A guy once told me that Wrong Turn 6 is the best movie of the Wrong Turn franchise because it has the most nudity.
I’m not getting used to this new WP interface. Everything is in the wrong place.
Around the time I first started doing WordPress stuff there was a lot of chatter in the RPG world about zero level funnels. I have a bad habit of being annoyed by things merely for the fact that lots of people talk about them. I don’t like that about myself. It’s right below my compulsion to explain to people the things I don’t like about myself on my list of things I don’t like about myself.
Separate from the fact that I was annoyed by how much everyone was talking about zero level funnels it also sounded like a not fun idea to me.
Last night our usual game was offline so we did a one shot zero level funnel. And it was super fun. I still don’t think I would like it as a way to start a campaign, which is the intent as I understand it, but as a one shot it was great.
One of my goals as an old man gamer is to try and metagame less and fun game more. Especially when it comes to bossing other people around like a jerk. There’s a dude in our group that’s always coming up with wildly impractical ideas that are neat and I used to be the gross guy in the gaming group who would be like “no, don’t use a 4th level spell for that this is a CR2 trap, you won’t be able to recover spells until after blah blah blah blah” which is anti-fun (for most people anyway, for some game groups that’s the whole point).
I’ve gotten better at not doing that to others but internally when you’ve been gaming for 300 years it’s hard (for me anyway) to really set aside metagame thoughts and get immersed. That’s part of the reason I like playing new games, I can’t metagame if I don’t know the rules.
Anyway, that’s part of the reason why the funnel was fun for me. Doesn’t matter if your guys die, that’s kind of the whole point. And they will die because they suck. It was fun to just do things for once instead of having to worry about my character you know, still be alive at the end.
It was also fun to be excited about picking up crummy equipment for a change. At one point we found hide armor and it was a BIG deal. It’s a nice change of pace from most campaigns where no one even bothers to take anything unless it’s a powerful magic item.
It was nice to get to actually do heroic shit. The problem with metagaming is that you know exactly how risky everything is so if you care about your guy and the campaign surviving you generally play it safe, except when people get bored and do insane things just to do them, which is also not great for the table. It was fun to be like “someone is in trouble? Blackjack runs forward to save them!” Because why not? Blackjack probably going to die anyway.
I’m wrong all the time about most things but for once it worked in my favor!
