The last session marks a solid year of our gaming group playing in Paul’s DCC campaign. (He runs every other week while I run my Reavers Pathfinder campaign in alternate.) I thought it’d be a good time to do a retrospective on how we’re finding the game.
It’s going well! The zero-level funnel was fun and we’re all about third level now so not quite as squishy.
Dungeon Crawl Classics is – hard. Deliberately, that’s its deal. It’s easy to die.
Magic and healing come at a very sharp cost. At the low end it’s ability damage and at the high end it’s mutation and such. It’s very random, too, most of the rulebook is lengthy random tables for every spell. Powerful magic items get you the wrath of the gods and thus penalties. We have more hit points now but there’s plenty of ways to take lots of damage, ability damage, or straight up save or dies where your hit points aren’t a major impediment. Attack economy is an overwhelming factor – even at this level “six skeleton archers” are a holy-shit moment.
Wilderness travel threatens to kill us not just with random encounters but with fishing accidents and dysentery. Being outside a city is terrifying. (And most of the “cities” are just 20-ish primitive screwhead mud farmers; nowhere we’ve been has things like “shops”.)
And the flavor is gritty. Adventures are about wading through mud, and blood, and rat pus, and rotting flesh that sometimes wants to have sex with you. NPCs are all feckless, whether Lawful or Chaotic. Even our fellow party members – we’re friends, but we sometimes are working at cross-purposes especially when our various supernatural masters are involved. And there’s a price or downside for nearly everything.
And we like it!
I got a comment on a previous session summary saying “it doesn’t seem like you are having fun from reading the summaries!” Well, we are, but our characters aren’t, I’d say… Except for the rare occassion they manage to get a good meal and a bath the world pretty much sucks to live in. But we’re all old school gamers who played original D&D (and many other games) since the ’80’s and it’s a nice change of pace from the anime-superheroes power fantasy mode of modern gaming.
Now, the system is different in a good way from AD&D 0e/1e. Fighters have mighty deeds of arms, starting spellcasters can cast more than one spell a day (with risk), Luck gives everyone a chance to improve stuff a little. Early D&D, you had 2 hp, 1 spell to case, and otherwise were shit out of luck. So the system’s a little more textured and forgiving.
But they definitely have an adventure style (most of the ones we have played are written by DCC mega-author Harley Stroh) based on the grittiest of the 1e strain of modules.
But as we are grown ass men, the challenge is part of the point. It also rewards being smart; it is combat as war, not combat as sport. While being stupid can lead to death from trivial causes, very dangerous encounters can be made way easier with careful planning, positioning, and scheming. Traps and dungeoneering are less about rolls and more about reasoning. That’s the most engaging part of the game for me (well, and the roleplay, but in the game part) – being clever enough to reduce the risk of what’s going on. Within the limits of most of us being weird Chaotic freaks, we’re not like a SWAT team or anything. And magic is very unreliable, so it’s hard to count on in a plan.
Having six PCs definitely helps (though not much healing), and Paul knows how hard DCC is so usually runs underleveled adventures for us. And we’ve gamed together for a while, so we know how we tend to think and act in combat.
Also, the cool thing about this is that you get additional powers not just from “leveling”, but from weird artifacts and Gygaxian pools and doodads and boons and stuff, so we are able to flex our characters in desired ways without having “a feat for that”.
The characters are shaping up well, I think, for being randomly generated!
- Podrick (Patrick) is our Lawful knight-wannabe, so is our impetus to do “good things” plot wise, and is a very effective tank and has a good magic spear.
- Gallfred Weasel (Bruce) with his Cloak of Cheret the Lost is so stealthy that we forget about him (and in extremis, he even forgets about himself).
- Mordecai (Matt) has become a very powerful and very Chaotic gish (wizard but with armor and sword) and is enjoying necromancy and becoming ghoulish. The necromancy rules make it a little tough to get actual zombies which frustrates him. “You get an undead… upper torso!”
- Old Man Fish (Chris) has struggled a little game rule-wise; as a ranger he has an animal companion but it’s his horse and doesn’t come in dungeons; he is an archer but has low damage. Personally he’s always a solid part of the group though, is often my fellow “plan guy” and has been helpful in the wilds (though some of those rolls require stats he is low in). Later on he gets healing and rage and stuff to fill it in.
- Ned (Tim) is definitely a fan of the weirdo mutation part of being a wizard, it’s actually hard to keep up with his bug infestation and tentacles and dirt fetish. Man he can magic missile the shit out of things if he rolls well!
- Hemp the Weaver (me) has tripled down on archery which works out well; force projection is important in a combat-as-war game. He has a side gig in being the party tailor which is fun.
Everyone’s got a good personality and a good schtick. And an overall plot is emerging – it was just random stuff but now it’s gelling around an evil monster king sending bullshit our way, so fighting against that is unifying. Lawful and Chaotic folks alike love to kill evil kings!
Bruce (who is our usual session summary scribe) adds his thoughts:
The game system does a nice job of giving each of the classes a trick that makes them useful in a (relatively) unique way during gameplay – the traditional OSR issue of fighter-types gradually becoming first just a huge well of (defensive) hit points, and then becoming entirely optional appurtenances of the heavy-artillery wizards is something the rules deal with nicely. I’ve personally really appreciated the easy regenerability of Thief LUCK – balanced by the fact that to effectively use Thief skills I end up with a character that cannot stand even close to the front lines.
As regarding the campaign, the ongoing sequence of character quests gives the players a good ability to guide the world. I’ve very much appreciated that. Paul has done a good job of mitigating the “only one shall survive!” nature of the mostly convention-oriented adventures. Adventures built with the idea of integrating more into an ongoing campaign would be useful, but perhaps not something that is as worthwhile to publish. The idea that characters can undergo remarkable transformations of nature that are overall a benefit (with some drawbacks), and that this is more common than outright curse effects that are nothing but bad, promotes more character experimentation, which is ultimately better for gameplay.
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