My view of DCC before and after playing it for three games

[Devil Swine]

I downloaded the Beta the night it was released and the next morning woke up to a printed out copy. I read it from cover to cover and was VERY disappointed. It did NOT look good. Too many hard bashing players over the head rules and it looked to be a mix of the worst rules I had ever read from both rules lite games and rules heavy games.

The crazy dice was also a HUGE disappointment,turning me off oif the game from the get go.

I made a halfhearted attempt to GET the whole game idea behind the game but frankly my mind was already set against it. I even gave a relatively bad review of the game to my friends in a forum with the note that this was only the beta ect...

Then I went on vacation. As I was going out the door I asked my son to grab my game binder to take with us in case we had time to play.

Fast forward to day six of the worst vacation from hell and we finally get a little time off from working on the wife's family cattle ranch in temperatures reaching 111 degrees. My son and wife and I sit bored to tears in the thankfully air conditioned room but when I pull out my binder I do not find my normal game binder but instead DCC. Well damn!

After some talking and page flipping and a argument with my son about running a Pathfinder game with no books or adventure we set about playing DCC just because.

Three days later we stop after the wife's Mom comments about how we traveled seven states to stay in our room and play some crazy game.

We loved it! It was the most fun we have had in years. When we got home the first thing the wife did was set a play date with our normal group to play DCC. Several members from my group had looked at it and dismissed it already but were willing to give it a try(in the words of Mike my fellow DM, I'll PLAY anything if I don't have to run it!).

Now I sit at my desk and work on the first adventure for the normal group and can't help but laugh at some of the remarks im hearing from people rollig up characters. Almost word for word what I said at the start.

This game is great and I love it but let me tell you. It plays about 10,000 times better than it reads.

And yes I did go back to the forum I posted my review on and update it and eat crow. I'm more than willing to admit when im shortsighted and unfair and just downright wrong. Well at least about this I am

[finarvyn]

Glad to hear this, and I agree that this game is spectacular once you actually play it.

One of my frustrations here on the boards has simply been the number of people who have "the perfect fix" for a "design problem" when they admit they haven't actually played. Not so much of an issue anymore, but certainly in the first couple of hours after the Beta came out there were quite a few folks who joined up and preached about what was wrong with the game. No way they gave it an honest playtest.

Serendipity that your son accidently grabbed the right binder, but a good thing as well since it sounds like you would probably never given the game a second look otherwise.

[Drew]

Hey, we're all armchair game designers from time to time. Par for the course. I know there is a good percentage of folks around who really like DCC and want to help make it the best game it can be. I know there are things that I don't care for, but I'll be the first to admit that I've only played this thing in a solo kind of simulation way. Plus, these are the beta rules, and rules do often play differently than they read. I recall when 3E first came out, a number of strange things people were sure were broken that eventually faded into the nether once gamers actually played the thing.

Anyway, I'm glad to hear that you have enjoyed the game DS. Especially to hear that you played it with your son. Gaming with my kids is one of my favorite parts about being a dad. I know that even in the limited way I've played DCC I have had a lot of fun with it, even if not a single party of level 0s has survived thus far.

[nodansland]

Good to hear. I have some deep reservations about the game, but I do want to try to run a few sessions with the group and see how it goes. I suspect that, for me at least, it is really just a different style of play. However, we tend to play a wide variety of games. I don't see the harm in running it as written, giving feedback, and see what the revised Beta looks like.