Monster, Lairs, and Battles

Lair Actions
    Something I really love that 5th edition D&D did was lair actions and legendary actions. For those of you unfamiliar with them lair actions are special actions the monsters can take within their own lair, such as making part of a cave collapse. Legendary actions are given to those monsters and foes who are a cut above, used to signify bosses of adventures, these are actions that allow them to act slightly out of initiative order to do a short list of things. I always thought these rules were fun and really lined up with the DCC philosophy of "monsters don't follow the rules", stated in the monster section of the rule book. Giving them these options contributes to making them mysterious and frightening. 

    In general my players have been smart and careful enough to avoid fights with monsters in their own lairs, luring them out, baiting them to another location, or simply destroying the lair before starting a fight. So I've never been able to really use lair actions in DCC until very recently. I gotta say it was a great time. The players fought an evil magician with his scarecrow minions. They went in supremely confident that they could trash this guy... and then he activated every scarecrow in the room for a free extra round of actions from them and the players immediately realized the danger they were in. It totally changed how the battle felt. It went from confident magician stomping to panic and filling the room with smoke and fire in a single round. Had they baited this magician out of his keep he wouldn't have been able to do this. 

    This really felt like it added something, everyone remarked that the fight was a lot of fun and despite things going sideways quickly they were having a good time. This is something that I really think fits into the philosophy of DCC and to make it lean further into DCC we could go as far as making it's lair action into something it rolls on a table to determine it's random lair action. Even a short d6 table could really make the  concept of a lair action lean into the identity of DCC more than it already does.

 

Legendary actions

    In truth, I've not had the chance to use this. If I'm being totally honest, I keep forgetting. The way I run is a lot of improv and off the cuff, so as a general rule, I don't have set stat blocks ready to go. I borrow from things I've read, I improvise in the moment, I copy something close enough. For something like these Legendary Actions, my style of running is really bad at having those. So I cant speak to this as anything resembling an authority. However, this feels like the philosophy of DCC. Giving a big powerful threat these special things that allow it to break the rules just a little lines up with that "monsters don't follow the rules" line. It also does something to make the monster or foe more dangerous while giving them complexity instead of just bumping up the numbers. In theory, if you were to lift it 1:1 from 5e you could make a whole lot of panic happen at your table when a character spell burns like crazy to do something devastating and the foe uses one of these legendary actions to resist it. I think there is a discussion to be had here over this one and I am open to that discussion.

 

 Windup Attacks

    A D&D youtuber who has been playing since the old days did a video about this, Telegraphed Attacks and that is where the idea came from for me. I've used it once or twice and always to great effect. The idea is simple, we've all played a game where the bad guy winds up for an easily avoided attack, you dodge and come back swinging. At the table this creates an environment of risk and weighing options. Maybe you know your friend already spent their round in the attack range and you need to decide if you're going to get yourself or them out of the way. Maybe you think you can bring down the foe before he brings down his huge sword? Failure to get out of the way of such a big and telegraphed attack should be punished. It should be crippling, an automatic critical, or some other effect applied to the characters who didn't escape the incoming attack. I've used this to have the battlefield suddenly altered, characters sent flying, and weapons and armor broken. It changes the flow of combat, no one wants to find out what happens when the ogre swinging a battering ram like a club connects that windup hit. It doesn't need a map either. If you're like me and handle your fights in a theater of the mind, its easy enough to explain that the foe is winding up an attack and you are in the range of people to be hit. 

 

I know this was a bit of a short one, I just really wanted to share this. This is one of those things that I found and liked while playing another system. Yes, DCC is my home system and the game I use to run almost everything these days. But experiencing playing other systems, even for a short time, is important. Even when I hate a system, there is still something somewhere in there, a small treasure to plunder and take back to my home system, something to enshrine on the shelf and make my home system just a little more personal.