In RPGs, character creation methods abound. You can create characters mechanically with point and option spends, build them alongside a backstory with a lifepath, or just roll some dice and see what comes out the other end. When it comes to actually aligning the characters with the game you’re about to play, so much so that you need to bring the GM along for the ride, I think I’ve found one of the best options. Now, one reason you’ve likely never done this before is that it’s time-intensive and it can be a lot of extra work for the GM if not all of the players. Another reason, though, is that to really play through character creation, you need mechanics to do so. Precious few games have these mechanics, but after giving one such system a spin I’m pretty comfortable saying it should be more of a thing for campaign play.

Pre-play character creation is exactly what it sounds like: You play through a specialized scenario with a rough or partially completed character. Along the way you see this character actually exposed to the conceits of the setting, and as a result the picture of who your character is begins to form in your head. Once the pre-play scenario is over, the real game begins and your character is complete. This idea of development through play isn’t new; one argument towards the high-lethality ‘meatgrinder’ attitude seen in old-school games at low levels is that your character and your play is shaped by seeing what character survives and how you help them survive. The idea of ‘pre-play’ is mostly different because the goal is to get you to a character that is narratively molded to the upcoming campaign, while character development by attrition only gets you that narrative attachment as a secondary benefit (and it’s in no way guaranteed). Still, it is an idea which filters through to both of the pre-play examples I’ll be examining today. The Dungeon Crawl Classics ‘funnel’ is one of the most famous examples of pre-play, seeing you whittle down a troupe of characters to one survivor. At the same time, one of the newest additions to the mechanics of Apocalypse World, ‘forerunners’, is meant to give narrative weight to the apocalypse by having the party play through it as it happens, but you still maintain that transitional point of character death as the milestone by which you cross over into full character-dom.

Forerunners and Funnels

When it comes to pre-play mechanics, the Dungeon Crawl Classics funnel is one of the most well-known and also one of the earliest that, to me, fulfills pre-play criteria: You start with a character (or characters) which are mechanically dissimilar to the sort of character you start the game with. Only through play do you shift your pre-character into a full-fledged character that will take on the rest of the campaign. While the notion of a ‘level zero’ character goes back to 3e (and quite possibly before), Dungeon Crawl Classics put a procedure to using level zero characters as opposed to the d20 System’s classic approach of mentioning the possibility and then refusing to elaborate further.

For a DCC ‘funnel’, each player generates two to four level zero characters. These characters have their stats randomly assigned along with an ‘occupation’ that gives some trade goods, a weapon, and possibly a demi-human race (elf, dwarf, halfling). Players then lead these characters through an adventure that could potentially kill them all. At the end of it, each player should have one character with enough experience points to advance to level one, at which point they will choose an actual class. What’s neat about this is that the design intent of the funnel engages both diegetic and non-diegetic elements of the pre-play experience. Diegetically, the characters with better stats are more survivable, which in turn softens the harshness of completely random character creation. Another fascinating diegetic note is that the characters are expected to loot the bodies of their fallen comrades, ending up with better gear than they started with. On a completely non-diegetic note, the rulebook notes that players will naturally pick favorites among their characters, be that because one is better suited to the class they’re interested in or just a completely narrative affection for the rutabaga farmer over the beekeeper. This inevitably means that players will make choices which will protect their favorites, even choices which may off one of their lesser choices. All of this combined allows players to discover preferences for play which may not have been clear or even available to them had they either handbuilt a character or randomly rolled just one.

Aligned with but in contrast to the funnel is a new bit of Apocalypse World tech, ‘Forerunners’. The Forerunners playbook is part of the most recent playtest version of Apocalypse World: Burned Over, which features some refinements to the 2021 version of the game and is currently only available through the lumpley games Patreon. Forerunners sets each player up with a playbook, ‘A Forerunner’, which represents a typical person living before the Apocalypse. At the same time, the GM is given their own microcosm of the Apocalypse World rules, ‘The World Alight’. Instead of starting the game with a Hard Zone and building a Threat Map, players and GM together work to build ‘The Chopping Block’, which is a gallery of NPCs who are significant to the characters. At the same time they’re building out a custom Hard Zone with locations that are important to the characters. Once this is all built out, the GM is instructed to ‘burn it to the ground’. Over the next few sessions the apocalypse occurs, and those NPCs and locations are changed into their post-apocalyptic forms. The players have their characters during all this, but are looking for one milestone: When the Forerunner character’s ‘life becomes untenable’ (i.e. when their harm clock is filled in), they have the choice between having the character die (as usual) and choosing a new playbook. This is, essentially, the key that unlocks the full Apocalypse World experience: at least one character must die or nearly die.

I recently completed an arc using the Forerunners mechanics; it took about five sessions to go from a player-created suburb to an apocalyptic nightmare with my core players each having playbooks. It kind of goes without saying that working with the players to create a hook-rich environment is a fantastic way to start a campaign, but Forerunners has the added bonus of giving some time for the players to communicate which threats and conflicts they’re most interested in. The GM mechanics of converting the ‘Chopping Block’ to Threats is a bit prescriptive; the current method involves reviewing the Chopping Block and pre-writing pathways from NPCs to Threat types. This is good prep, but after actually using the method I’d prefer something more reactive. That said, one thing that Forerunners builds on with Burned Over is the idea that the ‘apocalypse’ of Apocalypse World is something specific, not just a genre pastiche. In this manner, it may be that enabling Forerunners to be a solid platform from which to launch an Apocalypse World game could actually require more prescription, more of a look behind the curtain into the entities and themes which are implied across the rest of the game’s material.

Platforms and Prologues

I use the word ‘platform’ when describing Forerunners fairly deliberately; the rules set up a jumping-off point from which to start a campaign. I’d argue the DCC funnel is the same thing; it turns the entire character creation process into part of the game. What makes such a platform difficult is that for it to work it needs to be written into the rules, and there aren’t many other games that are really doing that yet. Although there are PbtA games that lean on ‘play to find out what happens’ and turn the first couple sessions into a kind of ‘curing time’ for what happens in character creation, it’s not really the same as a delineated arc of play like Forerunners. Similarly, although there are rules and suggestions for creating characters in, for example, Fate and then assigning Aspects in play, the guidance around how to create better characters with this method is wanting and the only real benefit is to avoid ‘blank page syndrome’ given Fate’s sparse guidance around character creation at all.

There is another method of pre-play that can be bolted on to virtually any game, a prologue. Instead of giving mechanics by which characters are created in play, a prologue is an arc of play that is essentially separable from the game that occurs from character creation onward. What makes a prologue useful is that even in absence of mechanical leads to character creation, the play results in narrative leads that inform said character creation. A solid example of a game which has this baked in is DIE; the questionnaires and initial play as “real world” characters have no mechanical connections to the Paragons that the players will create, but they sure as hell show everyone at the table what kind of Paragon your character should be. The line between platform and prologue is blurry; one could argue that Forerunners works as a Prologue because when characters change playbooks they may be writing their character essentially anew. What makes the distinction is whether or not your character is created after the initial pre-play or before and during that pre-play. When running a Forerunners arc, the mechanical throughlines from the Forerunner character to the Playbook character were obvious; in a game like DIE the stats aren’t even introduced until after the characters enter the world and begin play.

As far as a GM at home is concerned, the difference between a platform and a prologue is whether you need to hack a character generation system (or have one provided to you like the Funnel or Forerunners) or simply set up an initial arc of play. A Prologue could use different versions of the intended characters or different characters entirely, so long as it sets up how the primary characters will be created. One could imagine a Prologue that works (mechanically) in reverse compared to a funnel; instead of making lighter, less powerful characters, players start with much more potent, heavily resourced characters for playing through an arc that ends in disaster and starts the campaign. There’s also the potential for using an entirely different set of mechanics for a prologue: I’ve heard of GMs setting up the first ‘disaster’ of their campaign with a game of Fiasco. The important thing is that players have a chance to explore and determine how they want to play for the rest of the game, and GMs get to see what players engage with and use that information to tune their campaign to their group’s expressed preferences.

Pre-play is likely the most effective way I’ve seen to bring character history into a campaign. Both lifepath and straight-up backstory can give a character hooks, but aren’t necessarily informed by the mechanical realities of the game that’s about to take place. Through pre-play, players have the opportunity to figure out how their character and play style align, and then make key character creation decisions with that information in front of them. Pre-play helps GMs too, as it gives them more information that they’d get with just a stack of completed character sheets. My question is how best to incorporate pre-play into the prep process for an upcoming campaign. More games are incorporating pre-play to some degree; in PbtA the pre-game setting processes are giving way to more complete pre-play arcs like Forerunners, and games like DIE are providing more and richer ways to develop interconnected and interdependent characters. While it’s not always straightforward to hack a character creation system to make a pre-play platform, GMs should ask themselves what questions they want answered by the character creation process, and which of those questions can be better answered in play. Pre-play is a great way to bring ‘play to find out what happens’ into character creation, and is another tool in the toolkit for creating multi-faceted characters who are grounded to your setting.

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