🎪 Unreview: Dungeon Crawl Classics
Jan. 16th, 2026 04:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solo_knightThis is not a solo game, though many people play it (and other OSR games) solo, and adventures are abundant and easy to acquire. So when the 90+ item bundle came up on Humblebundle, I decided to invest a dollar to have the basic rules in case I ever want to consult them.
And my instincts were right; right now I’m looking for poison rules, so that was a dollar well spent. (Joke’s on me: while ‘poison’ is found on 60 pages and I have now learnt that a thief needs to make a handling check or poison himself if they wish to utilise poison, finding actual rules needs Appendix P; they’re pretty draconian with many featuring permanent penalties, e.g losing 1d6 intelligence or permanent paralysis that cannot be healed. Hurray.)
Am I going to read more of this? Probably not unless I am really, really bored, because I have a million (only slight exaggeration) game systems I want to read and that’s not counting the thousand or so items I’ve snagged in bundles. I figure I can keep myself occupied with things I’m curious about for the next four to five years, and I’m likely to grab more games if one of my wishlist titles comes up on sale or someone makes a new game that I’m curious about.
I’m sure there’s a scholar of old school DnD somewhere who can explain where all of the various game systems branched and what their differences are. There seem to be at least a dozen variants, some DnD editions, plus Pathfinder, Swords and Sorcery, DCC, Mazes, and probably several more I own, never mind the ones I have zero interest in hunting down.
Can you have fun with them at the right table? Of course. Will you need to modify the rules? The moment you want to step outside their narrow parameters, probably.
‘D10 tasks are a man’s deed’. Notice that women, apparently, can’t do anything. Characters are always ‘he’. (There is a mentioning of female orcs and a helpless female human in an adventure who gets killed whatver the players do. I love fridged women. I love giving players zero agency.)
And then there’s
[you should be] a fantasy enthusiast of imaginative mind, familiar with the
customs of role playing, understanding the history and significance of the Elder Gods Gygax and Arneson and their cohorts Bledsaw, Holmes, Kask, Kuntz, Mentzer, Moldvay, and Ward,
Gygax I know of, Arneson I have heard, the others are closed books, and the hero worship here makes me want to NOT read any further.
And the way in which you can be either a wizard or an elf, while canonical, is one of the least inspiring rules in roleplaying.
‘You are no hero’ makes me not just un-inspired, but anti-inspired.
Are there interesting mechanics and things that might enhance my gameplay in this? Maybe. Am I willing to dig through the guidebook, much less adventures, to find out?
No. I have so many things to read that excite me, and a bunch of things I want to at least a look at. This passage has only confirmed that I should not look at ‘Old School’ resources for my fun (I’d gotten that impression in the past); the people who canonise this particular playstyle and these particular designers are not the people I want to be inspired by.
Here’s a speedrun of the famous Tomb of Horrors in case you needed a better idea of what I'm speaking of.
It's a solo run, so on topic.
I love what DnD and RPGs in general have evolved into. I want to see more of the whimsical, imaginative, nuanced forms of play and less ogre smash.
Verdict: 🎪 Not for me.
And my instincts were right; right now I’m looking for poison rules, so that was a dollar well spent. (Joke’s on me: while ‘poison’ is found on 60 pages and I have now learnt that a thief needs to make a handling check or poison himself if they wish to utilise poison, finding actual rules needs Appendix P; they’re pretty draconian with many featuring permanent penalties, e.g losing 1d6 intelligence or permanent paralysis that cannot be healed. Hurray.)
Am I going to read more of this? Probably not unless I am really, really bored, because I have a million (only slight exaggeration) game systems I want to read and that’s not counting the thousand or so items I’ve snagged in bundles. I figure I can keep myself occupied with things I’m curious about for the next four to five years, and I’m likely to grab more games if one of my wishlist titles comes up on sale or someone makes a new game that I’m curious about.
I’m sure there’s a scholar of old school DnD somewhere who can explain where all of the various game systems branched and what their differences are. There seem to be at least a dozen variants, some DnD editions, plus Pathfinder, Swords and Sorcery, DCC, Mazes, and probably several more I own, never mind the ones I have zero interest in hunting down.
Can you have fun with them at the right table? Of course. Will you need to modify the rules? The moment you want to step outside their narrow parameters, probably.
‘D10 tasks are a man’s deed’. Notice that women, apparently, can’t do anything. Characters are always ‘he’. (There is a mentioning of female orcs and a helpless female human in an adventure who gets killed whatver the players do. I love fridged women. I love giving players zero agency.)
And then there’s
[you should be] a fantasy enthusiast of imaginative mind, familiar with the
customs of role playing, understanding the history and significance of the Elder Gods Gygax and Arneson and their cohorts Bledsaw, Holmes, Kask, Kuntz, Mentzer, Moldvay, and Ward,
Gygax I know of, Arneson I have heard, the others are closed books, and the hero worship here makes me want to NOT read any further.
And the way in which you can be either a wizard or an elf, while canonical, is one of the least inspiring rules in roleplaying.
‘You are no hero’ makes me not just un-inspired, but anti-inspired.
Are there interesting mechanics and things that might enhance my gameplay in this? Maybe. Am I willing to dig through the guidebook, much less adventures, to find out?
No. I have so many things to read that excite me, and a bunch of things I want to at least a look at. This passage has only confirmed that I should not look at ‘Old School’ resources for my fun (I’d gotten that impression in the past); the people who canonise this particular playstyle and these particular designers are not the people I want to be inspired by.
Here’s a speedrun of the famous Tomb of Horrors in case you needed a better idea of what I'm speaking of.
It's a solo run, so on topic.
I love what DnD and RPGs in general have evolved into. I want to see more of the whimsical, imaginative, nuanced forms of play and less ogre smash.
Verdict: 🎪 Not for me.
