#YOU CAN SLAP IT OVER MANY HOMEBREW OR OTHER ESTABLISHED FANTASY SETTINGS

[gunkreads]

Cairn session recap from Friday, which will also function as an advertisement to play Cairn with your friends. You should play Cairn with your friends.

My group of players have had very little contact with TTRPGs. Pretty much all they have is:

(friend 1) One completely horrid 1-hour D&D 4e session back in like 2011, plus about 50 hours of Baldur's Gate 3

(friend 2) Watching about half of said BG3 gameplay

(girlfriend) Two acceptably decent 4-hour D&D 5e sessions, plus hearing me talk about it endlessly.

So I have them going through a bog on a 3-day trip, escorting a merchant through it. Each day is supposed to have an encounter--day 1 was about 2 hours of Session 0/rules review/character creation, then about 2 hours of gameplay, about 20 minutes of which was combat; day 2 was about 4 hours, about 3 hours of which was combat (kinda overdid it on the difficulty ramp).

So, day 2 has my players with a reasonable grasp of the tenets of tabletop gaming and my personal philosophies on GMing. For some background, said philosophy basically starts and ends at the Rule of Cool. They wake up with their stinky sketchy merchant man, then proceed down the path before seeing a Rust Monster dash across the path, which the Merchant chases because he knows they tend to accidentally collect lots of non-rustable precious metals (my canon). They run into this small ruined outpost that happens to have a treant in it.

Now, something you should know about Cairn is that it has almost no progression system--no classes, no leveling, no stat increases, just "gear". It is designed to be deadly, so consequently there's very little you can do to invest into your character. This deadliness is something I heavily emphasized to my players, mainly focusing on the fact that I didn't know HOW deadly it'd be, since I hadn't GMed it before.

I ended up making the first session's combat VERY easy, forgot the rule about critical damage, and happened to see my players roll INCREDIBLY well, so that ended up giving them a false sense of confidence about their combat power.

They run into this treant in session 2. To say it "fucked them the hell up" would be a blinding understatement. It does a base of 1d10+1d8 damage, which I had already reduced to 1d10 before the session started (wanted to eliminate the chance of one-shotting my least tanky player). It downed two of the three players in one hit, and it basically got worse from there.

Because Cairn's rules are so loose, I was effectively able to build a ruleset on the fly to suit this particular combat scenario. I could roll with my players' ideas to do basic movement and inventory manipulation actions while downed (you're not unconscious, just unable to fight). I also loosened the restrictions around getting players back up--it just burned a turn for each player, which let me keep the combat going without completely sidelining a player for over an hour.

This led to one of my initially-incapacitated players killing the Rust Monster, which was hiding in the outhouse of this fort, by dropping a lit torch down into the pit and having the methane explode, then dropping a jar of tar on the still-burning enemy.

It also led to another player using a bottle of perfume as a Molotov cocktail against the Treant, and since they were doing such an incredible job at improvising their way out of this hopeless situation, I could narrate that Molotov knocking the armor off the Treant where it hit, letting them hit it a lot harder from there on. They were also specifically focusing on knocking off branches and roots, so I could reduce the Treant's damage die as they did that. It was IMMENSELY fun to whip up boons for the players based on their individual creativity, attention to their gear, and willingness to ask more about the scenario and setting.

The moral of the story for me in this was that when I, as a GM, don't have a massive ruleset looming behind me, I can actually do a lot better of a job making combat fun. When there's nothing to contradict, I can make rules as intuitive as I want.

So the two things I'd say in favor of following Bob World Builder's advice to start your D&D adventure by playing Cairn are these:

When there are almost no rules, you get to make all the rules. The GM gets to do quite literally whatever they want to help the players have a good time. If a player says "Hey, can I [action that has absolutely zero mention in the rule set], the GM can say "yes, make a [stat] save and fucking go for it" without ANY concern for gameplay balance. Shit, if you're concerned about your ability to be fair in metering their success, pick a die and a value and roll for it. In D&D, you can easily back yourself into corners by allowing something that eventually conflicts with an important balance rule later on. I know because I've done it. Cairn eliminates this stress and lets a GM learn how to PLAY the game, rather than just RUNNING it.

My players were more immersed in the narrative and roleplaying aspect of the game fully throughout the combat. Because they weren't limited to the 13(ish?) actions of D&D 5e, they were able to completely improvise their actions and run character interactions in a way that made them more satisfied with the cinematic-ness and narrative coherence of the fight.

Also, we had a fucking epic life-saving roll toward the end--one player had gone down twice, but still got back up and went back in to fight. She got hit again, which brought her down to 2 STR, and when you take a hit to STR in Cairn, you have to make a STR save to stay standing. Cairn is roll-under-for-success, so she needed to roll a 1 or 2 to stay up. And she rolled a fucking 2. We pretty much took an intermission for that one.