Dungeon Crawl Classics

Started by airboy, November 14, 2017, 02:42:28 PM

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airboy

I played this at MACE last weekend.  This is the most chaotic D&D type game that I've ever seen if you are a mage.

As a mage the strength of the spell and what the spell even does is totally dependent on a D20 roll.  Even more, if you have luck points you can juice the roll even more.  Even more, you can temporarily drain your core statistics to juice the spell further.

You can keep casting the same spells over and over until you get a bad miss which causes you to forget the spell.

But your critical misses backfire and the worst backfires yield corruption to your core character.

My 3rd level MU (10th is as high as it gets) rolled a 1, then rolled badly again so all of the flesh evaporated from his face and he was left with a white skull.

I had embraced the chaos earlier and proclaimed - "Nay, Nay - this is the White Skull with a mullet!"  "All of the girls are going to go wild!  Everyone will fear the dread White Skull bwah ha ha ha ha."

In our last encounter I spent 10 luck points (out of 14, next closest player had 6), and 10 more attribute points to fire a "Dread White Skull Disco Ball of Death" (Prismatic Spray) on the boss monster and toasted it.  Everyone was shocked since most of my spell casting had fizzled or had relatively weak effects.  But the rolls can go to 40 on a 20 sided die (if you blow lots of points in one huge effort).  I had a modified 24 which was really powerful.

For MUs at least, this was the most chaotic magic system I've ever encountered.  It was a ton of fun in a game convention to play, but it seems like most MUs would die early.  This was confirmed by the GM who said that MUs (not clerics) were both loathed and feared.  Very few MUs are out there and even fewer reach level 5 or higher.

A lot of fun, if you like some chaos in your gaming.

Nefaro

Judging by the big crit failure tables, it definitely has the biggest range of magic backfires I've seen.

I also dig the same chaotic backlash in WFRP3.  Love the magic system.  It's part of the reason I stocked up on them before they went OOP. 

With that one, you have to channel enough magical power, up from your base level if it's not enough to pay for the spell's cost.  One way it can hurt is if your channeling roll adds too many magic points to your current total, and you go over your limit.  So there's a goldilocks area you want to stay in to be most effective at casting.  But you can also get chaotic backlash from rolling particularly bad. 

Either way, it has a whole deck of chaotic magic cards, each with a different bad effect, which you draw from to find out what nastiness happens.  A lot of people complained about the price of having so many cards come with their RPG, but it's so convenient just being able to leave such cards sitting in front of peoples' characters, with the effects & info listed on them.  I hate having to look stuff up in the middle of a session, so the more info on cards (or homemade on index cards) the better.  Not for them, because their arm may have turned into a bundle of writhing tentacles, or have accidentally summoned a small unfettered demon.   ^-^

DCC looks like it has very similar chaotic magic, so I jumped.  Was also intrigued by them having the demi-human races as classes, like the old red box D&D series.  I'm not big on most OSR stuff, especially not the clones, but DCC definitely has a lot of it's own stuff going.

I also saw mention of people enjoying the Warrior class' mighty blow tables, or whatever they're called.  Sounds like bigger versions of some RPG's crit damage tables which detail the maiming.  ;D

Seems like the Thief class gets to use it's Luck ability to help pull off fancy shit more often..?  Or it replenishes more for that class?  I've not really read much, waiting on the dead tree edition to show up.



I'm likely to be running a fantasy rpg around Thanksgiving weekend.   Thought about doing DCC, but I think Dungeon World would be a better way to go due to how many novice players there are.  DW's character creation is just so streamlined as a group activity.  Not sure yet, though.

Nefaro

That is one thick tome.

:dreamer:


I'd just be concerned about having to constantly reference the huge amount of tables.  May be a shit-ton of table print-offs to be done.  :o

Dammit Carl!

The part of me that played a Wild Mage back in the day finds this to be exciting.

Nefaro

The GM Apprentice Fantasy Deck just had a community submitted d1000 Table Of Random Magical Chaos added as a bonus. 

http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product_info.php?products_id=213131

Looks like it was made for DCC gonzo magic fails.  ;D