I don't own the DCC rule books and haven't read them, but an old friend from high school, who lives out of state, will give me a break from DMing when he is in town and has run some games for me an my group.
When he ran a DCC funnel game it was a revelation. It was an absolute blast. A sinkhole opened up under some villagers home and he went to spelunking in it an never returned. A group of villagers was rounded up to attempt to find out what happened and hopefully rescue the missing villager.
Yeah, it was 18 characters. Yeah, we played them all concurrently. The only thing I don't recall is random-table save-or-suck deaths. But what these poor peasants ran into meant that just getting hit by an enemy was about the same as save-or-suck, except it was the GM rolling the dice. But that made it much more tactical and tense.
Depending on their commoner professions, a small number may have a family sword or hunting bow. But few had martial weapons. Most had pitchforks, spears, etc. The small amount of funds they had available had to be carefully spent on whatever basic equipment might be helpful. Rope, some food supplies, torches, etc.
At least more than half of them died. I think one player may have had all his characters die and another player gave him one of their characters. We played very tactically, it was tough, be we ended up defeating the big bad, the survivors had generational wealth, and the players had a blast.
It was much more focused on cooperative play and was less character driven, though role play was certainly still part of it. Play wasn't that bogged down by the number of characters. Probably because the DM was very experienced with the system and because zero-level characters do not have a lot of abilities, spells, and powers to choose from. It moved faster than mid-level 5e combat with one-character-per-player in my experience. Also, the DM ran it theater of the mind, which he did well, so there wasn't time spent moving minis or VTT tokens around. Just the occasional sketching something out on paper.
Now this was a one-shot. So we were not really invested in which characters survived. We were invested in enough of the group surviving to successfully complete the adventure.
But I liked the experience so much that for my current Rappan Athuk campaign (DND 5e), I used a similar concept. Except I used the zero-level rules from the Adventurer League's adventure:
DDAL-ELW00: What's Past Is Prologue.
- The character has chosen a name, race, and background.
- The character has NOT chosen a class.
- The character has gear plus weapons, up to one common magical item, and proficiencies granted by their race and background.
- A level 0 character has 6 + their Constitution modifier for hit points, 1d6 hit dice, and no proficiency bonus. Weapon and armor proficiencies may be granted by race and background; those are fine!
- Upon hitting first level, the character will gain hit points to meet their chosen classes "hit points at first level." E.g., if the character chooses to become a fighter s/he will gain +4 hit points.
Except, I added:
Each player will roll-up four characters at session zero. We will roll up characters together. If you can't make the first session, you will just roll up a 1st level character and bring it to the next session.
It wasn't nearly the same experience as the DCC funnel. Already, these are going to be beefier than the DCC characters, just because 5e stat generation alone (I allow players to chose either role 4 and drop one x 6 and assign in any order - or - point buy). Also, the players were in a caravan with other civilians and guards. The players were also very experienced and tactical...and not very heroic (were happy to let the guards take the brunt--its their job after all, and perhaps they didn't try too hard to save the civilians all the time). So the majority survived their travels to the frontier town that would serve as their initial base of operations for the campaign. From the survivors, the players would pick the one they wanted to play with and the others were backbenched as part of the larger group to be swapped if a character died or if the group wanted to put together a different combo for a specific mission.
As for DCC in general, I've played DCC, Mutant Crawl Classics, and DCC Lankhmar. It has a lot more random stuff in it, especially when it comes to magic use, but I've enjoyed every game I've played, whether from my out-of-state GM friend or at conventions. I've never played any of these in a campaign, however, only one shots. But I see no reason why I wouldn't have fun in a campaign with one of the DCC flavors.
No cows falling through [redacted] and then crushing a whole [redacted] of [redacted] especially after an enlarge spell.
