Cheat Sheets, Elves, and Wizards

This weekend, Mark Gedak of Purple Duck Games is going to be running a playtest of Prince Charming, Reanimator, at the Great Falls Gaming Rendezvous.  Because I am a firm believer in the XP system devised by Joseph Goodman & co. for the Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game, the adventure is designed with the assumption that characters will “level up” to level 1 when they reach 10 XP.

In my experience, both running home games and games as part of the DCC World Tour, most groups can level their characters, even if unfamiliar with the system, in about 5-10 minutes.  However, I wanted to make things even easier for Mark, so I created a “cheat sheet” for every class, on a single page, that covers going from level 0 to level 1 only.  It briefly explains all pertinent class abilities.

Trying to distill down class abilities to a shorter form made me notice some interesting things.  First off, I had gotten into the habit of letting dwarves smell all precious metals.  They do not; they can smell gold and gems.  This is actually an important distinction, because it means that the dwarf does not eliminate all need to search.

More interesting, though, was the elf.  There is a bit in the Judge’s Rules section about how wizards gain spells, but I am not at all certain now that this should apply to an elf.  As the cleric knows spells based upon the agency of his deity, I am now going to allow elves to know spells from level 1 onward without study, based on the agency of their otherworldly cohorts.  However, the flip side of that is I am also no longer going to allow elves to burn Luck to avoid corruption.