Quote from: bat on December 17, 2024, 11:43:48 AMNobleshield, have you tried Barbarians of Lemuria (or Legend, the lighter version) and/or the Everywhen Sword & Sorcery Codex? Not trying to alter the entire thread, just asking one person a question.
As for DCC, it can be fun to run. I ran it in public for years at a bar as part of the Road Crew and the gonzo side can make for a raucous table.

I have it, but only gave it a cursory glance.

On topic, I will say that as a PLAYER I'm intrigued by DCC (although I still really, really hate the funnel), it's just from a GM standpoint it's "this is garbage" (but I'm the same way with things like sandboxes/hexcrawls)

Funnels are really a tiny portion of the game that people focus on because they're a bit of a novelty and really fit convention play

DCC PCs are quite strong from level 1 onward and it gets quite crazy at mid-high levels

Quote from: Nobleshield on December 17, 2024, 12:11:01 PM

Quote from: bat on December 17, 2024, 11:43:48 AMNobleshield, have you tried Barbarians of Lemuria (or Legend, the lighter version) and/or the Everywhen Sword & Sorcery Codex? Not trying to alter the entire thread, just asking one person a question.
As for DCC, it can be fun to run. I ran it in public for years at a bar as part of the Road Crew and the gonzo side can make for a raucous table.

I have it, but only gave it a cursory glance.

On topic, I will say that as a PLAYER I'm intrigued by DCC (although I still really, really hate the funnel), it's just from a GM standpoint it's "this is garbage" (but I'm the same way with things like sandboxes/hexcrawls)

There is also Marauders & Magi of Mu to snag from, it IS very S&S.
Players seem to really enjoy DCC, as a Judge it can be frustrating, however a spellcaster rolling bad is always a treat.

Quote from: Nobleshield on December 17, 2024, 12:11:01 PMit's just from a GM standpoint it's "this is garbage" (but I'm the same way with things like sandboxes/hexcrawls)

wow. hate the sandbox/hexcrawl campaign. why?

I don't like the funnel system either. But the fix is easy: don't use it and start at level one instead. It's not essential and doesn't really affect the game if discarded.

Quote from: blackstone on December 17, 2024, 01:49:29 PM

Quote from: Nobleshield on December 17, 2024, 12:11:01 PMit's just from a GM standpoint it's "this is garbage" (but I'm the same way with things like sandboxes/hexcrawls)

wow. hate the sandbox/hexcrawl campaign. why?

Not to derail the thread but because it seems like a nonsense idea made up by "OSR" people based on how they THINK games actually worked; it comes off more like people who read someone talking about it once on a forum and was like "That must have been how people played in the 80s!" because no game that I played in the 90s or talked to people who played actually did that stuff. You had an adventure (homebrew or published) that you presented to the PCs and they were expected to take the "bait", not a list of rumors/quests and ask the PCs "what one do you want to pick" like a videogame. Hexcrawls make zero sense unless it's like an uncharted island (isle of dread), nobody played that way.

It's mainly the fact the OSR crowd seems to proselytize this as the "true way" of old-school gaming when that's an outright fabrication.

Do you mean carry on as AD&D like.. as a replacement? Or how so?
I think DCC has legs to keep being played for many years, in some ways because of goodman games, and in some ways despite goodman games.
If there are elements of it that you don't like, such as the funnel, you can completely ignore it and choose to play it like a branch of 3rd edition D&D, which is kinda what I do.  There are some elements from AD&D1e/2e that are missing, like rules or guidelines for random generation of terrain, at least in the base rules/game.  There's a lot of 3rd party content for DCC, most of which I haven't even read, so I'm not sure how much of the coverage of AD&D rules/systems have been brought into DCC or not.

I don't think it's true that DCC is carrying on the AD&D fever dream, given that it's much closer to 3e than AD&D, but it's a solid alternate take on what AD&D accomplishes. The whole "old school" sensibility it touts mostly just aesthetic.

Quote from: Banjo Destructo on December 17, 2024, 04:36:32 PMDo you mean carry on as AD&D like.. as a replacement? Or how so?
I think DCC has legs to keep being played for many years, in some ways because of goodman games, and in some ways despite goodman games.
If there are elements of it that you don't like, such as the funnel, you can completely ignore it and choose to play it like a branch of 3rd edition D&D, which is kinda what I do.  There are some elements from AD&D1e/2e that are missing, like rules or guidelines for random generation of terrain, at least in the base rules/game.  There's a lot of 3rd party content for DCC, most of which I haven't even read, so I'm not sure how much of the coverage of AD&D rules/systems have been brought into DCC or not.

Will it persist and remain active beyond a few scattered gaming groups, 5 or 10 years from now?

To answer the OP, I don't think it's really an AD&D "fever dream," but I do think it's carved out a strong enough niche in the hobby to carry on indefinitely.  Goodman is pretty supportive of 3PP to the point of selling their stuff on Goodman's site and doing crowdfunding campaigns with them.  And some of that Third Party stuff is absolutely first rate, like "Jungle Tomb of the Mummy Bride."  They've also done a good job with their IPs like Dying Earth & Lankhmar (even though I don't personally care for either setting), and they've updated a revised classic adventures like "The Dark Tower" and "Caverns of Thracia," doing a good job with those as well.

Personally, I was unimpressed when I first checked out and read a few reviews of DCC, but then I decided to try it out about 4 years ago and liked it more than I thought I would.  It is definitely better as a player than a GM and because of all the tables and varying spell effects, it plays a lot slower than say, B/X.  But you get far more varied and unpredictable results, which is cool.  I like race as class, so that's a plus and the little tweeks they make to the standard B/X classes are generally very cool, like having clerical healing vary according to alignment of the recipient vis-a-vis the caster, and differing advances for thief skills based on alignments.  The random spell manifestations are fun, and I really like how they use deities and patrons for special effects, punishments, and the like.  I also love the dice chain and I use it with my other OSR games.  Way cooler than advantange/disadvantage IMO.

As for the Appendix N "feel," I think that's open to each person's interpretation to an extent.  Sure, much of DCC doesn't quite fit those books.  But what I think DCC excels at as capturing the spirit or vibe of those 1950s-70s fantasy and Sci-fi movies (and books to a degree) where anything could happen and even beginning heroes can save the world.  This really comes out in the adventures, including the funnels (which aren't my favorite, but are alright).  So I think you need to be in a certain mindset or mood to fully embrace DCC and I totally get why it turns people off.  For me, it's not quite my preferred game (that's Castles & Crusades), but it's great when I want to fight aliens and weird monsters in the same setting and jump through portals to other planets.

Quote from: Nobleshield on December 17, 2024, 11:23:52 AMI'm mad that DCC claims to try to emulate Appendix N, which is 100% a lie...

DCC Lankhmar
DCC Dying Earth
DCC Empire of the East
DCC Purple Planet (pastiche of Barsoom and similar swords-and-planet fiction)
Martian Crawl Classics (H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds")

All of those (and probably more) create an experience very similar to the fiction they are based upon.

I would agree with you that the funnel isn't very "Appendix N" at all. I was a playtester for DCC and I can't recall what got that funnel concept started, but I agree that it gets overused at conventions and game demo sessions. The emphasis of the DCC RPG was always supposed to be the notion that monsters in the books are rarely "just another orc or skeleton" but instead are unique and creepy tentacled-things or something like that. I think that the artwork conveys this, the monsters in the modules convey this, the unpredictable nature of spells conveys this. A lot of those features are highly represented in the older "Appendix N" books. (Some of them aren't, obviously. "Appendix N" covers a lot of decades and a lot of authors, many of which were very different in style from one another.)

The funky dice are there because Goodman wanted to have something unusual. In the 1970's polyhedral dice were strange but now they are commonplace, so Goodman's use of bizarre-sided dice was an attempt to capture the cool feel of having unusual dice again. Some like them, some don't, but it's easy to replace the dice chain with a series of simple +/- bonus numbers.

There's a lot one can like about DCC, and clearly a lot one can dislike. As a guy who played a lot of D&D in the 1970's, I applaud the attempt to bring back the strange and unexpected. Having said that, my crew played a lot of DCC for a while then moved onto other RPGs.

I like DCC's aesthetic and general vibe, and they have a knack for licensing literary settings that I like. The wacky dice and reliance on tables are a deal breaker for me though, at least as a DM. I'm much more likely to take their modules and run them with another OSR system.

As to its long term viability, in the past I would have said it's a top three most played OSR game, after OSE and Castles and Crusades. My only real metric is what I see of open games listed on Roll20 and foundry though, so not wholly representative.

Post covid there's been a general slump in people playing online, but there's still usually a DCC game or two being played. As for 10-15 years from now, hard to say. DCC's been plugging along for a good while already, but it feels like the OSR as a whole has lost some of its profile/momentum compared to about 5 years ago.

Quote from: Nobleshield on December 17, 2024, 04:36:03 PMNot to derail the thread but because it seems like a nonsense idea made up by "OSR" people based on how they THINK games actually worked; it comes off more like people who read someone talking about it once on a forum and was like "That must have been how people played in the 80s!" because no game that I played in the 90s or talked to people who played actually did that stuff. You had an adventure (homebrew or published) that you presented to the PCs and they were expected to take the "bait", not a list of rumors/quests and ask the PCs "what one do you want to pick" like a videogame. Hexcrawls make zero sense unless it's like an uncharted island (isle of dread), nobody played that way.

It's mainly the fact the OSR crowd seems to proselytize this as the "true way" of old-school gaming when that's an outright fabrication.

B2 Keep on the Borderlands was both a Hexcrawl (without hexes but functionally it was) and a sandbox (no fetch quests, minimal guidance on what to do). B2 is the most played module in D&D history.

Quote from: Nobleshield on December 17, 2024, 04:36:03 PMNot to derail the thread but because it seems like a nonsense idea made up by "OSR" people based on how they THINK games actually worked; it comes off more like people who read someone talking about it once on a forum and was like "That must have been how people played in the 80s!" because no game that I played in the 90s or talked to people who played actually did that stuff. You had an adventure (homebrew or published) that you presented to the PCs and they were expected to take the "bait", not a list of rumors/quests and ask the PCs "what one do you want to pick" like a videogame. Hexcrawls make zero sense unless it's like an uncharted island (isle of dread), nobody played that way.

It's mainly the fact the OSR crowd seems to proselytize this as the "true way" of old-school gaming when that's an outright fabrication.

I agree. For every sand-box module in the style of Keep on the Borderlands; TSR/WOTC put out far more modules of the "let's go on X adventure" style.

Module play was a Big part of the early AD&D-2e culture. The concept of the modern 'adventure path' didn't exactly spring out of a vacuum.

GM buys module, says hey I'm running this, players are like "Ok sounds cool!", has been the way most people have played the game for decades.

"But my group..." Yes, we know. Nobody cares.

TSR and WOTC didn't print up and sell all those adventures for no reason.

Quote from: Ruprecht on December 17, 2024, 08:20:38 PMB2 Keep on the Borderlands was both a Hexcrawl (without hexes but functionally it was) and a sandbox (no fetch quests, minimal guidance on what to do). B2 is the most played module in D&D history.

Absolutely true. It also true that it came with most every B/X game. Isle of Dread got a lot of play for the same reason. Then after playing those, most groups promptly defaulted to "GM presents adventure to PC's that take the bait..." adventure style that most every module after those had.

In my opinion; the sandbox style game is a superior game experience for the PC's as they have maximum agency in the virtual game world.

But the hard truth is that most groups can care less about that, which is why pre-made adventures and modules continue to sell.

Oh, DCC will at best, continue to just be a relatively niche game with extra dice. It endangers the popularity of no other D&D clones.

Quote from: Nobleshield on December 17, 2024, 04:36:03 PMNot to derail the thread but because it seems like a nonsense idea made up by "OSR" people based on how they THINK games actually worked; it comes off more like people who read someone talking about it once on a forum and was like "That must have been how people played in the 80s!" because no game that I played in the 90s or talked to people who played actually did that stuff. You had an adventure (homebrew or published) that you presented to the PCs and they were expected to take the "bait", not a list of rumors/quests and ask the PCs "what one do you want to pick" like a videogame. Hexcrawls make zero sense unless it's like an uncharted island (isle of dread), nobody played that way.

It's mainly the fact the OSR crowd seems to proselytize this as the "true way" of old-school gaming when that's an outright fabrication.

You are aware that a significant number of the posters here were actually playing RPGs in the 70s and/or 80s?  The sandbox/hexcrawl was the primary structure of my games in the 80s, and almost everyone I knew played similarly.  Published modules were a very small portion of our gaming, and we didn't create "plot" or a set adventure often at all.  Mostly it was, "Here's some rumors, what do you want to do?" and sometimes what we came up with had nothing to do with what the DM had prepped.

So, as someone there, it's not a "myth," it's exactly how I (and my groups) played...