DCC Level 0 Character Funnel is a Bad Concept

[CapnZapp]

Only if you ignore all the free options, line the Purple Sorcerer app and website, all the other dice roller apps and websites that can handle these dice, and all the other ways to simulate these dice on regular dice.

I know you find it reasonable to consider a world where we all use computers and phones when we play ttrpgs, but some of us prefer the analog experience.

Stating that obscure and expensive dice is a needless hurdle to game adoption is an entirely reasonable viewpoint to me.

I liked DCC a lot. I think more people would have given it a go if they dropped the funny dice idea before they published their game. I see no advantage to these funny dice, none other games haven't achieved in other more regular ways anyway. (There are a thousand D&D clones that manage to get by on just D&D dice)

After the first shine wears off, we're left with a game that requires its own totally unique dice not seen anywhere else, and everything about that feels so unnecessary and easily avoidable to me.

 

[CapnZapp]

There just aren't many RPGs out there that appeal to me less than DCC.
1) Level 0 Character Funnels (for the 12 pages that we've already discussed)
2) A thick rulebook crammed with charts that you have to constantly look at so you can't just "enjoy the game" (if I wanted to be constantly flipping through a rulebook, I'd be playing Pathfinder)
3) Dice that look "gross" with the numbers printed on the edges. (In fact, the entire look of the game is amateurish and nasty. It looks like a 1970s pizza menu.)
In the 2 years since I made the first post, I've had friends try DCC and basically get the same result. Different games, different GMs, different conventions.
What else has happened? Well, Shadowdark has jumped on the funnel bandwagon, spreading more Lulz for peasants in meat grinders.

Man you had all the bad luck, didn't you?

My DCC dice look clean and nice.

And what's wrong with 1970s pizza?

 

[eyeheartawk]

Absolutely.

And I don't need a chart to simulate a d16 on a d20, or a d5 on a d6.

My point is instead that nit having the exact dice used by a game is a situation most gamers dislike being placed in.

They CAN make it work. It's just a nuisance that can well mean the group chooses another game.

I mean, I guess?

I don't quite understand what your broader point is.

Every game makes mechanical choices about how aspects of the game function that will cause groups to choose another game or not based on their preferences. What causes one group to bounce off of something is a killer feature for another.

So you either, play it as-is, change it or pick something else.

That disclaimer aside, if you neuter the magic system of DCC , in my view, it's no longer really DCC, it's what really separates it from any other OGL game out there (aside from it being literally the vast majority of the book). But to each his own. To me, that's like saying I really like 5e but I dislike how combat, leveling and skill rolls work. I say this without judgement and without snark, but if you dislike the special dice and the magic in DCC, what do you like about it? To me, if you remove those things there really isn't much separating it from virtually any other OGL derived fantasy game.

 

[CapnZapp]

The shame of it is that I have the rule book and dice set (I picked up the "new fan" pack - which is a great deal). And I got a big PDF bundle that has a lot of content that could keep me gaming with the system for years.
I had a bad experience with it the funnel - and I think my experience (while bad) is "roughly" the way it's supposed to go. And while I could try the system without it, that would be cutting out one of the major selling points about the system. Along with my players not liking the "strange dice," it would be like taking out the Escalation Die from 13th Age, Cyphers out of Numenera, or Sanity from Cthulhu.

Let's drop the attempts to get you to play a game you have clearly set your mind to never play again.

Now let's discuss something much more important: the awesome adventures you say you've scooped up!

Please do play or GM them with your preferred OSR style ruleset as soon as possible!

The adventures written for DCC are wicked sweet awesome, and you can use pretty much any OD&D clone game to run them!

 

[CapnZapp]

A friend of mine ran a classic DCC funnel and I had a blash, but, yeah, I can see where you are coming from.

But I took the general idea of a fun, and some rules for level 0 characters in 5e that were published in an Adventurer's League module, and I started my last campaign with a funnel. The campaign was Rappan Athuk and lasted five years. In the first session, everyone rolled up four characters. We had 4 players, so 16 characters. They were part of a caravan travelling down the coast road and then inland to a small trading settlement (Zelkor's Ferry) in-land, close to the area of the mega dungeon.

I thinked it work, because their object was to get to Zelkor's Ferry. By the time they got into the dangerous section of the travel surrounded by wilderness and far from civilization, they just wanted to survive and get to the safety of Zelkor's Ferry.

The initial encounter involved a highly deadly foe. If it were just the 16 level-0 PCs they would have just been ground up. But there were part of a larger caravan that had many NPCs from merchants to guards. It did a great job of setting the deadly tone of the campaign and was more about organizing with the NPCs for their defense and surviving the massacre.

From the PCs who survived, the players level them up to level 1. For players that had more than one survive (and most did, through careful, tactical play or effective cowardice), they selected one as their main PC with the other(s) available on the "back bench" back at the settlement (and later at a stronghold they took over and built up) to be available if their main PC died.

I really enjoyed starting a campaign this way. I'm now enjoying Warhammer Fantasy where you don't start out particularly competent. You might be a stevedore, rat catcher, beggar...there are a lot of careers, most of which don't make you think of heroic fantasy. I just like game where you become heroes rather than start as heroes. I like funnels for games where character death is more likely and expected because it sets a tone and expectation for that style of game.

Even in DCC not every funnel has to be played as a meat grinder. Where you are just expected to continue to throw your lives away. It could be a deadly escape from captors. Your ship sinks and you find yourselves as cast aways in a dangerous area and need to find a way to safety or just to survive. There are lots of ways you can use a funnel that results in PC death that can still tell a meaningful story, one which can fuel the motivations of the survivors.

I can understand why many don't like the aesthetics of DCC or the funky dice and all the roll tables, the unreliable casting, and many other things about the rule system. But I never understood the funnel hate.

Thanks for sharing

 

[Retreater]

Man you had all the bad luck, didn't you?

My DCC dice look clean and nice.

And what's wrong with 1970s pizza?

This unholy abomination is the d7. The shape is "weird." Numbers are printed on the edges - or sometimes on the face and edge.

Now that I've found that this style of d7 exists, I wonder why DCC doesn't use that.

 

[Retreater]

Let's drop the attempts to get you to play a game you have clearly set your mind to never play again.

Now let's discuss something much more important: the awesome adventures you say you've scooped up!

Please do play or GM them with your preferred OSR style ruleset as soon as possible!

The adventures written for DCC are wicked sweet awesome, and you can use pretty much any OD&D clone game to run them!

I don't understand how I'd get the stunt dice to work - or translate the DCC dice into normal polyhedrals.
Do you have pointers?

 

[overgeeked]

I don't need the overkill of DCC for that.

To you it’s overkill, to me it’s pitch perfect.

 

[eyeheartawk]

To you it’s overkill, to me it’s pitch perfect.

Right.

I think it's dependent on what kind of theme/mood you're going for.

If this is sort of a Dying Earth/Conan thing where sorcerers are all evil and there's hooded cultists with curved daggers around every corner and you're chilling at the courts of chaos at 1st level, then the magic working the way it does really reinforces that feel.

It's really the same with board games. There are board games that may not be objectively "fair and balanced" mechanically but those mechanics that are there reinforce the theming. On the other end of the spectrum you have stuff like Agricola or something like that, where you're supposed to be medieval farmers but nothing about this spreadsheet generator that spits out victory points makes it feel that way.

I'll take a chaotic thematically coherent game over a soulless mathematically perfect one (this is a personal preference, not a judgement against people who feel the opposite.).

 

[CapnZapp]

Right.

I think it's dependent on what kind of theme/mood you're going for.

If this is sort of a Dying Earth/Conan thing where sorcerers are all evil and there's hooded cultists with curved daggers around every corner and you're chilling at the courts of chaos at 1st level, then the magic working the way it does really reinforces that feel.

Well, I love me some evil sorcerers and hooded cultists...

..but the game needs to be playable for player characters, that is characters that might assume at least some responsibility for their actions, characters that can think ahead and not just act stupidly or selfishly. Player characters - at least mine - looked at the spells, calculated the probabilities, and said "nah".

For some spells. Others are much more actually useful in that the various random results still kind of work.

Again contrast mercurial magic, where you at least know what you're getting ahead of time. (Sometimes a spell became utterly useless. Or utterly hilarious. And all of this is fine)

But in the end we didn't need to put the game on halt because we needed to parse the spell results table and figure out what the results meant. There was just too much randomness. Everything was randomized.

You could achieve the goal of making magic feeling dangerous and unpredictable with far less clutter, far less annoying special tables, far less randomness. Just a little more randomness than D&D (where you basically always get the exact same spell effect every time) would have gone along way.

But DCC went absolutely nuts and ended up with a huge jumble. If some of you got that working... well, I didn't.

And then there's the small issue of spell burn. It's utterly unbalanced, and only the smallest amount of afterthought have been applied to fix it.

In the end I found DCC spells to be far more trouble than they're worth. A shame. I really like it when game developers try to break out of how D&D magic seldom feel, well, magical. The way spells have precise parameters and perfect reproducibility ruins the idea that magic is, well, magical, wondrous and unpredictable.