This post is an excerpt from my new zine Dice Forager, a collection of games and essays on game design. You can preorder it here if you live in the US.
It is the law that every RPG designer must eventually publish an elfgame. Like all those who came before me, there are dozens of such games that are decidedly not for me, a few that I almost love, and nothing that nails it exactly. But Yochai Gal’s Cairn gets close. It’s simple, clean, and free. Check it out.
The one problem I have with Cairn is that it’s a “roll under” system, meaning you have a few stats (strength, dexterity, and willpower), and when you need to roll dice, you roll a d20 and try and get under your most appropriate stat. This is really simple, and it means high stats are good, but you have to hope for low rolls. I don’t like that. High number good.
My elfgame, Silly Cairn, works exactly like Cairn except your stats are feeble, clumsy, and spineless. Any time you’d make a strength save in Cairn, instead you try and overcome your feebleness by rolling over your stat. So you want low stats but high dice. Not perfect, but high number good on dice.
This has the fun side-effect of making characters feel prone to fucking up. They’re all feeble, clumsy, and spineless. I like when my adventurers all feel like Fiasco protagonists, which also solves my other problem with Cairn: it’s a little bland.
Note that this change is very silly. It just trades one problem for another: now you want stats to be low, and as we know, high number good! Why bother? Such is our lot in life, us dreadful elfgame hackers, to tweak our elfgames ‘til the end of time.