Welcome to Out of Curiosity. This Blog will serve as a place to share
thoughts, impressions and creations. In the forseeable future most of
my posts will have one thing in common. They will be, more or less
closely tied to the "Dungeon Crawl Classics" RPG. Why DCC?
I
have been playing Role Playing Games for over 10 years and have tried
many Systems and settings. I first started playing with "The
Dark Eye" (like most german roleplayers) and played TDE (DSA) for years.
I immediatly got hooked into gaming and it has been my favorite hobby ever since. For DSA, i enjoyed the setting but found
the well-defined world quite limiting and as i tried other systems i
began having issues with the system in general. But still. DSA has been
the source of some of my finest memories in gaming, but my gaming group
fell apart. I soon found myself more interested in non-fantasy
Roleplaying and spent many fun sessions within Shadowrun, Dark Heresy,
Traveller and Vampire. And every time i wanted to play some fantasy. I
just didn't know how to start. I did not care too much for DSA anymore
and, despite years of play and many books owned, Pathfinder just was not
what i wanted from fantasy RPG. So i began to look around.
I
played DCC some time before I ever heard of DCC. At a small Convention
someone ran Dungeon World with a fan made rule set called "Funnel World".
We played Sailors on the Starless Sea (A fact that I only found out three
years later, as I bought the adventure after many recommendations). It
was fresh and fun but didn't stick with me. It took me another two years
until, at another convention, a friend presented DCC and I was quite
interested. I can't recall why I was so excited about it, but the more
liberal approach to fantasy Roleplaying and the rework of how
spellcasters work in comparison to DnD hooked me. I got the book and now
I consider DCC a personal favorite.
Enough backstory. Let's talk about the Thing. I don't wanna tell you to like it and i definitly don't want to say, that
DnD is bad. It is not. I just want to explain my point of view and show you some of the merits this system has.
So the question is: Why do I like this thing?
It
is not for nostalgia, as i am far too young to have any nostalgia
towards old school Dungeon Crawls. The Dark eye is not about dungeons. I
played Pathfinder, before ever playing any DnD and my first session of
aDnD was a month ago. So i don't just like this old school inspired
system for old times sake.
First of all: DCC is focused
around characters. While this might sound weird, looking at an Old
School System with only 4 classes in total and non humans being limited
to their own "racial class", creating a character shows a different
approach. The personality and development of a character is not tracked
on the character sheet but up to the player. There are no rules
regarding how you have to play your character except for being either
lawful, neutral or chaotic. While leveling up is important the most
drastic improvements or changes in DCC come from story elements, like
blessing of gods, magical artifacts, demonic intervention and many
more. So what makes a character unique is not recorded on sheet but lies
within its background and history.
Furthermore Dungeon
Crawl Classics simply has amazing systems aiding those character
developments and helping in creating epic moments in a natural way. The
systems all leave lots of space for players to be creative with and the
inclusion of many random tables into gameplay creates an expectancy that
anything can happen. But how does randomness and creativity work
together? The game never forces you into one direction. Reading the
rulebook will give you the impression, that you, as gamemaster, should
choose when to insert randomness. Yes, critical hits do use random
tables but if my fighter describes how he wants to stab the orc into the
leg and rolls a critical hit, then why even roll for a crit and not
just let the leg come off? Nothing stops you of doing this! That why the
gamemaster is called judge. Randomness does not have to be applied, but
when it is... Things tend to get hillarious.
But most
importantly, for me, DCC feels like a template to make what you want out
of your game. There is no predefined world and no lore knowledge which
is mandatory. If you have an Idea, then simply go for it. And this
extends to game systems. Meddling with classes or systems is not this
hard because balance is not done through stats but through expecting
players to pick their encounters wisely. There are few systems except
for luck that apply to all characters so you don't have to keep those
systems in mind when designing new stuff. Be it new classes, new
encounters, new monsters or new worlds. Not only is it easy to
implement. There are many people who already do this stuff and just a
quick search on the internet will leave you with tons of fanmade stuff,
some free, some not, all worth looking at, for this system.
Last
but not least. Modules for DCC are awesome. Goodman games knows how to
pick, choose and make good adventure modules and those for Dungeon Crawl
Classics are mostly top-notch. For everyone interested in fantasy
roleplaying i can not recommend them enough. They know that, just
because your characters are inexperienced and of low level, this does
not mean that things won't become epic and crazy. There are no small
goblin lairs on which to spend 3 evenings of cleaning up. No. You are a
peasant nothing more than a pitchfork? Ever heard of the Lords of Chaos?
No? Well... that's you problem. DCC starts of epic, at low levels and
doesn't slow down and this spirit translates into all their modules.
I
could continue writing about why I like DCC for a long time, but I want
to write more general articles about some of those things at some point
and this one went really long for a opening post.. The future will
bring more focused posts, but opening
with a post about my current favorite System and why creating things
for it is so much fun felt like the right way to start this.
So far, thanks for reading.
Marc
