Mail Room: Dungeon Dwelling Creatures (DCC)

 

From DCC, MCC, Star Crawl, and XCrawl, Goodman Games has the best "games for your imagination" in the industry right now. Today, we continue that run with Dungeon Dwelling Creatures, a DCC-genre game where you play the monsters. I got the crowdfunding PDF release for this today, and I like this game.

The monsters are quirky and strange, sort of mirroring DCC-style classes, but using the system in interesting and unique ways. Instead of luck, we get Vile, which is your Luck-like "power of evil." All the monsters have an icky factor, and none of them are cute or adorable. A huge problem with "play a monster" games is that they get too cutesy and chibi, and that opens the door to hurt feelings and problem players. A cute fairy dragon with butterfly wings would be inappropriate for this game, where a spider that sucks people's brains out would fit right in.

I would love to see expansion monsters for this game. What we have is great, quirky, and cool.

This reminds me of the Monsters Monsters! game from Flying Buffalo, the spiritual successor to the classic Tunnels & Trolls game. You play the monsters. Civilization is crushing you. You are the minions and mooks that live in a dungeon (and even the DCC modules) as the bad guys. The good guys show up and crush your dreams, loot the place, laugh, and head back to town.

A few times.

Maybe they burn everything out in a 10-minute adventure day, and you are watching them pull the typical party nonsense by coming back daily. Maybe you follow them back to town and give them a lesson in how the monsters who put up with this nonsense teach them a lesson.

This is close to being a new, major game in the DCC line, and it feels like a surprise release. The bestiary is excellent and covers many more of the classics than the main DCC book. This feels like "the other side" of the DCC experience, and it puts players in an unfamiliar but cool situation.

You are the monsters.

Deal with those pesky heroes.

A very surprising release, and I can't wait to get my hardcover.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: Built for Fun

There is no "off the shelf" with DCC; it is still firmly "on the shelf" for me. This is a game built for fun; it feels like a heavily modded 3.5E, but does things its own way, drawing on old-school tropes while taking them to crazy places. This game took all my shelf space for D&D 3.5E and Pathfinder 1e, and it proudly sits as the most gonzo and insane game I have, filling that power fantasy need, while still delivering loads of unpredictability.

Note, this does not replace 5E for me. 5E and I are complicated. Currently, C&C is replacing 5E for me while 5E and I work it out. My 5E books are in the closet until they can find an answer to the character sheet problem they have.

I wish 5E were better.

But, at this time, I can't support a game that forces me to do more work and flip through pages of a character sheet every round. It is in the closet until I want to fight with it again.

DCC is my 3.5E replacement, and it sings as that.

DCC drives the engines of many games, most of which are built and played out of zines and strange books that clutter my shelves. It is a crazy existence, one moment playing what feels like traditional fantasy, while the other powering a science fiction game. It really is more of a "game engine" driving any type of game you can imagine, with whatever random character classes you find being "tonight's entertainment."

Veer off into mutants and mahem? Fine. Bug hunts? Great! Surviving on strange alien-filled worlds? No problem. Crawling through the esophagus of a sleeping giant to rescue a singing parakeet? Sure! Fighting marshmallow goop creatures from a random gate a mad wizard opened? Works here! Playing "Keep on the Borderlands?" Why not?

DCC is the role-playing game equivalent of a Sharpie pen. A million and one uses, and it leaves a permanent mark on your psyche that makes all other games seem boring.

And the game isn't complete! You can pull in monsters from other editions, steal treasure tables and magic items from other games, pull an equipment list in from over here, use an adventure from over there, and generally mish-mash whatever you have lying around into your DCC game.

This one is sticking around, and it displays amazingly well.

To Tweak or Not to Tweak? Capturing the Era

Do you tweak your games? It depends on how important it is to you that you are playing "exactly what was played" in the 1980s, down to the last class ability and numeric value. You are not tweaking the OSE fighter to make it more them, just rolling with what you got. After all, the class was designed like this; it worked back then, and why change it?

I have a few good reasons to bump OSE fighters' attack bonus by 2 across the board at every level, but is that the original game? No, it wasn't. And yes, it was. We did tweak and make adjustments back in the 1980's, too; very few of us played rules-as-written unless we were playing AD&D in a hobby store or other organized setting.

D&D was the home of the houseruled game.

AD&D, we tended to obey Gary's wishes and keep it as it was when we played with new people. Those were the "organized play rules," but even then, houseruled home games of AD&D were a huge thing.

We tend to put older games on pedestals and preserve them exactly as they were, trying to recapture the moment by not changing a thing and sticking to every letter printed on the page. We have a false sense of the past in which sticking to only what was written on that day was "official," and we artificially elevate its value.

Objects in the mirror may appear more important than they were.

It is important to have perspective and not silence the work of creators of third-party zines and others who turn OSE and BX into a living, breathing game open to discussion and expansion. To them, the game is a modern platform, worthy of support and expansion, and new and fresh ideas are the way forward. They take the base game, written in today's era, and move it forward, as if we had the same open license and freedom we could have had back in the 1980s, had TSR not been so closed-shop and litigious.

If you see OSE as a modern platform, you will, of course, tweak and mod it.

If you see OSE as a 1980s rules-simulator, you will be less likely to mod it.

If you are more into the rules-simulation side of the hobby and do not want to mod the game, then games like Swords & Wizardry and its 1970s simulation of the game's state during that time will appeal to you more. Also, there are some who absolutely do not want to list a page of houserules to a new group, and that can scare people away faster than anything you ever understand.

I have had a group of new players never begin a 5E game since I had a page of houserules, and I wanted to use the 2014 game (since that meant a few players did not have to buy new books). The group never started. They all found other things to do. The game died before it even began.

Why do we need all these houserules?

Is the game broken?

I don't want to buy a new game that is broken and needs all these house rules I will never understand!

Houserules can scare off new players, since they see a list of things they don't understand, have to mesh with a new game, and figure out the "how and why" of how it all works before a die is even rolled. Most will just quit and go do something else that doesn't need houserules. There is great value in saying, "This is what we are playing." You can point to one book, and the discussion is over. The contract is set; learn that book. This is the game we all agreed to, and we can play.

I am not against house rules, but I know how hard they can make it for some new players. For a group comfortable with each other and the game, houserules are great.

And games like Swords & Wizardry, which replicate the 1970s state of the game, the rulings, the common assumptions of the meanings, and laying out exactly where the clear and vague parts were, while trying to present the commonly agreed-upon interpretations, are also invaluable, even from the perspective of historical simulation.

If Dungeon Crawl Classics is a reinterpretation of "1970s play" through a modern game design lens, rooted in 3.5E-era sensibilities, then Swords & Wizardry is the actual game we played in the late 1970s. The games offer two views of the same era: DCC is more focused on random tables, imagination, and fun, while S&W presents the game as it was at that moment in time.

The pain of Vietnam was dulling; the gas lines and inflation of the 1970s were still in the discussion; the hippies had all gotten jobs; condo-living was a thing; disco was dying; arena rock was resurgent; and the era of over-the-air TV was being replaced by cable. The Cold War still raged on. The Reagan era was just over the horizon.

And we did not have AD&D yet. We pieced together rules from the original books and did our best to figure everything out. When BX came along, it was a restatement and clarification, the game coming into focus.

And the AD&D books took a few years to release! In 1977, it was the Monster Manual, followed in 1978 by the PHB, and in 1979 by the DMG. Imagine taking two years to release a game today, book by book. There was a whole year with just the original books and the Monster Manual; none of us knew what to do, what rules to use, and what was coming. The Monster Manual dropped into the middle of this discussion, and many pulled it into their existing games as-is.

By the time 1979 rolled around, it was all AD&D, and the 1970s and the original chaotic game we embraced were over. We had our official "organized play rules," and that was that. But those five years from 1974 to 1979? Those were the days of zero edition, and what DCC tries to replicate, along with the game Swords & Wizardry presents and reframes so well.

OSE is both a simulation and a modern platform, depending on your wants. It is best for new players of the game, and it will get better in the new edition with more examples of play and additional features to help new players. You can play this as a recreation, or use it as a platform to support gaming moving forward, just like a 5E.

The original BX games are exactly what they are, without the new presentation or reframing. They are locked in time, cannot be written for (outside of OSE), and will not change. They are more valuable as "the actual thing" and a historical record, and weaker as a platform. They were both released in 1980 and reflect the newer era. Remember, the red and blue books were released the year after the DMG came out, and reflected the "for kids" easier version of the game.

Many of us chose to stick with AD&D and ignored these books, though they had a certain charm.

I feel the same way about S&W as I do BX, in that S&W is the easier version of AD&D, streamlined and stripped down to the best parts, and all the slow, heavy, and excess rules out of the picture. If I want AD&D today, I have OSRIC 3.0. Communities and open licenses are more important than nostalgia. The platform for creativity comes first.

S&W recaptures the lighting-in-a-bottle of the 1974 to 1979 period, along with all the common assumptions, interpretations, and the original "hippies in a van and black felt neon paint posters" sort of feeling that era had. This could be seen as a "modern platform" too, and the expansion books treat it exactly that way. It is also an "easier" version of AD&D, before the huge rulebooks came out and clarified every little vague area of the rules and inconsistencies.

Dungeon Crawl Classics

Dungeon Crawl Classics is D&D done right.

I keep coming back to this game. It has survived being put in the garage storage crates twice, yet it sits on my best display shelf today. If it displays really well, and it plays even better. It focuses on being a fun game before anything else. It doesn't worry about "platform lock in" or "digital strategies" - it just looks fun, plays fun, and is fun.

Many in the OSR are sour grapes about this game for little good reason. It is probably just jealousy and pettiness. DCC did what many OSR games could not, and it is the third-most-played fantasy RPG (by the Gen Con scheduled games metric). They have done well by focusing on core beliefs, keeping the game simple and accessible, and making sure every part of the game brings fun to the table.

It started with re-reading Appendix N books and going back to the basics. Too often in the OSR, you will find strict adherence to the B/X, White Box, BECMI, or 1E rules. Rules are what make it fun, right?

No, the rules are a tool to "get to" fun; they aren't fun by themselves.

Too often, the OSR puts the rules on a pedestal and expects the fun to happen. It can, but you have to know the secret to make them work that way. When you are at that point, any OSR game will do, and they are all interchangeable. But none of the OSR games do what DCC does: support emergent play and have fun built into the core classes.

DCC uses just enough rules to get the point across, then builds the rest of the framework around "how the game was fun back in the day." The fiction is the guide, and a past edition of the rules is not a milestone by which to measure the game. The game uses the OSR dialect, but it is not an OSR game.

Shadowdark does the same. It focuses on "how the game is fun" and jettisons the rest.

5E, in comparison, is far too heavy. It gets bogged down in silly subclasses and class builds. It goes on too long, describing a class and its power, sometimes dozens of pages, when just a handful would do. 5E hides a lot of complexity, and you end up paying for it later, six to eight levels in, when you quit, because your character sheet is longer than a tax form. And all that complexity and rules bloat does not get you much more than an easy, simple, straightforward game that puts roleplaying and fun first.

The OSR games are easy, and they put the character and fun first. Not the rules. Not platform lock-in. Not digital sales. Not forcing you to buy two copies of the book, one for your shelf and the other for your online character creation tool. 5E is too expensive and complex, when an easy game is just as much fun.

DCC gets it.

It keeps coming back to my shelf because it delivers on its promise. Level 10 in DCC is the same power level as level 20 in 5E. It cuts to the chase and delivers what is fun, tossing aside hundreds of pages of unnecessary rules to keep the game flowing.

5E takes a lot of money and time to sort out, and like a pile of Skyrim mods, it can be incredibly fun. Still, it ultimately breaks under its own weight when it tries to do something it was never designed to do, and gets overextended to the point where a more straightforward game delivers on the promise.

5E always breaks down for me.

DCC is too simple and fun to ever break down.

BackerKit: Castle Whiterock (DCC)

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/goodman-games/castle-whiterock

The Castle Whiterock mega-dungeon for DCC & 5E is over on BackerKit, and the price was very reasonable for what you get. I expected this to be three times the price, and it came in on what I wanted to spend. There are plenty of shiny add-ons, but the basic clamshell boxed set, plus hardcover (in the first 48 hours only, softcover after), was a great deal.

Some companies still keep gaming affordable and fun, and Goodman Games has a winner here. Backed and supporting.

Off the Shelf: Dungeon Crawl Classics

This is my fourth "off the shelf" article for Dungeon Crawl Classics. I write one of these articles every time a game returns to my "gaming shrine" and most-played shelves. I had DCC in the garage twice over the last four years, grew disillusioned with the game for a while, put it away, and then realized the games I felt would replace it failed me and never were as fun as this one.

One reason is that some on the OSR YouTube channels don't like DCC much, and they are entitled to their opinions. Sorry, DCC is worthy as Shadowdark is. And even Goodman Games says, "DCC does not equal OSR," and that break is good for everyone. This is a beloved game, a throwback tribute rock band to the 1970s and 1980s era of role-playing, when the game cared more about fun, and everyone could play.

The OSR and DCC are different things.

The OSR is the actual game we played in the 1970s and 80s, and there is an open question of whether today's players can understand how it was played back then, amid the mess of other games and sources we brought in. They are a faithful recreation of the rules, often without the context of the time they were played in. People who never played in the era will wonder what the fuss is all about and return to 5E.

A big problem in the OSR is being excellent while replicating rules, but terrible at providing context.

DCC captures the feeling of those times, and how a modern set of rules (3.5E-derived) could recreate that moment and feeling. DCC is more of an "early-age role-playing simulator" that pulls in external influences into the experience, like listening to Asia and Styx at Shakey's Pizza Parlor while Pac-Man and Defender arcade cabinets buzz in the background. Then someone has a story about their game, and something insane and cool happens (that, by the rules, could never happen since it is clearly not in the rules), and you are all in awe of the coolness that is this game.

A player in 1980 at that pizza parlor is saying, "Your character turned into a demon?! Wow!"

A player in 2026 is flipping through the original rules, "Nowhere in the rules does it say that this could happen. Were they even playing the OSR correctly?"

While DCC is not the OSR, DCC is the context of the OSR.

Castles & Crusades is similar; while it is not AD&D 2E, it is an AD&D 1E/2E simulator in a modern rules framework. It captures the feeling while not being the thing it is inspired by, opting for a modern play experience. Call them throwback games, but they capture the experience rather than replicating the rules. If all you want is "how it plays" without "all the confusing tables and junk," then DCC will sing for you.

DCC is worthy, fun, imaginative, and it displays on my selves incredibly well.

This is the time I grew up with in gaming; if not the original game, it captures the feeling well enough.

Take me back to that pizza parlor and let me live in that moment again.

GURPS, Castles & Crusades, and Dungeon Crawl Classics

My seven shelves in my room are my gaming shrines.

5E just left the room for my storage shelves, and it is likely heading into the garage this week. I can't support a game where my characters finally get interesting, only to have the character sheets be dozens of pages long. Sorry, I can't support that. I don't have the time, and I don't play digitally. 

I am left with my three best games.

GURPS is my toolkit, the best character creation system in gaming history. Forget what game designers "think" I should have in a class build, I am just going to pick it myself. After you are fluent in GURPS, there are a lot of games you don't need, and you begin to see the held-back character options that these game companies pull on the community as another way to drain your wallet on a slow drip.

You are the game designer. And the idiots in these companies that tell you they know better can pound sand. You can do it better here, and they give you the tools. I don't need Kickstarters to sell the parts of the game they left out, or the things I need to build great characters; none of the modern grift is needed.

If you don't like GURPS, Champions, and Hero System are nearly the same thing. Buy a robust, useful, and buildable point-buy system and stop being taken for a ride by modern game designers. You are smart enough to do it all yourself, and you frankly should stop wasting your time.

Even with character creation programs, my character sheets are typically a page-and-a-half long. That isn't too long. For a game with enough depth to enthrall me and give me complete control of my character designs, GURPS works better than any 5E alternative.

Another reason I love GURPS is that I have eight crates of Pathfinder pawns. The hex-based combat system in GURPS is amazing, and I have mega-hex tiles from The Fantasy Trip to play on. This is my miniatures and figure-based gaming these days. I play a variant, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy version of Pathfinder 1e (original Golarion), with low magic and brutally realistic characters, and I have fun here. Am I creating my own stats for monsters? Yes, but I don't care, and I can always convert the BX monsters to GURPS and be close enough.

GURPS-Finder, original 3.5E Golarion is the way to go. This is the best version of the world as I remember and began to love it, before it was ruined by retcons, the removal of savagery for boring, modern, pedestrian writing, and the fear of upsetting others ingrained into the world.

My pawn storage will fill the space 5E vacates on my upstairs storage shelves. 5E went the way of Pathfinder 2. I don't have a group to manage complexity, so I can't play the game, and it would be too much work to slog through it myself.

And if I don't feel like doing it all myself? Castles & Crusades beat out all my OSR games with a system that is so straightforward and easy, it does fantasy gaming in the blink of an eye, and remains compatible with all the best of my OSR adventures. Yes, the designers are in control here, but the design is so good that it was the last game Gary Gygax played in, and it has stood the test of time for 20+ years. Great things don't need to be constantly rewritten and rereleased.

All the silly charts and tables in OSR and 5E are gone. The save system is the ability score system, and those scores mean something. Everything else is so streamlined that the game puts your characters and the story first, not artificial builds ot systems for VTTs. You are not buying the game a few times on different VTT platforms just to have the privilege of designing characters.

C&C also has an amazing pulp game called Amazing Adventures, which feels like a d20 version of Savage Worlds, and covers modern, pulp,m or science fiction settings just as effortlessly. The game has a lot of tools it can bring to the table, and this could be your only game, and you would not need to touch anything else.

C&C is the best OSR game in a sea of pretenders, designers trying to outdo each other, and crowdfunding chaff. You don't need much else once you have tasted the best.

Oh, Dungeon Crawl Classics takes a lot of heat in the OSR community, but those of us who know, oh, we know. Frankly, I don't care about the company's policy of including everybody, who cares? Everyone can play together, and should.

I love the game because it embodies the spirit of playing it as we did in the 1980s. It embraces the nerd culture, the outcasts, the gamers in the smoke-filled van with the neon felt paintings, and the whole end of the hippie counterculture that ended up in fantasy gaming. D&D has become corporate and soulless, while DCC's soul is what keeps the game's heart beating strongly.

If D&D lost its soul, DCC cut it out, took it, and owns it.

And the designs here are fun to play with. This is designed for fun at conventions and around the table, where D&D can turn into a game of Advanced Squad Leader, with deciding what to do during a turn. DCC designs each class with resources, special dice, and fun things to contribute to party-based play. The dice are amazing, quirky, cool, and fun. The emergent play and random tables are a shot of unpredictability in a hobby where D&D can feel like a long slog, feeling more like Warhammer 40K than a fantasy game where players play imaginary characters.

Strange and hilarious things can happen in DCC.

In D&D, I rarely have anything cool happen other than killing things with the same boring, predictable, the party wins outcome. D&D is boring in comparison. I would rather be heavy metal swords & sorcery than I would some overdesigned character build with a character sheet longer than my arm.

There is no shame in DCC, you can have bare-chested barbarians and chainmail bikinis here, and no one will tsk-tsk and judge you. Orcs, goblins, and kobolds are evil here and worship demons (which are also evil and not character options). Werewolves are lycanthropes and insane killers on the full moon, and not character options. Modern games with this demon, noble monster, and animorphic influences bore me, and the worldbuilding is not great. Tieflings are the demon-blooded spawn of Satan. Frankly, we are sick of it all and just want a game that embraces the Gen-X spirit and tosses out all the tail-tucking and pretentious BS rampant in gaming these days.

These are the games that have endured multiple rounds of purges and reorganization.

These will be the games I carry forward, and most of the rest, save for a few exceptions, can go to Goodwill.

Pinball Crawl Classics: Last 9 Days!

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/goodman-games/old-school-adventures-1

We are closing in on the final days of the Pinball Crawl Classics campaign for Backerkit, so now is the time to jump in and make a pledge. This is one of the more original projects in the old-school space, and it has me excited.

When we get something new and different, licensing IP outside of gaming to bring in those ideas into our world, and this is a perfect combination of arcade culture mixed with gaming.

We don't see much "new blood" in gaming, and we typically end up with self-insert vanity projects that are some "author statement" for the writer trying to bandwagon people onto, "I am right, my critics are wrong." Nobody wants to make players play through your self-insert NPC's "quest of personal fulfillment" with the players on the sidelines doing all the heavy lifting.

Nobody cares about your utopian setting, Tasha, or any of these other self-inserts or idealistic snowglobe societies.

Let the players be the heroes!

This is their story.

Not the DM's. Not the adventure writer's.

We are back in the 1990s with TSR's "bestselling novel adventures" that railroad you through a story, only this time, we are being railroaded through some writer's personal beliefs and the times they were wronged on Twitter. This is the difference between the Tomb of Horrors and the newer D&D adventures. One is a classic, and the others are soon-to-be-dated fan fiction.

But this project excites me, and is a shot in the arm for gaming.

We are getting new ideas and new inspirations. The writers create a fun little world or reality, and it is up to you to navigate through it, with your story being what drives you forward. The pinball machine, and the story behind it, is just the backdrop to your greatness.

This stuff is cool.

It kicks butt.

Worthy.

Video: JAGGERTIME #1 PROTEST PURCHASE

"Put some metal sword and sorcery in your life. You'll be better for it."

I love this guy, and the DCC community is stepping up to discuss the "should DCC be simplified?" feeling that some have. There is some NSFW language here, but I love this; that is what gives us Gen-X gamers texture, spice, and grit.

What I love about this video is the "less is more" versus "more is more" comparison. Not sure what that is? Watch the video all the way through, like, and subscribe. This guy is cool.

This comparison nails it.

Winner.

Crowdfunding Trio!

We have a trio of great crowdfunders today! First up is Pinball Crawl Classics from Goodman Games:

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/goodman-games/old-school-adventures-1

Next up is Night Hunters for 5E and Tales of the Valiant:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deepmagic/night-hunters-gothic-horror-for-tov-and-5e-dandd

Adventures Dark and Deep Book of Fell Wisdom is a wonderful expansion for the premier 1E retro-clone.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brwgames/adventures-dark-and-deep-book-of-fell-wisdom

I am onboard with all three. This is a good day for crowdfunding, bad for my wallet, but I am a fan, and they earned my support.

Cleaning Up My DCC Library

I have too much junk!

The zine culture, small publishing, endless modules, crowd-funded mega modules, and all this other "stuff" for DCC have my game bloated and unplayable. The DCC bloat feels as bad as the Shadowdark bloat at this time, and I find myself having to pare down my collection to the absolute best of the best and put all the junk in storage.

I am there with 5E, and I found focusing my collection just on Tales of the Valiant, and using the Shard VTT to support it with character creation, is my best answer for the mire of junk I find myself stuck in.

All of a sudden, 5E feels playable again.

The mess of options and fluff is gone.

And I am left with a smaller, more focused, compelling game. It is so easy to get overwhelmed when a game reaches a specific size; you just quit playing it.

I am there with DCC right now, and I can't play the game and shy away from it since my shelf is a mess, crowded, filled with junk, and unplayable. I would play you more if I had less of you. I want a smaller, cleaner, more focused "fun center" and not one stocked and jammed with so many books it looks like a disaster zone.

Right now, I don't even have any room for my dice on that shelf, and it is a huge shelf. When a game gets larger than one shelf, it is too much game.

I get why some flock to one-book games, like the excellent Dragonslayer. One book is all you need. Not a library. I could play this and one of the megadungeons, and be set.

DCC vs. Second Edition

If I had to keep one game for fantasy, would it be Second Edition or Dungeon Crawl Classics? While my love of a combined Second and First Edition is strong, the fun factor of DCC can't be discounted.

DCC has far, far, far better support than Second Edition, and even ongoing and regular crowdfunding projects, and if there is only one reason to put Second Edition away, this would be it. DCC's support is better than 5E's at the moment, with giant adventure modules released regularly and a steady stream of smaller adventures with varied and imaginative settings.

With the 5E market, I see a lot of overwritten, expensive, and too-flashy pretentious junk. Everything feels like it is "please like me" overwritten, Chat GPT fluff text trying to sound intelligent, but delivering walls of text that make my eyes glaze over. Even the D&D corebooks are like this, with massive amounts of text to describe ideas that should just be left to the player's imagination.

DCC tends to keep the writing tight, using tables to deliver information, and being economical with their word count. What DCC does in a single chart and paragraph, 5E takes two pages of text to provide the same idea. 5E is one of the worst bloated games ever written, with reams of paper used to fluff the books for a higher MSRP and deliver little actual content.

When in doubt, add 100 pages of ChatGPT text and raise the book price by another $20, and we will make back most of that in profit. Paper is cheap. Concise and efficient designs aren't.

How did we get to the point where brevity is a money-losing strategy?

With Second Edition? I am either playing BX adventures, which are not bad, or recycling AD&D adventures. The support is "sort of what you can find or convert in." It is not bad, but it is not dedicated support. There are a few adventures written for For Gold & Glory, and they are nice, but they are still nowhere near the support DCC regularly receives.

On the other hand, every adventure written for BX, OSE, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, and any other retro-clone is compatible, and it gets easier if they support descending AC. So, really, you do have pretty good support if you expand your thinking and pull in adventures from BX. These work well for FG&G, and really, this is the OSR; your choice of rules is how you express yourself today, and that is cool.

It comes down to a few things. Can I get the full rules to a new player for free in PDF form? Is the publishing license open and free for anyone to create under? Is the book attractive and invites new players to join in and have fun?

FG&G hits all three points perfectly.

And there are some amazing ones. I like a lot of the mega-dungeons written for these games, and each one is easily a 10-year campaign. There is an open question of "Are mega-dungeons too much?" I love how huge and expansive they are, but there are times I prefer a larger campaign area with a few dozen medium-sized dungeons rather than one huge, multi-level monstrosity.

Second Edition has the nostalgia factor, while DCC gives me a tribute band experience, not bad, but not the real thing. There are some tribute bands of classic acts that are better than the real thing. As age takes its toll on these bands, the tribute bands can play with an energy and technical level that shocks me. I don't know the hard-working tribute bands; they pour a lot of heart into what they do, struggling and endlessly compared to the real thing, but putting in the time and effort just out of pure love.

DCC hits that same level of respect from me. This is a group of hard-working people who love the hobby as it was and are trying their best to bring back those days with fun, imaginative ideas. As a tribute band to old-school play, DCC hits all the right notes and brings me back to those days. With the Second Edition, I am playing a game that has seen better days, still the beloved original, but there is a danger here of my memories clashing with the reality of a game that has seen better days and fallen out of active support.

With DCC, every class is designed for maximum fun at the table. They are great class designs, and they have that "instant fun" designed into them, so if you sat down at a random table in a convention to play DCC, you are guaranteed to have a good time. With the Second Edition, it is the slow grind, and while I appreciate that, in today's world, where lots of things ask for our time, I will gravitate towards an instant-gratification game more than a slow grind.

I still like Second Edition; it is the best version of the game for me, across every edition Wizards or TSR put out. For the classic feeling and play, little matches it, and they loosened up the racial level limits to a point where they don't matter as much (or could be ignored), and the story XP is a solid system that is like a lot of the modern XP systems we have today. Taking away "gold for XP" and boosting moster XP makes a huge difference in motivation and why we play. The second edition is 100% compatible with anything made for the first edition or AD&D, so it is a solid choice.

For instant gratification and fast play, DCC wins.

For campaigns and classic play, the second edition, using For Gold & Glory as my rules, wins.

Pinball Crawl Classics

https://www.backerkit.com/call_to_action/891f2362-d05c-43a2-857f-417bb038207d/landing

Okay, this restores my faith in DCC and Goodman Games. A series of licensed pinball-machine-inspired adventures for DCC and MCC. What a cool idea, and this fits the game and brand better than a series of converted 5E adventures.

For a moment, I felt DCC had no direction and was a little lost compared to BX, BXA, and 1E. Now we are back in nostalgia-land again, but on some very amazing and fresh ground that has never been done before.

Thank you.

This is the sort of creativity, inspiration, and fun the hobby needs.

The DCC Malaise

I sense a certain malaise in the OSR community regarding Dungeon Crawl Classics. I still like the game, and it is an excellent, emergent gameplay old-school alternative. Many old-school YouTubers have put the game aside or reduced their collections to a book or two. The game is now mainstream and thus uncool.

So the merry-go-round spins of "what is popular" in the OSR. This never really stops, and I remember the days when Labyrinth Lord was cool. I still remember loving LL when someone told me OSE was so much better. They were right, and I moved on, by LL still serves as my DCC +1 game that I use to fill in treasure tables and other things the game needs.

DCC is a 5E offramp, just like Shadowdark, but it appeals to a different crowd. It was the third-most popular fantasy game at last GenCon, so the crew there has done a fantastic job. DCC today does feel mainstream, and Goodman is letting the game rest a little, as it is a mature system, and they are focusing on 5E and profits (and likely, player conversion).

A considerable part of the OSR is moving back to first edition, be it OSRIC, Swords & Wizardry (0e), Adventures Dark & Deep, or the original books. Myself? I have the original books, but I never use the PoDs, since the PoD reprints have errors. But the move is on, and more products are being released for dual 5E and First Edition versions. The good part about the First Edition is that it ensures compatibility all the way up from 0e (S&W and White Box), B/X (OSE), 1e (ADAD and OSRIC), 2.5E (C&C), and even DCC - mainly if you include dual descending and ascending AC values.

I would rather support games with communities and open licenses.

That is where I feel things are at: the OSR people have moved on a bit from DCC, as the novelty for them is wearing off. Many took a detour into Shadowdark (which still many support as a 5E alternative), and a sizable number returned to the First Edition.

For me, Adventures Dark and Deep or OSRIC are my First Edition standards. OSRIC 3 should be arriving here in a few months, and that is exciting.

I still have DCC on my display shelves, just for the high level of imagination and creativity. I still play and support this; there is nothing else like it. But, I get the feeling many are moving on. Because fantasy gaming is in a massive glut right now, and the moment feels like we are heading for a crash. If you look at all these games:

• D&D 2014
• D&D 2024
• Tales of the Valiant
• Level Up: A5E
• Pathfinder 2
• Shadowdark
• Daggerheart
• Draw Steel
• Nimble
• Cosmere
• Dragonbane
• ...and many more

And more are on the way, undoubtedly. I am probably missing a few, and none of the OSR games are on this list. There is no way the market can support them all. Something has got to give; if not, the entire fantasy gaming market will crash and burn. This is an Atari 2600 level of glut and oversaturation in fantasy gaming. There is no way the market can support all these games.

For many, returning to the first edition immunizes them from the coming storm, and I get why. There are too many choices out there, and most, if not all, will see hard times coming.

The first edition is a solid fall-back point. We will see where we go from here.

Dungeon Crawl Classics & The Others

Despite my feeling down on the system, I still like my Dungeon Crawl Classics books very much. I have too much stuff, and sorting through it helps alleviate the situation, allowing me to focus on the enjoyable aspects of the system rather than the clutter. Too many books drag the system down for me, and if I just focus on the core and a setting book, the game quickly returns with all its charm.

Where DCC shines is as a 5E replacement. It does 90% of what 5E does, but better, especially with the "mighty deeds" dice of the fighter replacing hundreds of pages of rules for feats and subclass abilities. And that die is far more flexible and "cool" than anything 5E can offer, without all the digital purchases, options, extra books, and fluff needed to make 5E "play right."

Every other class has "fun designed in" with clever mechanics and a minimal need for rules to make it all work. Spellburn, thieves and luck, clerics and their deities, and all the others are just so "classic" with their iconic gameplay intact, and nothing needs hundreds of pages of rules to figure out "where the fun is" by building down feat trees and being overpowered and disappointed as you level.

Other games, such as Old School Essentials, provide a great base. This game is glorious in its simplicity and expandability. It stays out of the way. It replaces 5E and then disappears into the background. The flexibility of this system means it can handle any fantasy game. This features some of the best expansions and dungeons ever written in fantasy gaming, even the ones from Labyrinth Lord, and all of them are directly compatible.

Where DCC outshines is in the emergent gameplay, creativity, and "fun classes" that simulate a modern fantasy game, without creating too invincible characters. This and DCC can replace 5E. OSE for the sheer amount of options, and DCC for the fun factor.

Adventures Dark & Deep is the definitive version of the first edition, surpassing the original in quality and organization. Only OSRIC comes close. However, when I start to feel the need to play something this in-depth, I will go for GURPS as my hyper-realistic fantasy game. While ADAD is amazing, DCC wins for fun-factor, and OSE wins for flexibility.

Still, this is such a fantastic game. I wish I had this instead of D&D 4E. This would have replaced it without a doubt.

GURPS wins for hardcore realism. Once you get any level of system mastery over GURPS, the universe opens up to you. People will criticize this game as complex or math-heavy, but it isn't. Once you know, you know, and nothing replaces it.

Still, as a "pick up and play game," it is hard to beat DCC. The level of imagination and creativity is truly remarkable. The speed of play makes this irreplaceable. The emergent gameplay, thanks to its wealth of tables, makes the game unpredictable when played solo. This is still one of my absolute peak 5E replacement games.

Crafting the Perfect 5E Replacement, Part 10

You will do well with Old School Essentials or Dungeon Crawl Classics.

If you are staying in 5E, do Shadowdark. 

And Wizards is trying to sell D&D to older markets outside the hobby, and they have no clue. The people who do crochet likely do not have the time to sort through a thousand pages of rules for a game, nor grasp the action economy of 5E. The character builds alone are hard, or near impossible, to do by hand. Older gamers outside the hobby, such as those who buy crochet books, are honestly better off with Shadowdark or OSE.

I could never recommend D&D 2024 to older people outside the hobby. I tried to put together a group, but the complexity of needing software, signing up for D&D Beyond, and dealing with the prices of the books killed my D&D group before it even started. My system veterans were hesitant to upgrade to 2024 and stick with 2014. They bailed, too.

I should have stuck with Shadowdark, which would have given me a chance to be in a group.

The older gamers who can understand D&D 2024? They already know D&D, and many have been turned off by the OGL. Many have abandoned 5E entirely. The Open 5E clones are fading and will only gain traction once 5E is surpassed by D&D 7. One could stay in the Open 5E clones, and that is a valid place if you still like 5E. To me, the system and interest is fading, and I like other games better. I only have so much room on my shelves.

GURPS, Traveller, OSE, DCC, and Call of Cthulhu are my top five games. 

Daggerheart has carved out a niche, but its interest is waning somewhat, and it is not the next Critical Role campaign's system, which is a massive missed opportunity (especially with those new hires and hype). Draw Steel is a new, more tactical game, but I don't see it taking over. Daggerheart will be a niche game only for the fans. They lost the chance to ride the wave when they announced campaign four.

History is filled with lost opportunities and companies that could have been king. Being a second player or a niche product only means fading into obscurity in the mass market. My feeling is the new hires were made since the next edition of D&D will be licensed out to Darrington Press, and they will pay for the rights to print "an edition" much like rights holders do these days.

I don't see any of the new games of 2025 making a huge impact. Changing the rules does not fix your game, or make it fun again. The hobby is a social one.

DCC is OSR compatible, and I like this game since the staff is nice and works hard. They put out some of the most imaginative stuff in the hobby these days. Some say there are too many tables in here and the game is "too much" for an OSR-style of rules, but to me, every table is just a suggestion and it is all meant to be changed and interpreted by the referee as inspiration, not written in stone.

I like DCC over 3.5E, since it is far easier, even with all the tables and the silly dice. I was a big fan of 3.5E and Pathfinder 1e, but DCC is my game for that now. It shares the saving throw system and that over-the-top feeling of 3.5E without all the bloat and crunch.

That said, DCC is less ideal for larger games where I may want to run a dozen characters solo. At most, I would run four in DCC by myself, since there is a complexity level to each that needs to be managed. If I run a dozen characters it will be for OSE since I will not lose my mind. there is a point to every game where "too much is too much" and you start to regret all the bells and whistles the system brings to the table. DCC is one of those "high character detail" games, where there is a lot going on, and quite a few choices a character needs to make during a turn with their resources and options. 

OSE will always be my go-to for classic play. This is infinitely expandable, and stays out of opinion and advocacy. It does not push itself as a silly "vibe" to adopt, it is what it is - just the rules. And what you do and create with them is your thing. There are plenty of mods and alternate rules for OSE and it blows my mind. All the adventures work together. you do not worry about compatibility or conversion, the OSR is a standard to write for, not a feeling or way of playing. Anyone who tells you you can play 5E "an OSR way" does not understand the OSR.

So, while I like DCC, OSE is my campaign game. The reasons and rules have not changed. All the best stuff that I have is for OSE, and it is 100% directly compatible without needing the DCC charts or extra stuff. Random charts for emergent play are nice, but they do not make a game.

For my 5E replacement, OSE is still it.

My 3.5E and Pathfinder 1e replacement? Yeah, that is still DCC. Mind you, DCC has flaws and weaknesses, but it is still fun.

OSE and that B/X style of rules are the perfect game. 

Crafting the Perfect 5E Replacement, Part 9

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.