Saturday, December 12, 2015

Fatso, the Fat and the sheer genius of DCC RPG! (and the Alice Class)

Howdy folks! I “restarted” my online campaign of DCC RPG just a week ago and it has been everything that I wanted in a tabletop RPG these days… small to zero preparation, light (but amazingly entertaining) rules, a lot of space for players to wreak havoc and great modules. We started the ‘People of the Pit’ module with the “lawful” side of the original party that (almost one year ago) survived the ‘Sailors on the Starless Sea’ adventure (the “chaotic/villainous” part of the group went in another direction during the last year to face the ‘Doom of the Savage Kings’ adventure and it was a blast!).



So, after our first session of ‘People of the Pit’, the party retreated to the nearest towns to equip themselves, hire new cannon-fodder and to upgrade those 0-level PCs that survived the Funnel (we got 2 new players for this part of the game). One of these 0-level poor souls was an almost unplayable PC – a human Cutpurse with four negative Ability Score modifiers and his best stat is a 12. His players decide to call him Fatso, the Fat – a  Samwell Tarly-like character. To our great surprise, Fatso was an amazing character during the session (and to boost the best rolled 0-level PC of that players was summarily killed). In other words, DCC RPG Funnel turned what would be an unplayable PC in the game session most memorable character!

After the game, we started upgrading the 0-level survivors to 1st level and it was suggested that Fatso would made an excellent candidate for the Alice/Fool character class (from the awesome ‘A Red and Pleasant Land’, by Zak). So, I upgraded him use the guidelines from Joshua Kubli’s Invulnerablog and added a few more things:

Discombobulation: This open-ended ability allows the Fool to (1 per round) gains a free (non-attack) action using a d14 action dice (d16 at 6th level, d20 at 7th level and d24 at 8th level). This ability is triggered when the Alice/Fool miss an attack roll.

Luck: Fools can spend Luck to reduce any damage they suffer.

I’m still not sure if those abilities make the Fool too powerful in DCC RPG. Let’s see.