Long, confused, pointless rambling post time:

I'm still in the middle of a hiatus in our DCC campaign, and there's been a bit of talk about starting it back up again.  My players loved it, and while reading the rules and running it to start with (if we restart , the campaign will be on session 10), I loved it too.  Now though, I feel a crushing ennui settle over me whenever I start to look through my notes, and feel my Labyrinth Lord books calling out to me.

A few things that are putting me off DCC as my main FRPG right now.

1) It's not really as rules light as I thought it would be.   Half my players are the sort who get on best when they don't have to know the rules.  For all of the talk about DCC 'gaming like it's 1974' it's actually quite rules heavy for this type of roleplaying, mainly due to stacking modifiers.  As a result, my players get on fine if they are just reading off their to hit or to-cast modifiers I've calculated for them on their sheet, but they don't know where they came from.  

The worst thing is, I love all these sub-systems in theory.  Thief alignment affecting their ability modifiers is one of the coolest things I've seen in retroclones.

2) Lookup sickness.  There's a lot of tables to roll on.  For spellcasters, especially, there's a lot of referring to tables.  Sure you can get players to do their own lookups (if they have their own books.)  The thing is, then you've instantly taken the 'magic is unpredictable and mysterious' thing and...well, made it just unpredictable, sans mystery.  Then you've got cleric disapproval, multiple critical hit tables for different classes, cleric healing by alignment, etc.  I really find it breaks the flow of play.  

3)  The assumed tone misses the mark for me.  I've never really been into running games that are set in strictly Middle-Earth/D&D pastiches - all of my games try and have something different in their tone, to varying degrees of success.  So I thought DCC would be a beautiful thing in this regard.  And I suppose the patron rules, intelligent swords do push it into something else.

But then we're still using Magic Missile, Flaming Hands, in our spell lists.  Compare that to the imagination that's gone into Heretic Werks' awesome Space Age Sorcery supplement.  I think if DCC really was going back to Appendix N, its spell list would be a lot stranger.

All of this is kind of getting near to the point, but not exactly on it.  Something about DCC seems less freewheeling and crazy to me than retroclones of Basic D&D.  Am I the only one?

TLDR: DCC is a great, great thing, and represents a successful attempt to do something different with OSR roleplaying (it's not even OSR, it's sort of a sideways attempt from d20/3.5 obviously), but I really think it needs exactly the right group for it, ruleswise and it needs to be stranger for it to really do what I thought it would.  It's got great support from the publisher and one of the most healthy communities out of any of the games I'm interested in, but it's not doing it for me anymore.

I should also point out I'm not very well read in terms of DCC modules - there may well be some great stuff exactly providing what I've moaned about above in Somewhere in Time, Peril on the Purple Planet, 998th Conlave of Wizard's etc.

Maybe it's just straightforward DM attention-deficit disorder.  I'm thinking back to the Labyrinth Lord campaigns we played when I first started RPGing again and the combination of freedom when prepping as the DM (even when sticking strictly to the core books) and the players misadventure due to just doing whatever they liked, not because of patron taint or whatever, makes me all wistful for those days.

Anyway, no great revelations here, I'd appreciate everyone's thoughts though.

I assumed it was trying to replicate the experience of AD&D, with a stronger nod towards certain influences in Appendix N, than it is OD&D or Basic D&D. It sounds to me like Lamentations of the Flame Princess is closer to what you're looking for.

I had a blast playing DCC, but...

A PDF of the rules (To print out extra copies of the game's many, many tables) and/or multiple  copies of the physical book are pretty much essential to play.

Also, DCC is complex, full stop. It's more like AD&D1e (With some weird DNA transfusions from STORMBRINGER and Warhammer FRP) than Moldvay-Cook. It will take several sessions of play to fully get a handle on the rules.

The spell thing never bothered me. Yeah, the spell is called "Magic Missile" but in play a DCC magic missile is a much different critter than a D&D magic missile. Just have each wizard re-name it and you're set.

Quote from: AndrewSFTSN;859100Maybe it's just straightforward DM attention-deficit disorder.  I'm thinking back to the Labyrinth Lord campaigns we played when I first started RPGing again and the combination of freedom when prepping as the DM (even when sticking strictly to the core books) and the players misadventure due to just doing whatever they liked, not because of patron taint or whatever, makes me all wistful for those days.

I feel like DCC is one big RPG that throws cats at players. And I mean that in a good sense.



If you have an adventure where the characters slay the orcs and rescue the princess, that's rather humdrum. Not because the outline is cliched, but because nothing really unexpected happened. Now, if one of the orcs got permanently charmed into a henchman, that would be something interesting.

Side note: One of my own adventures had a crashed flying saucer with aliens who were a nod to "War of the Worlds". One of the players charmed a "martian", and the adventure took on a whole new aspect with this creepy, blood drinking alien henchman following them around.

So I feel like DCC attempts to have those crazy cat moments codified into the randomness of the tables. You might get a spell that also summons a rain of frogs as a side effect of it's being cast. Or my favorite that I sadly did not explore, is the spell side effect of killing random people in another dimension. Very "Magician's Nephew" vibe, and I wish I'd run a whole adventure around that.

I think a lot of the OSR, and some games in specific like DCC and Lamentations, try for that crazy cat stuff.

Dunno if that observation will help ya or not. I'd love to get a chance to run DCC again myself.

Definitely try out some of the adventures.  They are often really cool, different and short, but most of all the maps and art are awesome!

Otherwise, I agree with you in terms of DCC feeling a bit restricted.  Spells are such massive things that throwing in new ones is a hassle.  And the game works best when players are tuned into using Luck, Mighty Deeds and Spellburn, otherwise, you are more or less playing D&D with spell tables.

Quote from: Durn;859113And the game works best when players are tuned into using Luck, Mighty Deeds and Spellburn, otherwise, you are more or less playing D&D with spell tables.

That's quite true from what I've seen... DCC has all sorts of toys to play with, levers to pull, but if you approach it in that careful-cautious 'fantasy vietnam' way, or try to min-max it, then, jeez, no one would ever cast a spell... or bond to a Patron.
Players need to kick the tires and play dangerously.

I printed out all the spells from the PDF for easy reference, but The Crawler's Companion is indispensable for the non-Luddite GM: http://purplesorcerer.com/tools.php

Like almost everything else with Old School gaming, the GM should be looking up stuff on the tables, not the players. I read a post somewhere, maybe here, about wizards NOT just being given the spell results table, instead having to discover effects when cast. This means low level wizards would have no idea (beyond theoretical of course) that Breathe Life can actually create golems until he tried it and somehow rolled a 40. Or maybe did a lot of research.

And, yes, the players have to rename spells to suit their character. We used to do this all the time when we played D&D/AD&D, so it never occurred to me that some people found it a foreign concept until I started reading 3.X message boards...4th was arguably worse in this regard.

As far as not understanding where the modifiers calculated on their character sheets came from, does it really matter? DCC requires a GM who enjoys prepping for sessions, it does NOT require players understand all the underlying mechanics, again, like AD&D. "Modern gaming" seems to be way too concerned with system mastery over games mastery; they're not the same thing.

Quote from: Simlasa;859119Players need to kick the tires and play dangerously.

Risk vs. reward. That's Old School. New Skool is being a pussy and expecting 10000 xp for winning a fight that has zero chance of failure. "Oh you showed up for today's session? Figure out the gp and xp I owe your character, and give me a list of magic items you want to purchase." So, basically, fuck those games.

There's also the free DCC Reference PDF: http://peoplethemwithmonsters.blogspot.com/p/dcc-rpg-resources.html
Also available as a nice printed booklet from Lulu: http://www.lulu.com/shop/jeremy-deram/dcc-rpg-reference-booklet/paperback/product-21753513.html

Kind of like a GM's screen but with more info.

Quote from: Simlasa;859119That's quite true from what I've seen... DCC has all sorts of toys to play with, levers to pull, but if you approach it in that careful-cautious 'fantasy vietnam' way, or try to min-max it, then, jeez, no one would ever cast a spell... or bond to a Patron.
Players need to kick the tires and play dangerously.

Yes. very much this. The system rewards you for acting like Fahard and the Gray Mouser or Elric. Play big or go home.

Quote from: Just Another Snake Cult;859128Yes. very much this. The system rewards you for acting like Fahard and the Gray Mouser or Elric. Play big or go home.

Which, considering how too much OSR stuff goes out of its way to try to make players be ultra-cautious and never dare, is why DCC is badly needed and so awesome.

Quote from: Brad;859120Like almost everything else with Old School gaming, the GM should be looking up stuff on the tables, not the players. I read a post somewhere, maybe here, about wizards NOT just being given the spell results table, instead having to discover effects when cast. This means low level wizards would have no idea (beyond theoretical of course) that Breathe Life can actually create golems until he tried it and somehow rolled a 40. Or maybe did a lot of research.

That's how we're already doing it!  It seems to slow play down to a crawl with my guys.

Player:  "Hmm so I think I rolled a 15 last time, so if I had spellburned five points instead of 4 this round, I could have hit three targets instead of 1 - I'll have to remember that.  Wait, I forgot to add my caster bonus, does that mean I DO get the three targets?  Or do I have to use some luck?"

DM:  "MY SENSE OF WONDER IS OFF THE CHARTS"

Thanks a lot for the link to the Crawlers Companion by the way, that's definitely gotta help.

Quote from: TristramEvans;859102I assumed it was trying to replicate the experience of AD&D, with a stronger nod towards certain influences in Appendix N, than it is OD&D or Basic D&D. It sounds to me like Lamentations of the Flame Princess is closer to what you're looking for.

I'm not sure.  I almost think I just want the Basic D&D sandbox to play in with all of the great stuff out there to pick and choose from to up the wide-eyed fantastical stuff (Planet Algol, Carcosa, Yoon-Suin, Slumbering Ursine Dunes etc. etc.) and that rules-as-tone a la LOTFP or DCC is feeling slightly too much like it's holding my hand for me.

Quote from: Durn;859113Definitely try out some of the adventures.  They are often really cool, different and short, but most of all the maps and art are awesome!

Otherwise, I agree with you in terms of DCC feeling a bit restricted.  Spells are such massive things that throwing in new ones is a hassle.  And the game works best when players are tuned into using Luck, Mighty Deeds and Spellburn, otherwise, you are more or less playing D&D with spell tables.

That might be what we're doing.  Some of my players enjoy it more because 'it's like D&D but better' but what they mean is they get more spells at first level and don't necessarily lose them when they cast.

Any modules you'd recommend?  I've only played Doom of the Fallen Kings (pretty damn good) and Emerald Enchanter (sucked).

Quote from: AndrewSFTSN;859168Player:  "Hmm so I think I rolled a 15 last time, so if I had spellburned five points instead of 4 this round, I could have hit three targets instead of 1 - I'll have to remember that.  Wait, I forgot to add my caster bonus, does that mean I DO get the three targets?  Or do I have to use some luck?"

Sounds like they're just being pussies. Balls to the wall or go home.

More tactful response: they're gaming the system instead of playing a game. The players shouldn't be worried about points and modifiers and whatever, they should be coming up with cool shit to do and letting the GM figure out what happens. If they're that interested in figuring out modifiers, ASL is available.