What's Veeky Forums's thoughts on pic related?

>Different user
>system that can be run on a d6
Without revealing what I like about the d20 part. Please explain how this can be run on a d6.

I'm interested but don't want it ruining the aspect I like.

There are playable, aliens, especially in character options 2, a focus and a descriptor

They added non-human races and Automatons as playable characters in the splat material.

Huh, well I'll be damned. Good on them then.

>Very possible to negate a bonus on a roll by having too many bonuses to the roll
It`s straight up telling you this was by intention in the book. And I approve of it personally.

>Minor nitpick, but the tone is inconsistent. It wants to be a very narrative game, and yet it's also mechanically heavy.
>Purely opinion, but the setting comes off as dull and uninspired for something that takes place billions of years in earth's future.
Yeah, very much agree. Instead of buying the Numenera book, I bought the cypher & strange book, and play them in... well not the Numenera world. It makes a great pulpy Scifi.

>No playable aliens? No mechs? Really?
Well there are. Two semi-aliens in the core book, and like seven in others. One robot races I know of, and one Robot-but-with-organs-and-skin and totally not human race.

>It`s straight up telling you this was by intention in the book. And I approve of it personally.

Just a difference of opinion. I think it's a very heavy-handed and clumsy way to discourage powergaming is all. I can easily see someone construing it as a punishment for being too good.

I just think it's weird is all.

It has a setting with the potential to be interesting, but does nothing with it and instead goes full generic fantasy.

>Billions and billions of years of history
>The world has gone through a hundred cycles of destruction and rebirth
>Mighty empires have risen and fallen, reshaping the very planet in their wake
>Society and technology have gone through such changes we can barely comprehend
>But none of that matters in any way, except we got an excuse to call out magic item tech
>Now make either a rogue, a wizard or a warrior and go get treasure and kills monsters.

>Having your "do cool stuff" currency be the same as your "not dying" currency.
one of the most common fixes I've seen is having XP split into 'hard' and 'soft' XP, with the first being gained from story stuff and used for permanent bonuses while the second is gained from Intrusions(compells) and so they functions more like the Fate Points they were like.

>Not rewarding XP for combat and having a class centered on combat
It's not that XP isn't rewarded for combat, it's just that XP isn't AUTOMATICALLY rewarded for combat. You get XP for making big discoveries/changes, so that progress actually corresponds to character development or story progress rather than how many bears you have shorn the ass off of like people say is the case in D&D.

Setting is the blandest garbage with poor execution.
System has a lot of weird, but cool ideas jammed together with ones that I'm not so fond of. Though that's mostly because it tries to push narrative when it talks about its system, but then loads you up on rules, which feels counter-intuitive. I feel like it could have been served by running on something other than a d20 system, but that's personal preference.

There's two non-human races on the very core rulebook. And, either way, I always assumed that like in he-man, your "human" always looks like a weirdo unless you're super vanilla human from the western kingdoms. This is heavily implied by the art all over the book.

Either way, the game's setting is just 80's fantasy, feeding on the roots of DnD. For whatever reason, modern DnD has turned so vanilla tolkieneske that everyone thinks Numenera is this weird unique thing.

That's not Strike!

Seriously though, while the setting possibly fits, the only other part that does is the adjective noun who verbs.

>everyone thinks Numenera is this weird unique thing
Do they really though?
The Opinion in this thread seems to be more towards: "this is boring".

>monte cuck

I'm not looking forward for more ivory tower style games

Good use of the system, even better when used as The STrange. Not so good when they made a generic spin-off game using the rules.

To many of the rules were designed with the setting in mind to be used generically.

>Now make either a rogue, a wizard or a warrior and go get treasure and kills monsters.
You'd almost thing that, in a game about archeotech, you'd be able to play an engineer, or a stalker.

I think he's talking about the normies.

You can only succeed on levels 1 to 6, so, a 3 to an 18. Intrusions and effects are nice but it's clear they were included because Monte Cook likes d20's, and not because of any key mechanic aspect.

Thete are playable aliens in the core book, as well as mutants. Each character options book has added more.

There's like, a dozen aliens you can play as now. As well as be an AI.

Normies don't play tabletop.
Much less reading a setting book about it.

>Doing cool stuff costs HP.

That's something I really like about Numenera. It's not blizarre at all.

>Limit to roll bonuses.

Now that my party has reached high tier play, the cap to bonuses is a godsend. It's to keep people from spending too much time stacking bonuses.

>Special armors don't matter
I could have sworn there was a reason for them to be special, but I can't find it. That said, no items have weight (the GM decides if you're carrying too much. that's it.) so there is no 'heavier' heavy armor.

>The tone is inconsistent.
It's supposed to be somewhere in the middle, but I'll agree that his execution on it can be off sometimes. I'll also agree that Monte Cook can't into balance.

you can, the three classes are very broad, you pick abilities from their lists as you level up. You also have a specific focus that really defined yoie character. My players are a Numenera crafter, a bounty hunter, a mind controller, a paladin, and a Glaive. The last one just made a straight up combat monster. The rest don't particular feel like their 'class'.

It's Gene Wolf and Moebius mostly.

>It's a good system
d20 versus difficultyx3? i fail to see the appeal

3 steps on a d20 scale equal 15%
1 step on a d6 scale equals 16.6666%

>inb4 why is Veeky Forums shilling strike post

The setting is an interesting concept. Shame it's only that and not a good setting.

The mechanics have some interesting concepts. Shame it's only that and not a good system.

The character options are neat. Shame that the system prevents them from feeling unique until a few tiers in.

The only thing I genuinely like are ciphers.
Players thought they were the best thing ever.
They had fun.
I had fun describing the weird shit they found.
10/10 have been finding excuses to put ciphers into a few games since.

Good times were had, but not through anything provided by the system or setting.

The play between stat pools, abilities, edge, and effort is what I like best. While 'roll a d20 then divide by three is an obtuse step to take, I do like a 5% chance for an intrusion and a 10℅ chance for an effect. So the way the rolling works is fine for me. 'pick a number 1-10' is also an incredibly easy way for GM's to assign difficulty to any task and npc. It makes running stuff without a plan very easy.

>The only thing I genuinely like are ciphers.
>Players thought they were the best thing ever.
>They had fun.
>I had fun describing the weird shit they found.
>10/10 have been finding excuses to put ciphers into a few games since.

It boggles the mind that Monte did not simply make all players some variation of Ciphers. The game is called Numenera. The Numenera is the great cloud of old nano-tech that surrounds the world, and endless machine that can do anything, the legacy of a million civilizations lost to the past.

And there's exactly one class that actually does anything with it.

So you've got your ciphers, manipulating the very essence of the world, pulling from the endless potential that exists in the great Numenera - the headstone of the peoples who came before. Can you use it to revive their legacy? Can you rebuild what is lost? You can try with the endless power of NUMENERA!!!

Oh, and jacks. You guys get extra skill points for open lock and shit. Pretty exciting huh?
>Eh... can we at least get a little magi-
We don't use that word. And you can have some single use stuff. But that's exceedingly rare of course, so you'll never get more once it's spent.
>... I'll take what I can get.

Ah, and glaives. You guys fight a bit,
>Just 'fight a bit'? I mean, the other guys is changing the fabric of the universe on a constant basis. And I'm kinda good at fighting,
>and that's all I do. Couldn't we like, make me have some fun special abilities tied to using the Numenera in some way? Like, some anime-style ninja shit or something...

Don't make me laugh. Can't have a fighter, rogue and wizard class ensemble without a fighter, can we? Now wave that spear at the monster while the other guys shoots it with lasers and mind bullets and phase in an out of reality while levitating.

Cyphers are the one shot magical items. You're talking about nanos. Jack's also get some esotery like abilities. Some of the physical abilities available to glaives are pretty amazing. In addition, everyone gets to pick a focus, some are more 'mundane' while others are more fantastic. They aren't 'class' locked '. Lastly there are artifacts and cyphers all over the place that give out all sorts of amazing options. The Glaive and Jack aren't sitting on the sideline while the Nano does his stuff. One of theJacks in my group does far more with Numenera then the Nano. The other jack can teleport.

>It has a setting with the potential to be interesting, but does nothing with it and instead goes full generic fantasy
Well, since it's basically trying to be a Planescape heartbreaker, I think it has competently emulated Monte Cook's contributions to that setting!

...You know, I'm amazed just how many designers who've been at it since the 90s manage to be accused by both sides of the divide of giving in to 'the bad guys'.

>>Minor nitpick, but the tone is inconsistent. It wants to be a very narrative game, and yet it's also mechanically heavy.

Why does Veeky Forums think that narrative implies rules light? There are so many crunchy narrative games.

I guess it's because everyone offers opinions on things they know nothing about.

It seems to be one of those games where if you've decided you like it you'll like it and nothing can change your mind on that.

Mostly because people who seem to like this game can't seem to find problems or nitpicks with it and PERSONALLY SPEAKING that tends to ward me off since it usually indicates players who're too loyal for their own good.

t. Someone who's never actually bothered to read the entire book or play the game

Every game or [skub] has fans like that.

The opinion I see every where is "has a few cool ideas mixed in with lots of crap ones". The main sticking point is which ideas people think are cool and which crap, but that's aphoristic.

Thing is if that WAS the concensus I don't think people would be defending this game?

Like if the consensus all around was "a lot of the ideas are shitty" I doubt many people would argue back and forth about which PARTS are shitty they'd just agree the game is mediocre and move on?

It's always the people defending the game who seem... compelled to call out any criticism however small or even legitimate it may be.

There's a bit if a chip on the shoulder because alot of the criticism of the game is coming from people who clearly haven't played it, or fully read it. It's an overly defensive type of thing.

It's not as bad as 4e DnD which gets attacked for just existing, but it's not like Savage Worlds where, if anything, the people who have never played it are recommending it.

Well speaking as a guy who has definately not read the entire book and just pieces of it the only thing that I kinda disliked was its GM intervention mechanic.

It felt like it was trying to ape FATE's mechanics but missing the point epically which I find crazy considering how ultimately barebones an idea FATE's mechanic is in that regard.

But that's just one mechanic out of the whole game so...

GM intrusions are the the biggest 'narrativist' component of Numenera. I haven't played Fate, but they remind me of the hero points you give out in Mutants and Masterminds in exchange for making the players let the story happen. I like Intrusions quite a bit.

How's the Cypher system itself? I wanted to do a sort of cyberpunky supers game and I was wondering if it can handle that sort of thing.

It probably could. I feel like the hardest part of utilizing Cypher more generically is fluffing the titular Cyphers. They worked in Numenera, or in the Strange, but what would they be in a cyberpunk setting? Individual gadgets? Do you just pick and choose which ones make sense? It's the same problem I had when I wanted to adapt it to my magitech gaslamp fantasy setting. I ended up scrapping the idea, and used Mythras instead, but if you can fluff the cyphers I think it'll work.

I mean, how entirely crucial are they to the game?

I could probably think of something.

pool systems are by design slow. they make players mull over how much to spend after carefully calculating all other modifiers.

and then you have some people complaining about other systems where you have to make an extra die roll to resolve an attack - a really minor delay in comparison. preposterous!

bacause many people who like storytelling games hate crunch

Because the crunch is centered mostly on combat, not the story and the narrative. It's been a while since I've read over Numenera, but a lot of the book was about fighting, and yet kept talking like it was a narrative-focused game in the other parts. It was jarring. There could be games with lots of crunch on how to interact with the world and setting, making them crunchy and narrative-focused, but Numenera didn't do that as far as I could tell.

While we're on the subject, what does a game look like when it is "Narrative Focused", and how would that be different from reading a game that "Isn't"?

The majority of the book isn't concerning combat.

What I'm not understanding is whether or not having heavily defined combat makes it a non-narrative focused game. Can't one have both?

I thought what denoted a narrative game was the very non-granular/crunchy mechanics.

you can. that user's statement was errononeous

narrative systems spend ample amount of focus on mechanics around choices that affect the plot. you're no longer simulating a game world, you're manufacturing a narrative instead. whether the game world is consistent is secondary to whatever you want the story to go.

Thinking of trying to get my group into it. Definitely get a bit of a Phantasy Star IV vibe from it, which is a good feel for me.

I really like the setup with the poorly understood relics as the focus of the setting. Really want to tinker with the societal structures, though. I don't think the pseudo medieval crap makes sense for the setting; I'm loosing thinking of modeling it more on spread out city-states and a more classical/ancient world vibe.

Thinking I'll start them in either Uxphon or Antre, maybe resituate them close to each other.

Also, not sure about this GM intrusion diceless aspect. Like, how necessary is it, really? I like that they've made things relatively rules light and I like the focus on cyphers.

No, it merely means that the mechanics are narrative focused; how crunchy or granular they are varies.

While that's nominally true, once your party gets the hang of stuff the large chunks that Cypher System uses for its target numbers make it very easy to figure out how much you want to spend, and it moves fairly quickly.

That's 'rules light'. Which Numenera is sometimes claimed to be. To be fair, it is lighter then the last four systems I've played.

I have played rolemaster and run shadowrun long enough to know that this is not true.

GM intrusions account for about half of my PC's experience. You can use them to do stuff like

>Your family was kidnapped! Have some xp.
>You fall into a hole. Have some xp. Also there're some runes down here.
>Your cyber dog catches a scent and runs off into the woods. Better go catch him! Have some XP.
>I can't think of anything to do an intrusion over. Tell the party something about your characters goals and take an xp.
>This combat is too easy. The wind picks up kicking up dirt. Everyone struggles to see, take an xp.

It's a nice mechanic that invites the GM to throw in all sorts of stuff. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to.

And I've played enough systems to know that it moves much faster then Shadow run. Which, to be fair, only requires you to have played Numenera and Shadow run.

They're so important the game system is named after them.

Probably the most fun part of playing.

The generic Cypher System book has a list of 'subtle' cyphers which basically amount to good luck cards and bennies.

That said you can also make them one use gadgets. But then you either need to explain why they can't be hoarded, or just chalk it up to some vague genre and carrying capacity thing. Notably. All three cypher settings have reasons the cyphers are limited.(cosmic radiation, universal transcription errors, and divine shards.)

But also notably, all three say those reasons are game balance and player behavior related.

It's fun to play, ease to learn and gives GM open hand when making scenarios. The class system is pointless and if you want to focus on killing things - find another game.

>Never check it out
>Knows it's bland
Typical fa/tg/uy

Right, cyphers are limited for game reasons, not really for narrative reasons, but there is no Cypher setting where the cyphers are not limited by narrative reasons.

Nu Men Era

Different user, but I still don't understand why this game has classes. They could have been completely skipped without any problem.

Gets a lot of flak for absolutely insignificant shit in tune of "HURR MONTE COOK DURR". Has bunch of quirky elements, but those can be simply ignored. Is nice for casual games.

But most importantly - it's fucking great for getting new people into the hobby. Our uni tabletop club managed to increase both attendance and number of members three-fold after we started running Numenera and get bunch of people interested in casual story games. So for this reason alone I will stand for this game.

In Numenera it adds an extra level of distinction between the players. Jack's and glaives and nanos are very different from each other, because of their edges and skills. Even before you get to abilities you can pick.

But in the generic Cypher System a lot of this is dropped to make each type more customizable. I'd like to see types remain in Numenera, but not be default in the generic rule set.

An extreme example would be something like Polaris or Fiasco, where the system is specifically geared to produce a specific type of story (tragedy in the case of Polaris, farce in the case of Fiasco.

To bring into the discussion, an example of a more conventional game with narrative elements would be Legends of the Wulin. In that game, you can negate wound penalties (and these "wounds" aren't always physical) by roleplaying the injury, or get bonuses that only apply when you roleplay the reason for the bonus (e.g. you fight harder when you're fighting for lover, so you get recover chi faster).

Generally, narrative systems focus on getting the players to act out a particular type of story, and tie mechanics more closely to roleplaying. One of the weirdest examples I've seen is Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist, where your Gifts (statements about your character, kind of like FATE Aspects) are rated on three factors: How true they are, how much the mechanics support them, and how much they can affect the story. Alas, WTF is unfinished, and Gifts got barely any mechanical explanation.

you mean it might as well be called:
numalera
monty confirmed cucke

how does Polaris create tragedies?

>Available information about a product is above all judgement.
>Nothing discernable about product holds appeal to me. Gee, better go buy it and spend my time on it instead of the products that interest me.
>Reading what is clearly stated as a surface look as a categorical condemnation of everything in the books.

oh please

Not him, but 99% of all opinions stated on Veeky Forums are implied to be categorical condemnation of products with barely even skimming the available information.

Also, buy? Newfags.

I haven't actually played Polaris, and I don't know if it does; I only know that that was a design goal for the game.

From what I can gather from reading about it and looking through the book a bit, one of the core mechanics is that, when the Heart (the person playing the main character in a given scene) declares that their character does something, the Mistaken (GM controlling the antagonists in the scene) can say "but only if" something bad happens (Polaris makes heavy use of stock phrases). This means that most of the time, scenes play out as a player negotiating with a GM what the consequences of the player actions will be, with the player able to fall back on dice rolls if they really want something to go through, or spending resources to force the Mistaken to change their position.

The game also has a stat called Zeal that measures your character's sense of purpose, and drops whenver you fail a roll. As you lose Zeal, your "competence" stats rise and the hopelessness of your situation wears you down. When you run out of Zeal, you start gaining Weariness.

Once your character has positive Weariness, you can then end a conflict on your terms by having your character die. You want your character to have suitably meaningful death, because if you get to 4 Weariness, your character becomes a demon. The game actually puts your character's heroic, tragic demise on a timer.

>Veeky Forums said it's shit, so it must be true
>I never actually had anything to do with the game in question
Wew, lad...

>99% of all opinions stated on Veeky Forums are implied
That would be claiming to no the intentions of the people writing the posts. And I would doubt that evenanecdotal evidence would add up to 99%. But if you wanted to lower the level of discourse, taking every comment as a unreasonable extreme would do it.

So you are saying the opinions of people using this board are worth less because...?

Haven't played it but I read it and the Cypher System book. It has some interesting ideas but ultimately feels like 3.PF in a lot of ways I don't like. Examples include pages and pages of character options being the lynchpin of the system, tons of rules for just about everything and an old fashioned approach to GMing. I also think the core mechanic is really clunky and, as others have said, should have used a d6 instead of a d20.

That said it has a lot of ideas I do like, such as abstract wealth, cyphers, simple monster stat blocks, XP not based on combat and GM intrusions.

He probably thought you were talking about the other Polaris. You know, the French one about living underwater that comes in two books.

I ran four sessions of The Strange, which uses the same system. What I took away from it was the following:
>You don't really need a d20, it works just fine as a d6 system. Since d6 are way easier to acquire, it feels needlessly complicated, which is weird given how bare-bones the game is.
>The players felt really limited until 3rd level. Thankfully they gained about one level per session so the second half of the campaign was slightly better.
>Nobody liked how intelligence, perception, wisdom, charisma, willpower, and magical prowess was all the same stat. It didn't feel fair when the other two stats were basically just strength/constitution and agility/dexterity. The game really needed to use more than 3 stats.
>Characters really wanted to gain access to more than one 'Verb' suite of abilities. Instead of building the game into only six levels/tiers, they could have doubled the number of abilities gained but slowed down your progression. So at level 1 you get Rank 1 of a 'Verb', at level 2 you get Rank 1 of a different 'Verb', and then at level 3 you can either gain Rank 1 of a third one or get Rank 2 of an existing one. Basically, characters felt unreasonably narrow in their abilities
>Cyphers are often really powerful with not a lot of rules covering what they precisely do. One character got a gravity-inversion cypher and everything went to hell, and not in a good way.
>Nobody liked spending points to use their abilities because it directly drew from their 'health' meters. Some abilities could be used for free, but many of them could not. In the same vein, exerting Effort to reduce the Difficulty was almost never done. Since the consequence for failing was usually losing 2-4 points from one of these meters, spending 1-3 points for a -slightly- higher chance of success was almost always never worth it.

Overall my group did not like the Cypher System. It has neat ideas but the mechanics just felt terrible and I thought it was poorly balanced.

Oh, right. That game that people keep talking about when I want to read discussions about tragic knights defending a dying civilisation at the North Pole that no longer cares about them.

Wealth really isn't that abstract in Numenera. I've converted my players to a wealth score for large purchases and ignored all small ones because after a few tiers your stock of shins is nearly infinite.

The division of stats into might, speed, and all mental abilities is fine for Numenera since it's mostly running around in the wilderness, but in other settings Intelligence is clearly overpowered. I'd be interested in a fourth pool. Not sure how to balance for it as durability is clearly balanced around the three pools.

>not supporting game companies that push products you like
poorfag

>Why opinions posted on Veeky Forums are worth less

Why opinions from a site almost entirely populated by contrarians and 3.X drones are meaningless? Gee, I wonder

Who said anything about not supporting?

But you don't need to buy the book to read it or play it. Dunno, ever heard about the concept of borrowing? Or joining a game with people who run it?

Newfag, you are literally digging yourself deeper

>One stat is strength and endurance
>One stat is agility and speed
>One stat is perception, knowledge, intuition, willpower, social aptitude, and magical might
Yeah, that's totally balanced.

>The strongest wizard is also the greatest pimp and detective

The difference is, many of those mental attributes won't see nearly as much play in the setting Cypher System was built for.

It really comes down to the skills. Edge and pool only get you so far. All nanos are going to be decent at conversation though. Which is sort of nonsense.

>Lets band together all the stats that are useless in out game anyway
>HUUUUUURRRRRR THIS IS UNBALANCED DUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrr

Intellect is crazy useful in combat though. Not only does it improve mental resistance and health (like against psychic attacks, which are everywhere in Numenera and The Strange), it lets you do things like throw frickin' lightning bolts with your brain and create defensive barriers to protect yourself and allies - not to mention rad healing powers. Intellect is, like, strictly the best attribute. It's just as good at offence and defence as the other two, but it enables and empowers tons and tons of magical attacks and abilities, many of which are just inherently better than weapon attacks and powers.

Do you at least follow the part about "all the useless shit grouped together with Intellect", or are too dense for it?

How about you start from the begin and explain your thought process instead of calling other people dense?

Not him, but this post is pretty clear.

So maybe the other user really IS dense?

Huh, all my players prefer speed or might, as they let you do more damage for less points than int, while also being insanely valuable for adventure.

All the intellect abilities have weird, arbitrary limits to keep them from being too powerful, even the sixth tier ones.

Also physical damage is most of the bestiary and environmental damage, not psychic.