The Gaming Den

Apparently, there's a beta version of the Dungeon Crawl Classics rules available now:
http://www.goodman-games.com/DCCRPGbeta.html

Good news for fans of rolling up random shit using a chart!

hogarth wrote:Good news for fans of rolling up random shit using a chart!

Oh, that'll be me then. Hello.

Given the spread of pages that the 1st Level spells take up, the amount of charts in the full version could be really offputting unless they condense or cut spells. From the convention playtest reports it seems the magic may end more skewed to the comedy in Appendix N (like the Harold Shea stories) rather than Tolkien or Howard.

If they're smart they'll put spells in their own book.

I've looked at a lot of retro clones, most of them keep making the same mistake of thinking that you need to use retro mechanics to have a retro experience. At least DCC looks like it's embracing some modernity like having a unified mechanic of d20 + modifier. They use positive AC and have attribute modifiers similar in use to 3.5.

A lot of things are missing, either through neglect, appeal to nostalgia or they just didn't want to add it. For instance skills, that chapter is about one page long if you take out the pictures, you don't get skill points, just in some circumstances if you have training (purely in your backstory) you can use you attribute modifier check. Those without training in their background don't get a check.

On the plus side their book is filled with a lot of pretty decent pictures (and some trash). The rules presented are probably going to be more useful than the old 1e rules. It's a shame that they cling to the idea that you need to use retro mechanics to have a retro experience.

As an aside the best of the Retro clones I've found so far is 'Myth and Magic' by New Haven games, it's by no means perfect though.

Goodman Games is staffed by nice, friendly, approachable folks.

They're decent guys.

It's just such a fucking shame their design work is...erratic, to say the best.

I remember Dragonmech had some awesome fluff in it: A city built into the side of a cliff around a waterfall that exited from about three-quarters of the way up the cliff, thanks to it being from an underground river that ran through the underdark and something even further below and even MORE FREAKY INSANE SHIT in there.

The Stygian Depths were awesome. Good use of showing creepy flashes of something unknown and potentially unknowable.

The Dragonmech mechanics on the other hand...

Well, the mech rules are overcomplicated, the custom base classes are too weak. PrCs varied around, but also tended towards sucking. Except for the Ghost Gear. That could let you play Kroenen from the first Hellboy movie. Much awesome.

It's kind of like they looked at DnD 2e and said "you know what 2e needed.... more dicerolls and more ways to permanently ruin your character and less character options.... and a chance to use these d30s I bought."

How do you playtest a game that eschews attempts at balance ?

geordie racer wrote:How do you playtest a game that eschews attempts at balance ?

It's a Paizo-style "playtest" where all they want is feedback about how cool they are and to create some buzz.

geordie racer wrote:How do you playtest a game that eschews attempts at balance ?

They mention a couple of bits of feedback they got so far:
-If your wizard randomly rolls up a bunch of useless spells, that sucks ass.
-Having zero-level characters who are nonproficient in every weapon sucks ass.

I look forward to more hilarity.

So, anyone looked at the final product?

I don't have the final rules but I know they've kept some weird design choices. The first and most inconvenient is that they use unique dice, d3,d5,d7,d14,d16 among others. I can only imagine that will slow things down, either more dice to fiddle through or having to simulate the results using other dice. Also spells are way more complicated, each time you cast you make a spellcraft check or some such, there are about 6-8 different possible effects per spell. Any magic-user is going to need a copy of the spells in front of them, it may be a sly way to sell books.

I'm actually kind of a fan of Goodman games, to be honest. I think some of their adventures are pretty fun.

TOZ wrote:So, anyone looked at the final product?

I'm curious about that, too. From the pictures I've seen, the production quality is impressive!

http://grognardia.blogspot.ca/2012/05/at-last.html

Heh, it looks like the Burning Wheel Gold Edition copy I bought, and would probably see about as much use.

Tried out this game in a one-shot during Free RPG Day - and the assessment is about right. We used level 1 pregens, and the spellcasters were given a page for each spell to make chart references easier. The whole aesthetic was gonzo, and there was definitely a love for weird dice (use d16s instead of d20s when you dual-wield for two attacks per round).

I played a wizard, and a veteran player ran me through the last customization step while everyone else pored over their pregen choices - most importantly the extra effects from using any of my spells. For example, casting magic missile gives me a -2 to all rolls for 1d3 rounds, while casting Ward Portal makes my chest grow a face (also for 1d3 rounds) that can independently cast spells. If I roll a natural 1 w/spellcasting, any number of things can happen - my character's hands were permanently blackened after failing to cast flaming hands, but I could've gotten the trait of making paper potentially ignite whenever I handled it.

Did anyone have the massive gilded tome linked to in the Grognardia blog above?

I don't even remember starting this thread, by the way, but here is the character I rolled up during the playtest:

Merlin the Wainwright
STR: 7 (-1)
AGI: 8 (-1)
STA: 8 (-1)
PRS: 6 (-1)
INT: 11
LCK: 12 (add luck to spell checks)
HP: 1
AC: 9
Fort/Ref/Will: -1/-1/-1
money: 33 cp
equipment: club, pushcart full of straw, large sack
AL: Neutral

Merlin is whiny and lazy. He enjoys other people pulling him on his cart while he takes a nap in a comfy pile of straw.

I actually played in a (short) campaign using these rules, among a group of gamers who were pretty much all old enough to have played AD&D unironically.

Was it fun? I mean ... I guess kind of, but I ascribe this almost entirely to the players and very little to the rules. There's a lot of shit that as far as I can tell is in there just to be RANDOM LOL. Because AD&D had some stuff you rolled at random, and if some random stuff is retro, then even more stuff must be even more retro, right?

I just don't see the point. It's like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" -- I see the title and I laugh and I move on. I don't feel any need to actually read the book, and there's a part of me that's sort of puzzled that someone felt like writing the book was a good use of their time, rather than just mocking up a cover in Photoshop and calling it a day. Dungeon Crawl Classics is a little bit more worthwhile in that rather than seeing the title and laughing and moving on, I read through the book and laugh and move on, but the point of a game is to be played and I would never pick this system of my own accord.

If I want a retro role playing experience, I fucking own a Players' Handbook. I probably have enough of them to equip a whole group. They're already paid for and the system is, like, the archetype of retro gaming. If you are for some reason lacking in confidence that an AD&D campaign won't have enough zany moments just as an emergent property of the game, and you don't feel like you're funny or creative enough to make up for it by adding your own brand of wackiness, then I suppose this might be a worthwhile buy. But it really comes off as excessively try-hardy, like when Hollywood makes movies "reviving" old properties that end up just being excuses to point at the original and laugh at how stupid we all were for making that popular.

I've been playing a weekly (with varying intermittent attendance, I missed a couple weeks in June for example) campaign of DCC for the past several months. We started with 4 level 0 characters apiece. Most of us are mostly level 1, and have had a bunch of deaths. I'm up to 4 deaths myself.

Is DCC the Spinal Tap edition of the original Hackmaster? I kind of get that impression but am only cursorily familiar with both games and have never played them.

I cut short my quipping since I had to head out. I'll echo what most have said. Yeah, it's another damn "retro" game. It has tons of randumbness. It reminds me of lamentations of the flame princess, but without so much squick. Spells are a lot more fiddly, such that our casters roll like 3-4x as many times on their turns as other characters (determine if the spell succeeds, determine manifestation of spell, special quirks like the head appearing and giving more casting per round, then the actual effect of the spell). It's bad enough that I actually avoiding making my high int character into a wizard.

I actually like the luck stat a bit (can burn Luck stat to get a bonus on a roll which can sometimes save your life). And it gives something mildly interesting to Thieves/Halfings (their luck regenerates daily). That said, all of my characters have shitty luck stats, so I don't really get to make use of this.

The main reason we burn through characters is that starting at level 0 our guys have less HP than the median damage of most attacks and shit AC. When the DM busts out multiple dice for damage (as happened to my first two guys), that's instant death. Only recently did I get some armor on my level 1 cleric who is now like unto a god with 10 HP and 17 AC, and he can heal all damage pretty much at will until he rolls a natural 1 and something bad happens.

Some of the things are funny, but the gags don't have much in the way of legs. How many times is it funny that you roll in with a farmer who has a duck that is used to detect traps? Most of the enjoyment definitely comes from gaming with friends, and we could just as easily be playing anything else for equal amounts of fun. My favorite part of it is that I have a whole party of characters under my command pretty much, and I use different voices and personalities to keep it parsed.