Right now, I'm currently in a phase where I want to plan out a new RPG campaign to run soon. Problem is, I'm not sure if I want that campaign to be in D&D5e. Some of this might be due to the OGL issues back in the beginning of the year, or maybe reading all these RPG books has me looking for something new. Since I already have a crap ton of RPGs on my shelf, I'm looking through the "rarely played" section.

I landed on checking out Dungeon Crawl Classics for two reasons. First, they always have a great Gen Con booth. I've only played one game of DCC back during the Gen Con Online of 2020, but I've got a handful of DCC adventures. Largely because you can get them for $1 at their Gen Con booth. Also, this year they had pinball machines at their booth, so it was an immediate eye-catcher. Secondly, we are trying to hit $50 on our patreon so we can play "Love Mutants at Castle Heartache". This DCC adventure has a man on the front cover who has a striking resemblance to my cohost Philip, so I should really understand how it plays.

I've Got Tone...

To start, I have to talk about the art style. I hate it. I really do. To be fair, it's done on purpose to evoke the feeling of artwork in the original editions of D&D, which it does a really good job of. However, what I've seen of the artwork in those old books doesn't appeal to me either. I do know that printing in black and white only reduces printing costs, so that part I don't mind that much. When it comes down to it, I can ignore the art style because they are going for that nostaglia, but if I was given the choice for a version with more modern artwork, I'd take it hands down. (Note: yes I know that goes against the point, I'm just saying...)

Where the tone does appeal to me is the writing tone. The DCC Core Rulebook is not one that you pick up if you've never played a RPG before. There is no "What's a Roleplaying Game?" section. This book knows that you've more than likely played D&D before. There's not an IP that is drawing you to this game. If you are picking up the book, you've played a RPG before and you are looking for something different. The book even sets the tone for the rules by comparing it to other 3.5 style RPGs. While those games, DCC claims that they use a variety of character options to help preserve game balance. With DCC, it throws those variety of options out the window in favor of randomness.

How does it achieve this? Tables. Lots and lots of tables.

Let's table this discussion

I'm not kidding about the tables. Take the rulebook and open it up to a random page. You are more likely going to hit a table of some kind. For example, spell casters can do "spell dueling" with an opposing magic user. There are multiple steps in this process, each with their own table as to what happens. You start off rolling opposing spell checks. If you score higher, there's a table to consult. If you score lower, there's another table to look at. There's even a table for if you roll the same - in fact if you roll poorly on that table there is ANOTHER table to look at.

At first, I thought maybe these tables are supposed to be guides. Suggestions for players for doing "epic" things when nothing comes to mind. Now I realize they are fundamentally the point of the game. As I said earlier, everything is randomized. There isn't a "point buy" system for character creation: you roll 3D6 for each stat in order and that's your character. So along that same line, there are tons of tables to make every adventure feel "unique" by adding the random chaotic nature of dice. It's kind of hard for power gamers to min/max their characters when they can be sucked into another dimension with a series of bad dice rolls.

In fact, the tables reminded me a lot of the BattleTech tabletop miniatures game. A second later, I realized why: they are both from/inspired by the 80's, when that was the type of games being played. Battletech is another game with lots of tables - there's tables for falling, punching vs kicking other mechs, building a mech with an internal combustion engine instead of fusion engine, etc. For BattleTech, most of the important tables are able to be condensed down to a single front and back piece of paper. Not sure if this is the case for DCC - although perhaps it could be done on a per class level. I'm sure there are lots of player resources available, but I'm just reviewing the core rulebook here.

Anyone who has problems with the "custom dice" from the FFG/Edge Star Wars games, Fate Dice, Vampire, etc. can't really complain too much about DCC. It does use the "standard" dice, but also uses what are called "Zocchi dice". This consists of a D3, D5, D7, D14, D16, D24, and D30. While other people make said dice, so it's not proprietary, but it is something where you have to use extra dice to play the game. Technically, the rules have options for using standard dice in their place, but it’s a bit wonky. The way that DCC incorporates them is in numerical order in a "dice chain". You might start with a D20 like in other games, but when you get a bonus or detriment, you move up/down the dice chain. So a player may roll a D24 or a D16 instead of a D20 for their attack. Even with the funky dice, its still a far less complicated system than certain other systems we talked about recently…

No high level overpowered characters here

As I noted above, I've played one game of DCC up to this point. That adventure was probably the most appealling part of DCC, which was a level 0 "funnel" adventure. In it, you play not a single adventurer, but up to 4 simple level 0 townsfolk. If you've seen the movie "Free Guy", imagine the beginning of the movie when Guy first gets the glasses and gets knocked out of his normal patterns - that's your merry band. You take these huge groups of characters and put them through a dungeon/adventure designed to kill off most of these characters. Once you get through that adventure, whatever characters are left are leveled up to Level 1 and become possible adventurers for you to choose.

That theme of death behind every corner goes beyond the funnel to just about every aspect of DCC. As the core rulebook mentions, getting to level 5 in this game is quite a feat. For example, that spell dueling that I mentioned above? The one with lots of tables? In the case you roll equal to the opponent on said spell check, you roll on a "phlogiston disturbance" table. If you are familiar with DnD5e, this is like the wild magic table. Yet, if you roll a 2 on that table you and the baddy are teleported away to an "alignment plane". You then roll to see how long on a D4 - a result of 4 means until the end of days - reminds me a lot about the end of Anubis in Stargate SG-1. Ok, sure the chances of that happening are 2.5%, but how many times are your magic users casting spells in your games?

Then again, maybe that's the appeal of this game - it's like "Hardcore" mode in Diablo, or playing the Dark Souls games. You know that your character is going to die at some point, the question is how much further can you get this time around. The popularity of those video games would explain why there are so many people attracted to the DCC-style of RPGs. Considering how you make entry level characters through random generation, its not like you have to devote a lot of resources to roll up a new character for a new adventure. I would probably bet someone has even made a website to auto-generate a set of four characters for DCC.

Conclusion

1. This game has a weird balance of being fundamentally simple in its core concepts, but deeply complex in how it executes them. Such a weird mix of those ideas that somehow does seem to make each class feel a bit more thematic than other RPGs.

2. How the heck do you GM this? I'm really curious what kind of aids that GMs and players have to use for this game. I'm sure everyone is not flipping over to their respective tables every time that a specific circumstance comes up. I would imagine that the core piece of GM-ing DCC is just knowing the situations that require table rolls, but it seems like a lot to put on the GM.

3. The chaos in this game seems perfect for my group, but I know some are going to be hating the fact that they can't min/max the system. Which, in fairness, is one reason I want to try it….muahahahaha…..