Numenera

This sums up my feelings pretty well. On the surface it looks cool with its fever-dream aesthetics and mishmash of genres, but the execution is beyond messy. Technology and lost civilizations? Right this way! But first you have to pick from a predefined list of character classes, select your D&D medieval equipment, travel to a Noun-noun town like "Redstone" (yawn), and then completely forget about the plot because your Forges Flesh player just LOLSORANDUM shapeshifted into a fucking dinosaur and is more concerned about eating everything in town.

Add in all the cyphers that are so married to the system you really need to buy cards for them (only $29.99!) and it's clear the system was thought of first as a product and less of a labor of love that Cook likes to make you think it was. I fell for buying The Strange and it's literally the same shit only with a worse setting and more encouragement to rip off of other published material (it actually tells you to steal from books and movies).

GURPS if you want a more gritty feel or Savage Worlds if you want a pulpy feel.

Any generic system will do really. FATE, Savage Worlds, GURPS if you really want to, whatever. The point is that you can probably do more with the setting than the developers did.

>Gurps, Fate, Savage World
okay

What's the problem? These are all solid systems, each doing it's own thing.

Only problem is that I don't know any of them well, and since I always DM for my group I need to learn the rules in and out.

Use the best bit of advice I was given as neophyte DM by Gygax himself. "When in doubt, roll and shout."

Basically make up a reasonably sounding roll and then get excited about the results and the players will forget about the rules until you figure what the proper rule is.

I do that quite a bit, my boys like it because they're all about narrative play anyway. Regardless, I would like to know which rules in particular I am violating so I can put at least some effort into remaining consistent.

Giving them all a once over on google makes Savage Worlds look pretty good. I seems more focused on narrative than rules bloat.

You could honestly run this better in D&D than its intended system. Literally any system could do it.

I've been running a Numenera campaign for the last two years and it's my favorite system.

The complaint about foci being imablanced is true, but other then that most of the complaints aren't actually issues. The overly narrow ability selections of the glaive are fixed in Character Options 1, spending your hit points to acjeive effects makes the entire game into an easy resource management system that applies in all situations, which I like, and it's difficult to end up being 'overtrained' without consciously picking training in the same skills multiple times.

The setting is interesting. The book is fairly superficial as far as the details go, which makes it easy for me to grab stuff and fill in the blanks for my own campaign.

Numenera's difficulty system and NPC generation are the easiest I've ever come across, and makes it a very easy flexible system to run.

I highly recommend Numenera.

I like using Open D6 for this kinda stuff. I was thinking about porting stuff over and hacking a more playable Numenera together with Open D6. Gurps would work similarly, but I like D6 better.

Ivory tower-level balance disparity alone would make this game needlessly frustrating much of the time, not to mention all the other problems the people above have described.

I've seen a bit of the Torment: Numenera game, do you think that that might actually lend itself better to the setting than the tabletop system does?

I pray that they used some video game alternate system rather than staying to close to Numenara's terrible core system.

>I know Monte Cook is a bit of a ponce
Let me guess, strictly melee player?

From what I've seen they added a health system instead of health being based on Intelligence/Speed/Might, and you use those stats to make certain things more likely to work.

I only saw one combat, but it didn't look like xp was awarded during combat, it might have been awarded at the end of the "Crisis" (Where two enemies died, one ran away, and the leader was intimidated into submission and called off the last enemy). XP was definitely awarded through interacting with random things in the world and with people though.

>He thinks it's actually fun to be leaps and bounds more powerful than everyone else in your group

I played many a caster in my 3.pf days and I did everything in my power to NOT powergame. I was STILL way to damn powerful. It's not fun for anybody. Bad game design hurts the whole game.

Shadows of The Demon Lord works well with basically whatever fantasy paint job you slap on it, basically because of it's simple core mechanics. I could see it working for Numenera.

Agreed. I would also point out that the jack isn't a rogue or thief, it's more like a mix of mage and fighter. And even then types are not your ol' clases.

Its everything you hate about 3.5 with some shitty narrative mechanics bolted on.

Shame, since it's based on pic related and could have been really interesting if it wasn't designed by Monte Cuck

General consensus around here seems to be cool idea, decent world, poor ruleset. Speaking as someone who's run it, I pretty much agree.

The world is neat in idea, but the "Technology that you can't explain!" doesn't feel sufficiently different from the type of shit that you can do in a standard fantasy game. I guess Clarke was more right than Cook would have liked.

On the rules end, it tries to mesh 3.5/OGL style design with story/meta currency driven FATE style design, and doing quite poorly with this execution. The game has the issues with blatant trap options (some descriptors and foci are way better than others) and caster (nano) supremacy that 3.PF has. The game uses the same point pool for advancement and Fate point style rerolls, but you'll never use them for the latter because you want to hoard them so you can advance to new ranks. Also, speaking personally, the GM Intrusion system never really clicked, and it always felt arbitrary to me, though that may just be on my end.

Far as Book of the New Sun, Cook completely misunderstands what makes that book as good as it is. There's actually an official New Sun GURPS supplement that's pretty decent and was actually written by one of the foremost scholars on Wolfe's work.

GURPS actually has an official New Sun book funnily enough.

The system has some major problems that be bandaided with some house rules, and other major problems and are impossible to fix because they are the basic rules on which the game operates.

The problems that can be fixed are the XP system. As they are intended, the xp system is complete trash. You are intended to get xp from GM interventions and use them to be able to reroll bad rolls or reject GM interventions, but also to level up. This creates this weird economy where the GM feels he should fuck you over because you can always get past it by spending XP. This inevitably leads to situations where a player is gimped compared to everybody else because he fumbled one too many important rolls. Sure, he is still in the game as opposed to required to make a new character (but GMs these days are pussies who don't want to kill characters anyways) but he is tier 1, and everybody else has their sweet new tier 2 abilities.
This can thankfully be fixed by separating XP into short term (used for rerolls and the like) and long term XP (used for leveling up)

The problem you can't fix is the base system on which everything runs, the combined HP and stat pools will at first strike you as stupid and annoying, and then you will think it is elegant, and then you realize again that it is actually just stupid and annoying, and lends to as some other user mentioned, spending points to do something, failing, and ending up worse than if you had just failed normally.

I love the high concept but am frustrated so much of the canon setting draws on D&D pseudomedievalism when it really doesn't need to. Just got through chargen with my own group.

Nu-men era?

Damn

One frustrating thing is how the classes are structured. You could have had so much cooler things like a class of dudes who can explore good, another of really knowledge-able guys, maybe some type of social class. I really wish the game wasn't so combat focused and did a burning wheel type thing

There are no classes, what the fuck are you talking about. Also there are foci foreach of the things you said.

There absolutely are classes, they're just called "character types".

This is the weirdest thing I've heard about Numenera, that it's somehow a classless system despite having very specific roles for your character that determine a good chunk of their abilities. The game even says they'd be called classes in any other system.

>are not your ol' clases.
Lol
Yes they are.
With only the core book theres not a single thing in the glaive that makes it any different than a fighter. Even the special powers are just glorified feats.

Reminds me of titanfall marketing campaign

>these are not your old mechs! They're titans!
When the end result is the same shit.

Yes, but not in an sjw sense of 'nu-males'. Just the literal era of new men. The ninth era.

It's classes in the style of 5e, if you could pick your subclass from any class. The classes also have you pick from a list of abilities, so they're more flexible.

Character options two has the Seeker, which is a lightly armored explorer that can carry more cyoherd and is trained in might and Intelligence defense.

There's also a social class in character options 2, the glint.

That said, all of the things you listed exist as foci.

sjgames.com/gurps/books/newsun/

It's a great concept and I'd definitely give the setting a shot. Only issue is that you have to actively deplete your health to perform tasks. Early levels have a high fatality rate.

Also, very few specifics with regard to combat mechanics. No number crunching, which is great until there's a discrepancy in the rules.

>Make rogue
>one who rides the lightning
>very little description of how it actually works
>GM rules I summon lightning from the sky, then grab onto it, and literally taxi over to a designated position
>GM rules this cannot be done in mid-air while falling as it 'takes too long' (immediate action)
>GM rules it cannot be used as a charging attack as "the impact would shatter every bone in your body"
>GM further rules the lighting is of a non-electric variety that cannot be directed as an attack on its own
Basically a great deal of the cool shit in this game only works if your GM feels like allowing it

Yeah, it's a pretty GM reliant system. That said, your GM sounds like a dick.

>the lighting is of a non-electric variety

>lightning
>non-electric

Don't care for the setting, enjoy using the system more for The Strange or certain one-shots with the general Cypher book.

The third party PDF Echoes of the Prior Worlds has a few foci and things that help with that

So, what I'm struggling with is a campaign arc. My players are into the idea of starting a city-state (going for more of a classical vibe in my spin on the setting, think the Athens and Sparta era or the Maya civilization than the feudal medieval thing the book has), and are starting as tied to the Dreaming Reliquary cult in Dynafel.

I'm thinking of making them start out to set up a new temple of dreams at a second installation of the sort from Nightmare Switch. Might modify the installation a bit so I can use the Pyramid stuff from the Ten Instant Adventures book. So the first part of the game might be some Oregon Trail type journey shit to get there, then managing the growth of their cult facility and settlements springing up around it. Does this sound like a viable campaign concept to you guys?

Yes but I'd award them xp for growing the settlement instead of discovering stuff.

Oh yeah, I've long been of the "you level up when I fuckin' tell you you level up" school of thought, so that's pretty much a given for me.

I don't think I've ever learnt a system in and out or even bothered to keep up the pretence of playing 100% by the book. My uncle was the one who taught me how to GM and one of the first things he taught me was that you can always make up rulings, either because you don't remember what they actually are, or because the actual rules are dumb or too complicated to be bothered with for the most part.

Big fan of Numenera. Just finished our second year-long campaign yesterday. My GM house rules a lot so it's a bit of a different vibe than vanilla Numenera, but we all like that the mechanics are pretty simple and easy to work with.

We're gonna run a short 7th Sea campaign until he gets the third setting book from their last kickstarter (into the beyond, i think?) and starts writing something for that.

I love the system as well. It's a GM's delight if your great at improvising. It's like the system was designed for me. /tg seems to be the only place that doesn't really hold it in high regard.

@OP
If your looking for a system with definied rules and tons of options and a very mechanically conmplex game this is not the thing for you. Your not understanding the system or what can be done with it.

The world is fantastic, but again he leaves it broad but blank for the GM to fill in. Some people like their settings really really fleshed out so they don't need to think of much new stuff where as in Numa as a GM you need to constantly be thinking of weird stuff.

So basically OP if you can think of a lot of weird stuff and fly on the seat of your pants half the time ( I still plan a loose structure for each session).

It's fantastic for open world games and I've run two successful ones in it until the players freaked the fuck out at not having a railroad to follow and got sick of it. Everyone wants total freedom until they get it and have no idea what the fuck they wanted it for int eh first place it seems.

Well, you don't want to just hand out fiat levels unless you divorce intrusion XP from campaign XP.

Yeah, I was thinking that too. I know my players well enough to know that they'll never use XP for a temporary benefit if it comes from the same pool as advancement.

>The third party PDF Echoes of the Prior Worlds
Do you have the PDF itself?

Classic Monte Cook.

Pillars of Eternity 2.0, cash in on the crpg fad before people catch on.

Am I missing something here? What the fuck other kind of lightning is there?

has there been a conversion of the basic mechanics to any version of D20? especially for monsters and the Numenera themselves?

Don't think so. Although numenera are stupidly easy to wing on the fly, some cyphers are d20 magic items already. Monsters aren't too hard either, especially if you're using 5e.

It would be incredibly easy to translate monsters to OSR games, just treat their level as HD, choose AC and note their mechanical ability, done and done.

To be honest, stat pools / effort mechanics and some storygame stuff aside, Numenera is as D&D as it gets.

Take the number they give you, multiply it by three. That's your DC in a d20 game.

That said the math won't exactly scale with 3.5. it could be okay with 5e. The highest DC is 30.

I like to find alternative uses for abilities, spells, etc. I find it pretty amusing.

But my GM is very wary of it because logistically allowing me to utilize electricity in a limited form already resulted in a number of "oh right that completely neglects this trap/situation entirely" moments. So I understand not giving me the ability to direct lightning bolts at people.

Given the other character's abilities we could have easily just upped the difficulty and started riding lighting bolts into giant mecha-lizards but that wasn't really where he was looking to take the campaign so it didn't happen.

There are guidelines for getting alternate use of powers which mostly revolve around spending more effort. It's a variant rule suggested in the core book.