Campaign thoughts?

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finarvyn
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Campaign thoughts?

Post by finarvyn »

Most of my DCC games to date have been a series of one-shot adventures, much like the old Conan or Fafhrd/Mouser stories were written as one-shots where they could happen pretty much in any order. A bunch of adventures like this with the same characters would represent a "campaign."

My wife wants a certain degree of structure where each adventure links more to the next, and I'm not sure there are many rules for this stuff so I thought I'd start a thread to see how others treat this sort of thing.

For example, in a series of one-shots I don't worry so much about days to recover from spellburn. I can just hand-wave and say, "so two weeks have passed and you are rested up for the next adventure," but that's really sort of cheating in a true campaign because the effects of one adventure really don't affect the next one that much.

Or my wife's character wants to brew potions but she has a specific type in mind and the tables are random so she might spend forever before she happens to roll the right type on the chart. Much time and expanse wasted, and not really what she is trying to do with her character.

That sort of thing. Things where time becomes more of a factor. I deal with this a lot in my D&D campaigns, but somehow I feel like a DCC campaign might have a different vibe to it.

Are these types of issues common for others, and how do you handle them?
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Re: Campaign thoughts?

Post by GnomeBoy »

From my perspective, I would never hand-wave spellburn or luck recovery, etc. They are meant to be a gamble, and even if you have episodic adventures, I'd say there were cases of spellburn/luck burn/etc. between "televised" adventures, so if you burnt 12 Luck last time Ms. Thief, you haven't necessarily recovered all or even any of it before we begin this next adventure. It's a little meta, but it keeps the gamble in place, over there being no risk in burning to the ground at the end of an adventure. I'd arbitrarily roll a die before the next session started... "you've had a d12 -3 days to recover from last time" but it'd be a different die and modifier each time (maybe the modifier should be Luck Mod!), based on campaign considerations (the party is hurrying to find a cure for someone, or stop an imminent event? Use a smaller die; plenty of wealth from that last haul and nowhere in particular to go next? a larger die is fine; etc.).

As for player requests, like "I want to create this specific potion between adventures" I'd set up a roll for "have they had enough time between adventures to do this?" and make each successive attempt for the same thing easier after each adventure, that is, if they fail that roll after the current adventure, it gets easier after the next adventure. Failed again? Easier still next time. As always, the Dice Chain is your friend. Then I'd set a couple of dice to multiply together to be the material cost, so that's unpredictable ("you went through a LOT of newts' eyes to get there, didn't you?"), and beyond a relevant spellcheck, they've done it. Then you've covered time, money, and skill without fiddling with too much detail that's not adventuring, but still made it in keeping with DCC's "who knows what'll happen" milieu.
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finarvyn
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Re: Campaign thoughts?

Post by finarvyn »

As always, GnobeBoy, you are wise.

(1) I like the suggestions and I may come up with some sort of wacky "roll a die to see which dice type is used" for the days in between adventures.

(2) I'll have to tinker with charts for this. If I recall correctly, there are costs based on the type of potion to be brewed so I will probably build it based on that scale, then throw in some randomness to keep it whimsical.
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
dustle
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Re: Campaign thoughts?

Post by dustle »

finarvyn wrote: Sat Sep 04, 2021 4:52 am As always, GnobeBoy, you are wise.

(1) I like the suggestions and I may come up with some sort of wacky "roll a die to see which dice type is used" for the days in between adventures.

(2) I'll have to tinker with charts for this. If I recall correctly, there are costs based on the type of potion to be brewed so I will probably build it based on that scale, then throw in some randomness to keep it whimsical.
If you do come up with charts, please share them. Would love to see what you come up with.
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Re: Campaign thoughts?

Post by Bobjester »

A list of "Downtime Activities" could be useful right now, but I am of the opinion that 5e's interpretation of Downtime Activities falls short of actual usefulness in setting up follow-up encounters, adventures and the basic continuation of the campaign. It showed some activities that characters could do, but most of them never had any lasting effects, except as between adventure filler.

That said, I asked my first time DCC players what goals they wanted to achieve and where I should set my sights for our next session, which is a little over a month away, thanks to my new work schedule.

These are the answers in no particular order, and with little explanations needed (or lacking enough detail for me to do something with):
"training for next level",
"selling ill-gotten loot from the City of Brass",
"re-exploring the Well of Brass to recover treasure that we missed and give that Wheel of Chaos another spin",
"reading the Key of Sezrekan", and
"praying to the Gods for guidance".

At least I have time to get a preliminary adventure ready, even if its a series of linked encounters. At least it'll be something to link to the next official DCC module that I have on hand. I know right away that selling the Brass Loot will be an adventure in itself, and this will lead to one or two scenarios I've outlined a bit already with the help of online random generators*.

I'm new to DCC as well as my players, and we'll learn how Luck & Spellburn, etc work as we play.

My four players had all of their (4) zero level PCs survive "Beneath the Well of Brass". They were especially lucky with their rolls, timing, and thinking far enough ahead to mitigate dangers that are inimically deadly to 1hp characters. That said, there were times when 3 of my players attempted to sacrifice their weakest PCs only to have them survive, and then become those players' favorites.

Steeve!, Cecil & Charlie not only made it to 1st level, but were celebrated as true heroes for risking their very lives.
I call them the "Styg Holler Sixteen", since they are all from the totally-made-up-for-my-campaign village name of Styg Hollow.

So with that, I've stressed to the players that from here on out, they can only play 1 or 2 PCs at a time, depending on who can show up for any given session. This will be an example of the old "stable of characters" campaign that doesn't use all characters at the same time, and, depending on who can play in our next Saturday's session (over a month away), and who can show up the session after that, different characters will likely be used by each player.

They will acknowledge that while one set of PCs is with a group checking out the Hole in the Sky, the next session might see a couple different players, but one or two players who were there looking into that Sky Hole cannot continue that particular scenario because of missing players, and must take one of their other PCs out to investigate the Legend of the Silver Skull.

Lacking any set DCC campaign world maps or setting, I've created my own world, and will set out to explore this just slightly ahead of the players. I won't make the mistake of over-creating a world that will never see any exploration and only focus on the paths that the players choose, as they choose them.

*But in anticipation of this, I've had to resort to a random adventure title generator to come up with some ideas to link one DCC adventure to the next. That resulted in me using the majority of today in a brain-storming session of module blurb writing of the kind I haven't done in years. Incredibly imaginative and well worth my time.

Now, I have a series of nearly 20 adventures that need filling in to meet each blurb premise!

I've also previously used donjon to generate a world map (not using directly, but inspires my own world making), city/town/village names & descriptions, adventure locale names & descriptions, and NPC names & descriptions.
I get a lot of other names from https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/, another fantastic, if not always spot on, it helps spur my imagination.

After months of slowly collecting towns, villages, locales, NPCs, factions, and finally adventure titles, its all coming to make sense. Still, its going to be a long, creative road ahead, and I am still learning a lot about DCC and just how different it is from D&D. Or at least, I could make it identical as possible to a D&D campaign, but I've been there & done that, and my players are clamoring for a different kind of fantasy RPG experience, and I want to go as weirdly pulp fantasy as I can without losing them.

So any tips or tricks I can learn about DCC from this forum is totally welcome!
“The wounds received in battle bestow honor, they do not take it away...”
― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
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