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Old 11-16-2016, 02:52 PM   #1
VariousRen
 
Join Date: Apr 2015
Default GURPS Character Funnel

Last weekend one of my players for a weekly game wasn't able to make it, but me and the three other players were determined to play something set in the same world.

I've always loved the idea of a funnel; you start with a bunch of random low powered characters on an adventure where they're completely outgunned. In the few hours before our normal game time I edited a google spreadsheet from a pervious game to generate completely random characters, with random attributes, skills, and advantages.

We created 21 random villagers, then did a draft with each player picking a character at a time until they had a roster of 5 (the unchosen 6 stayed back, apparently unsuited to adventure), and launched into a classic low effort adventure. Orcs and goblins from the mountains have been coming down and kidnapping people in the fields, the king won't send troops until summer, so we'll have to do it ourselves!

The game was a blast! Picking characters was hilarious as we tried to find the least-bad out of a pile of pretty bad adventurers. Trying to find uses for something like Gaming, accidentally ending up with no one with tracking or first aid, and trying to survive without a weapon skill. Combat required some crazy maneuvers, dog piling, and serious risk of death to survive. The players had a great time realizing that this is what the other people feel like when their murder hobos roll through town. By the end of the night one of the players liked their remaining characters so much that they wrote them up as proper PCs for our normal game, to step in when their current character dies.

So if you're looking for a fun one or two-shot I can't suggest running a funnel enough, or running one before the proper start of a game to find interesting characters. It's great for making awesome backstories that don't feel like their undercutting the current awesomeness("Oh, my guy killed 3 dragons before we started play, this is nothing.")

Here's the spreadsheet we used to generate characters for anyone who wants to take a look. I think you can copy it to get a version you can edit yourself: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing
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Old 11-16-2016, 05:29 PM   #2
Joe
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Default Re: GURPS Character Funnel

Thanks for this report! What a great idea for a last-minute one-shot.
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Old 11-16-2016, 06:04 PM   #3
dripton
 
Join Date: Mar 2008
Location: Northern Virginia, USA
Default Re: GURPS Character Funnel

Great idea. And nice spreadsheet.

I just read Dungeon Crawl Classics #6 Temple of the Dragon Cult, where the plot is that a dragon torched the wrong noble's carriage, the king sent a small army after the dragon, the dragon torched most of the small army but was badly wounded and retreated to its lair to heal, and the PCs have been sent in to finish the job that the army couldn't, for one quarter of the dragon's hoard.

Now I'm tempted to run it as a two-part one-shot. Part one: each player runs one squad of soldiers. It's expected that most or all of the soldiers will die, but any damage they can do helps. Part two: each player runs a 250-point Dungeon Fantasy PC (and possibly a surviving soldier from part one, if there are any).
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