DCC is a retro-clone of old school D&D. SotDL is like a distillation of the d20 OGL fused with a distillation of Warhammer Fantasy. Depends what you are looking for.
Not really, it's actually a complete rebuild of the concept from the ground up: more an alternate take on how to play stories like old pulp Sword & Sorcery rather than replicate the idiosyncrasies of OD&D. More of an alternate 4E.
What? I'm reading reviews and no one remotely mentions 4e as a source of inspiration. It's basically B/X race-as-class with a modified d20 OGL and weird random naughty word happening all the time.
No, it's a reaction to 4E: how Goodman decided he would do a radical rethinking RPGs, after frustrations with trying to be a 3rd party 4E publisher. The game is no more B/X than it is 4E, however, nor is it 1E. It is as radical a retool of 3E as 4E is, just with a different design goal. It stands out because it is not a retroclone, but rather a fresh rules approach to old fictional space.
I gave it a quick look at the gaming store a few years back. It felt like an OSR game. Elf as a class is very B/X. It's the reason we switched to AD&D.
I broadly concur with Parmandur. I would say it's still at its core a D&D variant; it is built off the 3E OGL chassis. But with new funky dice (to recapture the feeling of polyhedrons being "weird" and to offer more math tweaks with fewer modifiers), race as class (and each class has pretty strong niche elements), the elaborate spell system with failure and all those charts with variable effects, and some other interesting sub-systems (like Luck) meant to make it emulate Weird fiction and pulp adventure stories better than D&D wound up doing.
DCC is nothing like 4E in the mechanical sense.
I find the 4E mention completely unfortunate, but the rest of the post remains true. It actually "is" a reimagining of old school D&D rather than some kind of faithful clone.
Please do!
That generator even supports the specific adventure I'm talking aboutDCC also has a ton of GG support and 3rd party support. Not to mention it’s broadly compatible with their Mutant Crawl Classics and Lankmar stuff.
I’d you want to run a quick zero level funnel this comes in handy.
Purple Sorcerer Games: 0-Level Party & Tourney Generator
Purple Sorcerer Games is your source for exciting, affordable, fun-to-play adventures compatible with the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG from Goodman Games.purplesorcerer.com
Mod Note:
most of the covers look like they should be painted on the side of a van!
That is a particularly B/X move, and there are other exhies: however, a lot of the Sacred Cows that 4E slaughtered stay dead in DCC, such as Vancian casting which is entirely gone (spells are skill rolls that can be dangerous, meaning a Gandalf type is wise enough to avoid spellcasring if at all possible). The XP system is remarkably different from any used in D&D: sort of like milestones, but the milestone is every encounter giving 1-4 XP (by DM fiat of how cool the encounter went), the encounter possibly being a conversation with an NPC, trap or a puzzle.
To clarify, it is a direct reaction to 4E, even more than Pathfinder, as Goodman took 4E as an invitation to imagine what he would do if he could rewrite D&D as radical ally as 4E did.
