Dungeon Crawl Classics What is cool to you from a player perspective?

Smackpixi said:

Wow has this thread devolved. I guess no one that cared about OP is still reading, but I will say anyway, as player I liked the character creation via the funnel, it’s sorta like rolling for stats, but you have these rolls ànd try to protect the best one in the opening adventure.

Click to expand...

It is sort of random twice, once in rolling up the four zero level characters, but then again as you try and protect your characters and death comes randomly and easily. I think my first funnel death came from everybody make a luck roll, those who fail die, in which there is no way to protect your choice character.

Voadam said:

It is sort of random twice, once in rolling up the four zero level characters, but then again as you try and protect your characters and death comes randomly and easily. I think my first funnel death came from everybody make a luck roll, those who fail die, in which there is no way to protect your choice character.

Click to expand...

Yes. DCC is a love letter to polyhedral dice of all shapes and sizes. It shouts from the rooftops embrace the randomness!

I had the second game a little while ago.

It went well.

I embraced an old school dungeon crawling ethos. When exploring around the tunnels in the wall of the giant tree house we saw a skeletal hand sticking out of a collapsed side passage my first question was "does it have a ring on it?" It did not, but it looked like the rubble could be cleared with some effort. I led the group in doing so because "there might be one on the other hand!" Turns out no, but there was a whole chamber with dead bodies and their gear, lots of gold, rusty armor and weapons, including a magic spear designed to kill the titan/giant, which I took.

First time in over 40 years of gaming where I have found a hidden chamber with loot! I have never found a secret door myself, I just do not have a map sense for where they would make sense to be.

The DM had apparently run this intro module multiple times as a sort of DCC evangelist and we were the first group to find the hidden loot chamber.

We climbed to the top where the prisoner was hanging out of a birdcage and from the ton of ropes we had bought at the shop we set up safety system for the PC who went out on the limb to check it out and talk to her (we were over a hundred feet up).

I did not take my fellow PC's advice to dive bomb down with the magic spear to try to one shot the giant.

Turns out there is a lock that you have to stick your hand in to open it at a pain cost. The other PC came back and my low int high hp last character went out after roping up and taking off my armor and leaving the magic spear behind. Having no penalties from armor and being hands free, unencumbered, and roped up was the way to go, it was apparently very easy to situationally require really difficult rolls if you were not doing it so carefully and fall to your death, possibly right onto the sleeping titan. At the lock I secured myself and positioned myself well so if there was great pain I would not fall. I then bit down onto a stick to stifle any cries that might waken the titan. I then foolishly reached to stick my hand in the lock, but caught myself, repositioned, and stuck my left hand into the lock. Turns out it was just a Gom Jabbar pain test, I made a check and came out with no hp loss and my hand intact. The woman inside was not wearing a cloack but it was her succubus (maybe?) wings and flew out screeching in joy at being released from the binding prison. We felt we had confirmation we were working for a bad guy at that point. The whole place started to disintegrate, including the titan, we used our two hundred feet of anchored rope to go down quickly instead of maneuvering through the walls and the stairs and passageways there.

We made it back, got rewarded by the severed heads holding blindfold woman with an option for a spin of the Wheel of Destiny, which did things like change your destiny luck signs randomly. If you rolled well like I did with a critical, you could reroll a stat (my five int went to 12), get a luck bonus, change your race (I changed to a dwarf). A friend critically fumbled and died retroactively, he swapped fates with a different character who was killed in the adventure, which actually turned out great for him as he picked my hunter with great stats who died earlier.

Fun fairly gonzo 70s style fantasy adventure.

Next game will be us as now first level characters. Our group will have a destiny reshaped elf (no metal fighter mage), a cleric, my dwarf, a fighter, and whatever the one who could not be there for the second game picks.

I watched the launch video for Castle Whiterock, and it highlighted something that I think is cool about DCC: Goodman Games helps to promote the third party publishers who are making DCC content.

There are currently 14 products on Backerkit for Castle Whiterock. Only one one of those is the core Castle Whiterock set produced by Goodman Games. For each of the 13 that are by other publishers, GG has cross-colaborated to help offer extra material and extra rewards for each of them.

I think that's cool, and it's impressive to see that many moving pieces with a variety of people and publishers working together.

Argyle King said:

I watched the launch video for Castle Whiterock, and it highlighted something that I think is cool about DCC: Goodman Games helps to promote the third party publishers who are making DCC content.

Click to expand...

I think Goodman may have pioneered this, selling third party stuff through their own site. That kind of behavior appears to be becoming the norm.

Most of the Mothership product on the Tuesday Knight Games site is third-party stuff, for instance, and they have a licensing program where they review and certify all the content that displays the Mothership M on their cover. And now that Limithron has gotten their Down Among the Dead crowdfunding campaign fulfilled, they've begun selling third-party Pirate Borg stuff on their site, too. And while the Arcane Library doesn't (yet) sell third party stuff on their site, their widely distributed monthly emails highlight Shadowdark-compatible stuff. I had one of my adventures highlighted in it and I could see the sales spike that accompanied it. And, of course, WotC is now selling third party stuff through D&D Beyond, which would have been unthinkable during the OGL crisis.

It's a win-win for everyone in such an ecosystem, as it puts more content than the company can create themselves in front of their fans/customers, and it encourages third party folks to create for it, since they know there's a way to get it in front of the appropriate audience.

I'd call DCC something it's really fun to do in a one-shot setting, but not something I'd want to play a campaign of. I've played a couple of funnels, and the best one was run in the modern era with a slasher/cthuhlu cultist mentality. Our funnel characters were members of different social groups in high school that strangely mapped to classes and we were trying to make it through the night when cultists were summoning a Great Old One. Lots of fun, but I wouldn't want to do this as a regular, continuing campaign. But then I wouldn't want to do that with AD&D either.

I think you have to embrace the gonzo nature and roll with each situation you find yourself in if you're going to have fun.