Castle & Crusades - who has tried it and not stuck with it?

This in no way is meant to start a flame war; I'm just genuinely curious if people have been exposed to C&C and later decided it wasn't for them.

What were your reasons?

What did the system lack for you?

I'm one of them. It wasn't what I wanted. Were it left things open I wanted definition and where it gave me definition I mostly wanted things left open. Some things it change like each class getting its own XP table again I didn't want changed. The biggest plus people seem to saw it has is the how fast things can be prepped. I've never had an issue with how long it takes to prep regular D&D.

slimykuotoan said:

This in no way is meant to start a flame war; I'm just genuinely curious if people have been exposed to C&C and later decided it wasn't for them.

What were your reasons?

What did the system lack for you?

Click to expand...

I've played a little over a dozen sessions in two mini-campaigns. While I like the system, and initially thought I would enjoy its simplicity, I found myself wanting more detail in the rules, so I'm going back to 3E. C&C's main advantage, as Crothian said, is the short prep time. I think that if I'm worried about prep-time, I'll just use a published adventure, of which I have plenty.

I might pick it up again in the future, if I want to run a quick pick up game- it is nice to only carry around two books. But for a longer campaign, 3E is where it's at for me.

Ran a four month Arduin campaign using C&C. At the close of that camapign, my players (at the time) and I decided that the game didn't allow for enough unique mechanical definition of characters (e.g., no ability to specialize in specific skills or actions). This was the big issue.

It does prep much faster than D&D, which I miss, though I'm currently working on my own project that gives me the level of mechanical definition that seemed lacking in C&C with same said reduced prep time. So far it seems to have been received fairly well. I'm making the third editing pass currently and incorporating player feedback.

I bought a copy, read it cover to cover and promptly sold it. It did seem to capture the feel of "old school" gaming. Apparently my memories of 1E are better than the product available that emulates them... a bit of memory editing I guess... I'll be sticking with 3.5...

jdrakeh said:

...I'm currently working on my own project that gives me the level of mechanical definition that seemed lacking in C&C with same said reduced prep time. So far it seems to have been received fairly well. I'm making the third editing pass currently and incorporating player feedback.

Click to expand...

When can we see this?

*I may add your bits into my C&C...

I read it and didn't bother playing it, does that count?

My reason, my players don't much like changes in rules (some of them are not looking forward to 4E). Also, I don't have much problems with D&D's so called complexity. I can see where some people could prefer it, it's just not my cup of tea. If I'm going to play a simpler D&D, it'll be with RC rules.

Emryys said:

When can we see this?

*I may add your bits into my C&C...

Click to expand...

I plan to have it finished and available via Lulu in a month or so, though my day job eats up much of my free time, so I don't want to set a definite release date.

I should warn you that the system does not contain classes, feats, races, or skills in the traditional sense. Rather, it utilizes a system of "broad traits" and "narrow traits" to define PCs, with "broad traits" encompassing things such as race or class, and narrow traits encompassing things such as feats and skills.

Likewise, armor and weapons are simply props that, by default, have no mechanical value to speak of. That said, adding magical abilities to weapons in the form of either die roll bonuses or unique abilities (i.e., glows when near evil) is easy as pie and conversion of such weapons from other OGL games can be done on the fly.

It does use hit points and levels, though the former come in two varieties (Body Points and Sanity Points, respectively). Ignoring Sanity Points is easy enough to do and won't impact the game, they're simply there as an option. For the record, the three design goals of the system are:

•Accessibility. These rules are designed to be accessible to both hobby newcomers and seasoned veterans of the hobby alike.

•Compatibility. These rules are designed to be as compatible as possible with the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying System. [Note: As an unplanned side-effect, they ended up havinng a high degree of compatability with other rules sets, as well.]

•Simplicity. These rules are designed to be as simple as possible, minimizing prep time and allowing for quick, fluid, game play.

And with that, so ends my thread hi-jack (Sorry)

I ran two games of C&C. Neither I nor my players were very happy with it.

While many people claim "you can do anything with C&C" the fact is that you can do "anything" with any RPG system... or with a blank sheet of paper, for that matter. It's all a matter of how much work you want to put into personal revisions and house rule design.

Personally, we felt it wasn't worth the effort for our group in the end. We could house rule Moldvay Basic D&D, 1e AD&D, OSRIC, FUDGE or D&D 3.5 and get the same results.

One innovation in C&C that I really liked was the extended saving throw system, with one type of save attached to each ability score. I also felt that the fluff text for classes and races was very well done.

jdrakeh said:

It does prep much faster than D&D, which I miss

Click to expand...

This also.


If I come across a group in my area that wants to try C&C, I'd be willing to run it for them. However, it seems I'm the only person in my local gaming community who has ever had any interest in the game, even after I spent a year mentioning it as an option. :\

I played in a short adventure that stretched over two sessions, and even though I wanted to add a nice rules-lite game to my library, C&C just wasn't it. Character creation was just too boring, and while interesting, the SEIGE Engine in practice just didn't work as well as I would've wanted (the guy who rolled bad and didn't have an ability score above 14 was still regularly outperforming other people with 18s because he played a human and had 3 primes). Being straight-jacketed into the archetypes that the Troll Lords thought were archetypal really wasn't fun, especially when the archetypes were a little silly (the illusionist was seperate from the wizard, but no good support for a swashbuckling duelist?) I can see how the game would appeal to other groups of gamers, but I'm clearly not one of them.

True20 was a much better fit for me in the rules-lite department.