Though Goodman Games hasn’t announced it yet, and Joseph Goodman’s only given vague hints of “something fun in the works”, a few of us at DunDraCon 34 this past weekend got a taste of this secret RPG project. Goodman was playtesting an early version of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, which was exactly what fans of the DCC adventures would imagine – a streamlined, deadly, 1st Edition D&D throwback with some D&D 3.5e influences. As already mentioned, no release date or details have been announced as yet, but I’d wager we may see it in stores early 2011, possibly sooner. In the session I joined, character building took less than five minutes, and cast each of us as not one, not two, but three 0-level peasants out to strike it rich as glamorous adventurers. You can probably guess why we made so many characters – yes, the mortality rate caused comparisons to a session of Paranoia, but we had some truly horrible luck as well. We’ll talk more about my preview of the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG in the OgreCave Audio Report (which the Ogre shamans are casting resurrection on as I write this) sometime next week.
I guess Goodman reads Knockspell as well cause issue #1 had that exact same mechanic, 3 zero level characters per player. David Bowmen called them “thralls” rather than peasants.
Years ago when I realized how much I hated 3.5 I wanted to move to a more old school system and was quite pleased when I found Castles and Crusades. At the time there really weren’t that many old school systems available and it was a nice change of pace.
Today though? Seems like you can’t roll a d20 without hitting an old school “classic” RPG. The market is far too saturated and what’s disappointing is that so many of these systems all seem the same. A mechanic tweaked here or there, but overall if you’ve played one new-old system, you’ve played them all.
Hopefully GMG will do something to distinguish their system. Overall I think they put out some good stuff, so maybe there’s hope it will be unique.
Scott R. Krol said “A mechanic tweaked here or there, but overall if you’ve played one new-old system, you’ve played them all.”
By design, my friend. You can’t change much and still be old-school… C&C barely stays inside the lines as it is.
Chris Gonnerman said “By design, my friend.”
Yeah, but is that design? Isn’t it more like craft? (Both are worth doing, but it seems to me they’re pretty different.)
Why would I bother with this? I already have AD&D. It’s laughably easy to get, and cheaper than anything on the market, including PoD stuff.
Pass.
That’s the question that most of the old-school renaissance doesn’t really have an answer for, yeah.
The reason why folks might wish to bother with this is to support a company. TSR is dead.
By spending one’s hard earned dough to an existing company, one vote’s with their dollars to continue to support the old-school renaissance. That is the only reason I am aware of. I have enough TSR AD&D product to play for years to come. However, I find publishers like Troll Lord Games & Goodman Games worthy of support and will continue to purchase their products for this purpose.