If you are a sucker for role-playing games and for retro things in general like me, there are plenty of choices to feed your vintage soul. We’re talking literally dozens of options. Despite that, for the past eight years, I have only played Dungeons & Dragons 5e, and have had a blast doing so. But driven by curiosity and circumstance, one fateful night, I left my D&D books on the shelf to dive into the unforgiving world of Dungeon Crawl Classics. What I found is a tabletop game I’m eager to return to — and I even learned some lessons I’ll apply to my future D&D games.

The Old School Renaissance (OSR) movement began in the mid-2000s, mainly as a reaction to the publication of Dungeons & Dragons 3e. Beginning as a topic of discussion on online forums, growing interest in OSR spawned a loose community of game designers and gamers, united by a common passion for Erol Otus and Larry Elmore’s art, 10-foot poles, and tables. Lots of tables. Nowadays, this playstyle refers to dozens of TTRPGs that draw inspiration from the earliest days of the genre. One of the most popular and appreciated of them is Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), published for the first time in 2012 by Goodman Games.

DCC sits in a weird spot in the OSR universe. While the art, feeling, and tone are straight out of the 1970s (the official inspiration being Appendix N, the list of books that informed the creation of the original Dungeons & Dragons), the rules are actually a streamlined version of D&D’s 3e — yes, the same edition that made many players so unhappy that they decided to create their own retro-inspired games. This is interesting because DCC came out in the waning days of D&D’s 4e, which was disliked even more by players, but a couple of years before Wizards of the Coast came out with the most successful version of D&D to date, 5e.

Like so many others, I fell off the D&D wagon during the 4th edition years, and was pulled back in when 5th edition gave us simpler rules, a focus on storytelling, and exceptional campaign settings (such as Curse of Strahd). I have been running games (yes, I am an eternal DM) almost nonstop for eight years now, and it’s been........

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