Mutant Crawl Classics is Lazy

Let's get something out of the way: I love this game. The "roll and find out" mentality is perfectly illustrated here. It's a weird game with weird dice and weird results leading to weird and hilarious adventures. The character funnel alone sums up everything I've ever loved about d20 games. So don't take the following article as one-sided hate. I own the game. I will run the game. If someone else wants to run the game so I can play I will jump at the chance!

For those of you who are unaware of how the DCC/MCC setup works, here's the lowdown. DCC is a crazy dungeon crawler, filled with weird zocchi dice like d5s and d7s and d16s and more, combined with tons of tables for spells and critical hits and misses. Stories from randomized events are the order of the day for DCC/MCC, and the DCC/MCC games are experts are pulling order out of the chaotic mess that is dice rolling. They own it to a T: you randomly roll up to four zero level scrubs and throw them through a character-murdering funnel at at the beginning of the campaign. You then make a first level character from one of those survivors and play from there. Your characters are scrappy but fragile, and life is a brutal series of challenges that change you far more than you expected. And it's awesome.

That being said...

Mutant Crawl Classics claims to be two things: a supplement of Dungeon Crawl Classics and a standalone game, in that order.  I think the fact that they put it in that order is important to understanding the rest of this game. By the book's statement they wanted to make something to expand upon Dungeon Crawl Classics, but they also wanted to have the cake they were eating and make the game seem like it could be complete. I'm not sure how they arrived at that conclusion for a book that doesn't even have a GMing section, or a section on how to design monsters, not to mention a full spell list for the human shaman, or some of the most boring human classes I've ever witnessed.

Speaking of humans... the definition of lazy is in their class design. Notice that I didn't say broken. The human classes are not "bad". They're actually very powerful, with an amount of passively regenerating Luck that any DCC character would be jealous of. They are, according to the designer, more powerful than their DCC counterparts, and this is objectively true? I mean, assuming you do a lot of camping and obey the 15 minute work-day, you can burn Luck at a ridiculous rate, allowing you to circumvent most challenges in a truly unfair manner. So the classes, as designed, encourage an actively unfun method of play. With the human classes you do not play to find out what happens, but are being the scum of the earth, which is against the very spirit of  the game.

This brings me to what appears to be the second worst class in the game: the Rover. Again, I don't mean in terms of effectiveness: this sucker can regenerate Luck pretty quickly. But DnD style games have always had a harder time with rogue-like characters, simply because they don't really have any support for anything not a spell or combat, and that's where rogues are supposed to shine! Whereas Sentinels have an easy fix to their less-than stellar class design by porting in the Mighty Deeds of Arms, Rovers really don't have anything worth taking from their DCC counterpart. I mean, can you imagine a whole series of tables about trying to unlock doors and hack equipment, with the Rover getting better tables to roll on, akin to the Sentinel's crit tables. Hell, it's weird sci-fi future, why isn't there a table for talking doors or something of that nature? The rest of the game is so off the wall

But all of this pales in comparison to the insult that is the Healer class. It barely qualifies as a class, especially in comparison to the Rover, which also hardly qualifies as a class, but is nowhere near as boring as the Healer. There is practically no reason to pick this class, other than someone really should. A "should" is not fun. A "should" is not good game design. It would be one thing if this class was actually doing stuff with biofeedback and homeopathy like they claim he does. That stuff can do a hell of a lot more than just heal people in real life, before you throw in zany super science!

Now, normally I'm not that peeved by OSR-type games being so light on class design. That is part of their design, after all. But DCC/MCC has something that other OSR-like games normally don't have, which is a ton of tables and rules for interacting with said tables. Mutants, Manimals, and Plantients are defined by these tables, to an often hilarious degree. The human classes either barely interact with those tables (Shamans) or... well.. critical hits and fumbles, for everything else. Humans do, in fact, interact with the artifact tables and A.I.'s (this world's version of gods) particularly well (especially the Sentinel), but the simple fact of the matter is that it's not as interesting what an single DCC class can do, by themselves, without being at the mercy of the GM's ideas. And that really is the crux of the issue: the non-human classes have choices and features that are not a the mercy of the GM, and you can't say that about the non-Shaman human classes.

It's a shame, because I didn't want to be this negative about this game. Goodman Games make games and with a lot of heart and soul.. which is why partially why I am so hard on this game's classes, which don't have that same soul. I'm going to play this game. It's awesome. But I don't want to pretend that I won't houserule the crap out of almost all the human classes. I'll probably write those up after I've playtested them a bit. But still: as a base experience this is lacking. And it's a real, real, real shame.