Karaptis wrote:
Not to be confused with the cursed item Erotic Puzzle Box!!!

Oh my!
(Rolls Save vs. Ewww)
Ran through a 1st level playtest this weekend. It went well. Not as well as I'd hoped. Raised a lot of interesting issues with the character classes. Some of the players experienced issues with, well, DCC. I've tried to carry over as much as I could. In fact, the 0-Level experience (outside of the characters being slightly more survivable and the quirky new Occupations) is practically identical.
But the character classes were a fairly inventive amalgam of 4e memes and OD&D memes. This part received mixed results. Long story short, I'm going to do another rewrite of the classes. This time they will be skewed far more towards OD&D. I found the more situational abilities of some of the classes to be next to useless. This might also affect the leveling of the classes some. In that, the classes might be more distinguished by the upgrades they choose -- as opposed to the combination of features and upgrades.
That's a pretty big change and some of the classes will be altered dramatically. But their role in the game will remain unchanged. In most cases, the class will be receiving a power upgrade.
There are some rule changes that will just go away. They failed to come up and failed to add fun when they did. No sense in wasting word count on a crappy rule.
But beyond the classes rewrite, the larger changes will involve things being simplified, clarified and combined together.
That said... Everyone had fun. Everyone would play it again. It appealed to both new schoolers and old schoolers. And the game played like a combination of OD&D and Call of Cthulhu but no one felt de-protagonized by Sanity checks. Everyone was a pretty big hero and had the opportunity to kick some unholy backside.
The game has no need for magical healing. In fact, the gimped Cleric-ish healing abilities are going to be excised. They are not needed. Not even by 1st level characters.
So there's good. There's bad. And it's all getting better.
I'll post more details sometime in the near future as we continue to babystep this game into awesomeness.
P.S. The 1st level party was as survivable as a traditional 3rd level old school party. With no spellcasters in the group. Also, turning is pretty awesome/hilarious in TA. Similar to DCC with a few notable twists.