Cairn Is a Cool TTRPG
Soon I'll be DM'ing my 10th Session of Cairn and so far we've been enjoying it a lot.
My favorite part of the system is its simplicity. In the real world people have other hobbies than tabletop RPGs. They don't spend all their free time mulling over the rules and brewing characters. They usually play every few weeks, and don't think a minute about the mechanics of their game. They might review their notes, but they won't check how the damn game works. This was my big problem with DnD 5e: The game was complex enough, that it lead to players not knowing how the basic things work after not playing for some time.
I know that some people might say "make your players learn the rules yadda-yadda", But having a game that complex only works with players who are invested enough to always know how it works.
Thats where I think Cairn shines. The game does not have many rules and most thing are down to the DM to make rulings for. This reduces the amount of things the player needs to know, and just lets them be in the pretend elf game without getting hiccups, because they forgot how their character works. They didn't look at their character sheets for the last two weeks, because they touch grass and have other hobbies.
Hack Your Darn Game
Cairn also is very hackable. The simpleness of the game, allows the DM to create some silly rules or mechanics, to make the game work for their table. It's a cool exercise in game design, in my opinion. I introduced some parts of the Block, Dodge, Parry Cairn-hack. Gave my characters silly abilities to play around with. I stole the Mighty Deeds from Dungeon Crawl Classics and created a "do cool martial shit for one fatigue"-button, which is a design space I need to explore more in the future.
Fatigue
Fatigue hasn't really been an issue at our table. Maybe it's because we had a lot of social gameplay in the last few sessions. Maybe it's because I am not playing or tracking the dungeon turns right as the DM. Also it sometimes just feels odd to rolling Exhaustion on the Dungeon Events multiple times. The characters are just walking around, why would they get hungry again.
Conclusion of this Rambly Mess
Cairn is a cool game. Give it a try. Its rules are free on cairnrpg.com.