My main criticisms of Castles & Crusades, based upon the 1st printing that I possess:

* terrible paper quality
* poor editing
* poorly organized
* boring, uninspiring writing
* needlessly verbose, without adding actual depth
* Siege Engine/Primes are poorly explained
* a Prime bonus of +6 is a little too high
* art is bland and uninspiring
* Peter Bradley is an annoying twit (and mediocre artist)
* differing xp values feels clunky and out of place in C&C (as opposed to AD&D, where it belongs)
* Clerics being more proficient in tracking or trapfinding than other classes is retarded

Personal Note: I prefer some degree of character customization. If a game does not possess this, then that's fine.....as long as said game is well-written, and provides the reader with tons of campaign ideas. But C&C bored me. I don't know if subsequent printings corrected most of these issues, but my belief is that you get one chance to make a first impression, and Troll Lords blew it.

The only good thing I can say about C&C it is that its gameplay is faster than either AD&D or 3.x, and I can actually use it to run my campaign. But I just couldn't stick with Castles & Crusades, because the product as written just bored me to tears. :pundit:

P.S. The various OSRIC vs C&C threads on the Internet are hilarious though.

Quote from: Planet Algol;503778There's a quote by HR Giger about how one baby is cute, but a multitude of them is overwhelming and creepy; that how I feel about the wall of Peter Bradley art in C&C.

And would it kill him to draw one woman who doesn't had a protruding muscular butt in skintight garb?

What garb?  Pete likes big butts and he cannot lie...

Quote from: CRKrueger;623086What garb?  Pete likes big butts and he cannot lie...

An enticement to adventure!

Quote from: Kuroth;623089An enticement to adventure!

Now that's a megadungeon!

Speaking strictly as a professional artist, it literally would kill me to draw a woman with a lacklustre ass.

I would die. Literally die.

Eh.  It's not the ass that bothers me, it's the fact that even from this perspective, it's clear that woman possesses a waist that would be physically incapable of supporting her upper body.

Quote from: J Arcane;623104Eh.  It's not the ass that bothers me, it's the fact that even from this perspective, it's clear that woman possesses a waist that would be physically incapable of supporting her upper body.

Perspective is a mysterious thing: http://a3.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/118/c5da694cbfab4ff6a2c7ecefa520f758/m.jpg

My biggest issue with the art is that all of the women are wearing entirely too many clothes. How do they expect to be decent adventurers while wearing pants and a shirt?!

I enjoy C&C...but I don't have much use for the game. It doesn't do anything for me that my OD&D/S&W doesn't do.

I do prefer the C&C classes to their AD&D equivalents. I really enjoy my Bard and my Knight. If there was a C&C Living Campaign, I would definitely try it out.

I have played a few sessions with hardcore C&C fans and I have found the Primes and SIEGE engine to work fine at the table. Nothing amazing, but nothing nightmarish like I've read about on forums.

But then again, I enjoy Palladium.

We ran a little experiment where we ran a session with Swords & Wizardry characters using the Siege Engine. It worked.

So, precisely what is people's beef with Peter Bradley? I've never encountered him online but would be interested if people can point me to examples of particularly poor behaviour on his part.

Quote from: Warthur;623179So, precisely what is people's beef with Peter Bradley? I've never encountered him online but would be interested if people can point me to examples of particularly poor behaviour on his part.

He can be a bit of an ass on the forums. That's really it.

Quote from: danbuter;623190He can be a bit of an ass on the forums. That's really it.

Oh.

Considering that RPG discussion includes people who'll declare that all pre-Forge RPGs cause brain damage, that doesn't sound terribly obnoxious.

This system (castles and crusades) has always been one of my bugbears.  I like the underlying idea of the system and I think it was really unique when it came out.  But the books tend to be . . . flat.  I found Monsters and Treasures of Aihrde to be fairly uninspiring.  It focused on a lot of technical details without telling why this creature was awesome or why this item was interesting.  

The editing is never the best.  I understand how hard it is to proof your own work and I also have an overly dry style.  But it is an issue.  

Finally, the importing of the Seige mechanics has the same underlying issue I have with 3.5E.  In 3.5E they try to unify everything into one system, and some of the most odd things about that game come from this.  Wisdom for perception, for example, leads to strange things like aging increasing the acuity of a person's senses.  It's an easy system and it isn't bad (and I like how Primes make it impossible to strong everywhere).  

But it just doesn't gel.  And yet I still buy some of their products hoping that it will make that last little jump to "really cool".

To an extent, the SIEGE "system" seems to me more the superficial appearance of a system -- something to ease folks accustomed to the more truly systematic Wizards of the Coast rules sets.

In that regard, I think it works better to give players a bonus factor for "primes" on the character sheet, as opposed to the recommended approach of the GM adjusting target numbers.

To another extent, though, there are (as I recall) some significant differences in how the game works as compared with old D&D. For example, IIRC, saving throws against spells always have about the same chance of success against a caster of similar level; in the old game, they improved along with the level of the figure making the save.

This sort of thing may appear in other cases as well.

Some other things (e.g., revisions to the spell list) may also boost spell-casters, perhaps analogously to effects of rules in "3e" D&D.

On the plus side, many people seem to like C&C character classes very much. There are some interestingly different approaches to old standards.