I’ve had a chance to start running a few games of Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) and its derived games recently – a one-shot of Weird Frontiers for Unconventional GMs, and a “vanilla” DCC at MORPCon in Manchester. It’s a system I’ve always enjoyed playing, but except for a couple of 0-level funnels, I’ve not run it before. And it’s an awful lot of fun. 

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While it looks like traditional D&D, even OSR-ish D&D, it plays very differently in my experience. It does, however, take a bit of getting your head around to run as a one-shot. So here are my top tips for getting it to the convention table, or whatever one-shot venue you like.

Use the Modules

One of the big draws for DCC is the vast number of one-shot suitable adventures published for it. There are hundreds of them, and the quality – and fun content – is very high indeed. They show up every so often on Bundle of Holding, too – so it’s easy to get a good selection of them and pick one that grabs you.

Perhaps worth saying that the DCC variants, Mutant Crawl Classics included, tend to add rather than subtract complexity, so for your first time you might want to stick to vanilla DCC. It’s a fairly complex system with lots of little rules exceptions, so if you want an easy start, try a funnel – 0-level characters only engage with a very small subset of the rules, so you’ll have a good introduction with them. I’d strongly recommend The Hole in the Sky, an example of a 0-level adventure that feels like a 10th-level one.

Get Your Party Together

First of all, you’ll need pregens – Purple Sorcerer has you covered there. Give players of magic-users the spell sheets for their spells, so they can roll and look them up. For a game as swingy as DCC is, print out a few spare PCs, and have a thought to where they might be encountered (don’t worry too much about verisimilitude – we found an elf hiding in a chest the last time I ran it, the sole survivor of a previous party!).

It’s also a good idea, if you’re running a more traditional dungeon, to have a few hirelings on board. Apart from their use as ablative NPCs where you have deadly traps, they’re also roleplay accelerants – they can start some in-character banter with your players, for them to carry on with. Julio’s RPG Cove has a fantastic hireling generator that you can print out as cards to have on the table.

Get The Rest of Your Shizz Together

You’ll also need a few sets of dice. I’m not entirely on board with DCC’s stated intention to make you use all the dice you already have – I’ve never rolled a D16 or D24 outside of these games, but you’ll need them here (Halflings, in particular, use two D16s for dual wielding). No need for a set each, but I’d say 2 or 3 is a minimum number of sets to save you faffing around looking for a D5 for damage.

Also, DCC has a few tables that you’ll want to have access to – I have these printed out in a folder for ease of reference (and so I don’t have to carry a big hardback book to the con) – critical tables, fumble tables, magic miscast, that table the cleric rolls on if they displease their deity – all of them need to be to hand. It may feel like a lot of paper, but you don’t want to pause the game at a moment of drama because you can’t find the right critical table.

Embrace Solutions

The presentation and style (and structure, often) of the adventures is often really old-school – there’s not really a skill system, and class abilities consist of a set of special powers that are often only useful in combat. There isn’t, deliberately, a method for, e.g. decoding runes or tricking NPCs – a nod to old-school play of “rulings not rules” that, well, I can take or leave. My approach to this is to be pretty generous with clever solutions – NPCs are trickable, traps can be set, animals will flee from fire, that sort of thing. The combat rules are unforgiving enough that any clever ways to tackle obstacles will work, if they’re fun – keep it moving along and it’ll keep the players happy too.

Play in Turns

This is something I’ve picked up from, amongst other things, Index Card RPG. It’s really just a way of spotlighting a bit harder and framing scenes more strongly. I’ve started doing it for a lot of trad games, but it really enhances play in a dungeon-based game. How it works is you just make sure you go round the table fully before coming back to another player. After you’ve described a room they ‘ve just entered, direct your first questions to a player who hasn’t acted recently, and ask them what they do. By exerting a little bit more control over who gets to speak, you help to make the dungeon flow a little better – and feel like you have six characters exploring, rather than one group of misfits (often dominated by the more confident players).

Embrace the Collapsible Dungeon

There’s probably a bit too much content in some of the modules out there for a pacy one-shot, and it’s hard to tell how quickly your party will get through them. In fairness, a lot of the dungeons have neat little short cuts and interesting structures, so it’s possible that you could be fine – or not. With this in mind, don’t be afraid to smash-cut to the finale if you’re running out of time. Combat in DCC is relatively quick, if swingy, but some of the puzzles and exploration bits are at the mercy of your players, so don’t be afraid to mix it up.

So, some ideas for running DCC one-shots. It’s certainly a family of games I’m looking forward to running more of in the near future. Have you any hints or tips, or favourite modules? Let me know in the comments!