Crows Officially Announced by MCDM

MCDM Productions has officially announced Crows, a new dungeon-crawling RPG. The new RPG is being led by James Introcaso, with Nick De Spain directing the art. The game is described as a game about staring death in the face and grabbing as much loot from dungeons before your luck runs out. The game is played using D6s and D10s, with a health system similar to Knave in which inventory slots doubles as a health tracker.

In a Patreon post released today, Introcaso described Crows and its differences from Draw Steel. For one, experience points is determined by calculating the value of loot taken from a dungeon. Crows retains the power roll from Draw Steel but with some differences as to the result of the roll. Unlike Draw Steel, where the power roll always results in some kind of benefit for the player, the power roll in Crows has negative results for low rolls. However, players have no limit to the number of circumstantial bonuses they have in Crows, which can result in higher results with good planning.

Other nuances mentioned in the post include that all players can use any equipment they might find (spellbooks were given as an example), but some character classes will be more attuned to certain kinds of equipment. There's also a base building component to Crows, in which players build up the town they're headquartered in. There will also be a default campaign setting for Crows, described as a world in which Archmages were eventually corrupted by the magic they wielded and became Necromancers who waged war on each other until they all disappeared.

No release date was announced for Crows, but MCDM plans to provide updates on the development of Crows via its various social media platforms.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Sure, but as has been discussed ad nauseum here every time someone asks how they can run a better horror game in D&D, powering up your player characters too much makes horror a lot harder to pull off.

If you build characters getting more powerful into the character design system, rather than into the adventure design, you are all but guaranteeing that some tables will see characters outpacing the threat level of the game, rendering a lot of the horror aspects moot.

If we look at successful horror games like Call of Cthulhu or Mothership, we see the player characters stay weak forever. In contrast, in horror-coded games like the World of Darkness games, it's easy, even in the most horrific editions, for characters to get powerful enough to survive anything other than an adversarial GM, turning the games into the Underworld movies -- fun, but not at all scary.

That said, the MCDM folks are smart designers and I'm sure they've thought about this issue. So we'll see what they come up with.

I think that the issue lies in there being a fundamental difference between a horror game and a Resident Evil-inspired survival horror, and without adressing it, the game is going to be confused about what it actually is. Survival Horror has the thing ou list as a problem build-in as a feature, it rewards progression and mastering the game by making you more powerful, while maintaining the tension either by focusing on the atmosphere and other aspects of horror, and by keeping your character relatively squishy, your intentory at hand limited (while storage units are virtually unlimited) and number of saving spots similairly limited. Limit the number of ways and times PCs can heal and it won't matter how strong they get, they will need to rest and recover. That tension works great in Draw Steel and would be amazing to emulate the dilemma we often face in survival horror - "do I risk progressing now, clearing/exploring one more room? Or do I go back to safe spot, rearm and recover?"

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think that the issue lies in there being a fundamental difference between a horror game and a Resident Evil-inspired survival horror, and without adressing it, the game is going to be confused about what it actually is.

Ideally, all RPG design teams would have this level of introspection: "Does the gameplay loop create the experience we want, or is it incentivizing something different instead?"

And yeah, Team MCDM likely has a clear idea of where they fall on this spectrum. Looking forward to more communication from them about their vision for the game.