Let’s cut open Dungeon Crawl Classics and see how it bleeds | RPG Review

I think a lot of folks who only know and play wizards of the Coast's fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons love that game because it has given them three kinds of moments with their friends moments of fear as in worry that their character will get hurt or killed moments of Triumph either by their cleverness or a lucky roll of the dice and moments of hilarity where a joke or line or comment at the table creates a good laugh but those folks don't know or realize is that B&D 5e can create those moments but it is not really spef specifically engineered to generate them it's a bit of a hodgepodge in terms of game design and intent Dungeon Crawl Classics on the other hand has developed a cultish devotion and following because it has in fact been created to be an engine of those moments danger Triumph and hilarity it does this by being particularly brutal with its level zero funnel and lowl deadliness with its potentially very powerful class abilities like magic if you're lucky or backstab and with the fact that nothing in this game is taking itself too seriously especially if you take the cues from the artwork in this core rule book in other words this game is more Dungeons and Dragons than Dungeons and Dragons itself because it just gets what people find most enjoyable about the game and delivers it Dungeon Crawl Classics has been around for a long time now it started off as an offshoot of Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition rules back in 2003 and evolved with d and D's fourth edition but then in 2012 the AU author Joseph Goodman of Goodman games created a completely revamped version of the rules that went way back in time now what I'm about to say is controversial amongst some DCC Fanboys and disputes what Joseph Goodman himself says at the end of this core rule book that I'm about to walk you through in this video but basically This Modern version is a D and D retr clone specifically of the BX Edition and by extension it's an old school Renaissance or osr game by almost every single measure but unlike the nearly verbatim copies of BX that you might see in other retr clones such as the famous and beautifully laid out old school Essentials by Gavin Norman DCC adds to a lot of those Dusty old rules from the early ' 80s and it's not just new mechanics bolted on for more dangerous magic or weird new dice that will confuse the hell out of you there's a Brash personality and attitude infused in this core rule book that has energized a relatively large and very cultish and devoted Following over the years as always I'm going to show you what I'm talking about by just showing the pages straight out of the book maybe you can draw your own conclusions about Dungeon Crawl Classics one of the most remarkable aspects of this game is not exactly the game itself but how Goodman games has built up and embraced its fans what I'm showing you here is the 10th printing of the game and in the first few pages you see a list of supporters and members of the community as well as photos of regular folks just sitting at the table in random conventions playing this game it's not a particularly appealing set of photos and you can barely make out any faces but the point is that this game's publisher cherishes its fans and commemorates them in a way that I don't think I've ever seen with an RPG it also just happens that Goodman games publishes an annual yearbook that contains even more of this kind of stuff an affirmation of the community around Dungeon Crawl Classics the yearbook also contains usable game information and other fun detritus the summary of The Game's rules answers one of the biggest questions some of you might have about this game which is what kind kind of rule system does it use again despite the author's own declarations to the contrary found at the End of This Book this game is pretty firmly osr both in rules and in spirit there are some deviations from d and dbx rules but otherwise that's what you're getting here a unique but quite familiar retr clone of BX we'll go over all the nuances of the rules later in the video I do want to touch on another major contradiction made early on in this book and later repeatedly refuted and that is this bit here about your character not being a hero I love this declaration right here that in this game you play as a sort of Rogue or scoundrel but it's simply not true unless you want it to be at your table countless times throughout the rest of this book pces are literally referred to as Heroes on a more positive note check out this artwork this retro style may or may not be nostalgic for you but I can assure you that once you see enough of it it starts to grow on you all right so DCC might more or less be a DND retro clone but it brings some pretty compelling Innovations to the table one of the most famous and interesting ones is the so-called funnel the concept is that everyone starts their character at level zero or rather characters each player is asked to roll up two to four different peasants armed with little more than a tool from their profession and maybe some crappy equipment so with a table of four players and four level zeros each that's 16 peasants entering The Fray and that fry is a specifically designed scenario called a level zero funnel there are many which have been published over the years so there's no problem with finding one what happens then is that these peasants get decimated and by the end of it any survivors are awarded with 10 XP bringing them to level one and the choice of what class they will be in other words a level zero funnel is a character creation session drenched in Blood The Funnel concept is fairly unique to DCC and has even spawned a bit of ritualistic subculture for example Goodman games sells an official death stamp that you can punch on to players character sheets and the official unofficial website purples sorcerer tocom has even created an online generator that makes four level zero peasants for you with as little as one click another major Innovation to the basic expert D and rules from the early 80s is the so-called zachi dice these are a D3 D5 D7 D14 D16 d24 and D30 they are added to your standard set of seven polyhedrals and create a dice chain which act as step dice when assessing advantages and disadvantages on a check you also have modifiers to a role in this game as well so for example you might normally roll a D20 for something but you're cursed for some reason and have to roll a D16 instead but you might have an item that lends a plus one to that particular role okay I'll just share with you my mixed feelings on these funky dice right now on the plus side these dice reawaken that feeling that you first had the very first time you laid eyes on a set of polyhedral dice do you remember that moment I can only speak from myself but I assume most people felt a mix of Fascination intimidation and burning curiosity but as you know those dice became commonplace and the impossible eventually happened you were able to identify them at a glance well the zachi dice put you right back at square one where you're looking at strange and inscrutable polyhedrals that seem unnatural and telling them apart from each other again seems impossible so here's the thing the telling them apart from each other is actually a problem it's such a problem that Goodman games actually sells special dice trays that help you keep them sorted and labeled if you have a 3D printer you can also print out such a tray for yourself like I have another problem with these dice is that the substitute for each is Not Practical I know that the author and a lot of adherence to this rule system handwave it and say it's super simple to convert the normal set of seven dice to Funky rolls but it's not practical you'd be advised to just use a free online dice roller that incorporates the funk dice rather than fiddle with all these conversions but that brings me to my next Point as soon as you start using an online roller instead of the physical dice that glorious Mystique that I was talking about a second ago is gone once you're tapping buttons on a screen to roll these dice it's nothing more than a clerical task to serve the game's math and about that math my final gripe about these dice is that they don't really add much mathematical or statistical Nuance to the game at least not from what I could deduce or find online notice the increments between each of these dice why are these increments the way they are and could this step function just be accomplished with more modifiers like 99.9% of RPGs but you know despite all my winging and moaning I can't help but find these dice alluring and fun as long as I'm using them physically and not on a digital dice roller I'm not going to go over all the basic rules that were cribed from the Old Dungeons and Dragons here in this video it's a rollover D20 system where you try to meet or beat a difficult ulty class you have six core stats and in this case three saving throw stats there is a feature of your character though that is pretty unique and pretty heavily emphasized in this game and that's luck each character has a luck score as well as a luck modifier in essence you can burn luck points like a metac currency to improve roles and your luck modifier can apply to all sorts of actions in the game here are about 92 starting occupations that you can pick for your level zero p present your occupation here will very likely inform your class choice if you get to level one alignment is broken out into three choices lawful chaotic and neutral and the default setting in this game has deities associated with each alignment and deities are particularly important if you choose cleric as your class leveling up is relatively simple you can see from this chart here that you level up at particular lown number thresholds and the level cap is 10 in this game but rest assured if you get a character up past six or so the survival rate becomes quite high so there are seven original classes to choose from in this core rule book obviously in the many years since this game has come out there have been dozens even hundreds of additional classes published but that's beyond the scope of this video each of the classes here is constructed with some Unique Mechanics the cleric for example has to act within the scope of their alignment either good chaotic or neutral and even if they do anytime time they fail a spell check they risk disapproval from their God if they trigger actual disapproval they roll on this table and suffer the consequences they also get some default spells like turn on holy and lay on hands you can see here from this table that DCC does not abandon the original DND Convention of vancian magic whereby spells are categorized by level cross referenced and not to be confused with character level and spells can only be cast about once per day on average here's the list of default gods in the vanilla DCC setting if these names sound like something out of a Conan novel that's because this entire game was written in service to the literature of Roberty Howard and other authors who paved the way to the birth of fantasy RPG in the first place Thief is an interesting class because of one particular feature their daily luck regeneration even out of the gate they are able to recover luck far faster than other classes and can thereby burn luck more frequently juicing their rolls when they need it most another really notable feature that makes them engines of murder is backstab which gives them a critical hit if they hit at all the warrior special mechanic is a special die called a deed die you roll this die alongside any other dice when making an attack roll and if the deed die is three or higher the deed succeeds the deed in these cases is a special flourish or action and is left up to the player to describe this can come in the form of some acrobatic or Hollywood style shenanigan Wizards are glass cannons in this game extremely weak on defense and strong on offense but it's actually not as simple as that regardless of where they draw their magic from they make terrible risks every time they even learn a spell due to the system of Mercurial magic used in this game every new spell comes with a role on this D100 table on the lower end of this table the new spell is essentially a curse one that materially changes your PC or affect the whole party in a variety of horrible ways at the higher end of the infamous Mercurial magic table however a new spell is nothing short of a boon blessing your character in one way or another this whole Mercurial magic thing is actually one of the Marquee features of DCC and I think it keeps players coming back because the results just make for really funny and fun moments I think it Bears mentioning that there are three race based classes in this game the dwarf elf and halfling which is a grow back to Old DND this game does not retract or modify anything in terms of biological determinism dwarves have certain features and abilities because they are dwarves and elves are elves in every average typical milk toast fantasy sense of the word actually at the End of This Book the author declares that the fantasy races in this book should be reimagined outside of the gigian norm I'm not sure if he was just referring to the monsters you're supposed to kill because the playable fantasy races here are about as generic as you could possibly imagine but like I mentioned before this is a retro clone of bxd and D so some things are going to just be carbon copied from the original set of games the currency system and general presentation of gear and equipment is pretty much the same combat is largely the same except each character actually has a specific action die sometimes two or more that's the die that they use to make a check in combat usually it's a D20 but remember that for different reasons an action die can graduate up and down the dice chain a natural one rolled with an action die is a fumble which can lead to a variety of negative effects here's a list of fumbles they're what you might expect when you roll a one in a game like this a natural 20 or 24 or 30 if you're rolling those higher dice results in a critical hit the actual effect of a critical hit depends on your class and level some people actually complain about DCC having too many tables which slows down gameplay this might be an example of where that's the case here you have a crit table specifically for zero level and wizards as well as one for thieves and elves then one for cleric halflings level one and two Warriors and level one two and three dwarves and so on there can be a lot of specificity with certain aspects of this game which clashes with its otherwise casual and open-ended nature but in defense of this game the author does openly invite you to ignore any and all the rules that you don't like so in the case of all these crit tables for example you could instead just opt for a single table that can apply generally to all classes or not use a table at all and just narrate a critical hit in a way that makes sense in the fiction in the moment death in this game comes to any level zero character who reaches zero hit points then zero HP means you're bleeding out and you have one round to be stabilized you get an extra round to be stabilized for every extra level you have thereafter there's this really generous rule here that says that if another PC reaches your presumably dead body within an hour of your falling they can make a luck check to see if you were merely rendered unconscious if they succeed in the luck roll you just sort of wake up and gain one HP on the spot there's this huge miname called spell duels where two or more casters can go at it hurling Spells at each other until one wins it's a special set of combat rules that operates differently from standard combat I think the most curious thing about these rules is how granular they are surely they were born out of endless sweaty hours of debate it's actually six full pages of rules complete with three elaborate tables one sort of irrelevant detail here but one that I found interesting is that this is the only table I've ever seen that contains illustrations inside of it we touched on Magic a couple times in this video already but there's one major feature that I wanted to mention it's one that counts as yet another significant Innovation to the old D and rules and which is widely loved and admired and that feature is spellburn before rolling any spell check a wizard in particular can declare that they will attempt spell burn this means they temporarily spend points of their strength agility or stamina score to add points to their spell check on a one for one basis they recover their ability scores at a rate of one point per day as long as they don't spell burn in that time you can actually cast spells that have otherwise been exhausted for the day which is nice but you do have to role play some kind of weird or gross sacrifice whenever a spell burn is committed as described on this d24 table also if you roll a one on such a spell check you pick up corruption either minor major or greater corruption is a pretty serious alteration to your character in many if not most cases just in the minor Corruptions table you can end up with mutated ears a disfigured face or suddenly have one leg permanently much longer than the other at higher levels of corruption we're talking horns forked tongues flesh falling off in chunks a crab claw or a body covered in feathers in other words magical mishaps in this game will lead to Comedy gold so here's yet another unique and frankly kind of stunning feature of DCC you have all the wizard spells listed here from first to fifth level in power these are described as just some of the spells in the universe by the way and here are the much fewer cleric spells as well as spells tied specifically to different patrons but here's the crazy thing for every single one of these spells there is about a page of description they all have their level range duration casting time and general description just like with most RPGs but here you will also get a variety of possible manifestations a corruption range and a variety of misfire possibilities and finally you get a detailed table of possible results depending on your casting role for that spell check out magic Missile the descriptions of the possible corruption in misfires is tremendously verbos and the possible outcomes for the cast equally so here's the spell locate object object I don't know about you but the description of the possible effects here may cross the line in terms of comfortable word count and by the way this spell description spills over to the next page here I don't think anyone but the most hardcore of DCC fans really love this amount of description with their spells but then again not all spells are multi- pagers most of them fit onto one page like these two this is just a feature of magic in DCC you can take it or leave it anyway it's about 170 pages of the book if you were ever intimidated by the thickness of the DCC core rule book just remember that the Spells comprise 33% of that page count one thing I mentioned before but I'll just show you here is that this game is very much osr in spirit note here the author's philosophy of rulings over rules or in his words let the rules Bend to you not the other way around and again fear no rule also let the characters die if the dice so dictate this is all in line with foundational osr gameplay principles there are a few really cool generators at the end of the book for GMS or judges one of which is the magic sword Creator my favorite bit about this one is the hard and fast rule that all magical swords are intelligent and have their own independent desires I love the story possibilities for that the author's philosophy on Monsters is also pretty brilliant in a nutshell he says to never refer to a monster by its name instead put yourself in the mindset of an ignorant peasant who has never traveled more than 20 miles from where they were born instead of a minotaur kicking around in the nearby caves it's a singular Beast who locals call by many names mostly descriptive in nature make each monster rare and unknown is the point that is at the heart of true fantasy you can use this table to create completely unique monsters although the book also contains a decent collection of prototypical fantasy monsters as well again you as the judge need to do what you have to to mix things up and not use painfully generic Monsters the UND or so sted at the End of This Book should be used as a starting point one of the most significant sections in the book is this one right here titled appendix n essentially it's a list of the author's literary Inspirations for making DCC and his declaration that he made this game in order to emulate the adventures found in those books this list of books here actually comes from Gary gx's 1979 version of D and D but Goodman adds a lot more authors here as well including Clark Ashton Smith Carl Edgar Wagner Edgar alen Poe Arthur mockin aldron Blackwood William hope Hodson and Harold lamb this is all vintage horror and fantasy from the 19th and 20th Century if you're wondering I personally have only read a small fraction of the stuff mentioned here but I get what he was trying to do he was trying to get to the source of dnd's inspiration not necessarily use DND D itself as the inspiration regardless of if he succeeded or not this is a great reading list all right here are my thoughts on Dungeon Crawl classic judges need experience to run this game well the book even says it outright and there are at least half a dozen places in the book where instead of describing a rule or game aspect in detail the author just says to ask your judge assuming a certain level of knowledge and confidence zachi dice they are essentially a superficial novelty and don't really mathematically enhance the game's outcomes as far as I can reckon the dice injects some long lost Mystique into the game but if you're using an online dice roller that Mystique is completely negated physical book bifurcation the core rule book could benefit from being split into the core rules and a spell book since the spell descriptions account for such a huge portion Slimmer volumes would make the book much easier to read and handle magic is dangerous varied and hilarious between the Mercurial magic table that dictates what happens to you each time you learn any spell to the various misfires and the self-inflicted danger of spell burn the magic system in this game is unique and fun and most importantly it can be really funny funnel concept the concept of filtering a bunch of level zero peasants through a gauntlet of death in order to see which character you actually start an adventure with is just amazing it's not only funny in a very dark way it adds a lot of meaning to whichever character you do manage to have survive into level one nostalgic artwork I really feel that the artwork is integral to what this game is trying to do which is deliver a game experience that feels old and Dusty in a good way even when the game is being infused with all kinds of rules Innovations great reading list appendix n is full of Classics that I will probably spend the rest of my life exploring abundance of resources the community behind DCC do not just play and run this game they create a lot of resources for it you'll find a number of important resources listed at the back of the book perhaps most importantly for beginners the level zero generator but also like the DCC reference booklet which is $9.99 9 officially free in digital form or $666 as a print on demand book directly from the creators there's also an ongoing Master list of all resources kept on a Google doc that I've linked to down below this is definitely something you should bookmark if you're thinking of going down the DCC Rabbit Hole Universe of modules there are just hundreds of official modules at this point I don't know how many fanp published ones you're spoiled for Choice hair several other major settings once you learn the basic mechan of this game you have mutant crawl Classics and xcrawl Classics available to you you also have the lenar setting and the dying Earth setting inspired by Jack Vance himself I've actually read a few dying Earth novels and I'm hoping to explore this particular setting a bit more in future videos so let me know your thoughts and experiences regarding Dungeon Crawl Classics down in the comments below as always thanks for watching see [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Dave Thaumavore RPG Reviews

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Length: 24min 12sec (1452 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023