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.
