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I typed all this up for Kid_Kyoto's 5/5 Stars Thread and thought I'd repost here because we really need a thread about this awesome game.

The DCC RPG

You’re no hero.

You’re an adventurer: a reaver, a cutpurse, a heathen-slayer, a tight-lipped warlock guarding long-dead secrets. You seek gold and glory, winning it with sword and spell, caked in the blood and filth of the weak, the dark, the demons, and the vanquished. There are treasures to be won deep underneath, and you shall have them.

Return to the glory days of fantasy with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Adventure as 1974 intended you to, with modern rules grounded in the origins of sword & sorcery. Fast play, cryptic secrets, and a mysterious past await you: turn the page…

A little company in Seattle called Wizards of the Coast made it big thanks to a card game you've probably heard of. They made it so big, in fact, that they were able to purchase another little company in 1997. That other little company was called TSR and it had made it big years before on a roleplaying game you've probably heard of. In 2000, WotC released its own take on that RPG as Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition. Third Edition, and later its "3.5" revision, was a huge success for a variety of reasons -- not least of all the solid "core mechanic" of rolling a d20 and comparing the modified result against a target number. As you might expect, not everyone was totally sold on the complexity of the new rules despite the line's slick production values. Some D&D fans never abandoned their preference for the Basic/Expert version of D&D from 1977. By 2006, an "Old School Renaissance" (OSR) had been declared and indie publishers began to release "retroclones" of the B/X edition.

A year later, WotC announced the end of Third Edition and released Fourth Edition in 2008. WotC informed another little company, this one called Paizo, which had been printing the official D&D magazines, that its services would no longer be required. Paizo bristled and announced that it would continue to support the Third Edition rules, even going so far as to publish their own "retroclone" called Pathfinder. Across the internet, furious debates raged between fans of D&D 4E and fans of Pathfinder. This destructive period has been called the Edition Wars. In the meantime, the OSR continued to flourish. Perhaps the OSR reminded gamers of a simpler time when RPGs were about wonder and excitement rather than intense partisan debate. The trouble with the OSR games, however, is that none of them made comprehensive use of contemporary developments in RPG design. In short, they were characterized more by nostalgia than innovation.

Into the fray stepped Goodman Games, an indie publisher founded back in 2001. Goodman Games had made a name for itself by publishing "old school" style D&D modules that worked with Third Edition rules under the name "Dungeon Crawl Classics." Joseph Goodman sized up the Edition Wars and OSR not only with business acumen but also with what can only be described as passion. He realized that the market was missing a game that spoke authentically to the weird wonders of Gary Gygax's vision and at the same time transcended the clunkiness of Gygax's (and other's) rules. To little fanfare (at least outside of the cognoscenti), Goodman Games announced the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG (DCC RPG) in 2011. This past spring, the DCC RPG finally saw print.

The reaction so far has been telling: a few folks have picked up the massive nearly-500-page tome with no great expectations. After all, we've seen an army of "old school" games since 2006. But after cracking the thing open, jaws dropped. Astoundingly, this is a OGL game (i.e., the rules were based on Third Edition) that genuinely captures the experience of discovering Advanced Dungeons & Dragons -- or hell, RPGs generally -- for the first time. The DCC RPG even insists on using "funky dice," strange things like d3s and d24s. In a world where a 20-sided polyhedron is taken for granted, rolling a d7 is a reminder of just how, well, weird, these dice really are. And the art reminds us just how, again, weird and wonderous the world of roleplaying is. Most importantly, the rules are exciting: every spell has multiple outcomes depending on the skill and luck of the caster; every player can begin with four 0-level characters fully expecting at least three of them to meet a gruesome end before making first level; warriors that are actually better at fighting than wizards (no kidding, that's not how things were in Third Edition) ... and much more ...

Earlier this year, WotC announced the end of Fourth Edition and the imminent release of Fifth, or as they insist on calling it, "D&D Next." WotC has very loudly declared that their intent with Fifth Edition is to unify D&D fans of all tastes and styles under one ruleset, something that has not happened since the earliest period of D&D's history (1974-77) and only then because there was only one ruleset. That's an ambitious claim and, unfortunately for WotC, not one that I think they can achieve -- something that their playtest rules release nearly a month ago only confirms. Whatever other problems WotC might face, the real trouble is that the DCC RPG has already been released.

And the DCC RPG is the best D&D-inspired RPG that has ever been written.

Modules:
http://www.goodman-games.com/50665preview.html
http://www.goodman-games.com/5066preview.html
http://www.goodman-games.com/5067preview.html
http://www.goodman-games.com/5068preview.html
http://www.goodman-games.com/5069preview.html
http://www.goodman-games.com/5071preview.html
http://www.goodman-games.com/5072preview.html
http://www.goodman-games.com/5073preview.html
http://www.goodman-games.com/5074preview.html

Third Party Publisher Projects (among others):
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1778492214/appendix-n-adventure-toolkits-dcc-rpg-modules
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/932138058/tales-from-the-fallen-empire-sword-and-sorcery-set?ref=live
http://www.goodman-games.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=70&t=21797

So. I re-ask my previous question. What's the deal with the funky dice?

I'm going to have to check out me not very FLGS to see if they've got a copy of this I can browse.

htj wrote:@Manchu. Please explain the arcanes mysteries of a 'd7.' I have never heard of such a wonder, and am intrigued as to whether it's just a damaged d8.

In addition to the ... isn't it silly to call them this given how crazy they already are .. "basic" polyhedrals (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20), the DCC RPG also uses some "funky dice": d3, d5, d7, d14, d16, d24, and d30.

You can use a few of the "basic" polyhedrals to accomplish what the "funky dice" will do but you can also find the funky dice themselves:



Most of the funky dice were invented by Colonel Zocchi of GameScience (if you've seen a d100, he's the reason it's called a "zocchihedron") and you can buy them from gamestation.net -- although be warned: precision dice are not as cheap or as ... nonchalant? ... as Chessex dice. When you take a set of precision dice out of the package, they need some work: usually, they doon't come inked so you have to do that yourself (crayon wax works well) and some of the mold flak needs cutting away. You might even have indentations. In that case, I've heard gamestation.net will be very helpful if you send them a picture of the damage.

In other words, the DCC RPG takes us back to a time when only weirdo gamers had these weirdo dice.

htj wrote:So. I re-ask my previous question. What's the deal with the funky dice?

Well at first glance it would just seem that they are dice, but, you know, funky.


I imagine they are there to remind you of the first time you used a dice that wasn't a d6: d4, d8, d10, d12, and d20. They have become so common they have lost their novelty and using other types brings the novelty back to your randomization process. Though it might also be that they really like odd numbers.

It looks like fun; I would like to try it.

And the DCC RPG is the best D&D-inspired RPG that has ever been written.

Have you checked out Lamentations of the Flame Princess? That's a more basic revamp of D&D, but has some good, innovative mechanics (particularly how they extrapolate skills from OD&D, and encumbrance) and a lot of atmosphere. Might not be enough new in there to be comparable, though.

I have a friend who is mega into OSR games and he's a big fan of LotFP. But his final verdict is that it didn't need to be an entire stand alone game. I ended up buying Labyrinth Lord over LotFP myself.

I have and like Lab Lord. But then, I started on Mentzer Basic and Cook Expert, which is practically the same thing.

Well, hopefully Myriad will have a copy of this in stock for you to fall in love with.

Hmm, I'd be tempted to write off the odd new dice as a gimmick, but that would be overly dismissive of me. And from the sounds of it, kind of unfair. Plus, I like having dice. I'm a born collector.

Sadly, they didn't have a copy of this a my local store when I stopped in. I'll have to check back another day.

Manchu wrote:Well, hopefully Myriad will have a copy of this in stock for you to fall in love with.

Hopefully. Apparently they also just got Adventurer, Conqueror, King, which is the other one intriguing me right now.

I just ordered ACK two days ago, coincidentally. I'll report in after browsing through it.

I love the concept of dice chains. Somehow, the idea of using different dice is more appealing than applying different base attack bonuses.

This game - DCC RPG -, as well as the Traveller 5th ed, has rekindled my interest in playing RPG's again. I started in the good old days, 1977 actually, and no other game has ignighted my passion for fantasy gaming since this game. I have not felt the excitment of hitting an adventure in years.

For your interest the kickstarter Traveller page is:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/traveller5/traveller-5th-edition?ref=live

I played it for 10 hours last Saturday for the first time. I was very impressed and am waiting for my FLGS to get a copy in for me.

Did you play one of the modules?

Manchu wrote:I just ordered ACK two days ago, coincidentally. I'll report in after browsing through it.

So what are your thoughts on this system? ANy final thoughts on the DCC game? I mayself am torn between running DCC or going back to my roots with 1st ed. AD&D.

Manchu wrote:Did you play one of the modules?

Yes. Sailors on the Starless Sea. We went through the 0-level "funnel" wherein we each played two characters (we had 18 PCs to start with!) and play an adventure where the survivors go on to be 1st level. Only five or six starting PCs actually survived, including one of mine who was regurgitated by something that didn't like the taste of elf. And here I thought everything liked the taste of elf!

BattleBrotherBob wrote:

Manchu wrote:I just ordered ACK two days ago, coincidentally.

So what are your thoughts on this system?

Something went wrong with the order, it never shipped, I was never charged, and I haven't bothered to re-order it.

BattleBrotherBob wrote:Any final thoughts on the DCC game? I mayself am torn between running DCC or going back to my roots with 1st ed. AD&D.

I have been playing Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord recently and am loving it. That said, those First Edition clones are very, very rules light. DCC is much lighter than 3.5 but not so light as S&W and LL.

rules light <--LL--S&W----DCC-------3.5----4E--> rules heavy

In other words, there's not a huge difference between playing a retroclone and DCC if your goal is avoiding the tone of Third Edition and later D&D. But DCC does give you a bit more to "grab onto" you might say than the First Edition style games. I would prefer to play DCC over LL or S&W, all other things being equal.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

PrimarchX wrote:And here I thought everything liked the taste of elf!

I'm extremely eager to try out the funnel system. I think this has got to be one of the coolest innovations of DCC. You have to get your "special snowflake" urges worked out by playing characters in other games, maybe, but then you can hit this funnel thing running. I bet it was a blast.