Sell Me on Dungeon Crawl Classics For Long term Play, and NO Funnels

[payn]

Again, I see no reason you can't bring a 'continuity and focus' to DCC or any other game. It's only episodic if you want it to be... or do you need to have a focus provided for you? Myself, I prefer the DIY thing of worldbuilding and finding my own reasons for adventuring. I particularly like location-based campaigns that deal with local intrigues and power structures.

The Funnel is only the first session or two (I've never had it go past the first)... and I see no reason that the game would have to focus on pre-written modules and/or dungeon crawls.

I don't think these are issues with DCC or any other OSR-ish game.

Skipping the campaign notes for a moment, my issue is more the system itself. It's...fun for about one evening. There are much better games to play in perpetuity from a mechanical perspective. Also, IMO, of course.

 

[Simlasa]

my issue is more the system itself.

Well, there's no getting past matters of taste.

I'm just here to attest that it DOES do long-term campaigns just fine. I enjoy it more for than 'normal' D&D and other class/level systems I've played.
It's the only game where I really enjoyed playing a Cleric... because it makes your PC's relationship with their deity of primary importance, which I never felt in other games outside of Runequest/Mythras.

 

[payn]

Well, there's no getting past matters of taste.

I'm just here to attest that it DOES do long-term campaigns just fine. I enjoy it more for than 'normal' D&D and other class/level systems I've played.
It's the only game where I really enjoyed playing a Cleric... because it makes your PC's relationship with their deity of primary importance, which I never felt in other games outside of Runequest/Mythras.

I do enjoy the cleric and wizard aspects of the game.

 

[Nightfly]

Thats fine, but I like a continuity and focus of the game. Im not an episodic west marches style gamer. At least not in perpetuity.

What makes you think DCC is a one-shot based system? It explicitly isn't! If it weren't meant to be played in a campaign, the fact that thieves regenerate luck between adventures wouldn't be any kind of an advantage at all. That's actually intended to be one of the strongest features of the thief, which is because the game assumes you'll be going on many adventures in succession.

It's true that DCC publications have nothing resembing an adventure path, because the game harkens back to an era before adventure paths existed. But you could totally run a Pathfinder adventure path, or a big 5e hardback, under DCC rules with a little conversion. It would work just fine. Actually, a 5e hardback might literally work better, because 5e barely has any rules or guidelines about time spent between excursions and DCC does.

In short, the rules are not the same as the culture surrounding the rules. The culture around DCC assumes you'll likely go from one short "module" to another because that was the way most of us played in 1982. But people also ran campaigns with long narrative arcs back then and I'm sure some people do so in DCC nowadays. There's certainly no reason you couldn't.

 

[payn]

What makes you think DCC is a one-shot based system? It explicitly isn't! If it weren't meant to be played in a campaign, the fact that thieves regenerate luck between adventures wouldn't be any kind of an advantage at all. That's actually intended to be one of the strongest features of the thief, which is because the game assumes you'll be going on many adventures in succession.

It's true that DCC publications have nothing resembing an adventure path, because the game harkens back to an era before adventure paths existed. But you could totally run a Pathfinder adventure path, or a big 5e hardback, under DCC rules with a little conversion. It would work just fine. Actually, a 5e hardback might literally work better, because 5e barely has any rules or guidelines about time spent between excursions and DCC does.

In short, the rules are not the same as the culture surrounding the rules. The culture around DCC assumes you'll likely go from one short "module" to another because that was the way most of us played in 1982. But people also ran campaigns with long narrative arcs back then and I'm sure some people do so in DCC nowadays. There's certainly no reason you couldn't.

Yes, i understand all that, but I do not like DCC for it. I was asked to "sell it" for long term play and I cannot. However, @Reynard does have different taste than I do, so this might work as a selling point anyways.

 

[Dumnbunny]

While there are no adventure paths as such, there are some larger adventures intended to be run over the course of many sessions. The DCC conversion of The Dark Tower is intended to, over the course of several months, take PCs from 3rd/4th level to at least 6th and probably beyond. And this can be expanded by starting with the 2nd level lead-in adventure, By Mitra’s Bones, Meet Thy Doom!, and expanded in the other direction with the Chosen Sons of Set.

Coming up is the DCC conversion of Caverns of Thracia which takes characters from level 1 to 5 over the course of a potentially year-long campaign. I believe they've added a lead-in funnel, and expanded the adventure out in various ways as well. I wouldn't be surprised to see parties go past level 5 by the end.

Megadungeons are just one option. I like to start with an evocative setting (such as Lankhmar, Dying Earth, Hubris, or Tales From the Fallen Empire), workshop a starting premise with the players, sprinkle in a few appropriate modules here and there for PCs to stumble or get hooked into, and just follow my nose from there. Hubis with its absurd number of random tables is great for this style of play, but really all of these settings just ooze with opportunity for adventure.

Ooh! I should also mention the Sunken City Omnibus from Purple Sorcerer Games, a great set of four adventures in one volume from a stellar 3rd-party publisher. I should also mention the vast array of largely excellent 3PP books for DCC.

Overall, I'd have to say I've found DCC excellent for long-term play. Funnels get a lot of attention, mostly because they're fun and they're ideal for convention play. But many aspects of the game only really sing when the campaign really gets going.

 

[Ath-kethin]

The DCC rulebook makes it seem a lot less interesting: 1 XP for an easy fight, 4 for an extremely deadly one. Which is fine, but I greatly prefer your interpretation of "how awesome was it?". Thief simply rolls to disarm the trap, 1 or 2 XP... party thinks up a astonishingly brilliant way of circumventing it, 3 or 4 XP. Now I want to do something like that in all my games.

I'm not sure where you got any of that. Here's the XP section of the DCC Core Rulebook:

"The DCC RPG experience system works as follows:

• All character classes use the same advancement table.

• Each encounter is worth from 0 to 4 XP, and those XP are not earned merely by killing monsters, disarming traps, looting treasure, or completing a quest. Rather, successfully surviving encounters earns the characters XP in DCC RPG. A typical encounter is worth 2 XP, and the system scales from 0 to 4 depending on difficulty.

• All characters that participate in the encounter receive the same XP.

• The judge determines how much XP is awarded.

• Characters level up when they reach the XP threshold for the next level.

• The level thresholds become progressively higher. The number of “average adventures” required to advance to each subsequent level is higher than the preceding level."

I absolutely adore the fact that the system rewards survival, not conquest. Encounters are much more varied and players are much more creative in their approach when the game is explicitly set up such that direct combat is rarely the smartest option.

 

[Nightfly]

I'm not sure where you got any of that.

In my edition of the DCC rulebook, it says on page 359 that you reward 1 XP for "The typical easy encounter" and you reward 4 XP for "An extremely difficult encounter, one that the party barely survives." That's pretty much exactly what I said.

That's the GM-facing explanation of XP. The character-facing explanation on page 26 (in my printing) is what you're quoting above. So you're correct, but so was I. Anyway, the point is that I never quite inferred the idea that "more awesome = more experience" from reading either page. The way Parmandur explained it upthread made the system "click" with me in a way that it hadn't just from the book alone. Maybe I'm slow on the uptake, or maybe the rulebook should do something like 13th Age and just bluntly say, "We like to reward XP based on how epic the encounter was, rather than how hard it was per se."

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Out of curiosity...how does this work? Haven't really looked at the DCC Lankhmar stuff.

The meet is used to establish how the characters met and what shenanigans they got into. There's a bit of communal storytelling to it. Pretty much gives them a reason to adventure together and an initial goal. For example, you could roll "The PCs meet during a heist and have to work together to overcome unforeseen rivals and/or obstacles." The PCs might decide what they were doing there and the Judge uses that hook to plan the first adventure or even more.

Wait, they gained a single level in a year of play?

As @overgeeked pointed, out, technically three. I will say that they were pretty close to going up to third by the end. And honestly, after running a lot of 5e where you could be 10th level in the same span, the slow advancement was kinda nice.

 

[Reynard]

As @overgeeked pointed, out, technically three. I will say that they were pretty close to going up to third by the end. And honestly, after running a lot of 5e where you could be 10th level in the same span, the slow advancement was kinda nice.

Even three sounds slow but I definitely agree that in general 5E is way too fast. it also matters how often and for how long you play, of course.