Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Unfocused Thoughts After Running DCC

As I mentioned earlier, I'm in Hattiesburg right now.  One of my friends said he wanted to try DCC, and I had a copy of the adventure starter from Free RPG Day, so I decided to give it a shot.  Here are my thoughts.

  • The character funnel is really fun.  Even my old players who liked 3.x liked it.  I noticed that as the group thinned out certain characters gained more personality.
  • Individual initiative for 18 level 0 characters is insane.  We used party initiative.  I'm going to try the individual initiative system if we run it again with level 1 or level 5 characters.
  • The adventure had some really cool things in it, but too much of it was just "characters walk in and are attacked."
  • I basically had to assign DCs for things completely off the top of my head.  I hope I'm supposed to do that.
  • Since there aren't any experience rules yet, I'm a bit worried about the pace of advancement.  Though I acknowledge it was rather slow in the Nightwick campaign so far, I don't want something so fast that I can't have Nightwick Abbey have massive levels.
  • On that note, I'm not really interested in any RPG that can't run Nightwick Abbey.
  • Character creation went really quick.  This is of course a good thing.
  • It was weird seeing DCs for saving throws again after having dealt with static numbers for so long.
  • I think I mentioned this last time, but I really hope there is more guidance for the referee to build his or her own adventures and setting than is provided in the beta rules.  I understand they want to be elitist, but I don't have a lot of use for rpgs without random encounter tables.
  • The alignment of monsters is kinda all over the place.  It's weird to see a lawful demon snake next to chaotic undead who were all supposed to be created by the same evil War Wizard.
  • On that note, can one actually play a war wizard?  I hope so.
  • Finally, I'd really like to see some support for non-Dungeon Crawling activities.  Don't know if that's going to be in there.
On the whole I'd have to say it was a positive experience.  The reason I hope all that stuff above is in there, and that the pace of advancement isn't too quick, is that I think it would be neat to use with Nightwick Abbey/the Dark Country.  However, if it doesn't provide the support needed for a megadungeon or hexcrawl campaign that can be run pretty much indefinitely, I'll just stick to the rules I posted previously.

5 comments:

  1. interesting post, and some good observations

    dcc has some attractive features, i really must gather up some players and give dcc a whirl

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  2. Funny enough, but I also gave DCC a try this weekend. I liked it well enough but I don't think the Funnel was for me. Seemed like the adventure was designed *just* to kill characters, rather than having them attrit naturally. Also, the characters that I did lose died in the order of competence (which seemed to defeat the purpose). I only had one character (of 8!) with a net bonus on attributes and his 18 STR meant that he was forced to volunteer on a stuck (and likely trapped) door. His single hit point didn't save him.

    My longest lived character, ironically, had a LUCK of 3.

    I did like the 0-level characters. Wish we could have played long enough to try spell casting.

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  3. elitist?

    The whole thing acts like it's only for people who have played the game since AD&D. If you aren't capable of running it, then don't. I don't really like its attitude.

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  4. I actually played a demo game with Joe Goodman a few weeks back. I really think the whole "elitist" bit is a joke to him.

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