DCC Level 0 Character Funnel is a Bad Concept

[Jd Smith1]

Not sure what you think you will get out of discussing from this angle.

The whole point of the funnel is to throw that mob of people you're talking about into a dangerous situation, and those that come out on the other side are now presumptive heroes that get to pick a class and start learning magic and stuff.

Yes, they will likely do all of the above: run, die, fall on their face. But some of them will persevere. This is Dungeons & Dragons after all, not Russian Peasant Simulator.

You appear to want to convince yourself it's best and most "realistic" if they all die or run away... but what do you think you stand to gain from having that sort of discussion in the context of D&D fantasy gaming???????????

The same thing from any post response: sharing ideas and concepts.

It is most realistic that the attrition is close to 100%. Expertise is born of training, practice, and instruction, as any athlete or soldier knows. Or academic: you don't produce a scholar by placing an illiterate person in a library and waiting.

If my facts aren't to your liking, don't use them.

 

[CapnZapp]

It's only certain ones though. Elf, dwarf and halfling. Race strictly as race is pretty irrelevant in the game.

And easily houseruled.

Nothing breaks if you separate race and class. It isn't there to annoy - it's meant to be a positive nostalgic throwback to the simpler times of Yore.

Simply rename "Elf" to "swordmage" perhaps, remove the references to iron curses maybe, and let every race pick every class.

The level-0 funnel adventure "Death-Slaves of Eternity" by Marzio Muscedere that I highly recommend does something similar. Because it is set in a classic Sword & Sorcery setting where only humans exist (no elves) it reskins the demihuman classes:

Elf becomes Cultist
Dwarf becomes Soldier
Halfling becomes Pirate

So now every character (and they are all human) have three new classes to choose from.

 

[overgeeked]

But DCC turns spellcasting into a chaotic fiddly mess - an utter trainwreck, to be honest. My players found that they hesitated using magic since there was always great risks involved. And in the end they often ended up not using magic at all.

I can’t speak to you or your players’ experience, but it reads like the DCC magic system is working exactly as designed. It’s not bad design, it’s that you don’t like the design. Huge difference.

Magic in DCC is not a tool, as you say. It’s the ultimate expression of risk vs reward. Your mere mortal character is trying to channel pure chaos and use it to manifest their will into the world. That’s what makes DCC magic interesting, it’s a risk vs reward mechanic. That’s also what makes D&D magic boring, there’s no risk and only reward. It’s a tool, nothing magical, mysterious, or risky about it.

When I run DCC I remove the PCs’ ability to spend luck to avoid corruption. Making magic even riskier. It’s my favorite part of the game, honestly. Before DCC, wizards were boring. With DCC, wizards are finally interesting. This is also why I love WFRP magic. The risks.

It’s not for everyone, clearly. But damn it is the most fun I’ve had playing a D&D-like game.

 

[CapnZapp]

The same thing from any post response: sharing ideas and concepts.

It is most realistic that the attrition is close to 100%. Expertise is born of training, practice, and instruction, as any athlete or soldier knows. Or academic: you don't produce a scholar by placing an illiterate person in a library and waiting.

If my facts aren't to your liking, don't use them.

Why would anyone want to play a campaign where attrition is close to 100%? And why fixate on DCC funnels, when there's no real mechanical or numeric difference between a level 0 DCC character and a freshly generated 1st level character in pretty much any edition of D&D?

Since we're sharing ideas, here's one for you: Why don't you move over to the 5E forums and try telling them how realistic it would be if 99% of D&D characters died before they reached 4th level?

 

[Jd Smith1]

Why would anyone want to play a campaign where attrition is close to 100%? And why fixate on DCC funnels, when there's no real mechanical or numeric difference between a level 0 DCC character and a freshly generated 1st level character in pretty much any edition of D&D?

Since we're sharing ideas, here's one for you: Why don't you move over to the 5E forums and try telling them how realistic it would be if 99% of D&D characters died before they reached 4th level?

If you don't like my input, feel free to ignore it.

 

[Reynard]

It too be a great tool for that, but for decades I ignored them because even back in the TSR days, most of them indicators for the local ecology at best. Just tables of threat flavored encounters modified by random morale. Nothing surprising or inspiring for me, personally there.

In my experience, the key to making old school random encounters interesting is to always roll reaction. Finding our the ogres are friendly is a great way to spur your imagination, for example.

 

[CapnZapp]

I can’t speak to you or your players’ experience, but it reads like the DCC magic system is working exactly as designed. It’s not bad design, it’s that you don’t like the design. Huge difference.

Magic in DCC is not a tool, as you say. It’s the ultimate expression of risk vs reward. Your mere mortal character is trying to channel pure chaos and use it to manifest their will into the world. That’s what makes DCC magic interesting, it’s a risk vs reward mechanic. That’s also what makes D&D magic boring, there’s no risk and only reward. It’s a tool, nothing magical, mysterious, or risky about it.

When I run DCC I remove the PCs’ ability to spend luck to avoid corruption. Making magic even riskier. It’s my favorite part of the game, honestly. Before DCC, wizards were boring. With DCC, wizards are finally interesting. This is also why I love WFRP magic. The risks.

It’s not for everyone, clearly. But damn it is the most fun I’ve had playing a D&D-like game.

That all sounds great in theory, but when the players decide to never cast spells, something has clearly gone wrong.

Of course, if you just love starting fires with no regard for either friend or foe, DCC spells could work for you. This player would really really hate if his spell torched his friends. if everything was lost and casting the spell was the only chance of not having a TPK, then maybe he would consider using it. But that never happened.

DCC has far too many spells that do completely different things depending on the dice. Was he unlucky in his spell selection? Yes of course. But the criticism stands.

I would have preferred by far a system that acknowledges the static-ness and predictability of D&D spell-casting as something negative and then introduces ENOUGH randomness to effectively combat that, and then no more randomness. I would be interested in a system where spells remained fairly quick to adjudicate, and mostly did something akin to what the player could hope for, while introducing SOME modicum of uncertainty and just a little pinch of chaos.

Other spells were just much better precisely because the results that didn't do something directly useful at least didn't make things go horribly wrong. And then there were plain overpowered spells.

Contrast to the Mercurial Magic effects. At least once you rolled you knew what you had to work with. This was a highly chaotic subsystem that actually works.

I loved much about DCC, but Goodman clearly needed to kill their darlings when it comes to magic.

 

[overgeeked]

That all sounds great in theory, but when the players decide to never cast spells, something has clearly gone wrong.

Yes. Your players have rejected the notion that magic should be dangerous. That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the design of magic in DCC. It just means DCC-style magic is not for your players because they are too risk adverse.

The things you’re complaining about are literally the things that make DCC magic interesting and not boring. If you cast flame fingers, spellburn, and roll high enough you can summon meteors from the sky and destroy an entire city…at 1st level. That’s the definition of amazing. That’s exactly what I want from magic.

DCC has far too many spells that do completely different things depending on the dice. Was he unlucky in his spell selection? Yes of course. But the criticism stands.

As an indicator that you don’t like it, sure. That doesn’t mean it’s bad design. Only that you don’t like it. Again, huge difference.

 

[eyeheartawk]

I find the inherent nature of spells in DCC to be a feature and not a bug. Given the huge variance in effect, further modified by mercurial magic, makes no two wizards the same.

But more importantly, for me, it makes a high level wizard a questionable occurence. Like, if you've made it to level 7 as a wizard with all the spellburn and corruption you're probably not in the best shape. If you made it at all.

I like that.

Because of the design of the magic system it allows the fighter to be the best class in that game. And that, is really refreshing. Especially so, because they did without making that fighter use anime fighting magic.

It also speaks to me on a thematic level since I'm far more Howard and Vance with my magic preferences than I am the sort of epic fantasy everyone is a caster thing that latter editions of D&D have drifted to over the years.

I don't like funnels though. I skip them every time.

 

[payn]

I find the inherent nature of spells in DCC to be a feature and not a bug. Given the huge variance in effect, further modified by mercurial magic, makes no two wizards the same.

But more importantly, for me, it makes a high level wizard a questionable occurence. Like, if you've made it to level 7 as a wizard with all the spellburn and corruption you're probably not in the best shape. If you made it at all.

I like that.

Because of the design of the magic system it allows the fighter to be the best class in that game. And that, is really refreshing. Especially so, because they did without making that fighter use anime fighting magic.

It also speaks to me on a thematic level since I'm far more Howard and Vance with my magic preferences than I am the sort of epic fantasy everyone is a caster thing that latter editions of D&D have drifted to over the years.

I don't like funnels though. I skip them every time.