Goodman Games

I love the concept of spell duels, but to be honest, for me the DCCRPG method is pretty confusing.

Has anyone broken down the process in a very simple, step-by-step outline or flow chart? I want to run spell duels the DCCRPG way before passing judgement on it to either toss it out as a rule or embrace it as worth keeping.

Any simple, straightforward representation that isn't too complicated would be great appreciated.

Lengthy, elaborate descriptions would kind of defeat the point.

Is there anybody out there that has a solid grasp of breaking it down? Or, has anybody used this subsystem several times and found it be fluid in actual play?

chirp. chirp.

Crickets?

sorry bud, we haven't had any spell duels yet in our game

Is there a particular part of the duel process you're finding it hard to grok, or is it the whole thing?

Colin

Thanks for asking, Colin.

It's been a while, but I think for me the confusion was likely on the sub-initiative system.

A few months ago, I had prepped the rules before our game and thought that I'd grokked them pretty well, only to hit a wall when it came up in the actual game. All of us cracked our books and it ground the game to a halt.

I think some of the other difficulty for me was the spell/counter-spell match ups. I think that maybe the spells need to either be explicitly paired and matched, or perhaps made more generic (like general-offense vs. general-defense, or same-spell vs. same-spell.)

I'm going to hunker down and attempt to recreate it in a visual flowchart as is for my own purposes, and then see if that de-mystifies things a bit for me.

I also got some suggestions over on the DCCRPG Google+ page including the idea of making it just a contest of wills. What a great, supportive group of gamers -- I highly recommend joining Google+ DCCRPG if you haven't already.

If it ain't broke, I will be happy not to mess with it. But I have some ideas of things that could be introduced to expand on the concept, so I'm probably going to tinker with it a bit.

The damning part of it is that I want both complexity and streamlining. Unless you can come up with an elegant model, this tends to go in opposite directions.

I really don't use Google+ ... how do I get dialed in to the DCCRPG group?

I kind of stumbled into it and am still figuring it out. I think it is kind of like facebook, but through a Google account. Here is a sign in screen:

https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogi ... r&hl=en-US

And here is the link to the DCCRPG community:

https://plus.google.com/communities/105 ... 2243499289

First blush. No where near complete.

I decided to map out what it is "as is" before attempting to modify it.

My original request was for someone to provide a graphic or flow chart to help make some sense Spell Duel rules. Right now I'm sort of over explaining it to myself, but hopefully there will be something useful to others at the end of the process.

Check it: http://guildofthedungeoncrawlers.blogsp ... ccrpg.html