finarvyn wrote:I have the opposite story. I know of a mid-level character who was down to one hp, encountered a demon, charged it and died, then blamed me for killing his character.
I had the same problem with a friend of my cousin who decided to fly his ship straight at a star destroyer after I warned him that it was a very bad idea. He had delusions of grandeur I guess.
"When creating your character,choose an ethical system that can justify nearly any fit of temper, greed, cowardice, or vindictiveness, for example, Chaotic Violent..."
I'd say he went down in flames, but I'm not sure we'd get any cool flames in the vacuum of space.
No nifty explosion sound, either.
Marv / Finarvyn DCC Minister of Propaganda; Deputized 6/8/11 (over 11 years of SPAM bustin'!)
DCC RPG playtester 2011, DCC Lankhmar trivia contest winner 2015; OD&D player since 1975
"The worthy GM never purposely kills players' PCs, He presents opportunities for the rash and unthinking players to do that all on their own."
-- Gary Gygax
"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
-- Dave Arneson
"Misinterpreting the rules is a shared memory for many of us"
-- Joseph Goodman
finarvyn wrote:I have the opposite story. I know of a mid-level character who was down to one hp, encountered a demon, charged it and died, then blamed me for killing his character.
I had the same problem with a friend of my cousin who decided to fly his ship straight at a star destroyer after I warned him that it was a very bad idea. He had delusions of grandeur I guess.
He just does not know how to roll dies. In SW 2e... we did that. Took our light transport and went after a Victory Class star destroyer... rolled a 12 on our damage and the Victory Class SD rolled a 2 for defense... 6x damage = all blow up.
All in all, we were pretty insufferable to the GM the rest of the night with out gloating.
finarvyn wrote:I have the opposite story. I know of a mid-level character who was down to one hp, encountered a demon, charged it and died, then blamed me for killing his character.
I had the same problem with a friend of my cousin who decided to fly his ship straight at a star destroyer after I warned him that it was a very bad idea. He had delusions of grandeur I guess.
He just does not know how to roll dies. In SW 2e... we did that. Took our light transport and went after a Victory Class star destroyer... rolled a 12 on our damage and the Victory Class SD rolled a 2 for defense... 6x damage = all blow up.
All in all, we were pretty insufferable to the GM the rest of the night with out gloating.
As a DM I don't mind lucky rolls or beating the odds. What I hate is when the odds beat the players crazy suicidal decisions and they cry about it. I mean even Han solo ran from star destroyers and he had a piloting skill of like 12D6.
Last edited by DCCfan on Tue Jan 18, 2011 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
"When creating your character,choose an ethical system that can justify nearly any fit of temper, greed, cowardice, or vindictiveness, for example, Chaotic Violent..."
Fumbles that can kill you? Can you elaborate because that is rather scary, perhaps higher level characters have a way to mitigate it somewhat? Because even if the chance to die from a fumble is 1in20, that is relatively good odds that a character will die from a fumble based on the number of attack/casting rolls that are made over the lifetime of a character.
It might be fun and amusing when a low level character gets taken out by a fumble, but not as much fun when you have a character you have been playing for months does. Perhaps characters have fumble dice that improve as they level up much like their crit dice?
Death by fumble, Tacticon (or maybe NTRPG? The cons start to merge ... ) 2010:
PCs were engaged in combat at the base of a ruined tower. One of the PCs had managed to scale the tower and decided to start rolling boulders over the edge into combat.
PC rolled a 1 on the attack, missing the target. I called for another attack roll vs. the nearest PC.
Hit! The damage roll was sufficient to off the PC.
I'm sure there was a valuable lesson in there somewhere about missile weapons and melee combat, but it probably was lost in the heat of battle. >:)
Harley Stroh wrote:For the record, nothing brings a judge more joy than asking a player to roll damage against another PC.
//H
"When creating your character,choose an ethical system that can justify nearly any fit of temper, greed, cowardice, or vindictiveness, for example, Chaotic Violent..."
Harley Stroh wrote:For the record, nothing brings a judge more joy than asking a player to roll damage against another PC.
Fundamentally, I agree with you. The only thing is that the players need to have the right mindset in order to pull this off.
I once ran a game where a character had a bow that would never miss. That is, it always hit something and the character used to fire at a foe in the middle of melee hoping for a good roll. On a bad roll she hit a party member.
Loads of fun for a while. I think something bad happened to that player shortly thereafter, however. Characters killing characters is rather ... messy.
Marv / Finarvyn DCC Minister of Propaganda; Deputized 6/8/11 (over 11 years of SPAM bustin'!)
DCC RPG playtester 2011, DCC Lankhmar trivia contest winner 2015; OD&D player since 1975
"The worthy GM never purposely kills players' PCs, He presents opportunities for the rash and unthinking players to do that all on their own."
-- Gary Gygax
"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
-- Dave Arneson
"Misinterpreting the rules is a shared memory for many of us"
-- Joseph Goodman
Harley Stroh wrote:For the record, nothing brings a judge more joy than asking a player to roll damage against another PC.
Fundamentally, I agree with you. The only thing is that the players need to have the right mindset in order to pull this off.
I once ran a game where a character had a bow that would never miss. That is, it always hit something and the character used to fire at a foe in the middle of melee hoping for a good roll. On a bad roll she hit a party member.
Loads of fun for a while. I think something bad happened to that player shortly thereafter, however. Characters killing characters is rather ... messy.
Again...
"When creating your character,choose an ethical system that can justify nearly any fit of temper, greed, cowardice, or vindictiveness, for example, Chaotic Violent..."
finarvyn wrote:Loads of fun for a while. I think something bad happened to that player shortly thereafter, however. Characters killing characters is rather ... messy.
Something bad happened to the player? Yikes. Remind me not to piss off your group.
But yes, you are absolutely right. The shock of one PC killing another is best when accidental, but resulting from player choice. How many of our PCs have weathered the friendly fire of a poorly placed fireball?
I sit corrected. Something happened to the character. The player got a lot of bad looks, but she was my wife and so I couldn't let them kill her for real.
And she was having so much fun with the magic bow. They couldn't stay mad at her for too long.
Marv / Finarvyn DCC Minister of Propaganda; Deputized 6/8/11 (over 11 years of SPAM bustin'!)
DCC RPG playtester 2011, DCC Lankhmar trivia contest winner 2015; OD&D player since 1975
"The worthy GM never purposely kills players' PCs, He presents opportunities for the rash and unthinking players to do that all on their own."
-- Gary Gygax
"Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"
-- Dave Arneson
"Misinterpreting the rules is a shared memory for many of us"
-- Joseph Goodman
I had a great game this past weekend running one of Harley's wicked modules. It has this scene where the PCs get entranced by strange carvings, which subsequently induce them to go mad and try to sacrifice fellow party members to the Great Leviathan which they later encounter. Worked out great...one PC failed the save...nothing happened immediately...but a half hour later when she was in combat, she felt compelled to pick up a fellow PC and hurl them in sacrifice to the Great Leviathan. What's better than combat rolls against a fellow PC? Opposed Strength check PC vs. PC -- and loser goes into the belly of the Great Leviathan!
muherd wrote:I haven't seen how initiative is handled. Has anything been posted?
Well, in the rules as written, you roll 1d20 and add your Init modifier, which is usually equal to your Agility modifier. I've gone back and forth on how to integrate two-handed weapons and/or heavy armor (should they operate on a second band of initiative?), and how to deal with players controlling more than one PC (it gets tedious with 20+ low-level PCs so I have them roll once per player at low levels). I'm not sure I want to mess too much with initiative. It's a fairly straightforward mechanic which is easily modified by a DM with a strong preference for a different system, and it doesn't directly tie with any Appendix N / sword & sorcery concepts (at least not that I really see) so I will probably leave it very "vanilla" and assume some DMs will just change it to their preferred method.
Keeping initiative "vanilla" in the core book makes a lot of sense, given the "keep it simple" mantra and the number of PCs (at 0 level anyway). I can see our group utilizing the Zocchi dice, though, by lowering "die type" for initiative based on armor/weapon type. Bring on the playtest
geordie racer wrote:In the DCC rpg, will higher Armour Class equate to D&D style 'harder to hit' or is it more like greater damage reduction/absorption ?
I understand that each class will have its own crit chart to roll on, but will the crit descriptions on each chart vary based on weapon type, i.e. piercing/slashing/blunt?
My guess would be no, just for space. Because then Magic Users would have to have one for each type of spell damage. Also if the crits are worded right, they can be easily narrated to fit the weapon/spell that does the damage. The mechanical effects stay the same... e.g. description = head destroyed and mechanical effect = you die. DM can use Edged = decapitation; blunt = skull crushed in; piercing = weapon through the eye socket into brain; fire = head immolated and brain cooked; ice = head frozen in a block of ice etc etc.
