Goodman Games

My four players have been getting wiped out by Doom of the Savage Kings. It's been fun, but I'm starting to wonder if I need to get them to play a couple of players each. Thoughts?

What's the style of play?

Do they expect to just do toe-to-toe with everything and trounce it? Because DCC is sometimes otherwise.

But hard to suggest/comment without knowing what's going on...

In the introduction for Doom, Stroh says, "This adventure is designed for 6 to 12 1st-level characters." Four players with 2 PCs per player will fall right in the middle of the recommended range.

DCC, much like OD&D, is all about the followers. Four 1st level characters is pretty light, so I'd let them have at least 2, but probably 3-4 0-level followers for each 1st level. If you were really trying to run your players through a DCC module with 4 level 1s, and your players don't absolutely hate you, I'm shocked.

I let my 5 players play 4 0-levels each through PutS, and two players had two chars survive, the other three only had one each. So the attrition rate can be pretty high. The step up in power (and, probably what's most relevant, AC) from 0 to 1 isn't so great that you'll be able to survive an adventure - ANY adventure - on such a small fraction of the recommended size.

Don't play it like a 3rd or 4th edition game, heh.

The funnel is always in effect, thats the games style, make sure your players have read the game book, you really need that to get the concet of the game down. This is not D&D and if played that way it fails to capture what this game is. First players have to think and plan, the game was not designed to coddle the players, their is a huge amount of cause and effect. Read the first adventure in the game book, this is not your usual adventure. Something you do in one part of the level effects something else.

I have told my players over and over to see 5th level would be a miracle and to see tenth level would be a once in a life time event. This is not the Pathfinder/3.5 exp mill, this is Sparta.

My 2C

Ken