It plays well with others.
I keep Dungeon Crawl Classics around, and it still, to me, feels like the true "gonzo OSR game." One of the best things about DCC is any OSR game, from Old School Essentials to Swords & Wizardry plays well with it, and can serve as "expansion books" for treasures, monsters, encounters, wilderness rules, magic items, or anything else in the book.
If I want to play any of the OSR games, there they are, on the shelf beside DCC. And OSR games don't typically take five shelves to store, like 5E or Pathfinder. The bloat and fat in 5E and Pathfinder books is legendary, they just keep pumping those out and there is no stop to the madness.
Typically, one OSR book does the job of an entire shelf of 5E books, and the page counts of 5E books just keep getting longer and longer. With AI art and text generation, some of the 5E books I own are endless machine-generated drivel with no sense of editorial discretion, content control, or game design. I can't keep up, nor is trying to do so worth it anymore.
DCC is special. It is a strange mix of the same 1980s attitude the Paranoia game had, where the game was more about the fun than the pretensive identity marketing and "me-isms" that pollute today's games. In DCC, you are a zero to a hero and often, your character dies and the next hero steps up to answer the call. In a way, it celebrates the over-the-top-hero, and in others, it tears them down and laughs with you as you start again.
It is not a game for "pet characters" and I am beginning to see why the entire "the character I play in every game" mentality is toxic and destructive to the hobby. Pet characters suck, and they keep you from discovering new characters to love. Always playing them, again and again, damages us mentally, and it is not healthy. When I spin up 16-20 level-zero characters for a funnel, I know one of them in that group "will be the one" but I don't know who it is. I need to discover them, find them, learn to love them, and sculpt them from the few numbers and rolls I have to describe them.
But every one of those characters is new, cool, and iconic.
The moments they save the world and find glory will be glorious.
And I hope they meet a fitting end, tragic or heroic, and I accept that as their story reaching a close. Nothing is worse than characters who never die, who become institutions and protected, and they end up rotting our concept of fantasy to be the "me" instead of the "us" as it should be. And with each character that meets an end, I will start a new group and find the next.
Finding "the one" is a Neo moment in the Matrix. This is special, and amazing to see happen.
No game gives you that.
I heard DCC described as a game where "your wizard could one-shot kill a giant sea hydra and then randomly die to a mugger in an alley the next day" - and it fits. The mixture of amazingly heroic met with sudden, random, and tragic potential death fits my idea of fantasy. This new corporate fantasy where characters become icons and never die is boring, overdone, overplayed, and toxic. We never get any satisfaction from a character arc anymore.
Our imaginations, brains, and dreams stagnate and die if "Filby the Bard" is our the only bard we can play or imagine. We keep playing him in game after game, trying to relive that first moment we found him. Nothing ever lives up to it, and that nostalgia becomes a form of depression.
Like great writers say, "kill your darlings."
Great role-players let their characters die.
And they pick up a new group of zero-levels and begin again to find a new one.
It is healthy and helps your mental health and psyche to turn over the new and begin again. To toss out the old and find new characters and new stories. To be able to finally let go, and help someone new discover their story. This is a natural thing.
Otherwise our minds become stale as the next Hollywood remake or sequel. Look at yourself in a mirror, and ask yourself, "Can't we do something different?"
5E and many of these other "identity games" exist to lock in your "pet character" into a forever rules system. They blend the "you and your character" - which is dangerous - and sell the game as the idealized version of you, instead of the story of someone entirely apart from your experience and biases.
DCC breaks the matrix. It breaks your mind free of that cage.
The dice in DCC are some of the best in gaming, and the round-ended d4s are always a pleasure to pick up. They can be used with OSR games, too, so the dice become the collection and the means to play every game on the shelf. They are great dice, and these are my go-to sets.
DCC is comfortable, tragic, and epic. It supports other games, borrows from them, and is great by itself. It is a game that doesn't try to take over your gaming shelf, but co-exist alongside all the OSR classics.
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