My hits are way up for Castles & Crusades articles. I suppose this game is not "really" in the OSR, and many are using it as a replacement for 5E. I can see why, it is quick, simple, does the "D&D thing" and does not require much in the way of computerized support.
I am beginning to feel that if your game requires an application to design characters, then you are no longer a pen-and-paper role-playing game. You are a wannabe computer game that lacks application code and a GUI. If you had the budget to make a computer game, that is where you would be; instead, you load the complexity of designing software onto other companies or the community.
Sunk costs can do amazing things, like get the community to write application software for you for free.
Castles & Crusades needs none of that. I can create a character in 5 minutes on a piece of notebook paper. My group does not need a "session zero" since we are playing in about 15 minutes. Any game that needs a "session zero" where it takes 8 hours to design characters has a serious design flaw; it is offloading unneeded work onto the players.
Imagine Monopoly taking 8 hours of session prep.
You would get a subset of players who love to go into autistic detail, trying to justify why setting your firm's "bank interest rate" and "subprime mortgage exposure" are needed details for Advanced Monopoly, along with 200 other financial factors you need to calculate for your firm. Not to mention the need for a collection of character cards for your firm's personnel and their salaries, along with going through several hiring phases.
You need three hours to set up the city's economic status indicators and the city government, since that affects housing and building, too. Along with the country's broader economic context, the optional Wall Street expansion gives you an add-on board that lets you play the market, the Federal Reserve expansion board simulates the economy, and the Futures Market board simulates another part of the economy. By the time we get to the Big Oil and Auto Industry boards, we are left wondering why the focus on building houses on Baltic Avenue has been lost in the shuffle.
That reminds me of a certain game....
D&D has gotten too detailed and complicated. It rivals GURPS in complexity. With C&C, dungeon crawling is a game again that you can pick up and play. Without all that detail, subclass options, action types, and magical attacks, my characters feel more focused on "character and story" and less on "rules and builds."
No wonder hits are up for C&C.
You can play a dungeon game in a few hours, start to stop, and you don't need to be constantly sifting through rules. This is almost exactly like a 2d6 science fiction game, like Cepheus Engine. You can get started in 15 minutes, have characters good to go, and start playing in a future universe quickly and without endless rules reference.
These massive games have a shelf life of 7-10 years, and then they collapse and die under their own weight when people no longer have time for them. While they are hot, they are fun. When the bubble bursts, we are left with piles of books and cardboard pieces that people no longer have the time to play with. I still love my books and pieces, but a part of me knows the magic is gone and the era is over.
C&C has lasted so long because it is, at heart, a simple game.
Simple games endure much longer than these games designed to be an all-encompassing lifestyle.
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