By Far, My Favorite B/X

Dungeon Crawl Classics isn't a B/X clone.

It is a 'B/X clone' experience simulator.

Fifty years of D&D has done a lot to jade us to fantasy, and the tropes are tired. The monsters are commonplace and not extraordinary or scary. The classes have been reduced to mathematical charts and progressions. The spells are MMO 'click the button' affairs, where you wait for the cooldown and click again.

Magic isn't magic anymore.

It is all math. And math isn't fantasy.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

How do we recapture that feeling where we, as kids, did not know what a beholder or doppelganger was, and those monsters surprised us at how alien and strange they were? The terror of seeing a mind flayer for the first time? What was it like to learn of the drow - elves underground? The insane displacer beast and intellect devourer? Dragons could be blue and shoot lightning bolts? What?! This was like fighting aliens! We didn't have a concept of these monsters, what they could do, where they came from, and their motivations.

This is what made these games so great in the 1980s, and so dangerous to young minds.

They made us dream and think outside of our limited experiences.

These days, the tyranny of trademark and copyright law enshrined all these monsters as the soul-sucking 'Product Identity' of companies, and they were not scary anymore. The mystery was gone. Articles were written explaining the ecology of everything. The unknown was known. The fun became 'could you beat the math.'

Spells, classes, names, magic items, and many other things were product identity, product identity, and product identity. It is not D&D unless it has this. It is not fantasy gaming unless it has that.

We never think outside of our own experiences. D&D has become the game to reinforce the status quo.

When Wall Street bought D&D, it died. The game became marketing, and a way to push copyrighted content into revenue streams, and they put the same old monsters and magic on endless repeat. Worse, the real world is in the game now, muddled with today's fights on social media, and we can never escape and dream outside of the world we live in.

We can never escape this world.

The game keeps pulling us back into it.

And it isn't because the 'designers are stupid' - they aren't. Corporations don't allow them to empower people to dream and think outside of those sixty-dollar books and VTT experiences. You will get a million dreams and ideas at the low levels of employees, and they will die on a whiteboard when management says no.

Not profitable.

This does not push our IP.

Won't move the needle.

Not synergistic with our corporate holdings.

I have been in that place before. Boundless dreams and energy in an office of a creative company and every idea you have isn't heard. You eventually feel you are wasting your time. Your ideas and energy fall on deaf ears. This is when you leave to chase dreams because they won't happen there.

And it isn't always management's fault, there are times they want to listen.

But they can't.

If One D&D were doing the right thing, it would not ship with a monster manual or book of spells. Just creation systems for everything, random charts, and ways to put together spells. The game should tell you, ''Come up with it all yourself."

But it would fail.

Nobody has been 'trained' to think for themselves.

And this isn't the D&D 'brand.'

People criticize DCC for being 'chart heavy' when the charts aren't the point. They miss the point so hard it hurts. You can make up your own results, given a spell check number. Make it similar in magnitude and effect to whatever is on the chart, and you are good to go. If it seems better and would make for a better story and effect - do that instead! The charts are just there to free your mind from what you think a spell does.

The DCC magic charts are a deprogramming tool.

They are not magic spell results.

They are all suggestions.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

Once you realize this, your mind breaks free, and you begin to see the wonder and power of magic again. This same thing happens in the game repeatedly when you start to unlock more of the systems and methods. You begin to make your own monsters. You realize that thieves and fighters can be excellent again. Clerics serve mysterious gods. Mages can call upon the powers of unknown alien entities. Magic items aren't 'things on a list.'

Even the concept of what a dungeon is begins to change. You could be shrunken to microscopic size and fight floating alien virus monsters. You could enter the kingdom of lost souls. You could adventure in a titan's shoe. Fight along the branches of the miles-tall World Tree. Wander through the veins and arteries of the Earth. Fight on rooftops or the tops of zeppelins and enter a kingdom in the clouds. Visit an upside-down realm. Go to a place where water is breathable, and air is not. Be turned into spiders and crawl along webs, fighting fly-creatures and centipedes.

You begin to feel like a kid again.