Clavis said:
What I love about C&C is that is essentially D&D with cleaned up mechanics. It's exactly what I was hoping 3rd edition was going to be. I actually stopped playing 1st ed AD&D because I felt like AD&D was too rules heavy. I skipped over 2nd edition altogether, and was mostly playing Vampire in the 90s. I also tried Rules Cyclopedia D&D, and loved it. I was one of the people who really wanted a streamlined, new edition of D&D. Since 3.x has turned out to be much more rules-heavy than AD&D ever was, I quickly found myself unable to have fun DMing it. So when I found out about C&C, it sounded like it perfect for me. I'm now DMing a group of 7 players, most of whom where also looking for a lighter, faster system that would let them focus on fun roleplaying.
S'mon said:
Yes - we play C&C because of problems we had with 3e. I like 3e a lot for about the first 6 levels, but after that it rapidly becomes too complex and the power gradient is different from what I want.
But there _are_ other alternatives to standard D&D, that are lighter and yet still pretty recognizable as D&D/d20. For example, the Lone Wolf rpg from Mongoose.
You can see a quickie video review here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaJF8_L9Byw
No, I'm not the guy that did the review, just someone that appreciates him doing it.
Lone Wolf is the first d20 game I ever came across that I thought, "You know, I'd be willing to run this straight by the book."
S'mon said:
C&C is a cleaned up version of AD&D incorporating streamlined d20/3e based mechanics and it does what I want.
And this right here is the big split I think between a lot of people that like C&C and a lot of people that don't.
As a slimmed down version of a d20 game, C&C is great. It might be a bit on the light side, but you can certainly plug in rules bits from other d20 games to fill out those areas that you want. It's also great because you can grab stuff from the older editions of D&D, and slap them together with newer things, and the process is relatively painless.
The problem is that most of the fans seem to be like S'mon in that what they really want is AD&D, and the system veers towards supporting that. I used to defend C&C as not being about Nostalgia gaming, but I've given up on it. While the system _is_ capable of being used for far more than that, the majority of the people that are into the system also seem to be into the "good old days" of what D&D "used to be about".
If you didn't like AD&D or don't have any knowledge of it, C&C (and many of its fans) is something you're probably not going to really get. Sure, someone could walk in cold having only been playing rpgs for a year, never having played AD&D before, and fall in love with C&C. AD&D (and to a large degree, C&C) has a particular aesthetic to it, and some people like that.
Others don't.
Of course, it gets muddled because some people _really_ like AD&D as it is. They feel that C&C changes things too much and just aren't interested in it.
The thing is, a fair amount of the fans (at least all the ones I've seen) are _extremely_ firm about "This is what I hoped AD&D would be more like" and that's pretty much the end of it. They're not really interested in seeing C&C move beyond rather basic grim-n-gritty-low-magic-years-to-level-a-character-to-20th-level fantasy. It doesn't mean that every single person playing C&C buys into this mindset, but it looms over everything.
I really wish that C&C could have been something more than what it is. It's got an awful lot of potential for people like myself that enjoy things on the rules-lighter side. For better or worse though, the majority of fans have adopted it as "This is what I hoped AD&D would be more like".
If you just dislike the complexity of default D&D/d20 there _are_ other alternatives. Pay ones, like Lone Wolf or even Everstone (it could be stripped down pretty easily, and I've done some of it myself). Blue Rose even seems to be a slimmed down version, although True20 seems to take the Blue Rose concept and complicate almost to the point of D&D. There's free ones like Simple20 by jdrakeh:
http://miscellaneousdebris.sitesled.com/games.html or Perfect 20 from Levi Kornelson:
http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/srd/perfect20/
If you just like AD&D (or its aesthetics), but wish the mechanics were cleaner it's a good way to go, with the added bonus of being able to hijack d20 stuff to use.
