how do you handle casting in melee?

[catseye yellow]

how do you handle casting in melee? attacks of opportunity? some sort of defensive casting? nothing at all as per rules as written?

laying on hands too? to grope fellow wounded fellow PC freely or not?

[AQuebman]

I only use the Withdrawal rules that are in the combat section. Casting has its own downsides that heavily play themselves up in DCC and if they try to run away they take a free attack. If they dont run away they get stabbed at every turn while in melee and any attempts at concentration will be almost impossible.

I personally feel like Withdrawal rules are all you really need, anything else just makes the game overly convoluted for no reason.

[Stretch]

I think it would depend on the spell being cast and the initiative order. A spell like flaming hands that is instantaneous with a cast time of one action could be performed in melee if the caster has the initiative or isn't struck by the enemy in front of him before he can get the spell off. I would downgrade the action dice one level, d20 to d18 or d16 if ya like, to represent that he his trying to dodge and cast at the same time. Casting in melee is dangerous but sometimes you are surprised and have to defend yourself how ever you can till you can get some breathing room.

[oncelor]

We've been playing that characters can cast spells of any sort while engaged in melee with no penalty or other chance of failure -- this seems to be what the rules indicate. I've been thinking of allowing creatures to a get a free-whack at creatures casting spells in melee (with any damage counting as a penalty to their spell roll), and perhaps allowing casters to take a -2d penalty to cast a spell without provoking a whack, but we haven't tried this yet. We do play with miniatures on a grid, so melee positions are more well-defined in our game than in the rules. It doesn't come up too often, because casters generally try to stay out of melee, but occasionally the cleric gets into melee and then starts laying-on-hands every round to heal all the damage that the monsters did to her in the previous round; I've found that this "wall of healing" seems kind of cheesy.

[AQuebman]

Eventually disapproval will come down and bite the cleric. Possibly even removing them from the fight depending on what the dm thinks their god will require.

I personally think its a dm call. Dcc is wide open to allow for this sort of open interpretation so for the OP if your running a game id say call it how you view it in your own mind.