Moldvay... and how this became something other than Moldvay.

When I set out to create Hack & Crawl Campaigner,  I wanted to combine two things: the elegance of Tom Moldvay's Basic D&D rules and the random swinginess of Joseph Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. The early versions of the rules started out pretty much as house-rules for the DCC play-by-post game that I was running. I added some restrictions to the DCC rules based on the B/X rules, but it was mostly DCC. When it came to creating a setting, I wanted to pay homage to my inspirations. Thus, Moldvayn. But the name (as in "mold-vein") also inspired the fungal theme. So the gazetteer in Appendix G was mostly inspired by the name. But as the game developed, I became more and more interested in the versions of the game that preceded Moldvay. In fact, the more I read and researched, the more I became interested in the earliest version of the game. The result of this is most apparent in the lack of emphasis on Ability Modifiers. I want +1 to mean something. The easy availability of +3 (or even +5!) would make it mean that much less. But on the other hand it also means that there are no hopeless characters. Given standard rolls, the worst penalty you'll receive is -1.

However, a big difference that I codified in the game is the use of raw Ability Scores as the basis for Skill checks and Saving Throws. Rolling under Ability Scores is not new in and of itself, and it's likely that Arneson and Gygax used similar mechanics for such checks (though Saving Throws seem to have been introduced fairly early on in a way that would have superseded such checks). But HCC uses Ability Scores as the prime component of checks (rather than modifiers) and thus makes characters more nuanced in terms of how able they are to handle different checks. The Judge is always encouraged to make ad hoc rulings in terms of bonuses ad penalties to rolls, but the Ability Scores themselves provide more of a base for each character to start with.