Less Mercy, More Doom! - Dungeon Crawl Classics - TTRPG Review

[@shinigamiauthor]

DCC is phenominal and has become my favorite D&D replacement.

[@DoubleCritFail]

I LOVE the idea of your 10-Shot reviews. Based on your description, Dungeon Crawl Classics almost gives me Darkest Dungeon vibes. I actually own the physical DCC core book but have yet to crack it open. This might get me to finally do it.

[@RenegadeRolls]

Go for it - I reckon you’ll have a blast, just make sure your players are ok with characters dropping like flies at Level Zero. Some games make you feel strong… this is not it! Darkest Dungeon is brilliant - and definitely has some similar vibes. It also has my second favourite narrator in video games (after the guy in Bastion - his voice is like honey!) (ps I highly approve of the continuation of the “I LOVE all Dungeon Craft videos” approach that lots of people in the TTRPG KZbin community are keeping up! Thank you!)

[@MrReverseMan]

Thanks for doing this! Been curious about the system

[@RenegadeRolls]

You're welcome! If you and your group are familiar with DnD5E, you'll find you can pick up the basics straight away. There's more depth to it than I had time to cover in the video, especially on higher level play. If my players are up for jumping back in some time, I'll maybe try a high level 10-Shot campaign and report back!

[@JMEPatterson]

Great video with some good feedback! If you get your group to go again I would suggest Nebin Pendlebrook's Perilous Pantry or Doom of the Savage Kings

[@RenegadeRolls]

Thanks for the recommendations! I'm hopefully going to run a new short in-person adventure in DCC soon (as I've got the softcover book and a set of funky dice arriving in the post any day now). That first session has a really outsize influence on the rest of a campaign, and Portal Under The Stars was great for capturing the feel I was hoping for from the system. I've just picked up Nebin Pendlebrook's Perilous Pantry (partly for the alliteration in the title) and Doom of the Savage Kings. They both look really interesting! I'll be reporting back with my findings!

[@optionsgoat9432]

Our home game switched from 5e to DCC and we are so much happier - it's such a wonderful system! The Dungeon Crawl Classics discord community is also super nice!

[@RenegadeRolls]

That's great to hear! Would you say your group is more combat or roleplay focussed (or a mix?) I found with my group, that they roleplayed differently in DCC than in 5e, and I think it was because they knew EXACTLY who their characters were, as they'd been with them since they were just commoners, rather than fully formed heroic heroes.

[@age-of-adventure]

So is that the whole Portal Under The Stars campaign? Or just part of it? Did the party succeed or fail? Or was the adventure designed to end like that. Loved the video and recap, and Foundry looks great, but the ending for the players seemed unfulfilling? (Or did I miss something?). And I’d love to know how long each session was (trying to gauge how long Portal Under The Stars would take to complete?)

[@RenegadeRolls]

The Portal Under The Stars took us two three hour sessions (so six hours in total including character creation) - it was just that upper and lower level, the other eight of the ten sessions was fully homebrew by me: out in the world using some of those awesome Caeora maps. I’d say The Portal Under The Stars is pretty fulfilling for what it is - a fun intro to the system, and it does a great job of setting the tone. It was just the layout that the players didn’t like. Also the fact i ended up giving them The Clue for defeating the clay army was probably the main source of feeling unfulfilled for them. As for the resolution to the 10-shot campaign, the players enjoyed the ambiguous open ending that I set up for it with the different portals for the different alignments. This was deliberate, as it’ll make revisiting the system / setting interesting if/when we go back to it.

[@dandmadeeasy]

Thanks for the review, I've seen a lot of people talk about Dungeon Crawl Classics, but never known much about it. How long does it take to make a character roughly? It would be pretty devastating if it takes a while and your level 0 would-be adventurer dies to a stray arrow!

[@RenegadeRolls]

It's around five minutes per Level Zero character if you do it by the book. There's a bit of page turning (or PDF scrolling in my case) to catch all the stats, but it's pretty quick. If you're doing four characters, it's maybe 10 minutes for all of them. There's also a whole load of really good tools available here, if you'd like pregens in seconds: purplesorcerer.com/tools.php

[@dandmadeeasy]

@@RenegadeRolls oh no, not the P word :P 5 minutes per character is cool!

[@RenegadeRolls]

It's something I hadn't thought about before, but DCC is effectively giving you a "The P Word" sheet for each character as there is so little player choice in their creation if you go Rules as Written. I'll need to ask my group whether they would have liked to hand-craft their doomed little Level Zero characters, or whether it would have felt like a waste, given four of them got impaled in the very first room!

[@dandmadeeasy]

@@RenegadeRolls Do you get to choose/customize your Ped character if you reach level 1? I'm a very strong proponent for customization - making a character is one of my favorite parts of RPGs (if you get a lot of choice in it, of course).

[@RenegadeRolls]

You keep the Level 0 stats as they are, but you get to choose their Level 1 class (unless you're an Elf, Dwarf or Halfling) and spells. I did a bit of ret-conning of stats with my players between Level 0 and Level 1 to help their stats feel a bit more suited to the classes they wanted to play. We all decided we'd preferred that approach to playing strictly Rules As Written. You can also come up with any character you like - Rules As Written the strictness I mentioned above only applies to the ones who made it out alive from the Level Zero Funnel.