Goodman Games

Hello,

I've just recently started running a DCC campaign (after playing/running Pathfinder almost exclusively for years). We started out with the "Hole in the Sky" funnel, which everyone enjoyed immensely. From there, the party has been traveling, spending time learning spells, acquiring patrons, etc before I throw them into "Well of the Worms".

I'm really having a hard time planning out encounters in between as they travel. I'm used to basing things on CR where I have a better feel for what is an appropriate challenge for the characters. Without CR, I am finding it more difficult planning on what to throw up against a group of level 1 characters. For instance, a small group of bandits attacking an out of the way inn was a much more deadly encounter then I planned for.

I know DCC isn't necessarily supposed to scale all encounters, but is there some rule of thumb people are using to put encounters together? The stuff written in modules for level 1 definitely has a good mix of difficulty of challenges, even if there isn't the EL/CR mechanic.

Thanks!

You can use HD somewhat in place of CR, at least until you get a better feel for the game.

The swingy-ness of DCC makes CR nonfunctional. You can throw a simple challenge at a party, but the dice decide it almost kills them, and vice versa...

Also, DCC is built on the same 3e basis as Pathfinder is/was, so it shouldn't be too far away from what you're used to doing!

Thank you for the response!

I think 'swingy-ness' is a good way of putting it. Nothing is for certain, which the spellcasters are definitely finding out. I am trying to not fall back into the Pathfinder/3.5 comfort zone for rules. Having young players who have never played anything besides Pathfinder, I am trying to avoid things like 'roll for perception' and get them to actually interact/pay attention to the room descriptions.

It has been fun watching the players running with characters they would never have built/played in other campaigns and enjoy the craziness of them.

Sounds like you're on the right track...

Forgive me a digression, based on your comment. When D&D 3e came along, I thought it was pretty good, but over the years complaints started to echo around the internet, complaints which I couldn't understand... One of them was about the skill system, with it's "roll and be told what happens" -- except that no one was spelling that out in their complaint, just saying that the skill system didn't work... I couldn't understand *why* it didn't work for them, because it seemed to work fine for me.

Then after 3e was done and dusted, finally someone somewhere online spelled it out -- that whole "roll and be told" thing mentioned above -- except I'd never stopped asking for people to tell me what they were doing, and then the roll (if needed) would tell me how much detail to go into beyond what their description gave me. I don't think there's anything in those older rules that says "Don't describe what you're doing under any circumstances" (let's be honest, it's a roleplaying game, you are meant to describe what you're doing!), but somehow large numbers of people had interpreted the skill system as being a "mere" die roll. And they'd missed a lot of fun...!

Getting my players to describe what they're doing before rolling a die for a skill is like herding cats.

I've even gone so far as to say that nothing comes of their rolls if they roll without describing what they want to do first. Some times a roll is not even needed, and I can tell them everything they want to know.

The tend towards reinforcing "player agency" has left some details unspoken and forgotten. Gone are rulebooks with "examples of play" that tell players how the game could be played, describing the exchange between players & GM and rolls that follow up those descriptions.

Simplifying, but I had a player with a Thief basically say, "I move silently and hide in shadows as I sneak across the room." The room was brightly lit and metallic with no cover. I said, "The room is brightly lit and metallic. How are you going to do that?" He said, "Let me just roll." He rolled. Success on the Thief Skills chart. But then I told him the DC was too high for it to be a success without a description to mitigate it. He described every action thereafter.