FLAILSNAILS to DCC conversion (first draft)

rules not as yet tested for swiftly converting FLAILSNAILS PCs to DCC games and/or using OSR-compatible homebrew classes in DCC.

First, determine your character's base class:
If you fight good and do very little else, you are a Fighter.
If you fight good but also have some extra abilities such as ranger, paladin or racial powers, you are a Variant Fighter.
If you fight fairly well but have other abilities that make up at least 50% of your schtick, you are a Cleric.
If you have skills, sneaky stuff or other utilities that aren't fighting or magic, you are a Thief.
If casting spells is your primary thing, you are a Wizard.

Characters get attack bonus, action dice, critical tables and saving throws as per their base class.
Fighters get the Deed Die and Mighty Deed of Arms.
Variant Fighters don't get the Deed Die, and instead get an attack bonus equal to the average of the Deed Die they would have gotten, rounded down. (e.g. d3 = +1; d4 = +2; etc) They cannot perform Mighty Deeds of Arms.
Clerics and Wizards still cast spells as per their original system; no rolling on tables for you.
Thieves use whatever skills they had from their original system, but gain the ability to burn and regain Luck as a Thief.

Your DCC Strength, Agility, Stamina and Personality correspond to their equivalent stats in the original system. (Why they insisted on renaming Dex, Con and Cha I will never understand.) Your DCC Intelligence is the higher of your OSR Intelligence or Wisdom. Your Luck is rolled as you enter the DCC universe.

Where does the cool shit come from?

I played a game over G+ with Chris Kusel today, delving solo into his megadungeon The Core. Quite apart from being by myself, it had a different feel to the other FLAILSNAILS games I've played. The Core is very much an old-school dungeon crawl which feels like it must be pretty similar to the games that were played 'back in the day' by the earliest D&Ders. I fought some kobolds, found a secret door, evaded a dart trap and looted some coins from a treasure chest. It was generic D&D, without any of the negative connotations that the word 'generic' usually implies.

In contrast, the other FLAILSNAILS campaigns I've played in all seem to be created by people who for whatever reason have moved beyond the original premises of D&D. They've added an 'and' or a 'but' on the end. Agrivaina is like "There's dungeons and dragons and space aliens and undead armies." Caves of Myrddin and Blight of the Khazars are both (in different ways) a matter of "There's dungeons and dragons but it all fits into real-world history and geography." As someone who's entered the world of old-school D&D through these campaigns, I found it kind of refreshing to go back to the original flavour of dungeoncrawling, which I'd sort of skipped over without ever actually experiencing.

But it also got me thinking about how these different campaigns are constructed, about the cool shit that happens in them. Here's the coolest things I can remember from five different FLAILSNAILS campaigns - see if you can spot a pattern.

Jeff Rients' Caves of Myrddin: Throwing rainbow grenades at medusas; DM ruling on whether a blue cheese golem counts as a fungus monster.
Trent B's New Feierland: A Cleric got traumatically inseminated by a slug; an orc expanded until he was one with the universe.
Ian Burns' Agrivaina: Drinking mutagenic crab's blood; Samson Jones seeing a vision of himself in a satellite(?) firing a laser that blew up the entire campaign setting.
Zzarchov Kowolski's Blight of the Khazars: A giant winged lion being dissected by halfling Huns; insane hordes of adventurers running blindly into a dungeon while a boatload of Jews wisely escape over the horizon.
Chris Kusel's The Core: I put a bunch of fanged worms in a jar to make a worm grenade; I kidnapped a kobold and forced him to lead me to treasure, and he died after opening the trapped treasure chest.

The pattern I'm seeing is: in The Core the coolest things were things that I made up myself, as a player. In the other campaigns, the cool stuff is almost all made up by the DM (although there are some border cases, like Ian made up the mutant crab's blood but it was our own stupid fault for fucking around with it.) So I'm wondering if the other campaigns have a different style of play where the players are more like spectators to the DM's awesome ideas?

I mean, I'm not saying that these campaigns are railroads or the players don't have agency. We definitely always had control over our own destiny, where we went, whether we lived or died... but in those campaigns, there was always so much crazy stuff to see that I think it led to a bit of creative apathy amongst the players, like why bother inventing something cool when the DM has already done it for you? Whereas The Core is more like a blank canvas inviting you to paint your own cool shit all over it.
Both styles are a heap of fun. I'm still thinking about which kind I want to emphasize in my own campaign, if/when it gets off the ground. Would it be possible to strike a balance between the two?

On Social Combat Mechanics

My opinion of social mechanics, and particularly social combat, has generally been pretty low. Social skills in 4E generally encourage the players to say "I use Diplomacy!" rather than actually talking to NPCs; it also means that whoever has the best CHA skills is treated as the 'face' while all the other characters stand back and say nothing at all. The only time I've tried to run a full-on social combat system was in our abortive attempt at Spirit of the Century: the debate lasted one round and ended when one of the players pulled out a gun and shot his debating opponent in the leg.

I'd previously come to a conclusion that goes something like this: the reason we roll dice in RPGs is to simulate complicated things that we can't actually play out. For example, we don't have the skill, courage or time to actually fight each other with swords in order to resolve a combat round. However, we do have the capacity to play out a discussion or dialogue in full, so why bother simulating it with dice?

However, while playing in Zzarchov Kowalski's Blight of the Khazars campaign, I recently witnessed social combat mechanics giving rise to one of the strangest and most memorable moments I've yet seen in a roleplaying game. The setting was a village by the Red Sea where a dungeon was about to give birth to some sort of Antichrist dragon who was the son of nine (?) evil gods. A bunch of people had been possessed by Bacchus and herded into the dungeon as sacrifices, and our dwindling party was trapped in some sort of infinite maze presided over by Belial, Prince of Lies. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that things were looking pretty grim.

Then, after Belial showed up to speak with us, Ian's character Daerith decided that he wanted to bullshit Belial into thinking that this dragon (of which Belial himself was co-father) was going to destroy the nine gods as soon as it hatched. So away we went with the social combat system. Somehow, after a few rounds of argument, Daerith came out on top! He successfully lied to the motherfuckin' Prince of Lies himself. I think Zzarchov said that Belial needed to roll three consecutive 1s on a d20 in order to fail, and that's exactly what he did. So now Belial has told us how to slay the dragon, and we have a slim hope that the entire world will not be destroyed in the next few sessions.

My point is that if there weren't any mechanics for social combat - if the rule was just to 'roleplay it out' - then Zzarchov would probably have just said "No. It's impossible for you to sell such a preposterous lie to Belial of all people, now let's move on." But the social mechanics actually gave Daerith a small chance to succeed - the task was almost impossible, but not quite. More generally, social mechanics have the virtue of bringing something to the table that's unexpected by everyone. Just as it's interesting to see that the orc warlord randomly fumbled and dropped his sword, it could be similarly engaging when the dice randomly dictate that such-and-such an NPC really hates your guts for no particular reason (or alternatively, so-and-so has just fallen in love with you...)