DCC RPG - After Report

So.  I managed to get to play DCC RPG as a player tonight.

It was ok.

The DM was super nice and did a great job.  The players were super nice.

What got in the way, for me, of the game being fun was the game system.

Simple rules does not always equal fun in a game system.  Yes I know.  I am a super big advocate of early RPG games but when you create an introductory game experience for new players where the zero level characters are so ineffectual and paper thin that a single average roll...not even a bad roll...but an average roll means instant death, it just leaves me bored and unimpressed.

I felt absolutely zero investment or interest in whether any of my characters lived or died, were successful or failed and as a whole I think that most of the players were feeling the same way about their characters as well.

The comedy of your character gets shredded into a thousand bloody pieces is funny, sure, the first time or two but two hours into the "funnel" it was just boring.  No.  Boring is not the right word.

Stupid.  It was stupid.

All together I think we played about a four hour session.

At the end we got to roll to see how our "stars aligned" to get us ready to convert the characters from zero level throw aways into first level throw aways, or at least that was the impression I got.

Get this. If you rolled lower than a six on 1d20 your character, that you just did your level best to keep alive through this funnel despite only having three hit points and no actual skills or abilities to draw upon to make any of it even vaguely interesting...if you rolled less than a six, your character was zapped back in time as if nothing ever happened and you had to turn them over to the DM.

Yes, that is correct.

You spend four hours of your life playing the game trying to be clever and keep a couple of your paper thin goons alive and at the end of the game, one low dice roll and randomly nothing that you did, no creativity, nothing, allows you to keep that character. 

So.  I am going to keep playing DCC RPG in the hopes that somewhere down the road the game gets better.  I own the books.  I've read through good chunks of them and I am hopeful but reading through something and actually playing it are two very different things.

For now I am giving DCC RPG - the introductory play experience in the funnel with zero level characters a one half star out of five. 

Descriptive words for the published adventure for the funnel I would use are boring and overly simplistic.  Descriptive words for the introductory experience playing through the zero level part of the game would be...boring, uninteresting and a waste of four hours of my life that I will never recover.

If you haven't purchased DCC RPG - I would hold off until you play it a few times to make sure the game is worth the money you are going to drop on the books.  The books are cool looking and like I said, the rules once you get playing seem interesting so I am holding out hope that this will improve.

Hopefully when I post again about DCC RPG I will be able to rave about how awesome the game is after you create a level one character.