I wrote a theory post. Don’t worry, I paid my tax!
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I like the edmocat post. Seems like it’d play smooth. But for me, this is the meat of the matter:
They’re attempts to make Cairn feel more legible to D&D expectations. To make it feel familiar. To make it feel safer. To make it feel like you can play “a campaign” the way your brain thinks campaigns are supposed to work.
I feel like this approach is very much “milk before meat,” built to player expectations—a distortion pedal rather than a dial on the amp, haha, hoping to get them to desire the acoustic sound, so to speak.
If I was in a hypothetical situation where I was stuck with players who required an “Official Brand Product” feel (and in this make-believe scenario I couldn’t refuse to run the game), the edmocat post is what I’d want to do.
A lot of And, Ifs, and Buts, there, tho. My IRL Cairn players still call it D&D, and they have the damn player’s books, hahahaha
My mom still calls every video game a Nintendo…. I guess at some level, all TTRPGs are D&D.
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Adding levels to Cairn doesn’t look any different to me than adding an inventory to Into the Odd (which, by the way, does have levels).
It seems to me a bit out of place to assume that people don’t actually want levels but it’s just some “cultural discomfort”. It’s the old “I know what you want better than you” attitude.
I didn’t say it was different. In fact I acknowledged exactly that. What I am reacting to is the reason for it!
And it isn’t really about levels; if you read the original blog I linked to, the goal as stated by the author was to bring it closer to D&D. And that’s what I don’t really understand; if you want to play D&D there are far better games suited for that purpose. Heck if you want a roll-under rules lite system, The Black Hack is right there! Or if you want an Oddlike with levels and classes and magic like D&D, Into The Dungeon: Revived is there as well.
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Levels were just an example for me just as they were for you. My point is, the argument you have against “them”, could be made identical against Cairn. You borrowed the inventory system from Knave because Into the Odd didn’t have one but you wanted it in your game. If you wanted a game closer to D&D than Into the Odd, there were several already. The Black Hack was right there! But you didn’t want to play the Black Hack, you wanted to play Into the Odd. With an inventory and spells.
Maybe I’m reading your argument completely wrong, but it really sounds to me like you’re trying to discredit others for doing the same, by arguing that their reasons are different and less legitimate.
By the way, edmo already more or less addressed your argument in their post. I’m not gonna repeat that here, but I would point out that it’s basically session 0 stuff: defining what kind of game a table wants to play together. Sometimes the game is “pure”, sometimes it’s a compromise, sometimes it’s fresh and new, sometimes it sits on comfortable tropes, sometimes the GM prefers to “compromise” a game they’re excited to run rather than pick a “better suited” one they don’t care about. As long as all the people at the table have fun, the goal is achieved.
No one would argue that Into The Odd produces the exact same play experience that OSE does (if only!); and I personally see them as falling into two distinct camps within a larger shared play style. The reason for Cairn’s existence was to make Electric Bastionland style play - which I believe is fundamental to what makes it so special - more compatible with OSR modules by introducing elements such as spellbooks, fantasy themes, and so on.
What seems curious to me is why someone would want to take the thing that makes Cairn, well, Cairn, and reverse engineer it into something that already exists? And for what seems like the tenth time, I don’t think there is anything wrong with that, I simply am trying to understand it.
Furthermore, I’m not “discrediting” anyone. Nor do I argue that anything I have done is substantially different; only my reasons. Suffice it to say that everyone is free to hack whatever they want, my game is CC-BY-SA for a reason. You seem to interpret my pondering of this particular kind of hack (specifically, “baking-in some additional resilience for player-characters of a long form campaign game…”) as an attack against it. Nothing could further from the truth! I’m simply trying to understand why someone would want to put dials back on the dashboard, when there are clearly usable dashboards on cars in the same lot!
If you know anything about me and you know, the very community that we are discussing this post in, you know that I believe that “The best game is the game you like to play” - it is the tagline of this very website!
However, it seems to me that if you’re still not understanding my point of view by now that repeating myself isn’t really going to help, so this will be my last response to this particular line of discourse. Have a good day!
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@yochaigal, I too find it interesting that people start changing something about a system before they even give it a try, as written. I assume these are the same type of people who salt their food before they taste it. Imo it’s a signal of a closed mindset, and one that does a disservice to themselves. Unfortunately, TTRPGs are group activities, so those effects spill over to the group as a whole.
I also am baffled by the quest for the “perfect” or “eternal system.” This mentality that there is a game out there that they will find and then never look back, playing it until the end of time. Why? Why would you only want to play something one way? I personally love the variety of playing other systems and trying new things. It also indicates a lack of understanding of design, which, to be fair, was my primary area of focus in college.
Which gives me a framework to define this scenario.
Design is defined as a series of choices, purposefully selecting a different option to tip an end product toward something that is unique. Normalizing removes identity and creates sameness. By adding familiarity to placate a wider audience, or “looking at how we could bring this game a little closer to the expectations of people who might otherwise ask me to play an Official Brand Product,” they are inherently removing the reason that they should play it.
Playing 30 sessions and then making a change is a design practice. It would be defined as “iteration” or “evolution.” And I think that’s where you find the “why” for these people. This audience was never interested in the practice of design, just the pursuit of “different.” An undefined “different” that lacks clarity of intent, therefore, they return to comfort, recreating in bastardized form, the thing they sought to avoid. In well-practiced design, we set achievable design goals and then test our preferences and solutions against them. They are doomed to failure before they even begin.
A long-winded rant, I know. But it was an interesting thought piece for me. Thanks for writing it.
I am curious, however, what you think about running a system using a different culture of play, though? For example, I love DCC, and play it weekly. Though the group that I play with, we tend to embrace more of the OSR ethos. DCC is kind of unique as its core system seems to dip into multiple play cultures, but I think the question is still worth considering. Is the implied play culture of a system part of it or is that dependent on the table?
I suspect that many folks attempt to do things like put levels on Cairn because Cairn is much more well-known than games like Into The Dungeon: Revived, and because Cairn is a lot easier to run than even something like B/X. It can be overwhelming trying to survey everything that is out there. I suspect that the demographic of folks who want something “little closer to the expectations” (as the post puts it) is fairly common among those looking to get off the name brand.
what sounds more likely to y’all to happen:
- GM goes looking for a name brand alternative, wants something simple, finds Cairn (or Knave, etc) which seems very close, and decides it would be easiest to modify it to make a smoother on-ramp for their players
- GM goes looking for a name brand alternative, wants something simple, finds Cairn (or Knave, etc) which seems very close, but holds out for something with more of the usual dials, and eventually finds Into The Dungeon or Beyond the Wall.
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