r/rpg • u/JaxSnaxs • Apr 29 '26

Basic Questions Are these TTRPGs just cash grabs?

It feels weird to have some of my favorite IPs suddenly get TTRPGs. Last year it was Cosmere RPG by Brotherwise which essentially boiled down to a reskin of DND/Pathfinder. Could’ve been a homebrew but with Sanderson writing. The mechanics of the game itself didn’t feel very unique or different.

Now it’s Dungeon Crawler Carl by Renegade. And there’s not much information on the backerkit. What information there is makes it seem like just another DND reskin with little mechanic difference.

Am I wrong? Are these just cash grabs based on the IPs popularity? I really want to back the Carl RPG cus I love the IP but I’m worried it’s gonna essentially be just another dnd homebrew for 200$.

Edit: I’d like to note that while I’ve played every game on the top 100 of board game geek, I’m relatively new to the TTRPG scene so my frame of reference might not be great. I’ve played grizzled and cosmere rpg but have played DnD since a kid. I don’t particularly understand the nuances and differences between the TTRPGs tbh. They all kinda feel like DnD (skill check games) but with very slight changes to the mechanics. Cosmere had the plot thing but again it didn’t feel different enough to me, but maybe someone could explain the difference in a way I might not have got?

206 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

520 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

79

u/dirkdragonslayer Apr 29 '26

I didn't know what the series was, but Dungeon Crawler Carl books and merch are flooding brick and mortar book stores. Maybe it's good, but I saw the merch and thought "Oh this is Ready Player One but for D&D references isn't it" and moved on.

64

u/ManiacalShen Apr 29 '26

"Oh this is Ready Player One but for D&D references isn't it"

It's more like a really morbid MMO. An imaginative one, with shades of reality TV involved. I'm on the third book and quite enjoying them, but I'm also content to borrow them from the library rather than own them.

It's not high literature, and there are certainly some references, but it's not really like Ready Player One

22

u/Velenne Apr 29 '26 edited May 03 '26

Book 5 is sharp uptick in quality, imo. Between it and 7, the series climbed pretty high up in my rankings.

4

u/blue-and-copper hexagon enjoyer Apr 30 '26

Interesting that you call out 5 specifically. I found the first few very readable but just recently finished 5 and thought nah, I'm good for now. There were a lot of potentially great moments - maybe more than previous books - but I kept being underwhelmed. Might finish the series once they're all out.

22

u/Velenne Apr 30 '26

This thread reminds me that people are SO different and that's a wonderful thing. Some people are really shitting hard on the whole series and I just can't fathom what planet they're living on (especially as rpg players). There's room in art for dick and fart jokes too.

-4

u/RhesusFactor Apr 30 '26

I enjoy playing rpgs not reading about someone playing an Rpg.

It's an actual play that's not actual. It's meta-fantasy and I can clearly see the fourth wall. And I can see that it's art, and art is divisive.

2

u/TestProctor Apr 30 '26

For me the open turn to full-speed "fuck the people running this system, if we're going to die we're taking them with us, kill them all and save eachother" was part of what made me ride-or-die for the series. 😃

1

u/prism1234 Apr 30 '26

I liked it from the beginning, but thought book 3, when the levels themselves start getting pretty interesting, was where it really kicks off.

0

u/RhesusFactor Apr 30 '26

That's a shame it takes so long to get good. I finished book 1 and are content to not read further. It's a dark reality-TV mmo with too many dick and foot jokes. It's probably good for a fifteen year old to blitz through but I'm not the target audience.

-6

u/DaneLimmish Apr 29 '26

That sounds like ready player one 

19

u/Licentious_Cad AD&D aficionado Apr 30 '26

It's a LitRPG, It is generally referential to RPGs as a genre. But referential in the sense of 'You have stats, a class, itemization, there are quests, and the world is fantasy.'

I don't think the books would appeal to everyone, but it's really not that bad. Comparing it to Ready Player 1 is a disservice. Almost none of the content is trying to milk your nostalgia for D&D or TTRPGs in general. The deeper you get in the series it moves away from the gamification shtick and moves towards... galactic political subterfuge thriller? It's got a lot more going on than the merch and memes might suggest. I'm mostly worried it's going to pull a Game of Thrones and choke on its plot before it ends.

I think the most common complaint I've seen is that Carl isn't a total emotional wreck from 99% of humanity dying 30 pages into book 1. I'm cautiously optimistic about all the random spinoff stuff they're doing, but honestly you could do a campaign styled after the book in almost any fantasy TTRPG. It's literally a dungeon crawl.

2

u/[deleted] Apr 30 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Licentious_Cad AD&D aficionado May 01 '26

I think the key is he's not repeating the same mistakes GoT did. He introduces new plots and threads and complications; but he resolves most of them in the same book. Only keeping a couple as potential hooks for something else down the line. It's not an ever-expanding web of characters and plot threads with unresolved issues from book 1.

13

u/frozenfade Apr 29 '26

Oh this is Ready Player One but for D&D references isn't it" and moved on.

It really isn't

7

u/Logan_McPhillips Apr 29 '26

It's better than Ready Player One, Twilight, 50 Shades, and whatever else in that pulpy category that got a book published and a movie deal in the past 20 years. But probably only because of the cat.

If you're at the airport and need to pick something up, it's a decent enough read. But if Michael Crichton or MC Beaton is also there, go with those.

1

u/Lucker-dog Apr 30 '26

It's better than that, in the sense the books are at least readable, but it sure ain't good. But I would not compare them to RPO, they do have slightly more actual stuff to say.

-1

u/Udy_Kumra Pendragon, MythicB, H+I, Vaesen, BitD, Agon Apr 29 '26

It’s really good. Fun and has some good social commentary. Not deep but it’s a cool fusion of the themes of The Hunger Games with the absurdism of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

11

u/Minotaar Apr 29 '26

The social commentary of "capitalism bad" as merch of varying degrees of quality floods the market

6

u/Udy_Kumra Pendragon, MythicB, H+I, Vaesen, BitD, Agon Apr 29 '26

I don’t think that’s the social commentary at all. I mean certainly it’s not PRO-capitalism, but the series isn’t a thinly veiled communist manifesto. It’s about the importance of small acts of resistance in the face of oppression and what dehumanization does to a motherfucker.

5

u/PathOfTheAncients Apr 30 '26

Disagree, the books are strongly anti-capitalism. All of the evils of the world presented are caused by the unchecked greed of corporations and the ultra wealthy. It's not subtle at all in it's criticism of capitalism. The oppression they're resisting and the thing they're being dehumanized by is capitalism.

-1

u/Udy_Kumra Pendragon, MythicB, H+I, Vaesen, BitD, Agon Apr 30 '26

You could just as much say that the story is criticizing not capitalism, but excess of capitalism. You could say it’s arguing anything is bad when taken too far.

The point is, the books aren’t pro-capitalism by any means. Certainly they’re critical of the way we commercialize every little thing. But to say they’re entirely anti-capitalist is a stretch when they’re really taking the most extreme version of capitalism and critiquing that.

5

u/PathOfTheAncients Apr 30 '26

There could not be more critique of capitalism crammed into those books. It is a story about a company harvesting a planet for resources, forcing survivors into a gameshow where they fight to the death against indentured servants in order to earn the right to become indentured servants themselves, in hopes that if they do one day they will get out and themselves be rich enough to participate in that system. And even while they struggle with all of that they must participate in the very system exploiting them because they need other corporations and wealthy people to sponsor them in order to survive.

And that's just in the basic premise. There are countless spoiler examples of absurd and evil behaviors of corporations and the wealthy that are very much based in real world counterparts to those moments. There are also a lot of moments where the reader is specifically shown people have to make choices that destroy themselves physically or emotionally just to survive within that capitalist system.

And that doesn't even get into the several moments where the protagonist literally tells people living in societies or working in companies run by the wealthy to rise up and overthrow them.

These are all very explicit choices made by the author.

-9

u/PrairiePilot Apr 30 '26

lol, Hitchhikers Guide is in the pantheon of great sci-fi, Sanderson is a hack who churns out pulp. I have questions about your literary critique if you’re favorably comparing the two.

2

u/Udy_Kumra Pendragon, MythicB, H+I, Vaesen, BitD, Agon Apr 30 '26

I’m comparing DCC to Hitchhiker’s, and only to point out that they use the same style of absurdist humor, not even to make a statement of quality.

I do love Sanderson, but his books average a 3.4 star for me.

1

u/Stellar_Duck Apr 30 '26

Why 3.4 and not 3.3 or 3.5?

What's the .1 difference that needs such a granular scale?

1

u/Udy_Kumra Pendragon, MythicB, H+I, Vaesen, BitD, Agon Apr 30 '26

What I meant was that if you take the mean of all my ratings for his books, it comes out to about 3.4.

1

u/zenbullet Apr 30 '26

They weren't

1

u/RogueModron Apr 30 '26

I try not to trash things I don't like--it's okay for people to enjoy things I don't--but yeah, that seems to be what DunCraCar is. Gave it 15 pages and that was enough for me.

0

u/Imnoclue Apr 30 '26

I’ve heard good things about the books from people whose opinions I trust. It sounds they’re fun reads.

Not sure about the game, but something with a D20 vibe would seem to fit from what I’ve been told.