DCC exists because people forgot how to play roleplaying games.
It takes a lot of random charts, forced 'bad stuff happens' rolls, bad things happen, random sudden death, and insane modules to come close to how we played the game back then - but this comes close.
For some, it is too much—it was for me the first time I read this. I felt it was impenetrable—a giant book with hundreds of pages and charts everywhere. I was reading it, telling myself, "This is cool, but I do not need all this to role-play how we used to."
I would just do it.
And I could do it with any version of B/X; just pick it up and go. Something insane may happen? Make a save, or it does. The old "save or die" roll, and we interpreted that as "save or this crazy stuff happens to you."
An arm turns into a tentacle, and you are turned into a green slime. Your face melts, and your sword is destroyed. You are teleported, sans gear, into a random dungeon room. You fall into another plane of existence, and your soul is torn from your body.
Deal with it.
I feel future D&D books will ban these sorts of things from the game and forbid the DM from using these "save or die" mechanics because they are traumatic. The entire game will be written around "protecting the player's ego and mental health," and at that point, it will be time to throw the books out. We are almost there with institutionalized safety tools; even though I support their use, people will abuse them - and game designers will just keep extending what they can do into other parts of the game.
Every monster will have a safety tools section.
Most Safe (recommended): The gelatinous cube will not dissolve the character in acid but merely carry them around in a comical and slapstick way. The character will be able to breathe and speak normally. As a result, nothing terrible will happen to the trapped player character, and they will be let go in 1d6 turns (in a safe area). If the X card is touched, merely push the character back a square without encasing them. If touched a second time, the cube blocks forward movement without forcing backward movement (DM: Ask the player if they fear substances like Jell-O and do not serve them this type of food during the game).
We would not want players to have panic attacks because they fear being dissolved alive and suffocated! You may laugh, but this is the cozy game D&D is slowly turning into. I am all for non-violent solutions and problem-solving, but I do not believe in pulling punches to protect someone's character. I have had a player believe their character could not die, step off a cliff to prove it, and I ruled the character died.
Cha'alt has a simple roleplaying game (Crimson Dragon Slayer) written into the book's appendix, and it is a complete, rules-light version of 5E meant to run the adventures at conventions. With every book, this gets iterated on and improved, and I can see why it is there. For convention play, why do you need anything more? Why do we need character sheets? Say what you are and the rules. Figure out your hit points, attacks, and bonuses, and tell me what you do.
And compared to DCC? Why do we need all these charts, character sheets, rules, and dice? This game goes all around the barn to walk in the front door. You don't need all this extra stuff if you know old-school play.
Fail a spell roll? Critically hit? I will tell you what happens. I only need a few pages of charts and rules. DCC, by comparison, is old-school play with training wheels. It is a very harsh way of putting it, as I love DCC as my go-to OSR game, but I can see where the feeling comes from. The charts train you how to "do all this" without a book telling you to "just make up something cool."
The charts are a starting point; if you can think of something better now, go with that! The book tells you to. In fact, DCC tells you to go beyond the book and the rules if you want to, so the entire game is optional.
So DCC is too big and unwieldy, and if you look at it another way, all of DCC is optional - so it isn't.
But DCC does train you on how things are done and gives you ideas. In this day and age of role-playing games written to take all imagination and fun out of the game and make the events in them "reflect your mundane life," we need this game more than ever.
So, playing Cha'alt with DCC makes sense.
In other ways, it doesn't.
The old-school answer to the question?
Are you having fun?
If you say yes, then it doesn't matter.
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