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

[Dragonhelm]

Wow... exactly what I've been lookin at!

I can't say how good it makes me feel to hear someone else say that! I feel a little more validated now.

*I can see how others would find the system rather sparce, but I prefer to build it up as opposed to tearing a more robust system down...

I've often heard that it's easier to build up than to tear down. I've found from my own experience that d20 is so hard-wired together that taking out one little thing (i.e. attacks of opportunity) can lead to a lot of work.

 

[Henry]

I own it, and have tried it, and haven't "left it" per se -- I just use it for one-shots and pickups, more than a regular system. My group doesn't like it much because of the lack of "fiddly bits" to customize characters with, so they're happy with one shots, but they don't like more than that.

 

[Midknightsun]

I haven't played C&C yet, but I was initially interested in giving it a try. Though I know that that doesn't "really" qualify for the purposes of this thread, I'd like to say that I was someone who really, really wanted to like C&C, but just couldn't--- at least not more than 3.5.

The DM in me was getting tired of the constant prep time of 3.5, and the need to consult the books for just about every rule. Looking over C&C with great interest (for several months on and off), I found a lot of the flavor to be nice and the siege system did seem to allow one to put just about anything on top of it without harming it. However, I found it a little too simplistic for my taste. Perhaps 3.5 ruined me for it, I don't know. In the end I found myself wanting something that didn't sacrifice so much substance for speed of use. I don't mind house ruling (I do it myself now and then), Its just that I looked at C&C and realized I'd have to house rule a lot to get it to do what I wanted, which pretty much brings me back to a lot of extra work --which I was trying to avoid with 3.5. It would just have shifted my work to a different aspect of the game. Though I'd have no problem playing in a C&C campaign, I just wouldn't wanna DM it.

 

[Stormborn]

I bought it with the intention of running occasional one-shots with it, but after reading it and doing some testing on my own I was just unimpressed. It lacked a level of detail and customization that i wanted, I didn't care for the seperate XP charts, and overall I was just unimpressed. Havind said that I should add I never played any edition of DnD before 3.0 (other than as a computer game like Planescape or Baldur's Gate) and so had no 'nostalgia' to play on.

 

[Irda Ranger]

I bought the system and got enough "into it" to sign up as a playtester for their high-level rules. I ran a few adventures using it. And I've moved on.

Basically, it seemed on paper to be what I wanted, but actually solved all the wrong "problems" I have with D&D 3x.

I was excited by the thought of not having to plan character development from levels 1-20 out of the gate, to make sure the PC qualified for Feats or PrC's wanted later to flesh out concepts. The character archetypes ended up being too narrow however, and there's no way to really distinguish one Ranger from another (other than choice of equipment and Primes). There's also no presented system for creating a new archetype, such as a Warlock or Sorcerer type caster. A system that intelligently did away with overly-complicated prerequisites for Feats and PrC's would be a better solution for me, allowing customization but also an "organic" character development.

The Primes/SIEGE Engine seemed awesome at first, but I found them to be a bit too abstract and "clumpy" in practice. Consolidating and/or pruning the skills list like 4e, Iron Heroes and SWSE appears to be a better solution.

I actually really liked the way races were handled. Fluff text, as mentioned was top notch. DM prep time was ridiculously short. I've never had any problems coming up with plots, hooks, and NPC "concepts", so it was always rules-gen and stat blocks that slowed me up. I could (and did) write a soup-to-nuts adventure in C&C in about two hours. That was a blast.

But I disliked that C&C maintained OD&D's problems related to relative character power at various levels. Mages still suck at 1st level, and they're still gods at higher levels. Fighters still have an extra attack to look forward to three levels from now. Woot? :\

In the end I moved on because C&C was nice for me (as the GM), but it wasn't doing my players any favors. To fix that I started house-ruling, but I quickly found my house rules documents starting to eclipse the basic rules. It was too similar to older editions of AD&D (and thus, did not improve on it), and retained too many sacred cows. The only thing it really had going for it was the "feel", and if I wanted that I could easily just pull my AD&D books off the shelf and run that game.

I still have the books though.

 

[Ourph]

I ran two sessions of C&C and played in one run as a demo at the FLGS then gave my PHB away to the guy who ran the demo game. Mechanically, C&C was just too bland and vanilla to keep my interest. Reductionism in an RPG can often be a thing of beauty, but there is a distinct line to be drawn between simple and simplistic and C&C falls on the side of simplistic. I guess the biggest turnoff was that nothing about the game struck me as in any way original. The classes were bland, not particularly well-designed, amalgamations of class ideas from AD&D and the SRD, the combat system was simply the 3e system stripped down to the barest of bones, the SIEGE mechanic was nothing more than the ubiquituous universal resolution mechanic implemented poorly. I'm not afraid of using house rules to modify a game to my needs, but if I'm going to use a game as a base for house rules I would at least like the base game to give me some unique reason to choose it over other games. C&C didn't even come close to doing that.

The analogy I used with a few of my local fellow gamers was that, if there were a C&C equivalent to Monopoly, it would have all the property names, money, house and hotel rules, chance and community chest cards removed. The game would be played by rolling dice to move numbered paper chits (not dogs, shoes, and race cards) around a plain black and white board, with the first person to make the full circuit being declared the winner. Is it a game? Yes. Is it a blank slate open for modification? Yes. Is there one original idea involved in the concept of that game? No. Does the game give you any compelling reason to actually sit down and play it more than once? Absolutely not. That was my experience of C&C.

 

[Son_of_Thunder]

2nd AD&D

My group and I just went back to AD&D 2e and sold our C&C books. 2e was what we were familiar with and with house rules did everything we wanted from 3.x, so all's good.

 

[Greylock]

Yep. We left Castles & Crusades. As a group, most were satisfied with 3.5, but the DM was a little burned out on it. Myself, I'd hit a creative wall. So, we went to Castles & Crusades. It was fun for a while, but we made some basic mistakes, some from the DM's end in choosing material that didn't adapt well, and some discord in the group.

So, we ditched C&C and went 3.0. Yep, 3.0. Gave Dragonstar a go. Well, that was short-lived, so we rebooted in Rifts. That didn't go so well either. We refreshed with some Settlers of Catan and decided to have a group vote on a new campaign, with a fresh look at genres and systems. Well, the vote of the group was unexpected, at least to me, but delightfully acceptable. No one in the group wanted to go back to 3.5, and no one wanted to learn a new system again. So, we went back to Castles & Crusades, having learned from our previous mistakes. The new game is going dandy.

I know that doesn't exactly fit the OP's criteria, but technically we DID try C&C and didn't stick with it. But we eventually made our way back to it, and are quite happy with our game again. This one has legs.

 

[Hairfoot]

So, which system did the people who ruled out D&D AND C&C go to?

Does 1e do the job better?

 

[jdrakeh]

So, which system did the people who ruled out D&D AND C&C go to?

Does 1e do the job better?

I went back to D&D 3.5 briefly. Then I designed my own system. I still keep copies of the Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game in reserve, along with copies of BESM d20 and Grim Tales. And I have three copies of the D&D 3.5 PHB just in case (in case my free time gets more manageable, I guess).