games and class abilities weren’t scaled quite as nicely as they were in later editions of the game, making it harder to decide what could be given and what should wait until 1st level. 4th Edition was a hard no-go on that front. It could possibly be done by limiting your power selection, but the game was very focused on tactical combat. As a rule, the stories that this kind of session told were largely divorced from combat, and so the game engine doesn’t really play well with the concept. 5th Edition however, with both background and class assigning proficiencies and granting abilities supports this kind of play even better than 3.5 did in my opinion. By giving a “Level 0” character full access to his background abilities and limited access to some of his class proficiencies, you can give a player a taste of playing the class and then give him full access after a session or two. All you have to do is decide which features you’re going to diminish or restrict access to. A Fighter for example may not get all of his armor and weapon proficiencies and a Rogue may only be proficient in one or two skills instead of all of them. Casters is where it gets tricky, but I think it can be pretty easily adjudicated by giving them access to only their cantrips which they can cast a certain number of times before needing to rest – these aren’t full-fledged casters remember. Regardless I’m intrigued enough to take a small dive into each of the classes and continue to explore this option over the next couple of weeks. And who knows? Looking under the hood of each of the classes might give me a better idea as to what makes each of them tick.
And after that? Well all of this reminiscing today has me jonesing for another game like that.
Ben Erickson
