RPG Errata: Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Maneuvers

Dungeon Crawl Classics, created by Goodman Games, is an OSR-adjacent game, inspired in part by “Appendix N.”

What is “Appendix N?” It’s the Appendix in the original D&D Dungeon Masters Guide that listed sources of inspiration for GMs. DCC is inspired by the same media that inspired the original D&D. It encourages the same OSR sensibilities that other games champion. It is a game where, quote: “Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you fear, and the secret doors you know are there somewhere.” Is there any stronger claim to the OSR name?

Which makes it fascinating how different DCC is from the old-school rulesets.

There are too many differences to list, but here’s a sample: The system uses dice ranging from d3 to d30, including virtually unheard-of dice like the d5, d7, and d24. Wizards require patrons, making them a bit of a mix between Magic-users and Warlocks from 5th ed. D&D, including a set of mechanics that allow you to petition your patron like a cleric, sometimes receiving deity-level boons. Characters have a “luck” stat which applies only in one specific instance, chosen at character creation. Rolling better on a spell-check means the spell itself is uniquely stronger in some way: fireballs explode bigger, or you can levitate a whole castle instead of just yourself.

Really, almost every aspect of the system is interesting in some form or another. I could do a whole breakdown of each choice, but there’s only one I want to talk about at the moment: Warriors.

True to its ancient roots, There are only a few classes you can choose from when making a character; the original seven: Wizard, Cleric, Thief, Warrior, Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling.

Warriors have an awkward place in RPG history. Since the B/X days, warriors had high HP, strong attacks, good armor, and that’s about it. Magic-users and clerics could cast spells, thieves could hide-in-shadows and pick locks, the non-humans could do some combination of things, and warriors…

Well, they just hit things.

In the olden days, this was perfectly fine, because that was mostly what everyone did in combat. Thief abilities were largely focused on safely moving through the dungeon outside of combat, clerics were useful in very specific circumstances, and Magic-users were so hampered in their spell-casting that they rarely had to decide if now was the right time to cast fireball; they’d save their powerful spells until they were really necessary.

Nowadays, combat is supposed to be more engaging. Wizards and Warlocks cast spells every turn. Thieves can slip between enemies and backstab the unsuspecting. Rangers have animal companions, bards have magic songs, barbarians can rage, and warriors…

Well, they just hit things.

A lot has gone into making Warriors more interesting. “I hit it with my Axe” has been augmented with specific maneuvers: grappling, disarming, tripping, and any number of tricks practiced by the Errol Flynns of the fantasy world. Warriors are not just the armored knight, but also the swashbuckling rogue and master fencer.¹

Generally, these maneuvers are about strategic planning, rather than directly dealing damage. Most tactical games have specific “moves” that you are allowed to perform. Instead of a basic attack, you can try and “grapple” or “disarm” your opponent. If you want to try and knock your target prone, you might be able to “ram” them, or perhaps you have to grapple them first, or maybe you have a feat that allows you to trip your opponent without grappling them. There are always rules and/or conditions that detail what penalties or special rolls you need to make.

This turns anything other than swinging your sword into something extra; a bending of the usual rules. Much like how a wizard could either attack or cast a spell, warriors could now attack or do a special action.

What usually happens is people forget about them.

There are countless possible reasons for this. In some cases, it’s because the characters most likely to succeed at disarming or tripping your opponent are the characters best suited to do damage, meaning their time is better spent crushing skulls than merely delaying the inevitable. Being disarmed or tripped sometimes doesn’t do much, anyway, resulting in only minor penalties to defense or damage.² Good game design can alleviate this particular issue, but even if the results of a maneuver aren’t minor, most tactical systems aren’t balanced towards requiring fancy tricks to ensure player survival. Most games are balanced for players to get by just fine without needing to disarm their foes. If they weren’t, that would turn combat into a keystone-cop style cavalcade of flying swords and tripping foes.

DCC has managed to do something fascinating with its warriors. Much like Wizards cast spells and Thieves pick locks, Warriors perform Mighty Deeds.

Mighty Deeds are, in brief, anything that is not directly dealing damage. Perhaps it’s shoving your foe to the ground. Perhaps it’s swinging on a rope to get to the other side of the room. Maybe it’s preparing to parry an incoming attack, calling your shot, or cutting a potion out of an evil wizard’s belt. It is, in effect, anything that isn’t a basic attack.

But it’s not instead of your basic attack, it’s in addition to. During any attack where a Warrior is attempting to perform a Mighty Deed, they roll a Deed Die, and if they roll over a 3 they succeed.

What does success mean? It’s fiction-forward. It does whatever the maneuver would do. You don’t have to flip through the rulebook to find out what rolls Grappling requires, you don’t have to try and figure out how tripping an enemy “works,” you don’t have to strategize whether disarming a foe is more or less efficient than trying to do damage; you can just…do it.

Iron Halberd has a similar “Maneuver” action. Maneuvers are, quote: “ruled on the spot, not picked from a list; anything a skilled warrior could do is possible.” This should sound familiar: Narrative games like FATE might have catch-all rules for “creating an advantage” or “improving your momentum.” Ironsworn places all combat actions under this rubric, making basic attacks just another method of moving combat closer to your victory. Deciding to disarm your opponent is a fiction-first choice, not a specific rule.

Now, instead of gaming out tactics and deciding when to use which encounter-powers, you’re engaging with the story of the combat. Now, kicking your opponent in the chest and sending them off a cliff is not only viable, it’s encouraged. Disarming your opponent or tripping them into the dirt is a viable strategy, instead of a distraction. Swinging on a chandelier doesn’t waste your turn, it’s a viable augmentation to your basic attack.

Okay, but isn’t that possible in tactical games too?

Let’s be fair, Lancer has a distinct Ram action; you can ram your foe off a huge cliff into the ocean if you want, and if their mech doesn’t have jump-jets, the GM has to count them as dead, right? All RPGs are hacks, so there’s nothing wrong with having more complicated rolls to see if specific actions succeed or fail, is there?

Here’s my take on that: rules are boundaries that we cannot cross: you aren’t allowed to catch the soccer ball with your hands, and you aren’t allowed to grapple an opponent when both of your hands are full with a rifle. Games that have rules for specific maneuvers, such as D&D, change the framework from “what can my character do” to “what is strategically viable?”

Most of these systems change the combat metrics so that rather than making an attack roll you are rolling your stat vs. your foe’s stat. Given the frequency of attack rolls and the rarity of stat rolls in combat, players will generally have a better idea of how easy a foe is to hit than how difficult it is to disarm, trip up, or otherwise hinder a foe with a maneuver.

Even Trespasser, which has a similar Maneuver action, allows you to inflict conditions rather than play in the game-narrative. Yes, there is a lot more flexibility than most, (You could swing on a chandelier and boot someone in the head to cause Staggered, Unguarded, or Prone) but it still is a system-forward method of play. You’re not necessarily knocking a foe prone because you’re trying to intimidate them into surrendering; you want to give them a -2 penalty on attack and defense, so you’re knocking them prone.

And what if you want to give them a status that isn’t accounted for? What if you want to fling their sword aside, rather than just get them to drop it? There really is no way without the GM making a ruling instead of a rule, and that’s part of what I like about this design. Creative players will always come up with something that the rules don’t account for: whether it’s cutting the rope and crashing the chandelier to the ground, or rolling marbles on the ground to trip up foes. As soon as you acknowledge that rulings are going to be a part of your system, you have to then ask; why not rely on rulings?

DCC is not rules-light. The rule-book is almost 500 pages long, and most of that is charts and lists. It could very easily be called a “rules-heavy” game, and yet one of the core abilities of the Warrior class is almost strictly narrative based. I’m fascinated by these kinds of design choices: the fewer rules you have, the more unbendable they have to be, but the more flexibility you have in the whitespace around the rules.

Turning that into an asset, like DCC has, is fascinating game design.