I had this article written to justify Old School essentials over Dungeon Crawl Classics, but then Goodman Games turned out to be incredibly nice during a recent shipment, and I gave it a little more thought.
Why would I still use OSE? Well, for one, OSE is a smaller, more compact, more expandable, and simpler game. If I want a game I can expand however I want, it will be OSE. I am already expanding it some by considering the Downtime rules and the Into the Wild alternate classes, and that is a solid mod of the game. So, yes, I am modding the game to start.
OSE has a good collection of 4E-like races to use, but to be honest, OSE supports "race-plus-class" so I could just as easily port in the OSE race templates into DCC, and use those to modify some of the existing classes to create Dragonborn warriors, Tiefling thieves, and Drow clerics. It is not that hard.
OSE also supports classic content easier, and it drops into any OSR or classic setting seamlessly. DCC sometimes wants to do "its own thing" and be weird and strange, and that is cool. If I am running a classic setting such as the Lost Lands setting from Necromancer Games, my first picks would be OSE or Swords & Wizardry. Those feel "at home" here. I have not tried running classic settings, in a serious manner, using DCC, and that may be interesting.
There are times I feel a too-fantastic "base world" of DCC takes away from some of the amazing and unexpected moments the game offers. If everything is strange and fantastic, then nothing is. There are times you just want to live in "strange world" and be a fish out of water, and that is more like the Dying Earth and Purple Planet settings, which again, Goodman Games does the best job at giving us worlds that we have never seen before and blow our minds.
Then again, I also get tired of the same-old, same-old. Why am I playing in another faux-European setting again? I could argue there is no real difference between Mystara, Greyhawk, and the Forgotten Realms since they are essentially the same place with different names and maps. especially these days with the current crop of writers for Wizards who write level-select adventure compilations. You say Waterdeep, I say Specularum, and someone else says Greyhawk City.
None of them are Middle Earth.
It is hard to care about these legacy settings without real support, and new adventures being written for them and delivered regularly. They are classic rock, great, but a nostalgia trap, and no one can sing it anymore without screwing it up.
This is one huge problem with nostalgia marketing, we will never see anything truly amazing, new, fresh, and mind-blowing from Wizards ever again. It will all be the reheated leftovers of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, and they did horrible jobs at recycling Ravenloft, Spelljammer, and Dragonlance. All we will get from Wizards is recycled, vaguely European, Ren-Fair settings with the thees and thous, Irish, British, and Scottish accents everywhere, and those stereotypical Russian Tieflings. Yes, Greyhawk is a classic setting and I loved it, but notice the past-tense there. I still love it, but I have DM-ed that place when it was first released, and I am ready for something new.
The last new thing TSR did was Dark Sun, Spelljammer, and Star Frontiers. Eberron from Wizards was more of a remix than a new idea entirely, and it relied too much on the Wayne Reynolds art (which became Pathfinder's iconic imagery) to ever have its own identity. Outside of Magic the Gathering, Wizards never really did anything new or original, risk-taking and mind-blowing with D&D.
Baldur's Gate 3 is seriously at risk of being overused and overexposed, if it is not there already.
Then again, Wizards isn't loved by much of the community anymore, and even if they were to do something new and original, it would likely not be received too well. A nostalgia play is the "scent of death" for a declining company, and you even see that in all the inane D&D cartoon callbacks. They are also pretty much well ignoring the authors of their classic settings and novels, and this is a huge loss to the lore and worlds once we lose them to time. Their current talent pool is not up to the task of supporting the settings they have.
If you want new ideas, buy a set of Zocchi dice and pick up the DCC core rule-book and one of the settings. You won't get "new stuff" from Wizards anymore.
With DCC, I don't really need to mod the game all that much, the game has a solid core engine and plenty of random table support. I would still like to use the Downtime book, along with an additional OSR resource (my Labyrinth Lord book is my add-on game to DCC for treasure tables, but OSE is also perfectly capable of being that), and I have it all covered.
On Downtime and Demesnes would work well with DCC. DCC has "skills" and ODaD has training costs, though "skills" in DCC would not be the +3 of this set of rules, but be the normal d20 roll of DCC (unskilled is the d10). I would rule expert is a d24 while master is a d30, sticking with the DCC dice chain instead of flat modifiers. We have the dice, so use them! Talents, raising statistics, crafting, and weapon mastery training work as they do in the ODaD book.
Also, with OSE, there is an element of "going back into the cave" and retreating into the too-familiar and nostalgic. There is a reason OSE's covers are so wild and out there, and I suspect even they are trying to fight that perception of being "a rules reference for an old game" and trying to keep the concepts fresh and away from the too-familiar.
DCC is already a "perfect" 5E replacement. Nothing more needs to be done and said. The system, at its core, is a simple 3.5E-style game, no different than OSE. I could use either and be happy. OSE would be lighter-weight and faster. DCC would have random table support for emergent play.
When two games are equal, it comes down to preference.
And, of course, the company you prefer to support.
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