I really love the aesthetic and attitude of Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, and I don’t even mind the general d20 system and game mechanics, but when I think of my ideal system, I’m much closer to the rules-lite side of things: Cairn, Into the Odd, Mausritter, Mythic Bastionland, etc.

I like DCC’s mechanics, but I don’t love them. Too much time looking things up in charts (and yes, I have the Crawler Companion on my phone, but even that takes several seconds to look things up). Too many stats that don’t end up meaning much. Roll-to-hit combat that means when it’s a player’s turn, they may end up missing, and then they have to wait for the next round to see if they can maybe try to succeed at hitting again, and too many misses in a row becomes frustrating for the player, and combat becomes a slog of misses and misses and misses. Roll-for-damage combat is the way to go. Faster, more intense, and nobody’s sitting in frustration because they’re not really involved in the action.

Part of this was spurred by a recent Questing Beast video about three-round combats, a hack that’s meant to speed up and make combat more meaningful. I’m not sold on it, frankly, but it got me thinking about my biggest pet peeve in D&D-like RPGs: the roll-to-hit mechanic. Having just been a player in a 5e game, it was beyond frustrating to keep missing with my spells during combat, and to then miss with my weapons during melee. It made the experience frustrating and not very tense.

(Why not tense? If the baddies are whoopin’ on us and we can’t seem to hit them, then shouldn’t that be hella tense? Surprisingly, no. It wasn’t tense at all. Tense is a ratcheting up of tension, but this combat wasn’t ratcheting up anything, it was just bandits hitting us and us missing them, but because we had just enough healing magic and a bottleneck so only one of them could attack at a time, we didn’t feel particularly in danger. Maybe if our rolls had continued to suck and we’d lost a few PCs, then tension would be there, but we avoided that outcome by eventually rolling successfully.)

Anyway, all these things made me think about ways to hack DCC to make it mechanically more like Cairn and other ItO-style games, while maintaining the unpredictability of magic and some of the Sword & Sorcery/Appendix N flavor of DCC.

I had a few brainstorms right before bed and stayed up till 1:00 a.m. thinking about them, then the next day I spent a couple of hours trying to hack together Cairn and DCC (“Cairn Crawl Classics”?). I simplified the stats (STR, DEX, WILL, LUCK), switched to a roll-under system, and for spells, created a new mechanic called “press your luck” where a luck save could bump a spell up to the next “entry” on the spell chart but a failure meant misfire and possible corruption. I also figured that characters could still spellburn to move a spell up to the next “entry.” This would allow players to succeed on their spell with a successful WILL save, but still give the spells their various levels of power.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with the other classes (Warrior, Thief, the demihumans), so I played around with both Deed Die/Luck Die mechanics as well as offering advantage/disadvantage for various class-related things.

In the end, I “playtested” it by making a Warrior, Thief, Wizard, and Cleric and “running” them through the Abbot in the Woods module from the core book (written by Harley Stroh).

The playtest was a bit meh. The PCs were either overpowered or utterly unable to overcome certain situations. Combat was faster, for sure, but the module itself wasn’t very combat-heavy, so it meant that some of the other changes I had made overpowered the thief (advantage on thief-skill checks was way too much), and the Cleric Turn Unholy spell was simply too strong (I eliminated the HD-tiers and it was just Will SV=success at lowest result, “Turn 1 enemy;” but with “pressing your luck” and a little spellburn, the Cleric was easily able to dispatch two ghosts). It turned the game from one in which clever play, interaction with the fictional world, and teamwork makes a difference into one in which players “press buttons” on their character sheets to overcome obstacles.

Back to the drawing board. Except, I decided to do a quick search to see if anyone else had tried hacking DCC with Cairn, and low and behold, someone had indeed done such a thing: it’s called Spellburn and Battlescars.

Well, well, well. This game did several similar things to my own attempt, but instead of my “press your luck” mechanic for increasing spell results, S&B went with a GLOG-influenced “power” mechanic where a player can increase the power of the spell by spending equipment slots and adding more d6s to the dice pool. This was brilliant! I could easily take a DCC spell, set the first success result (normally 12-13 for Level 1 spells) as 1-6, and then each successive entry on the spell chart would go up by 6: 12-13 becomes 1-6, 14-17 becomes 7-12, 18-20 becomes 13-18, etc. Players who want a result that’s normally a 21 in DCC, would need to roll a 19 total, so they might spend 4 slots and roll 4 dice hoping for the sum to be high enough. (Of course, per S&B’s rules, this increases the likelihood of some corruption happening, because if you roll doubles you have to roll on the mishap table, but even here, I could use the corruption tables from DCC and the spell could still have this more explosive result for the player.)

(And yes, I know I wanted to avoid all the “looking up on charts” hassle from DCC, but I figure, these spell results can be shortened/adapted for use in S&B, and the corruption table could be something I homebrew, maybe modifying what’s in DCC with what’s included in S&B. I would have all this on my GM screen instead of flipping through the massive DCC book, and that alone would be a time saver. But no matter what, S&B generally simplifies combat and makes magic and fighting successful for players because there’s no more roll-to-hit mechanic.)

S&B also solved the problem with making each class unique by having a list of abilities that players can unlock as they complete tasks related to their archetypes. The game doesn’t have levels per se, but it does have players keep track of what they’ve accomplished in the game world, and if it’s related to their archetype, they get to try for improved skills, hp, and more special abilities. Simple mechanics, story-focused but still retains the flavor of “classic” character classes from DCC, this was much better than my advantage/disadvantage and Deed Die/Luck Die/etc. stuff. PCs are not too overpowered but also not too squishy either.

The one thing I’m not sure about is the cost of equipment in S&B; some items seem wildly overpriced. But that’s easily tweaked, and frankly, with only ten item slots, PCs can’t be buying a lot of stuff anyway unless they hire retainers to carry equipment. The game seems less interested in inventory management than games like Cairn, partly because the archetypes are a bit more powerful and problems can be solved more readily through combat (which is true in DCC too).

All in all, I’m glad I tried my hand at homebrewing my own “Cairn Crawl Classics,” but I think if I want to play DCC with faster, more streamlined rules, I’ll use S&B to do it. Frankly, I’m so excited by a faster, rules-lite DCC, that I kinda want to play a one-shot with S&B characters and a DCC module. I imagine it could be incredibly fun, fast, and still feel very “DCC,” just without some of those sluggish mechanics.

(One last thing for those of you thinking, “What about the funnel?!” Because S&B includes “Backgrounds,” players could still play zero-level PCs in a funnel, using the equipment included as part of their PCs’ backgrounds, and then, if they complete something related to one of the archetypes (they most definitely will in a funnel, unless they die), they could “level up” to that archetype, get the archetype equipment and special ability, and be ready for “level one” modules. I could even see them answering the “Origin Question” on the character sheet with an answer from their funnel adventure, making the funnel and character creation even more story-focused than it is in the original DCC game. And not only that, you could easily use DCC occupations instead of S&B’s backgrounds, so gongfarmers could still be a thing!)