Playing RPGs once again.
This weekend I had the opportunity to finally run Dungeon Crawl Classics and XCrawl Classics. It’s been a very long time since I posted and even longer since I played. This blog was created with good intentions, hoping to reignite my TTRPG hobby, but work, health, family life and, truth be told, other hobbies took priority. As such I’ve decided to wipe the blog and restart.
On Friday I ran a DCC module for some colleagues after work, then on Saturday I ran an XCrawl Classics module for some online friends. A future post will go over the games and the plans for future campaigns, but I thought I’d use this post to talk about how it was to run the games in different mediums for different groups. Spoilers for the two modules ahead.
DCC #86: Hole In The Sky
One thing I notice is that depending upon where you see this listed the module might be called “The Hole in the Sky” rather than simply “Hole in the Sky”, print copies omit the word “The” so that’s my preference. As the module says, previous adventurers have been through the hole, so there’s probably more than one anyways.
A bit about how I ran this game. I’ve previously ran games for colleagues, I taught some of them how to play Magic The Gathering and similar card games, and I’ve run Old School Essentials, Monster of the Week and Cairn adventures in the past. There’s a core group that enjoy playing RPGs, and they’re always keen to try new systems. I can count on them to have fun. We play in person, I supply dice, dice trays, pens, paper and character sheets, they just need to turn up and we can play. Purple Sorcerer’s tooling made giving out characters easy, I just generated a bunch of sheets, each with 4 level 0 characters and let people pick randomly. In all we had 4 players, each with 4 characters.
We started little after 4pm and finished not long after 8, including some interruptions and a break we got through the module in 4 hours. I think that’s about right, funnels seem like the perfect intro to the game and being able to get through the adventure in a reasonable time is ideal. I rarely want to play for more than 4 hours at a time and will usually hard cap my games at 4 hours, I don’t have the energy or attention span enjoy a game that goes longer.
The players seemed to enjoy themselves, and the PCs ended up with some personality shining through, guiding their actions. Of the 16 starting the adventure 6 survived to the end, with each player having at least 1 character to carry through to level 1 and on to the next adventure. I’m being purposefully brief here, I want to recap the module in a dedicated post. I’m hoping to run DCC #80: Intrigue at the Court of Chaos next.
XCrawl Classics: XCrawl’s Got Talent
This module is the level 0 funnel included within the XCC core rule book. I was running this one online for a group of friends in a discord server. When we hopped into the voice channel one player was missing and an extra server member joined the channel. I tend to limit my groups to 4 since more than that and I tend to struggle to give everyone time to shine. I’ve tried working on it, but I struggle. I’d rather give 4 people a good game and have 2 people miss out, than give 6 people a bad game. 5 is borderline, and I’ll usually play it by ear. Since one of the players was missing from the start time, I quickly filled the extra in, got some characters rolled up and off we go. The missing player turned up super early, so we ended up with 5 players each with 4 characters.
I’ll try to avoid spoilers where I can since this is a fairly new system and a new module, but this module will get it’s own write up and hopefully there will be a series of posts documenting an ongoing campaign too.
One thing that I struggled with here was timekeeping. Either because of the additional player, or because I didn’t roll particularly well some early encounters seemed to take a while. I think I struggled to explain situations as I often had to kind of recap for some players at certain times – I put that down to playing online as it wasn’t an issue with the in-person DCC game. We started not long after 8pm and finished around 1.30am. Finding a good time to play across multiple time-zones is an issue. Because this was a funnel I really wanted to finish the adventure so we could make level 1 characters for next time, but future games will absolutely be hard-capped at 4hrs, with a 15 minute break in the middle. If modules span 2 sessions then so be it.
Of the 20 characters that started this module 2 took the “no go” door to escape (a player had to bail for IRL issues) and 9 died during the adventure, this left 9 characters surviving. I always roll in the open and let the dice determine the fate, and I really rolled low at times. Missing 3 or 4 attacks in a row with a +3 modifier against a 10 or 11 AC character for example. It’s great when these things happen, the players feel super powerful, but the final fight against what should be a big challenge ended up being a little anticlimactic as the players were able to get through it largely unscathed.
We wrapped up super quickly (Me and the other UK players really needed sleep) but I promised the players that I’d write a recap for them and we’ll get some players up to level 1 for the next module.
XCC shipped with 2 modules in the rule book, the level 0 funnel and a level 1 adventure. There are also 7 standalone adventure modules I’ve purchased that take the characters from level 0 through to level 6. I’ll compare the rule book level 1 adventure and the standalone adventure to determine which we run next.
That’s as much as I have energy for today, I’m running on 4 hours sleep and I really want to go play some disc golf before I inevitably fall asleep before dinner time! Stay tuned for campaign write ups coming soon.
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