Goodman Games

If a player gets a wizard's apprentice when rolling up his 0 level PCs, does he get spells in his black grimoire?

If I'm understanding the spell acquisition rules correctly: "Yes, but they're useless until he has an epiphany (i.e. reaches level 1)"

Correct. A level-0 character (even an apprentice) cannot cast spells. The 'apprentice' label is strictly background flavor until he reaches 1st level, so any advantages would be on hold until then.

But what if you don't roll wizard's apprentice and want to be a wizard? Or worse you do roll wizard's apprentice but go with your strength attribute and decide to become a fighter?

Has anyone then come up with a way to simulate class related training for 0 level pcs? Say I roll a gravedigger who happens to have a decent intelligence and I survive the funnel to lvl 1. Then I decide I wanna be a wizard. Do I just create the background then that he was actually an apprentice wizard and just dug graves to pay the bills? Or do I create a story like a sinister entity rose from the graves one night and offered to make a pact with me?

The same problem exists for all types really. A farmer to a fighter, and baker to a thief, a trapper to a cleric. Where did they learn their skills?

It stretches verisimilitude almost as much as the racial problem. I like the character funnel idea; but this is still a hang up for me.

There is a thread somewhere about changing the profession table to a set of tables keyed off ability score so you roll on the table of your best score. This would help avoid stupid wizard apprentices and weakling blacksmiths.

Yep found it :

viewtopic.php?f=60&t=12524&hilit=levelling

Answers my questions and more. The PC funnel is really to be viewed as a part of pc creation. You haven't finished the creation process until you've been through the funnel.

No, that's a great thread. But the idea I was referring to started here:
viewtopic.php?p=44709#p44709

For the gravedigger with 13 INT becoming a wizard, i'd say that he could find a grimoire in a tomb, then decide to pry in its secrets...

I always give 1d4+(N) months of time for the characters to train between adventures, so they can go from their level "N" to level "N+1". It makes sense especially if coupled with some retroactive storywriting, for example: the baker that became a thief always had a knack for playing hide&seek, so that when he enrolled in the guild, it took him only 3 months to learn the rudiments of lockpicking, pickpocketing and climbing sheer surfaces...

I expect a 5th level character to spend almost a year researching spells and training hard to be "ready" (read: to level up) for his next adventure!
This way i avoid the "why is everything happening around me/to me!?", also known as "Murders she wrote" syndrome...

I sympathize this seems to be a hold over where perhaps too much Appendix N has influenced the game. In the Fritz Leiber "Swords" stories the protagonist The Gray Mouser is introduced as a sorcerers apprentice but then spends his latter days as a swordsman rogue.

If memory serves, he goers from rather average (but still capable of casting one spell?- Build THAT in the Game if you can Mr G!) Apprentice mage, to a master swordsman/thief in a single bound. Although there is an unspecified interregnum between his starting (o level) adventure and his debut as the best Thief in Lankhamar...

Where possible I really LIKE the idea of granting a 1d(X) month space between gaining levels to allow for the training of the needed skills. I wish now I had built that into my pilot adventure.

Ah well that's what house rules are for!

I think that the entire point of backgrounds is to help differenciate between two otherwise "identical" characters. Folks complain about the fact that all fighters (for example) start out pretty much the same, but backgrounds give a little spice to an otherwise bland stew.

So one thief used to be a farmer while another used to be a wizard's apprentice ... in the mechanics of the rules both are still the same thing but in the mechanics of play they might not be. Perhaps a party is lost in the woods somewhere and the ex-farmer might be able to identify edible plants. That's certainly not in the rulebook, but would fit in well with the story. The ex-apprentice might not get any actual spells but when the party is trying to loot a wizard's library, guess which character would be able to find the real spellbook in a shelf of decoys?

My point is that rather than looking for a quantified bonus for various situations, clever players should be looking for hidden gains that can be made in play. That's called "role playing."

And that, in a nut shell, differentiates an old school gamer from a more modern, power gamer!

A good DM will add flavor and allow players to do things on the fly. A good player will not comb the rule book for every situation, but will present to the DM a good reason why his Warrior with a locksmith background should have a shot to pick the lock using the dead thief's tools.

+d20

As long as DCC gives us a game where DM's are allowed to be DM's without a mass of "Official rules" that crimp their own creativity. But instead positively BEG for them to make up (consistent and fair) house rules Goodman games will have achieved something that decades of "Rules experts" have taken away from the old bright and glorious concept that was D&D.

So far the signs are good from what I can see here.

One of my favorite examples of this came in a campaign where I gave my spellcaster a simple spell list. She wanted to see the rulebook to look up what a couple of the spells did. I wouldn't let her.

"What do you think it does?" I asked her.

That's the way we played it. No rulebook, no pre-determined "it causes X number of creatures of level Y to fall asleep" type information. We just played it and winged it.

It was particularly nice since she didn't know "the rules" and had to improvise on the fly, and her ideas on how to use spells were really great. For example, when the party needed to cross a section of hallway with hot lava dripping in, she cast a Shield above the group and they walked through with lava bouncing off of the shield.

You can't write this stuff into a rulebook!

+d30
like that post

But you can play that way only with genuine, good players.

I'm afraid we need some kind of "affects X creatures for Y rounds" because we need some common ground... what if a player asks for something that's beyond the idea of that spell ("i cast magic shield under my feet to walk on hot lava" , therefore crossing the lava river they weren't meant to cross... you don't want to let the wiz cross the river, but you don't want to kill him either!)?
I just don't want to start bargaining with my players to decide how the spell should work , because it might lead to perceived favoritism and other nasty stuff...

If you have good players , well it's just so much better to play like you posted!

This just proves that a good DM trumps the necessity of rules in general. I once ran a game with no character sheets and no system. The players wrote character backgrounds to describe what set them apart from other people and I used that to create a mental image of the characters for my use as DM. I created a verbal spell system with a fake language and gave them their spells written out. Something like Dra-To-Fa-Len-Ba would cast a small ball of flame at an enemy and To-Dlee-Fra-Ben would close an open wound. When they wanted to cast a spell, they were allowed to mix and match whatever spell words they wanted (often to disastrous and/or hilarious effect).

Initially in the game there was a lot of "can I do this?" and I would respond based on the task and the personality of their character history. "You know you can do it." "You aren't sure it would be safe to do that." "Why are you asking? You already did it." It was a great game. I had a single die that I might roll for 50/50 stuff. Otherwise I just described the result of their actions and NPC actions as I felt the result should be.

There was one player who had to drop out of the game early on because he couldn't accept the fact that he didn't know what his character can do. Or what his limits were. And no amount of "ask and I'll tell" would help.

But you can't package that as a game and sell it.

The issue there would likely be that he is supposedly making and playing a character but ultimately it is the DM's internal, subjective vision of the character that mattered; there was no objective standard by which he could anchor his own vision nor any manner in which he could perceive the DM's vision other than piecemeal.

This is a reversal from the typical RPG which puts players in charge of characters. It is like playing Cops & Robbers as a kid. "Bang, I shot you!" "No you didn't." And since one of them is the DM, he gets to always be right.

Agreed completely. Maybe playing with no dice rolling, no sheets can be ok for a casual 2 hour game, if you and your players just want to rp a bit. But for a longer game, the DM's whims are too much of an issue, because even the best DM with the best intentions will have a bad day sooner or later, and that could be easily reflected in his subconscious deciding "The trap cuts your head, stupid halfling... you're dead." rather than "The trap springs hurting you badly, poor halfling. You need healing."

The game lasted 6 months of 4 hour weekly games. And internally there was a character sheet. I was actually GMing Fantasy HERO (with modified combat/checks of course). They just didn't know it. It was very consistent. If I told someone they could jump a 5 foot gap one day, they could do it any day.

The guy who dropped out had trust issues that went far beyond the game. And I think that was his real problem. The other players were a mix of diehard RPGers and casual RPGers and they had a blast. (The fact that they could game the spell system helped them maintain interest, too. My rule there was they to write out the spell if they were trying something new. Then I would take a few minutes to translate the spell and see if it did something and what that something was. By the end they had invented a couple useful spells but still didn't understand how it worked. They had problem like Harold Shea with scale and number and it wasn't until I read the Shea books that I got a good laugh out it.)

Still, everyone here must know a DM whom they trust implicitly to be fair who could pull this off. I'm not that good. There's just no market for it.

Actually, Amber Diceless did this pretty well if you have the right types of players and GM, so it's not impossible to run a game like this. It does force everyone to shift the way they think, however.

And if the game is actually being played with a hidden system, as jmucchiello suggests he did, it still only works if the players have faith in the GM. I ran a game once where players didn't know their own stats or hit points. I didn't like it because I had to track everything, but players had a general sense of who was strongest, fastest, most charismatic, and so on, plus they had some general guidelines as to how injured they were at any particular moment. I won't say it was the best way to play, but it was a fun experiment.

Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, the first thing the players did when the game started was spar with one another to figure who was better at what. I was most amused. I ran that game in college over 15 years ago so some of the details are fuzzy. But after the short sparring round (and hey, it was very comic book for the "heroes" to meet and fight one another before becoming fast friends, right?) they settled in to just worrying about characterization and it was a blast.

But you can't count on that! You have to assume that everyone at the table is there to have fun, and it would be in everyone's best interest to play fairly, reasonable and trust each other. You can say the same about players, a player can be having a bad day and take it out on the group and DM by running amok and ruining the adventure, and therefore the night for everyone. The best game in the world, whether it's no-rules, rules-lite or some mega-simulation, can be ruined by any gamer having a bad day.

Anyway, the point of jmucchiello's post has nothing to do with whether rules-lite/less would work for everyone, it should go without saying. He's just saying that a good DM (which is the assumption) can adjudicate anything as needed, when needed. And the DCC rules definitely makes this assumption.

I've said many times: A good DM (with prep) can run any system and the result will be an enjoyable game. A fool DM will create a bad experience no matter how foolproof the system/adventure.