DCC: A Monkey's Initial Thoughts

I don't think I'm exactly the target audience for the upcoming and now available in beta Dungeon Crawl Classics. I am a gamer of a certain age who cut his teeth on the Moldvay edition of basic D&D and has afforded his original AD&D 1e hardcovers a place of honor on his RPG bookshelf. When I see classic illustrations by Trampier or Otus, I do tend to fall into a golden stupor of nostalgia. But I was never a guy who embraced random player characters or (gods forbid) high casualty rates among those characters. In games that I played or ran, PCs were finely crafted heroes that usually seemed destined for greatness. And in recent years, I have moved towards games that require very little (if any) in-game reference to the books or charts.

But, I gotta say that I find myself swept up in the DCC hype anyway. Maybe it's the old school crowd that I'm running with these days, but I've been more willing embrace randomness in character creation. Arriving at a viable first level character through natural selection still gives me pause, but I must say that I find the idea strangely intriguing. If nothing else, I'd be willing to try it at least once.

Much has been said about the art already. I don't have much more to add on that score other than the fact that a) I love it and b) think that it builds nicely on Goodman's Dungeon Alphabet. Yeah, there's a lot of art. But that doesn't bother me in the slightest as I think it mostly helps to create a distinct feel for a game with only an implied setting. I like many games that lack art entirely, but I cannot deny that good art can hook my attention, make me persevere through rules that I'm skeptical about, and help me envision how the game is meant to be played.

There has been many complaints about the Zocchi dice. While I don't actually own any yet, I have no problem with buying a set for the game as I'm of the opinion that you can never have too many dice. And as a Risus guy, they would expand my options for games that employ Funky Dice.

I love, love, love the Luck Score and think it is a nice and colorful replacement for the feats of recent editions of D&D. I dig how Thieves and Halflings can burns Luck and later get it it back.

Even though I'm wary of creating a stable of expendable characters, I do like the idea of starting with 0-level characters. I think the Occupation table is awesome and is the table that can most readily be customized for a given game world. I'm thinking back to my first edition Warhammer FRP and you could almost take those tables and use them directly. It wouldn't be too hard to create a sword & sandals-style table, or Renaissance, early modern, planetary romance, or even post-apocalyptic.

As a Risus guy, I also love how the occupations imply an inherent set of skills. Indeed, it is the game's skill system for non-thieves. Next to the magic system, this is perhaps my favorite aspect of the game.

I love the class write-up and find all the class/race options to be very playable. One quibble, though... for a game that purportedly goes back to the pulp sword & sorcery roots of the hobby, I find myself wondering how you could possibly create Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser without the addition of multi-classing rules. The Mouser, especially, is problematic. He is clearly a thief but he is also one of the finest swordsmen in the world (never mind his minor magical capabilities). I'd also prefer to see a way for non-Warriors to perform Mighty Deeds, even if they are much less effective.

The charts... eh, I'm a littloe put off by them. But not too much. I'm going to without judgment on them until I actually play the game. As long as they are not too cumbersome to use, I think they could add a lot to a game. I do hope they prettify their presentation is the final version of the game.

And on initial read, I really dig the flavor of the magic. But that's going to require a closer read to see exactly what it is that I like about it. I'm also gong to give the combat section a close read, since I mostly just skimmed it to get to the other stuff.