Caves of the Black Scepter - first session with DCC

[abk108]

I started playing this little adventure (10 pages worth of .doc) I wrote for DCC, starting at level 0. Here's a brief report - and my thoughts.

Synopsis - PCs are villagers from West Farbury, a small hamlet that has suffered several goblin raids in the last couple of months. People got kidnapped, and goods stolen. The sceriff, following the procedure, asked help to the near town of Eagledell twice already, but they "have no time for trivial problems, such as those of a small village of farmers and herders".
Therefore, after the last raid, in which they PC managed to kill 4 goblins and save a woman (but not her husband), the PCs decided they had enough. They went North, looking for caves or ruins that might serve as the goblins' hideout. At night, they noticed a glowing door frame on the rocky side of the hill where they were about to camp. They read a sinister rune message glowing on the stone. They found a secret switch and entered the dungeon...

----

We had 4 players, with three 0-level PCs each. That's 12 total.

1) I started giving small individual XP awards for small things such as getting past a locked door (doesn't matter how), surviving/detecting a trap, noticing important things. These bonuses are almost always between 1 and 5, hardly ever reaching 6 or higher. This idea received very positive feedback, because the player felt the PCs growing in front of them, and noticed how it wasn't all about just killing things to get XP.
By the end of the session, the PC with most XP had like 40 points, of which only about 25 came from monsters.

2) Nobody burned any Luck so far. I'll probably remind them next time. Besides, they were all neophytes or players that hadn't played any D&D for a long time, so I had them get the hang of the most basic rules first.

3) We already got some TPKs. A guy's Elf Artisan had 3 Int, he hated him and they all made fun of the "idiot". Basically they conned him to open every door and stay upfront. At door 2, he got an arrow through his neck*. No surprise there, hm?
A dwarf, sent to scout ahead in a corridor. I gave him 3 chances to notice the ghoul hiding under the rubble and broken furniture in the room ( LUCK checks, because he wasn't specifically looking in the room, but in the corridor... so he'd have had to be lucky to randomly turn his head in that direction and see the thing). He got clawed, had only 1 hp.

*FUNNY FACT: they resented it afterwards, felt sorry for the idiot, felt they were all horrible people. The guy even asked me to resurrect somehow the idiot, in exchange for one of his other PCs! >>> The funnel works very well for having players growing attached to their pcs, even crappy ones.

4) I devised the Eye of Fate: something like a trap, that i think helps the funnel. It's a magic circle with runes that dare any PC to sustain the gaze of the Eye. That means passing a DC11 Will save. Those who pass, get +1 to a random Ability score. Those who fail, disappear in a whisp of smoke and sparks. (they are actually transported to the main dungeon rune and petrified. They count as dead, of course, but it'll be funny when the players find their former PCs as statues! Restoring these people might serve as a hook for future adventures)
This had the players intrigued. A guy lost his favourite character, a trapper, and 3 other people tried the test successfully. They have no clue what's the DC, so these 3/4 odds they have in mind might lure them into trying again

5) We played with my houserule for ability checks. Rolling a d20 UNDER (or equal to) your ability score is a success. Some checks might have a bonus difficulty, such as +2, +5, which is added to the dice roll. This seemed a little awkward at first, especially for those used to play a little 3E, but then they appreciated the little differences this created between their various pcs: they sent up front the guy with 11 Int and 12 luck (good at noticing things, and maybe lucky enough to see a trap before it springs), rather than the guy with 10 Int and 9 Luck, even though they had the same modifiers. Similarly they preferred putting the guy with 15 STR in front, ready to bash doors/push things around instead of the guy with 13, even though their modifier was +1.
Good feedback on this.

6) I forgot the morale rule. Despite having it written down on a side note. Or maybe, I somewhat played it more freely. The raid was about 4 goblins in the house, 4 in the store. The PCs had basically to make a choice: we go in the store? we search the house? or we split and look both? They went for the house, to save the people that lived there. The four goblins in the house found 6 people rushing in while other 6 were waiting outside. They didn't roll Morale, they had nothing else to do but fight to death. And they did. On the other hand, the other 4 goblins in the store ran away with goods and a kidnapped.
I think i'll use the Morale rule as RAW only for bigger (7+) fights.

Thanks for anyone who has any comment and likes to share his thoughts

[finarvyn]

A guy's Elf Artisan had 3 Int, he hated him and they all made fun of the "idiot". Basically they conned him to open every door and stay upfront. At door 2, he got an arrow through his neck*. No surprise there, hm?
A dwarf, sent to scout ahead in a corridor. I gave him 3 chances to notice the ghoul hiding under the rubble and broken furniture in the room ( LUCK checks, because he wasn't specifically looking in the room, but in the corridor... so he'd have had to be lucky to randomly turn his head in that direction and see the thing). He got clawed, had only 1 hp.

*FUNNY FACT: they resented it afterwards, felt sorry for the idiot, felt they were all horrible people. The guy even asked me to resurrect somehow the idiot, in exchange for one of his other PCs! >>> The funnel works very well for having players growing attached to their pcs, even crappy ones.

This is a great story, and thanks for sharing. It goes to prove a couple of points:
(1) The character funnel works. And it often creates some memorable and fun characters that players might not ever think of playing otherwise.
(2) Playtesting is the only way to discover stories like this. They just don't come up in academic discussions becasue no one really expects to enjoy playing "the idiot." Go play the game!

[abk108]

A guy's Elf Artisan had 3 Int, he hated him and they all made fun of the "idiot". Basically they conned him to open every door and stay upfront. At door 2, he got an arrow through his neck*. No surprise there, hm?
A dwarf, sent to scout ahead in a corridor. I gave him 3 chances to notice the ghoul hiding under the rubble and broken furniture in the room ( LUCK checks, because he wasn't specifically looking in the room, but in the corridor... so he'd have had to be lucky to randomly turn his head in that direction and see the thing). He got clawed, had only 1 hp.

*FUNNY FACT: they resented it afterwards, felt sorry for the idiot, felt they were all horrible people. The guy even asked me to resurrect somehow the idiot, in exchange for one of his other PCs! >>> The funnel works very well for having players growing attached to their pcs, even crappy ones.

This is a great story, and thanks for sharing. It goes to prove a couple of points:
(1) The character funnel works. And it often creates some memorable and fun characters that players might not ever think of playing otherwise.
(2) Playtesting is the only way to discover stories like this. They just don't come up in academic discussions becasue no one really expects to enjoy playing "the idiot." Go play the game!

Thanks

Another thing that i noticed, but maybe it is just my game... with infravision, elves and dwarves are sent ahead and risk so much more than other PCs. We had 3 demi humans (2 dwarves, 1 elf) but now we're down to just a dwarf. This way i fear so few demihumans will actually get to play the game after the funnel. I would like to see a slight increase in the chances of getting a demihuman on the random creation chart. Like 4 elven, 4 dwarven and 4 halfling occupations instead of just 3. This moves the odds of playing a demihuman to 40% rather than 30%.

[abk108]

I ran the second, and final, session of my little funnel adventure.

Just before entering a corridor three of the PCs risked getting killed by a 4-arrows trap. Only 1 got killed, having 1 HP, the other 2 dodged the attack.

The PCs slaughtered 8 goblins by using a half-barrel of some oily substance to set the corridor in flames. They didn't even need to roll dice, that just killed them all. The only surviving goblin killed a PC using his shortbow, and then got killed.

The party rescued some prisoners, and kept some of those who could fight with them. (this gave the opportunity for a new player to jump in and for the other players to reload PCs- up to 2 each)

FUN FACT- New player likes to play Wizs. He picked a nice 16 Int noble, an 11 Int Elf, and an old lady, with 13 Int (but also 4 STR, 7 AGI, 6 STA, 10 PER, 7 LUCK) as his PCs. Guess which one survived??

Party enters main dungeon hall. Finds a couple of secret doors with sarcophagi (these were just background elements of the dungeon). One PC falls down a bottomless pit-trap. In the room there are only 4 pillars with 1 gem on each (they promptly removed the gems), bones scattered everywhere, statues (actually, petrified people that were transported there from a magic trap - see previous post, The Eye of Fate) and a portal.
Eventually they tried the portal with one PC each. They were scared of what they could find on the other side. They were also scared the corpses in the sarcophagus were mummies that would attack them.

On the other side of the portal they found the Black Scepter in a room with dried blood and bones everywhere. They remembered the runes they read upon entering the dungeon "The Black scepter demands blood to let those pass/who will face the white robed king for the ametyst throne" so they went and soaked in blood the Scepter.
The fake Scepter. They just activated this deadly- no save trap. The invisible barrier that prevented them from taking the scepter started pulsating red, like a heart. Suddenly the barrier exploded, hitting them like a gush of fresh air. When they moved to take the scepter, relieved nothing bad had happened, they found out that their limbs weren't responding. Their blood started flowing out of their skin, like pierced by millions tiny glass shards. Their bones started to crack while their marrow started leaving them. Their heads rolled on the pavement, just to catch a glimpse of their body, now just a skeleton, crumbling to the ground, joining the bones that were already scattered there.


The other PCs waited outside the portal. When they understood something bad had happened, they sent one (old lady) to get the gems they had taken on the other side of the portal!
In the meantime, since one player had no PCs left, I had the one that previously fell into the bottomless pit-trap to actually climb his way back out.
She went in there, took the gems. She didn't touch anything else (the player actually roleplayed that crappy character as alternating the will to take some risks 'cos she thought she was wiser than the youngsters, to never going too far being old and weak - nicely done).
Upon going back through the portal, it drained her Personality (-2 to random ability : from 10 to : she came out looking even older and wrinlkier. They figured out that the gems needed to be activated in order to open a secret door. They put them back on the pillars and trying every combination they opened the secret door (the rune message they got at the beginning was actually the key for this - read above - as it gave the order in which the gems had to be pressed : BLACK (onix) BLOOD (ruby) WHITE (pearl) Amethyst (..amethyst) )

There they faced the Necromancer who was trying to unlock the powers of the REAL black scepter, defeated him and retrieved the scepter and some other stuff.

FUN FACT: my only girl player got nuts with the power of the artifact. She put all her will into restoring some of the petrified people back to normality (and it worked) then she tried giving life back to the man they wanted to rescue; the man lied disembowelled on a sacrifial table. He got back to life, only to discover his condition, see his own entrails, and die again in agony and sputtering blood. She then properly worded the "wish" and resurrected the man. She wanted to keep trying helping people with black magic but the others stopped her. One of the guys ran back throught the portal and carefully requested that his other character (killed by the fake scepter) could live again. He did. But he had an evil glint in his eyes. The PC ran away back through the portal, suffering a -2 to a random ability. The evil "ex-PC" went through but crumbled back into bones.
They decided not to further meddle with the Scepter

In the treasure they found a diary explaining the background of the adventure, some treasure, a black stone (acutally a basilisk egg - nice as a further adventure hook).

That's all, folks.