Goodman Games

Hi, new to the board and about to run my first DCC 0-level funnel this week.

Considering how tracking time is so important in DCC, I was surprised to find no rules concerning burn duration for torches and oil lanterns. Did I miss something, or should I house-rule? If I gotta house-rule, what do the rest of you do?

Honestly, I run length and mass and time in a very "loose" manner. I don't get hung up in tracking torch burning time, only instead I make sure that the party has bothered to acquire torches at the start and assume that they burn them at a regular rate. Details like actual time tracking seem to slow down the pace of my action too much.

In my games a torch will last about a hour. Much less when used as a fiery club! Even less when hacked at or thrown into huts!

Dropping a torch or lantern, or having it go out is a good response to a player rolling a fumble.

Great suggestions. Thanks!

I did find in the equipment table footnotes that a flask of oil in a lamp burns 6 hours, same as the mother-game. Torches there burn an hour, so I can use that if I feel the need to be precise. However, your suggestions got me thinking ... there's no guarantee that PCs will always buy "standard" quality torches and oil. I could secretly roll a 5-sider when they purchase a batch: 1=crappy torches/oil that burn half as long and/or give off feeble light, 2-4=standard, 5= exceptional quality that burns half again as long and/or significantly brighter. Unless the PCs test their purchases ahead of time they wouldn't know how long their stuff would burn until they were well into the dungeon. Probably too much record keeping, but the emergent play situations sound really interesting, don't you think?

I stuck my pc's with cheapo torches one time that put out triple the amount of smoke. Made it hard to see if they stayed in one place for long and smelled godawful! I had every critter around either go running away or running to them.

It only worked once but was fun while it lasted!

Generally, the oil runs out or the torch extinguishes just at the wrong time. You know, when you hear some bone-chilling scraping sounds from just beyond that corner, getting closer and closer...

That's my rule of thumb.