Generally, I (the Judge or Dungeon Master) had a very good time.
DCC absolutely teaches and invokes the Old School Mindset, and so it is a worthy candidate for any Dungeons & Dragons player looking to elevate their game above 5th Edition.
The funnel concept and the bare-bones chargen really help sending the message this isn't your regular D&D anymore.
However.
The rules are in places shoddily written, with inconsistencies, ambiguities and unclear passages happening way too often for a game that has been revised eight times already.
This is in part because the game developer (and his proponents, including some of you reading this) apparently conflates two things, one good and one very very bad:
- leaving things up for the reader to decide can be good
- leaving the reader wondering what is meant is never good
It's perfectly okay for a ruleset to state "here it's up to you the reader". Sometimes a set of rules is better off not overly specifying a rule.
But this needs to be clearly communicated.
Just leaving a poorly explained rule with the justification "it's better the rule doesn't clearly state one or the other" is extremely annoying. It's just wrong, full stop.
In each case where the designer intentionally wants to not make a decision, say so.
The rules still fails to clearly explain how Luck points work, how and when Spellburn can be used, how the Deed die interacts with multiple actions, and many more niggling details.
Soon someone will pop up to defend the rules with "its a GOOD THING each DM must decide for themselves".
But again, the rules should have clearly stated when any omission or ambiguity is intentional, rather than leaving the reader wondering what is meant.
Another major weakness of the rules is how overengineered the spellcasting is.
The basic idea is fine. Spellcasting is much too similar to technology in regular D&D. Things that work reliably, and give off reproducible effects, we call "tools", not "spells".
However, DCC increases the rules-load way too much by making everything variable. And by making each individual spell vary in its own individual way. This is nothing but clutter. The core idea was good, but somebody needed to rein in the writers.
Playing a game of D&D is already chaotic and unpredictable as it is. Adding a die roll to determine how effective any given spell is, is fine. Having to look up each and every spellcasting on a table that is unique to each spell, with results scattered all over the place (as opposed to a simple "higher is strictly better" scheme) is changing far too many variables at once.
Compared to regular D&D, adding randomness to just one or two factors, would go a long way to combating the feeling that magic is only a reliable tool, or technology. Adding randomness to essentially ALL factors just makes DCC magic a pain to use, with next to zero added benefit.
Unfortunately, these aspects of DCC mean my players won't want to play another campaign with these rules.
Avoid DCC if you and your group prefers clearly understandable rules and/or rules for magic that doesn't severely bog down gameplay.
That said, playing a campaign of DCC has really given me valuable OSR insight that I will be sure to carry with me into whatever comes next.
TL;DR: Dungeon Crawl Classics would profoundly gain by a 2nd Edition, where an experienced ttrpg editor is hired to clean up all the confusing rules passages, and to kill off the darlings in the spellcasting rules.