6 Reasons Dungeon Crawl Classics Is A Masterpiece Of Game Design

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We live in a golden age of gaming. Roleplayers these days are spoiled for choice, and an RPG, especially a fantasy RPG, must be something truly unique and innovative to avoid being trampled by a veritable orcish horde of competition. It’s no surprise then that the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game by Goodman Games is building a horde of its own with a die-hard cult following all over the world. Modern gamers may at first crinkle their noses at what DCC has to offer. “Only seven classes? Three of them are races too? Where are the pages of Feats?” However, between the covers of DCC’s deceptively meaty tome is one of the most finely crafted fantasy roleplaying games on the market today. Goodman Games lovingly poured nearly 20 years of experience into their creation, and it shows, presenting a fresh and innovative look at time honored conventions such as spell casting, Game Mastery, even gaining XP. This game will change the way you look at roleplaying games.

1) You Probably Already Know How To Play
Dungeon Crawl Classics runs on a streamlined, rules-light version of the classic d20 System. So if you’re already familiar with systems such as Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition or Pathfinder, most of the game will already be old hat, plus or minus a few tweaks. DCC’s biggest change is the Dice Chain. Rather than bombard players with a pedantic slough of plus and minus modifiers, DCC simply lets you move up or down the Dice Chain, rolling a larger or smaller die for your action. To facilitate this, DCC adds in d5’s, d7’s, all the way up to a d30. However, while rolling a d30 is immensely satisfying, you don’t actually have to own any of the weird dice to play. You can simulate them perfectly with the standard 7 polyhedrals you already own. For instance, a d30 is easily aped with a d10 and a d6. If the d6 comes up three or four, add ten to the result of the d10, five or six add 20.

2) A User-Friendly XP System
I spend my free time adding numbers to dice for fun, and I can still say with a reasonable degree of certainty that nobody likes math. DCC takes much of the heavy lifting out of tracking advancement. Every player gains 0 to 4 XP based on how difficult an encounter was to overcome, whether they completely steamrolled it, barely crawled away alive, or anything in between. No forcing the Judge to fiddle with wacky multipliers or pore over endless CR charts, and the players don’t have to bust out calculators every time they want to see how much closer they’ve crawled to the next level.    

For Judges that don’t want to see the campaign degenerate into a series of monster closets, characters also gain XP for activities related to their class. Warriors gain XP from training with weapons, Wizards gain XP from researching spells, etc.

3) The Character Funnel Is A Game Unto Itself
While characters in DCC can be created in a traditional manner (4d6 drop the lowest, 3d6 down the line, etc.) the rulebook suggests a brand new method called “The Funnel.”

Rolling on some tables, the players create two to four Level 0 characters; simple village folks with little more than 1d4 Hit Points, an improvised weapon and an occupation, such as Farmer, Locksmith, or Gongfarmer (the guy that cleans out the outhouse). The players march their plucky peasant mob through a dungeon of horrible monsters, lethal traps, and the twisted, mangled bodies of their fallen comrades to prove themselves worthy of being first level adventurers. The idea is to randomize character creation, thus making it harder to “power game” while also allowing the players some level of agency over the character they end up with, as the player will be more inclined to take risks with the characters they don’t want.

I admit, I was originally skeptical of this when I first read it. However, speaking from experience, the funnel is an absolute blast. The most fun I had at GenCon last year was marching my own band of intrepid amateurs through a buzzsaw. Even if you decide to use traditional character creation for your own campaigns, Funnels make perfect fodder for one-shots or convention games, and are by themselves icing on an already delicious cake.

4) Spells Are Dynamic
Spells in most games are rote. Mark of a spell slot, look up the effect, it will do the same exact thing every time, plus or minus a saving throw, and then it’s gone for the day.

In DCC, magic is the building blocks of the multiverse, the tools of gods and demons and far beyond the ken of mortal men. It’s dangerous, it’s unpredictable, and its awesome.

When a Wizard casts a spell, they make a spell check. Depending on the roll, a spell can manifest in more powerful or completely different ways. This is what lends the rulebook its ample girth; every spell has its own table. Fireball might scorch a patch of ground, or it might erupt into a barrage of flaming orbs, leap across multiple targets, or even call down a burning meteor from the heavens. Levitate might raise a single person into the air, or it might conjure a 20 x 20 invisible floating platform, make everything in a 10 ft. square float, or life an entire castle into the air for a month.

It’s also worth noting that unless a player rolls particularly poorly, spells are not lost upon casting and can be used multiple times. This facet alone carries several benefits, not the least of which is alleviating the “five-minute workday” problem other RPG’s have tried to address with cantrips. Clerics no longer have to miserly hoard spell slots for healing, and anyone who has played a healer before can tell you how liberating that is. I’ve also seen players who refused to play spellcasters in other games leap to Wizards and Clerics here, as they still feel useful instead of drained dry by a few rounds of combat.

However, there’s a price to be paid for such power. Spells can just as easily backfire, and for Wizards, being mutated into a hideous monstrosity by the coruscating waves of magic is about the best one could hope for. Truly unfortunate sorcerers may find themselves aged 100 years, warped to another plane, or on the wrong end of a demon lord’s eternal enmity. The Spell Duel system (DCC’s take on the traditional counterspell) cranks this up to 11. All manner of havoc can ensue when the energies of the cosmos are bashed together like billiard balls.

Clerics accrue the disapproval of their deity, and being on a god’s bad side starts to suck real fast. Sinning, or just plain failing their spell checks, widens an ever increasing Disapproval range. When a spell check falls within their Disapproval range, the deity calls the Cleric to atone for his sins, and they don’t exactly ask nicely. The rulebook comes complete with a table chock full of creative punishments for a Cleric who takes his divine powers for granted.

5) Mighty Deeds Of Arms
Martial Maneuvers are a popular idea in modern d20 games, but most of them are still gated behind character archetypes or a litany of Feats. This means that most players will never get use them, and the few who do will have to deliberately build their characters to perform a handful of situational techniques at the expense of something else. Dungeon Crawl Classics resolves this with a mechanic called Mighty Deeds of Arms. Warriors get a bonus die called a Deed Die, which serves as their attack and damage bonus, and increases in size as they gain levels. When making an attack, they can declare a Mighty Deed. If the Deed Die rolls high enough and the attack hits, they can accomplish anything the player can think of with their weapon, (subject to Judge approval of course) from simply disarming an opponent to sending them flying through a door, stapling them to the spot with an arrow, or any number of bombastic stunts. This system makes Warriors true weapon masters, giving them limitless flexibility in combat beyond “I run up and hit ‘em.”

6) The Rules They Didn’t Write Are Just As Important
There are some things DCC deliberately left out. You won’t find a Raise Dead spell in the rulebook. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t raise dead. At a certain level in most roleplaying games, death is just a gold tax. Fork over 500 gold to the local temple of Who Cares and suddenly getting beheaded is a minor inconvenience. DCC says “quest for it.” Travel to Hell and steal the soul back, trek to the Haunted Fen to beseech a lich lord for passage into Death’s realm, search for an ancient coin minted by a lost kingdom to bribe Charon for passage across the river Styx. Want to increase your stats? Quest for it. Want a magic weapon? Quest for it. Want a dragon to ride on? Go on an adventure, you know, like an adventurer.

The Judge’s section of the rulebook implores you to make monsters unique, and create your own, but rather than besiege a Judge with charts and rules that take 30 minutes to pore over, DCC simply presents you with a few pages of example monsters and tells you to go for it. On paper this might seem unbalanced and exploitable, but in practice it keeps monster creation from being a laborious process, meaning that most Judges will actually do it. This is its own benefit as it keeps players from being able to metagame an encounter, as they’ll constantly encounter and endless array of new monsters with abilities they’ve never seen before.

The rules-light aspect of DCC also makes it incredibly easy to house rule. The rules for most RPGs are balanced precariously upon an intricate mathematical lattice, which means that often changing a rule can have unforeseen consequences in another area. DCC actually encourages you to house rule and homebrew whatever you like to make the game your own, and since there aren’t many rules, there’s not much to break. Want some more classes? Go ahead and write ‘em up. Racial classes aren’t your style? Give humans a stat boost and add the demihuman racial traits to the human classes. Is the game a bit too lethal for your liking? You can crank up the number of failed luck roles needed to buy the farm.

This also helps it translate easily to other settings and genres beyond fantasy. The third party sourcebook Transylvanian Adventures takes DCC into Gothic Horror territory, the free Gongfarmer’s Almanac 2017 presented the WWII-themed Trench Crawl Classics, the module Rock God Death Fugue turns the party into a rock band on tour, and the upcoming Mutant Crawl Classics brings players into the devastated ruins of a primitive post-apocalyptic future. Creative judges will have no shortage of epic adventure on their hands.

Dungeon Crawl Classics puts story and adventure first and players and GM’s a very close second. It will ignite your creativity, it will make you rethink the way you play fantasy RPGs, but most of all, it will remind you that gaming isn’t about pouring over endless sourcebooks and an unending litany of rules. It’s about having adventures, it’s about telling stories with your friends, and it’s about a damn good time. More and more gamers are remembering every day, and if you truly wish to see what’s fantasy gaming could be, you owe it to yourself to check out Dungeon Crawl Classics.


Chaz Lebel is a fiction author and member of Caffeinated Conquests, a YouTube channel dedicated to nerd comedy and tabletop gaming. He and his team once produced some promotional videos for High Level Games that they probably wish they could forget. Chaz can be found on Twitter @CafConIsOn

Picture Reference: http://www.belloflostsouls.net/2017/01/tabletop-spotlight-dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg.html

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