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.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

On the other hand, I suspect that players will tend to pigeonhole their characters into certain class-like archetypes anyway. Once you start investing in, say, melee attributes, you start thinking of yourself as a "fighter" and you continue to invest in those attributes/skills/equipment. So class becomes self-defining.

Reading on...


But isn't that true regardless of whether or not there are classes? At least, I've never seen players in a class-based game say, "Yeah, you know what...it's not worth the risk. What if the only treasure I find is a wand, which I can't use? Better to just sit in the tavern where it's safe."

So, again, I like the flavor, and I like class-less games, but I'm not following the logic of how the game design drives the expected behavior.

Have you checked out Knave? It's an inspiration for Crows. Knave has no classes. No skills. No feats. Not even species. Nothing but attributes. Attributes and gear. So all character growth is through gear. That creates a motivation to go adventuring that's heightened even more than the default for D&D.

The particular genius of Knave is that when you get seriously wounded, wounds take up inventory slots. The same inventory slots that hold your gear. There's an intrinsic tension built into the game -- you need to adventure to get gear and gain power, but adventuring can cause you to lose gear and lose power. Brilliant stuff.

I first read Knave a couple months ago. My first thought was to fuse it with Shadowdark to have at least a little bit of additional character customization. I looked around but couldn't find an existing game which did that, so I started writing up my own. A few weeks later, Crows was announced. I guess something is in the air.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Have you checked out Knave? It's an inspiration for Crows. Knave has no classes. No skills. No feats. Not even species. Nothing but attributes. Attributes and gear. So all character growth is through gear. That creates a motivation to go adventuring that's heightened even more than the default for D&D.

The particular genius of Knave is that when you get seriously wounded, wounds take up inventory slots. The same inventory slots that hold your gear. There's an intrinsic tension built into the game -- you need to adventure to get gear and gain power, but adventuring can cause you to lose gear and lose power. Brilliant stuff.

I first read Knave a couple months ago. My first thought was to fuse it with Shadowdark to have at least a little bit of additional character customization. I looked around but couldn't find an existing game which did that, so I started writing up my own. A few weeks later, Crows was announced. I guess something is in the air.

I haven't looked at Knave. Maybe if I did then I would understand the connection better.

Maybe it's like XP: it's always tempting to see if one more door will get you just a little more XP. So in a gear-based game maybe it's similar?

At the same time, I have a hard time disassociating "gear-based" from video games like WoW and Diablo. I hope that is a misapprehension...

 

[zakael19]

At the same time, I have a hard time disassociating "gear-based" from video games like WoW and Diablo. I hope that is a misapprehension...

In those examples, your gear tweaks your class build and gives bonuses to certain things - but your class and talents determine your skills and such. If you wanted a MMO like to draw a parallel to for some reason, I think Guild Wars 2 would make more sense - the weapons you equip there entirely determine your available skills (but still by class so not a perfect analogy). Equip a spell book to cast spells, equip a 1her to have a shield and hit things.