The "Character Funnel": while this might be entertaining once, it feels forced and gimmicky, just like I felt it did when it showed up with AD&D first edition. And the method of winnowing down a pile of characters to come up with your "real" character seems like a caricature of old-school D&D. And doesn't really feel like the kind of stories that the game tries to emulate.
And why start at level zero with negative experience? That just seems clunky.
Why are halflings masters of two-weapon fighting?
The pile of necessary charts for critical hits and fumbles, magical results, are about the opposite of simplifying play that I prefer.
The odd dice are a bit off-putting.
Variable healing based on proximity of alignment and clerical miracles are interesting. The ideas behind magic are interesting, but adjudicating that complexity would be a real challenge, at least at first.
Combat maneuvers seem like more to memorize.
Why do we use different size dice for two-weapon fighting instead of penalties?
Spell duels might be cool.
Some of this seems like design for design's sake. This indeed captures the feel of many after-market unofficial D&D supplements, clones, variants and the like from my youth, but much of that was also cluttered and full of things we used for a little while before abandoning.
I'd gladly play a demo to see if I'd change my mind, and will print and read it, I suppose. But after my first skim through, I am not likely to be looking to grab the final version.
I'm a big fan of Athanor, so it's great to hear your honest critique. Overall, It seems like a better implementation of a gritty S&S genre than the LOTFP rules which seemed to mostly strike a cord with "killer DM" types.
ReplyDeleteWhile I don't like the smaller dice, that actually does make numerical sense. If you have true d16's, than your average roll ends up being 8.5, instead of 6.5 if you instilled a -4 penalty. It screws the Halfling a little less. Although I'm not convinced that is saying much.
ReplyDeleteFrom skimming it last night, DCC RPG Beta is more something to take inspiration from than run as-is. The one-per-page spell tables seem clunky to me, a unified table with brief examples in each spell and on-the-spot adjudication might flow better in play (not to mention keep the page count down), but that might simply be my preference :)
ReplyDeleteRight now, on initial read-through, my impression of DCCRPG isn't far off from Jim Raggi's (http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2011/06/dcc-comments.html) -- unless I play it, I think I'm going to feel like this has charts and tables and character funnels and killer DM talk that feels like an old-school gimmick rather than a coherent game.
ReplyDeleteMore annoying to me is that it simplifies feats, skills, and attacks of opportunity to add in a bunch of crunch elsewhere, adding options AND rules to fighters and magic use, lots of tables (including different crit tables by class AND, in the case of fighters, by level). I also don't see a particular reason for the things they kept from OS D&D given their focus on gritty swords & sorcery (why not kill the monster-hunter cleric and make it a type of magic user? Why keep race-as-class? Why even have dwarves, elves, and halflings?)
I'm not throwing this out. I'm not even saying DCCRPG is bad, but it isn't what I expected from the ad copy, and my first read-through made me feel like this wasn't the game for me. In fact, if I wanted d20 pulp fantasy, I'd probably look at dusting off my copy of Badaxe Games' Grim Tales instead.
It feels like a caricature or joke based on old school gaming, but then this is from the same company that puts the "Remember when" text on their modules talking about every NPC being meant to be killed, etc. Goodman modules are not bad at all, but the attitude has always been silly, similar to that of Hackmaster. And no, sorry, this game does not resemble the novels it was claimed it would. Just another set of weird retro-clone houserules, a bit weirder than most.
ReplyDelete