If you are a sucker for role-playing games and for retro things in general like me, there are plenty of choices to feed your vintage soul. We’re talking literally dozens of options. Despite that, for the past eight years, I have only played Dungeons & Dragons 5e, and have had a blast doing so. But driven by curiosity and circumstance, one fateful night, I left my D&D books on the shelf to dive into the unforgiving world of Dungeon Crawl Classics. What I found is a tabletop game I’m eager to return to — and I even learned some lessons I’ll apply to my future D&D games.
The Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement began in the mid-2000s, mainly as a reaction to the publication of Dungeons & Dragons 3e. Beginning as a topic of discussion on online forums, growing interest in OSR spawned a loose community of game designers and gamers, united by a common passion for Erol Otus and Larry Elmore’s art, 10-foot poles, and tables. Lots of tables. Nowadays, this playstyle refers to dozens of TTRPGs that draw inspiration from the earliest days of the genre. One of the most popular and appreciated of them is Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), published for the first time in 2012 by Goodman Games.
DCC sits in a weird spot in the OSR universe. While the art, feeling, and tone are straight out of the 1970s (the official inspiration being Appendix N, the list of books that informed the creation of the original Dungeons & Dragons), the rules are actually a streamlined version of D&D’s 3e — yes, the same edition that made many players so unhappy that they decided to create their own retro-inspired games. This is interesting because DCC came out in the waning days of D&D’s 4e, which was disliked even more by players, but a couple of years before Wizards of the Coast came out with the most successful version of D&D to date, 5e.
Image: Goodman Games
Like so many others, I fell off the D&D wagon during the 4th edition years, and was pulled back in when 5th edition gave us simpler rules, a focus on storytelling, and exceptional campaign settings (such as Curse of Strahd). I have been running games (yes, I am an eternal DM) almost nonstop for eight years now, and it’s been great. I have moved twice in that time period, and D&D helped me make friends, build connections, and spend my free time with creativity. Together with my players, we have told amazing stories that will live with me for a long time. However, that odd, wizened dragon called Old School was always staring at me from the corner of my eye…
Two weeks before writing this, I picked up the entire DCC library at a discount. Fatefully, one of my players could not attend that week’s D&D session, so we decided to put our campaign on hold and try something new in his absence. It was time to go old school.
I opened the DCC Quick Start rules, and was welcomed by the illustration of a brave warrior and a maiden (admittedly, scantily dressed) fighting off a Pteranodon with a clearly evil wizard looming behind, which seemed to come straight out of a pulp trade paperback. (OK, I’m interested.) The following page was a spoof on the black-and-white martial arts ads found in 1970s magazines, which proudly proclaimed DCC as the “Deadliest Game Alive.” (Now I’m entertained.) Before getting to the rules, one final message appeared: “You’re no hero.” Now I’m fully in.
The premise of DCC is that the game is not a heroic fantasy where players find fulfillment by building the strongest characters possible and achieving godlike feats. Instead, it’s a deadly run for treasure and glory where the fulfillment comes from surviving the horrors that await you. In DCC, you start by creating several 0-level peasants. Then you run them through a first dungeon, and if any of them survive, you get to pick one and bring it to level 1, where your adventuring career actually begins. The game’s core statement is that trying to balance player characters and monsters is a fool’s errand. This idea was also included in the OSR’s “manifesto,” A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming, written by Matthew Finch in 2008. DCC takes that idea and runs with it: In the game, everything about your character is randomized. You roll six stats, as usual, but there are no bonuses to them, and most importantly, you don’t decide where to assign the roll. If you roll low for your strength, for example, you won’t decide to play a warrior, because you won’t hit anything. Randomization brings balance, and it works surprisingly well.
Perhaps the biggest issue I’ve had with D&D 5e is how difficult it is to balance encounters after players get past the first three or four levels. I like to play narrative-focused campaigns, but I still want my players to feel a level of danger and excitement during the game, and that hasn’t been easy. At the end of the Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign, for example, players who should be between level 9 and 10 get to fight Auril, an actual goddess (albeit with limited powers at that moment). I was expecting this to be a challenging fight at least. Instead, my players easily dispatched Auril not once, but thrice (she has three forms, each one stronger than the previous one). Keep in mind that level 10 is, in theory, only half of a character’s progression in D&D.
It’s not a coincidence that, for the entirety of 5th edition, Wizards refused to publish adventures or campaigns for “high-level play,” tailored for characters of level 10 and above. (The only exception was 5e’s final book, Vecna: Eve of Ruin.) It was a silent admission that the game was not balanced for those levels, and it never would be. In DCC, on the other hand, character classes only get to level 10, and the game makes it very clear that getting so far should be an exception, not the rule. A level-5 character, for example, is described as “once in a generation,” with an incidence of one in every 10,000 people. At level 9, you are “the best there ever was,” with an incidence of one in every 10 million. At level 10, you are a demigod.
This is a perfect example of “old school mentality,” but I think there is a lesson here that can be applied to D&D campaigns, too. As a DM, you should not think that the only way to reward your players for surviving your challenges, progressing in the story, and showing up to sessions (the mightiest deed of them all!) is to have them level up. Sure, current D&D is built on that reward system, but what if you shake things up? Why not try to make the act of surviving the reward? Walking out of a really tough fight or a deadly dungeon without having to roll a new character can be a big moment of satisfaction for players, and there are always different rewards you can give. A powerful magic item, hoards of treasure, rising in the ranks of an organization, the deed to a house, or even something related to the new Bastions system; all of these things can reward players without impacting the balance of future encounters. More importantly, these rewards have a practical effect on the game, enriching it more than, say, a Barbarian gaining an extra use of Rage at level 6.
At the end of our DCC session, each of my players had one character surviving. (The game encourages players to run at least four or five characters each at level 0, as most will die in horrible and amusing ways.) They made it by the skin of their teeth. The session had been nonstop combat and exploration, two things I usually dread at my D&D table because they tend to be the slowest and most drawn-out. Instead, all the players were excited and satisfied. It was an eye-opener for me. I have been thinking for a while about making my D&D games deadlier in some way – especially as we are currently playing Out of the Abyss, the Underdark setting of which really plays into that – but I was afraid of getting out of my comfort zone. Now, I’m eager to insert some of that old-school feeling of “anything can happen” into my games.
Image: Goodman Games
I admit that DCC is not for everyone. Players coming from D&D could take offence at the fact that “species” are still “races” here, and they are classes too (you don’t get to play an “elf wizard,” just an elf), or at the exclusive use of male pronouns to refer to characters in the rules. However, if you have been thinking about trying an OSR game, or you are simply curious after reading this article, I encourage you to give it a shot. There are plenty of published adventures, too, and they are all weird, bizarre, and deadly fun. Laser harpies? Check. Barbarians fighting space robots? Also check. Even if you’re not an old-school fanatic, there are plenty of lessons from Dungeon Crawl Classics that can be applied to your Dungeons & Dragons games, too.