(This post is part 2 in a series about playing Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG with my family. Read Part 1 here.)
Playing through "The Old God's Return" was the longest RPG series that my family has played to date. As I mentioned above, this is partly due to the two-hour cap on session duration, which I think worked well for us. There were certainly some points where I was willing to go a bit further, but given the range of age and experience, I will call this a successful move. It helped that it was one continuous module, with a coherent beginning, middle, and end. This took a lot of pressure off of me compared to my experience with other games like ICRPG, Fate, and PDQ, where I had to do the additional prep work of making a story.
One concrete lesson I learned is neither original nor particularly insightful, but I will record it here. I really should have copied essential material from the module into my little notebook, such as the tontuu's stat blocks. This advice is given by basically every RPG pundit on YouTube, but the truth is that I haven't run someone else's module in a long time. The sometimes month-long gap between sessions would have also meant that my notes would have been a good refresher of the essentials, rather than having to re-read the module as prep each time.
DCC RPG manifests the OSR aesthetic. The world is dangerous, and the heroes are pressed up against it. I understand the appeal of such systems, and I could see myself really enjoying a continuous campaign with players who understand that they should not get too attached to their characters. Regardless, conversations with my wife between sessions made me realize that there is a gap in the design. When facing a dangerous world, good luck is needed, but one would hope that wit counts for something. However, there were almost no points in the game where cleverness was rewarded: more often, it was just a matter of rolling dice.
I would like to explore that in a bit more detail, drawing upon our experience with "The Old God's Return." It was a good idea for Seth to scout the area around the top of the floating glacier, but he failed the roll, so it was fruitless. The players know that he failed the roll, and that there was nothing they could do except move forward and hope, which led to Seth's first fall. DCC RPG has no concept of failing forward as one finds in games like Dungeon World. Fail-forward strikes me as a much better way to reward players for cleverness and creativity, not to mention narrative-centered moves such as roleplaying a situation to the point of personal danger. Later, when facing the wall of rubble, Seth again decided to scout, but this time he made the rolls, and it led to that cinematic ambush. When the dice are with you, it works, but when they are not, it can feel like punishment.
One could say "That's just the OSR aesthetic" and be only partially right because of one particular and excellent rule: the fighter's Mighty Deed of Arms. Whereas the other classes have a laundry list of abilities, the fighter has essentially just this one, but it is a doozy. On any attack roll, the fighter can try to accomplish some mighty deed, such as tripping the opponent, knocking away a barbarian's axe, or grabbing the magic chalice out of the sorcerer's hands. It's a strangely narrative moment in an otherwise statistical game. This mechanism accomplishes the stated design goal of differentiating the fighter from the other classes, which I consider a great success over the earlier D&D distinction, which was basically that fighters have bigger numbers.
Mighty Deeds of Arms introduces a contrast that highlights the lack of robustness in the rest of the system. The fighter is the only one who can use the environment to his advantage in combat, and while it's fun to be the thief who finds the trap, that happens rarely, and there's a lot of time in combat. Put another way, it may be more consistent for the fighters to just have bigger numbers. DCC RPG has no concept of 5e-style advantage or ICRPG-style hero coins: there is no mechanical way to encourage players to do something contextually interesting, so it boils down to who rolls well. By way of comparison, it's worth looking at Phoenix Point: Dawn Command, which had the best environmental interaction system I have ever seen. For each scene, it provides a list of items from the description that can be used to the players' advantage, but each thing can only be used once, akin to boosts in Fate.
Playing games like DCC RPG and PbtA games, players are often choosing from a menu of options. With DCC RPG in particular, there is a sense that if it's not on the menu, it cannot be done. This is not technically true, of course, in that a good DM will come up with a reasonable, systemically-appropriate way to handle special cases, but keep in mind that I am playing with a broad range of ages. I already mentioned how Joe the Cleric's player was clearly overwhelmed by the number of things he could do, and enough time passed between each session that almost nobody could remember how to read their own character sheets. An anxiety manifests in my wife, who claims that the family "is not good at" these games; as I have written about before, I think this is a sort of UX problem, where the system does not present itself as learnable. This came up in the final battle with Tjaptar, for example. When Joe commanded the Old God to flee into the woods, my wife started looking for interesting things that her character could do... but the only thing she could do was go attack the Big Bad, which is a false choice since it's the only one. Indeed, it's slightly worse than that: the party had earlier learned that Tjaptar's power was centered in his antlers, and that they should attack those. This meant that every shot had to be a called shot at -4, which for the party meant a success only on a natural 20, or, with about a 7% chance and restricted only to fighters, a successful mighty deed. The choice becomes really less than meaningful then: do you shoot Tjaptar in the regular way and have nothing good happen, or do you take a crippling penalty? You can see why morale was low at the end of the penultimate session.
Now, of course, I could have put a mystical amulet on the altar in the back of the room that was a nexus for Tjaptar's powers, and foreshadowed its existence, and given her the option of getting Joe to cleanse the evil altar... but now I'm doing the work of writing a module rather than the much easier work of running a module. Once again, if a group wanted exactly this kind of OSR experience, then more power to them, but looking at it as a designers and as someone playing with my family, I am left hungry.
My family has been talking some about the experience, and no one is clamoring for more DCC RPG right now. My wife insists that she does not like dice, although as the session report indicates, she was certainly the most emotionally responsive to their fickleness, the first to moan at a 1 and the first to squeal on a 20. I suppose one does not have to like that feeling, but an outsider watching the game would think it was her favorite part. Regardless, our conversations brought us back to more narrative-first games, and Fate in particular. I played a fun ad hoc session of Fate with the older two boys which I think they were excited to continue, but for which I ran out of steam. The whole family played one session of Fate together with a setting that only resonated to a few of us. In both cases, I feel like I was an amateur at running the game, moving too slowly through things that could have been left on the cutting-room floor. I was also improvising without much direction, while trying to keep the needs of the family in mind.
I think our next move will be to try Fate again, but with a few specific constraints. One will be to limit the duration of the game, which will be good for all of us—maybe especially me, so that my creative juices do not run dry. I will need to have in front of me a copy of the players' character sheets, because I realized that it was too much to try to remember their aspects from across the table. Another constraint will be to use a familiar setting. Our previous family game of Fate was about exploring an unfamiliar planet with a B-grade sci fi aesthetic. However, because the genre and setting were unfamiliar, most of the players had little sense of what they could do in that environment. Instead of introducing a fantastic new environment, we will definitely be choosing settings that all the family can understand. Fortunately, they read a lot, and so there are a lot of options. Unfortunately, our conversations have not led us to one that everyone is equally excited about. Part of me wants to do a medieval fantasy setting just because I have all these excellent miniatures that could be used with zone rules, and I know the boys can draw on their experience watching classics like Hawk the Slayer or the MST3K riffing of Cave Dwellers. On the other hand, I find myself thinking about Sherlock Holmes' Victorian London or Indiana Jones and wondering whether these can be laced with some fantastic elements and secret societies. I think if we focus on a one-off, then there won't be pressure to saturate the world, and we can see where that takes us.
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