The sales staff won't like my suggestion....

[finarvyn]

The sales staff won't like my suggestion, but the more I read about DCC and its randomness the more I think that the most fun is to be had when the players don't know the rules and don't have access to the charts.

The more the players know the content of the random charts (spell effects, results of criticals, monster appearance, etc) the less "cool" the game will feel to them.

In other words, potential players really sholdn't be buying copies of the game.

Scenario 1: Player casts spell, has bad thing happen, looks at GM and other players and says "it did WHAT?"

Scenario 2: Player casts spell, has bad thing happen, rolls a 6 and remembers from the chart that he just lost a leg in the mishap.

Just me thinking out loud, but it seems like this effect would be more severe in DCC than most RPGs. (Other than Paranoia or similar games where you aren't supposed to know what's going on.) The fact that magic swords are supposed to be unique, monsters are unique, (and so on) leads one to the conclusion that surprise and the unexpected are a huge component of this game. When you know what options are on the random charts, it seems like you lose a lot of the luster of the game.

What do you think?

[Geoffrey]

I agree with you both in regard to DCC RPG specifically, and in regard to D&D in general.

We are indeed hated by all publishers.

[mshensley]

I agree with you in theory, but it seems like it would be a royal PITA to dm a game where I had to look up the results of every, single spell by myself.

[Black Dougal]

I am going to partially agree with you.

There will be places where the magic is lost. For example, when the players start to really learn the spell charts. This is unavoidable even if the players don't have a copy of the book and have never read it. Eventually they will learn what rolling below 11 means.

The place where the magic should remain is in the adventures. If the DM is creating many (all?) of his/her own monsters for adventures, then there should always be a few unknowns to keep the players guessing.

[jmucchiello]

There's nothing inherently wrong with players gaining expertise in what their characters can do. Remembering that 24 on the magic missile chart is d6 missiles at 2d8+whatever does not hurt the wonder of the game. Players won't have that kind of memory until they've cast a lot of magic missiles. A wizard should have seen most of the possible results from his own 1st level spells by the time he is 7th level. Having a surprise result at that point would make wizards too random.

[goodmangames]

Agree in theory, though in practice it's hard to keep that kind of information from players. And in game world terms, an experienced mage would have a sense of what each spell does after many years of magic use.

But there's a compromise...

Most of the spell tables are visible to the players.

But some of them, specifically those associated with patron magic, are DM-only tables -- they're in the DM section, not the player section.

You can call for help from your demon patron, but exactly what happens is up to his whims...

[Geoffrey]

Agree in theory, though in practice it's hard to keep that kind of information from players.

Alas, that is true. We need more poor players with no internet connections and who live far from game stores.

[GnomeBoy]

Just pray for players like me who can't quite remember how spells work anyway.

[smathis]

Just pray for players like me who can't quite remember how spells work anyway.

I'll have to multiclass into Cleric.

But I'll do my best...

[finarvyn]

I agree with you in theory, but it seems like it would be a royal PITA to dm a game where I had to look up the results of every, single spell by myself.

Oh, I wasn't thinking of the spell charts as much as some of the other random things like monsters. My example was kind of poor, in retrospect, but it shows the idea if not a specific instance.

Sort of like a monster encounter where you read a discription from a monster book ... "you encounter a huge, lumbering humanoid which looks like a warty creature with mottled flesh, elongated facial features and nasty claws" ... and everyone looks at each other and says "troll!"

You're trying to make it mysterious and full of flavor, but astute players who have read the book* know too much.



* The example is from the C&C Monsters & Treasure book, if you're curious.

[GnomeBoy]

Oh, well, if it's monsters you're worried about, don't worry. Make them look however you want them to look regardless of the stats you're using. You can even re-use stats with a different description and add a power stolen from another set of stats to mix it up.

For example: In the campaign I'm starting next week, the populace will be referring to certain creatures as "goblins", "fiends", "devils", etc. but they aren't naming anything in particular by phylum, kingdom, etc. etc. etc. -- but bad-mouthing/cursing creatures they fear and don't understand. Nobody in the game world owns a monster manual. The only thing that's locked down at this point is orcs, since I have a half-orc character in the party. Even that I may be able to fudge around with...

I've done this before, and it has worked well.

[Black Dougal]

I agree with you in theory, but it seems like it would be a royal PITA to dm a game where I had to look up the results of every, single spell by myself.

Oh, I wasn't thinking of the spell charts as much as some of the other random things like monsters. My example was kind of poor, in retrospect, but it shows the idea if not a specific instance.

Sort of like a monster encounter where you read a description from a monster book ... "you encounter a huge, lumbering humanoid which looks like a warty creature with mottled flesh, elongated facial features and nasty claws" ... and everyone looks at each other and says "troll!"

You're trying to make it mysterious and full of flavor, but astute players who have read the book* know too much.



* The example is from the C&C Monsters & Treasure book, if you're curious.

I will quote Joseph here. I hope he doesn't mind.

I've probably mentioned this elsewhere, but I can't remember for sure, so here is a brief commentary on monsters.

One of the refreshing elements of reading Appendix N books is that they have a knack for presenting creatures in a fresh manner. Most of the Appendix N books were published before the genre of "fantasy" existed. There was a time where "adventure" books sometimes took place in fantastic settings, but they all fell into the "adventure" category. Somewhere along the way, the "fantasy" category evolved. I don't have any real factual knowledge of how/when this happened but it seems obvious to me over the last 30 years or so: book stores now have dedicated fantasy sections and everybody knows what an "orc" is, but neither of those was the case in 1970. What that means is that fantasy books published in the "pre-genre" era have this wonderful naivete about the nature of the creatures they present. Nowadays fantasy books present archetypes and detailed descriptions, and clarify how "my version of a dwarf is different from this other one"; back in the 1970's and before, a monster was just some sort of creature and it was always presented in a fresh way.

In that vein, something I want to do with DCC RPG is bring back the novelty of monsters. Insofar as the published modules go, this means a moratorium on using existing monsters. The first four written DCC RPG modules do not include a single "existing" monster. Every combat encounter is with a new critter designed for that encounter. Because the monster stat system is really simple (REALLY simple), you can bang out a new monster in a very short amount of time, so it's easy to create creatures on the fly as you go. I just ran a game today where every single encounter was with a creature that doesn't have an "entry" in any monster book anywhere (including the DCC RPG core rulebook)...it's all creatures I made up for this adventure, and they all fit and make sense.

In games, players are constantly unsure of what they face. Is that weird cultist with no face more powerful than me, or not? The four-legged lizard with the gold horn and the hypnotic eyes...how powerful is it? The enormous devil-frog that's the size of a house...it's big, but how dangerous is it? (I love that one because EVERY group assumes it has a sticky-frog-tongue attack...which it doesn't...but it IS psionic...) You get the idea: no player has any idea of the nature of their opponents, beyond what is described, and many of the creatures are truly weird and unusual.

The DCC RPG also encourages judges to make minor changes to monsters in order to make them more interesting for players to encounter. Make your orcs blue instead of green, and watch what happens. "What are these blue humanoids? What powers do they have?" Well, they have the same stats as orcs but the players don't know that! For undead, give them perfectly preserved bodies and normal skin-and-bones. Why do they have to rot? A zombie or ghoul with pale white skin and a normal, if glassy-eyed, appearance is far more terrifying than rotting flesh, especially when they don't bleed when wounded and advance in a a lurching fashion.

I can go on and on (and I do so in DCC RPG ), but the point is that I don't want any one monster to get re-used that much. The DCC RPG core book will include rules for all the archetypal monsters, but I am on the fence about doing any monster books. Gamers love them but I don't want to end up in a rut where the creatures come from a predictable place. Every adventure needs to have specific foes that are thematically appropriate and maintain the sense of true fantasy and novelty.

So, that's a roundabout way of saying that I'm not sure how many monster books I'll publish. What do you guys think? Do people want a lot of monster books? Or, knowing that it's very simple to create new monsters, would you rather just create your own?

So, the situation where

... and everyone looks at each other and says "troll!"

shouldn't happen often, if at all, unless you the DM want to use the archetypical monsters.