What's the deal with DCC?
There has been some discussion in Chris McDowall's discord concerning whether DCC is OSR or not. I have had some experience with the game recently with the Weird Marches, where I am really trying to make use of the game's core systems in total.
First and foremost, I think I have been misunderstanding this game pretty much all along. I think most people misunderstand DCC or, perhaps, their first inclination regarding the game is more correct than they might've imagined. So I don't just want to write an answer tot he question "Is DCC OSR?" I want to answer the question "What really is DCC?"
I think some contemplation of how we define OSR is probably helpful. I think the way I have seen OSR defined most often is a tactical description. We might say OSR games promote problem-solving, resource conservation, and interacting with the environment as if its real. These are all tactical descriptions of what the players will do in response to the game's systems. If these are the ways we define OSR, then DCC falls short.
I will give an example from my most recent session.
I give the players a tactical problem, quite literally. They have an army of beefy summoned snakes and they are trying to invade an overtake a castle. I tell them that branches from the trees near the castle have been shorn of their branches and that these branches litter the ground around the castle. This is obviously a trap.
Their strategy is to try and take a cart loaded up with flasks of oil, pushed by the snakes straight for the palace wall, ignite the oil with Cantrip and blast a hole in the wall.
They manage to effectively deal with the slime-pit traps and push their cart up to the walls. Upon arriving at the wall, the wizard casts Cantrip and... fails the roll. Cantrip is lost and now they need a new way to explode the cart.
In another situation where the party was less powerful, this could have been the end for them if a spell simply didn't work.
Another more dramatic example occurs further into the castle where they discover their enemy has taken hostages of the noble family and will kill them if the pcs attack. This is another complex strategic problem. The party wants to save the hostages but can't simply walk away from this fight without losing their biggest advantage as the summoned snake army would disappear the next day.
The response from one of my players was to get a lot of bonus from burning luck and get more from the party's halflings and cast Sleep on the enemies threatening the hostages. The player rolls a 36. This means that everything within 500 yards gets sleeping beauty cursed. Plants, animals, friendlies, and enemies all get put to sleep until the caster's condition is met.
The boss falls to sleep and won't even wake before it is killed.
In both situations, DCC says something fairly definite about its mechanics. This isn't a tactical game. It is most certainly not a story game. Nothing has to happen. PCs aren't powerful enough to always be assured victory like with Trad games. But DCC isn't a tactical game.
Its core systems from its crits to its spells are built upon tables, each with wildly varying results with dramatic possibilities for how each result could affect a certain situation. This is an element of randomness that really does throw a huge wrench into any and all players plans in both good and bad ways. On one hand, it is good when a plan becomes complicated with a bad roll. This leaves the pcs forced to find new ways of finding victory and that can be dramatic and fun.
On the other hand, it can totally ignore all the planning of the group in an interesting and potentially quite rewarding to solve situation and essentially one shot a boss.
But here's the thing: that can be fun too, under the right circumstances.
But DCC has been teaching you how to have its variety of fun from character creation. Character creation is some dice tosing and then a supremely chaotic adventure where who lives and dies amongst your handful of peasant scrubs is almost entirely up to chance.
The fun in this is that you have no idea what's going to happen. No one does. Not the designers, not the Judge, and not the players. You are all mostly just watching to gleefully see what horrible death or nonsensical victory awaits your poor pawns. It throws in an element of gambling with Luck and there you have a solid foundation for building a game almost entirely off one crucial element of OSR games: emergent narrative.
If we define the OSR solely by what kind of tactical decisions the player's make, we might easily forget that some of everyone's favorite moments in a game is where the completely unexpected happens for everyone at the table. Where dice command absurdities that have the players and gm telling stories for years to come.
In all games but OSR games: trad games, story games, ect something stands in the way of emergent narrative. There is no real emergent narrative where the outcomes are all limited to some variation of PC victory as with Trad games. Story games simply see no value in emergent narrative. The OSR holds that allowing the "story" to be what the dice and the player's decisions demand it to be is a central tenant. Jonh B recently wrote this post: https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-basis-of-game-is-making-decisions.html
What makes decision making such an important part of the game is that this is the core of what it means to play. In a world where everything is up to the players and the dice, there is true freedom and the players have real agency.
DCC messes with this mixture by leaning things more to the dice than to the decisions of players, taking emergent narrative to the extreme making players into children tossing around fireworks in the midst of toys and seeing what breaks and melts rather than children playing a game using said toys as pieces.
Thus we return to everyone's first thought about DCC: its chaotic fun. It might as well be on the book. Normally saying this would be a hasty statement, indicative of a reviewer needing to more deeply delve into how the systems truly work. In this case, the more you uncover of DCC's depths, the more you realize how much it has built its systems to enhance that gleeful chaos. You simply uncover new depths to the maelstrom.
So is DCC OSR? Eh... Maybe? If your definition of the OSR primarily leans on its tactical tenants, then no DCC is not OSR. If emergent narrative is the most important part of the OSR to you, then DCC is the most OSR game out there. Ultimately, the more I play DCC the less I think of it as OSR and the more I begin to enjoy it for what it is. Each session brings surprises galore. As a Judge, I stop feeling disappointed when boss battles are totally bypassed by spells and also stop feeling like I have to hold back. I get to feel empowered to throw firecrackers too. If my pieces explode fantastically, I cheer too! I build new things to see what will happen to them and howl with childish joy when it all comes crashing down!
What's the deal with DCC? DCC is chaotic fun. 'Nuf said.
First and foremost, I think I have been misunderstanding this game pretty much all along. I think most people misunderstand DCC or, perhaps, their first inclination regarding the game is more correct than they might've imagined. So I don't just want to write an answer tot he question "Is DCC OSR?" I want to answer the question "What really is DCC?"
I think some contemplation of how we define OSR is probably helpful. I think the way I have seen OSR defined most often is a tactical description. We might say OSR games promote problem-solving, resource conservation, and interacting with the environment as if its real. These are all tactical descriptions of what the players will do in response to the game's systems. If these are the ways we define OSR, then DCC falls short.
I will give an example from my most recent session.
I give the players a tactical problem, quite literally. They have an army of beefy summoned snakes and they are trying to invade an overtake a castle. I tell them that branches from the trees near the castle have been shorn of their branches and that these branches litter the ground around the castle. This is obviously a trap.
Their strategy is to try and take a cart loaded up with flasks of oil, pushed by the snakes straight for the palace wall, ignite the oil with Cantrip and blast a hole in the wall.
They manage to effectively deal with the slime-pit traps and push their cart up to the walls. Upon arriving at the wall, the wizard casts Cantrip and... fails the roll. Cantrip is lost and now they need a new way to explode the cart.
In another situation where the party was less powerful, this could have been the end for them if a spell simply didn't work.
Another more dramatic example occurs further into the castle where they discover their enemy has taken hostages of the noble family and will kill them if the pcs attack. This is another complex strategic problem. The party wants to save the hostages but can't simply walk away from this fight without losing their biggest advantage as the summoned snake army would disappear the next day.
The response from one of my players was to get a lot of bonus from burning luck and get more from the party's halflings and cast Sleep on the enemies threatening the hostages. The player rolls a 36. This means that everything within 500 yards gets sleeping beauty cursed. Plants, animals, friendlies, and enemies all get put to sleep until the caster's condition is met.
The boss falls to sleep and won't even wake before it is killed.
In both situations, DCC says something fairly definite about its mechanics. This isn't a tactical game. It is most certainly not a story game. Nothing has to happen. PCs aren't powerful enough to always be assured victory like with Trad games. But DCC isn't a tactical game.
Its core systems from its crits to its spells are built upon tables, each with wildly varying results with dramatic possibilities for how each result could affect a certain situation. This is an element of randomness that really does throw a huge wrench into any and all players plans in both good and bad ways. On one hand, it is good when a plan becomes complicated with a bad roll. This leaves the pcs forced to find new ways of finding victory and that can be dramatic and fun.
On the other hand, it can totally ignore all the planning of the group in an interesting and potentially quite rewarding to solve situation and essentially one shot a boss.
But here's the thing: that can be fun too, under the right circumstances.
But DCC has been teaching you how to have its variety of fun from character creation. Character creation is some dice tosing and then a supremely chaotic adventure where who lives and dies amongst your handful of peasant scrubs is almost entirely up to chance.
The fun in this is that you have no idea what's going to happen. No one does. Not the designers, not the Judge, and not the players. You are all mostly just watching to gleefully see what horrible death or nonsensical victory awaits your poor pawns. It throws in an element of gambling with Luck and there you have a solid foundation for building a game almost entirely off one crucial element of OSR games: emergent narrative.
If we define the OSR solely by what kind of tactical decisions the player's make, we might easily forget that some of everyone's favorite moments in a game is where the completely unexpected happens for everyone at the table. Where dice command absurdities that have the players and gm telling stories for years to come.
In all games but OSR games: trad games, story games, ect something stands in the way of emergent narrative. There is no real emergent narrative where the outcomes are all limited to some variation of PC victory as with Trad games. Story games simply see no value in emergent narrative. The OSR holds that allowing the "story" to be what the dice and the player's decisions demand it to be is a central tenant. Jonh B recently wrote this post: https://retiredadventurer.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-basis-of-game-is-making-decisions.html
What makes decision making such an important part of the game is that this is the core of what it means to play. In a world where everything is up to the players and the dice, there is true freedom and the players have real agency.
DCC messes with this mixture by leaning things more to the dice than to the decisions of players, taking emergent narrative to the extreme making players into children tossing around fireworks in the midst of toys and seeing what breaks and melts rather than children playing a game using said toys as pieces.
Thus we return to everyone's first thought about DCC: its chaotic fun. It might as well be on the book. Normally saying this would be a hasty statement, indicative of a reviewer needing to more deeply delve into how the systems truly work. In this case, the more you uncover of DCC's depths, the more you realize how much it has built its systems to enhance that gleeful chaos. You simply uncover new depths to the maelstrom.
So is DCC OSR? Eh... Maybe? If your definition of the OSR primarily leans on its tactical tenants, then no DCC is not OSR. If emergent narrative is the most important part of the OSR to you, then DCC is the most OSR game out there. Ultimately, the more I play DCC the less I think of it as OSR and the more I begin to enjoy it for what it is. Each session brings surprises galore. As a Judge, I stop feeling disappointed when boss battles are totally bypassed by spells and also stop feeling like I have to hold back. I get to feel empowered to throw firecrackers too. If my pieces explode fantastically, I cheer too! I build new things to see what will happen to them and howl with childish joy when it all comes crashing down!
What's the deal with DCC? DCC is chaotic fun. 'Nuf said.
Great post! The only thing I'd really disagree with is that story games don't see any value in emergent narrative. All the ones I've played are relentlessly focused on emergent narrative, it's just not as driven by random tables as DCC is.
ReplyDeleteThank you! I love your reviews!
DeleteI suppose that depends on the storygame and the definition of emergent narrative. When players are involved in the worldbuilding and story direction, is it really emergent narrative or is it directed narrative? Maybe there is some overlap and I know there are storygames that do more emergent narrative and others do more directed.
You are correct that it is a generalization for sure. I would wonder if emergent narrative is really valued as a part of general story game philosophy. I really don't know!
I would say that emergent narrative is the main feature of story games. The whole point is that you don't have one part (the GM) telling a story as in trad games, or other that you play a fixed story written in advance. Instead the story is built as you go along by all the participants. Wikipedia says that: emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own. In a story game each person contributes a part of the story, and it results in a story that none of the participants could have anticipated for themselves.
DeleteThat is a good point! You and Ben L have changed my mind and I agree. Story games are indeed about emergent narrative.
Delete