3 out of 5 rating for Dungeon Crawl Classics
Ok, so it's been a LONG time since I've written a review for a product, and this actually has less to do with people who might read this review, and more to do with me having a moment of catharsis. Mostly, this is just me waxing philosophically about play styles. If you don't want to read that, feel free to move along.
So, I had a chance to play a game of this over the weekend at a local convention. Prior to that, "DCC" meant a collection of modules from the d20 days. Little did I know that this existed in RPG form. Why they didn't bother actually coming up with a name for the RPG, I have no idea, but nevertheless. DCC, the RPG is an interesting take on role-playing.
Now the philosophical part. When you roll a 1st level character, there is a bit of a "gap" between the character's first adventure, and whatever might have come before that. In every core rulebook since the beginning of time, there is a chart that tells you what your "starting gold" will be. With this somewhat meager amount of money, you are to procure your items and begin your adventuring career. For some GM's, presumably, this amount of money is tantamount to a fortune. Just how, pray-tell, did this individual come up with 80gp anyway? Especially given that your average potato farmer might never see a single gold coin in his or her lifetime. There is some amount of reality-bending that we assume on behalf of the game experience that we wash over this nuance. But not DCC - nay. This area is rife for role-playing and "gritty" combat, life-or-death stuff, even. While I can certainly appreciate the many aspects of backstory that this can provide, is it really necessary?
The economic reality of the game play experience also really breaks down in most games. Let's face it: how many times in your gaming career have you ever actually purchased mundane full plate armor? By the time you've got the funds to buy full plate armor, you've already got +1 chainmail, and the full plate becomes kind of irrelevant. Surely, there's room to more fully explore this area of the role-playing experience, and somehow even drag out this experience over a longer period of time? I can certainly appreciate that. But the reality of it, I think it's also kind of boring. But I can appreciate the effort.
The last aspect of this that I want to touch upon is the spellcasting system. As others, in other reviews, have pointed out. This is overkill, and strikes me as (as my subject line says), "show me on the doll where the bad player touched you". In other words, this entire system reeks of a solution to a problem that the author probably had with flying wizards throwing down fireballs from above, and decided that an entirely new system that screwed players - especially wizards, needed to be built. Some clever player, probably more clever than the author, found a loophole, or used some clever combination of magic to utterly decimate the BBEG in their campaign, and they got butthurt over it. The solution to this isn't to completely rebuild an entire new spellcasting system that is so complicated, and has so many baked-in penalties into to basically guarantee that no one in their right mind would ever want to play a wizard. The solution, I feel, is to just play 5th edition. The concentration mechanic easily, and sublimely solves most of these problems. The authors of DCC should be ashamed in thinking they needed to devote hundreds of pages towards rewriting the magic system. A more simple mechanic could have solved it, and it just kind of reeks of GM-payback.
I think DCC is an interesting system. Full disclosure: I've never read the book, only played in a game, so obviously take this review with a large grain of salt. I just feel like it's a really heavy-handed solution trying to solve problems that don't really exist.