Treebore said:
Its obvious the nay sayers didn't give C&C a fair assessment, one of them in this thread even admitted they returned it the next day. Yep, they know what they are talking about.
Because I'd love to waste three weekends playing a game I didn't like. Yeah right.
We spent two hours prior to the game going over the rules (with the help of some overviews found here at ENWorld), making note of what C&C added and what it took away. The SEIGE engine got a big plus from us. Great idea. But then the target numbers just seemed arbitrary. Wasn't enough to put me off of the game. The Seige engine was something I'd been looking for since d20 got rolling.
But then we sat down and started making characters. I got to pick a race and a class and a prime. We were planning on playing the game in a pre-existing campaign world, and I was going to make a character descended from one of the heroes in an older game. Assassin was good (if a shameless appeal to nostalgia), but the character needed some more melee presence, so I decided I'd multiclass him to monk. But wait! No rules for multiclassing. That combined with the horrendously small amount of character creation options weren't enough to deter us. We spent some time designing an unarmed assassin class (took about 45 minutes, and it wasn't easy with little guidance from the book). Still, I wasn't willing to give up on the game. I'd been waiting for this game for too long to do that.
We got into play, and after a break about four hours in a player mentioned that he was disapointed in his character, since its abilities didn't really reflect what he wanted (he had made a thief who he wanted to play as a social dilitante as he had done with a rogue previously in 3E). Over some dinner we decided to add feats back into the game (since I assured everyone that the game was designed to allow this sort of portability). It also helped cover up the problems we all had with how little character customization the rules allowed (short of designing a new class every time you get a new character idea).
When we got back into it, we got into a nice-sized melee in a tavern and the game just started to break down. The thief was trying to get behind the counter of the tavern for cover and made a dexterity check to do so (high stat and a prime), which he did easily. The human knight then said he wanted to do the same. The CK said he couldn't, but the knight said that he had dexterity as his prime (for being human), and thus should be allowed to do the same action as the thief. The game ground to a halt for a few minutes while the CK explained why he didn't think a knight should be able to move like that and questioned why the knight had dexterity as a prime. The knight replied that he wanted to be a master rider, and ride is a dexterity skill in 3E.
The argument went nowhere, and the knight reluctantly agreed to the CK's ruling, though he then requested permission to change his prime from dexterity (since it was useless to a knight in the CK's mind). The game continued, with more little rules inconsistancies and inadequacies cropping up. The mage tried to polymorph himself into a giant but noticed that the monster didn't have the abilities mentioned in the spell, so we spent a few minutes reverse-engineering the entry to get the correct stats. The knight tried to jump a fence with his horse, but we couldn't figure out what number the horse would use to make the check, and whether or not the knight could make a check to assist the horse. My big frustration came when the knight and I tried to hold ground in a hallway. Earlier, a bandit had used a strength check to hold us back while others escaped with an NPC we were after, but now the CK ruled that we could not attempt the same. With no rules on how it was done in the first place, we didn't have much of an argument, so we set back into our normal mode of trading blows ad nauseum.
That turned out to be the nail in the coffin for C&C for us. Combat was
boring. We just sort of swung at one another until the bad guys died, then we moved over to the next bad guy and repeated the process until the fight was over. Occassionally we were allowed to do things like the thief's tumble to safety in the tavern, but generally the CK was hesitant to allow "special moves" that weren't already in the book. We patched this problem before the last encounter of the night by importing 3E's rules for tripping, grappling, disarming, etc.
When the game was over, the CK said that he'd been really frustrated by the lack of direction from the rulebook in terms of figuring out how to do certain manuevers in-game and the players were all frustrated at having to play characters who (mechanically) had nothing to do with who the characters they invisioned. There were no options for players to do anything really meaningful with character development on the mechanical end, and we enjoyed that aspect of 3E. The knight's player pointed out that after all we'd done to make the game more pallatable, we were basically playing 3E again. Nobody was having fun playing a game with such limited options and one that basically came out of the box requiring so much house-ruling to make it playable for us. Why would I want to play C&C when it didn't offer players any options and the CK nothing but frustration? To save ourselves half an hour or so of character creation time? To give the CK easier-to-read stat blocks? Not worth it. I come to a game looking to translate a character I have in my head into gameplay, and C&C staunchly refused to allow that with its boiler-plate character creation system. If I couldn't play the character I wanted, and I couldn't get the character to do what I wanted in-game, why would I bother with the game? So the next day I returned C&C to my FLGS and the next game continued the previous session with 3E rules. It took longer to recreate our characters, but we were much more satisfied with how our characters turned out and how the gameplay ran. We wanted simple gameplay, but we didn't really get it in C&C. Luckily Blue Rose filled that void pretty nicely.
) I actually had fun playing some of these. My favorite character was (in Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic) an army chaplin who carried (among other things) a hypodermic dart gun, with hypos full of holy water, in case he ever ran into a vampire! Yes, it was goofy, but it was fun.
