Goodman games should stick to modules.
As I stated in the one about OSR generations, 2nd gen is where it's at. DCC is 2nd generation. But it's still garbage. There are old reasons and new reasons for this. Lets begin with the dice:
DCC requires special dice. And since Gamescience went belly-up, there's only one company to get these terrible hunks of plastic from reliably: Goodman Games. So the first issue I have with this game is pointless additional accessories required to play, which I call the Fantasy Flight Games problem.
The second issue I have with this game is the size. A 500 page game is for kids. It's a baby mindset to think a game requires this many goddamn pages. Every game that's this heavy (physically, as in weight) needs to look into shedding the pounds. 200 pages of a spellcasting chapter should have been a separate book. The game itself is not overly complicated except for...
The third issue I have with the game is it's design is rooted in rolling on random tables hundreds of times in a session. It's extolled as a virtue but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.
DCC is excessive in every sense of the word.
Fourthly, enter this Rant. DCC is "Appendix N derived" but in and of itself doesn't have a setting. It's a disjointed mess like other OSRs. Settingless and therefore heartless, it chugs along like a zombie. It fails to inspire because it's just a mess of mechanics to run through their module line with, and it reads that way and plays that way. There's no "there" there.
Fifthly, and lastly, it's not really OSR. I mean it is, but it is closer in power level to third edition, the edition that is definitively not OSR. The opening funnel is a camouflage to hide this. Anyone who somehow manages to play this system past 4th level will recognize a sharp uptick in PC power level. I consider this a wolf in sheep's clothing, a backdoor way for 3E players to usurp OSR players back into the 3E treadmill of trash.
EDIT: DCC is no longer OSR. See here.
