Adapting DCC

Searching through the archives, I see several people mentioning having played (and enjoyed) both ACKS and DCC, but no mentions of combining them into a single ball of gooey (must be all the mutated body parts…) goodness.

For our last session, I tried converting the DCC rules for clerical spellcasting into ACKS. The cleric’s player loved them, but he also rolled extremely well, only failing a single casting roll, so he only saw the benefits, not the drawbacks. We’ll need to run with it a bit more before we can fully asses how balanced it is, but, after that assessment is done, I think I’ll probably want to port over the remaining “core class” features from DCC.

Has anyone done this before, or even just given it significant thought?

My main objective here is to make classes more distinct (the clerical magic conversion basically resulted from me not liking that arcane and divine magic are mechanically identical in every way aside from their spell lists/repertoires) and to bring in a fair bit of the weirdness from DCC, but without needing to consult a 1-2 page table every time a spell is cast or try to find zocchi dice.

Flavor-wise, I’d probably be happy with just adapting the clerical and arcane magic systems, but I have a feeling that would end up being a major buff to casters, so I’d likely need to also bring Mighty Deeds of Arms and Luck over in order to bring non-casting classes on even footing.

People whose judgment I trust have told me that the games play well together, but I have not personally read DCC closely enough to offer any advice on conversion!

I can definitely see DCC adding some really interesting flavor to ACKS spellcasters. I know I look forward to reading more about this when you get a little more data on the experience!

I was oggling some of the more gonzo adventures DCC had put up for sale at GenCon, but I was unsure of how easily they could be converted (not to mention if their wackiness would slot easily into my existing campaign), and so I balked at purchasing any.

I haven’t read any of the DCC adventures (aside from the introductory funnel in the core book), but, from reading the rules, I would expect it to be fairly easy to use DCC adventures in ACKS (or vice-versa, for that matter).

Of course, whether the weirdness would fit your campaign may be another matter entirely.

There are some little assumptions you’d have to work around, but that’s what rulings are for.

For example, IIRC in one of the DCC adventures I own all the player characters need to activate a sorcerous device to make progress. This is possible because even non-magic-users can attempt to cast spells, they just roll a d10 instead of a d20. Since you normally need to roll 11+ to succeed, they’re completely dependent on bonuses. With these devices the target is lower (6+?), but you still expect the non-magic-users to get a few failures with painful results.

I really want to run some DCC adventures under ACKS (Or S&W or LL for that matter) but for the most part I don’t want an ongoing DCC-ness in my campagne. That said I really think the Frog God is making a massive mistake by not publishing a DCC-ified version of XCrawl. I mean what would make a crowd of modern-pseudo-romans lose their minds more than the inherent mad randomness of DCC style magic? I don’t know of I’d run XCrawl as is, but I’d definitely jump on at least a one shot of DCC-Xcrawl.