Numenera

A friend is about to start a game in this system. What are the pros and cons about it? I know literally nothing.

Con: attracts a lot of /pol/tards and le ebin monty cuck penis-eating memeshits

Pro: dunno, never read the book

If you like mash ups and subversion of the fantasy genre, numenera scratches that itch. The basic premise is that the world has gone through so many cycles of rising to ultratech and then getting blasted back to the stone age that you can't walk down the street without tripping over something ancient and wondrous. Even the soil is suffused with nanotech which may or may not be working. The mechanics of the system buy into this wholesale, encouraging the player to find and expend any working gizmos they come across.

I'm not a fan though. The writing in the crpg gets pretty pretenous about the setting and how just EVERYTHING is fantastic and wonderful and weird. The stats system is odd as well... everything is based on pools of resources. Like a big strong guy isn't actually bigger and stronger than the team nerd, he just has more ability to dig deep and be big and strong more often in a day, at least until you stack up some discounts and such so that you can do strongman stuff for free. It feels very... meta.. with the pools dictating your actions and how hard you want to try at something.

You can just have the setting be anything more or less and fit. My team of Anime-like heroes were investigating what looked like an ancient castle, which ended up being the insides of a giant whale, then portal'd into space shortly after where we fought a living comet that spat zombies.

The setting wants a nitty gritty system, but is very light and feels hollow ie:

Whats this Power tonic do?
+3 Might (or whatever)
What about that Mech suit?
+3 Might (or whatever)

There are a collective total of like 6 crunch aspects (with 3 base stats) to your character so a chainsaw blade and a flame sword play out nearly indentically.

It also operates under the false assumption that one time use impressive effects are cool.

So a teleport belt you can only use once is cool.

But its not and feels pretty hollow as treasure since your just only gonna use it for a vital moment making everything kinda dry.

Pros: Great art, an overall good setting with plenty of blank spaces to make it your own.

Cons: System is some weird attempt to Fate-ify d20 and full of weirdness. Poor decisions like XP being used to buy rerolls and other effects, your health being the same as your attributes being the same as the points you spend to boost your rolls, etc.

I like Numenera, but not enough to run it unedited.

Having played quite a lot of numenera, here are my impressions (as well as the impressions of people I have played with)

Pros:
-Pretty cool setting, that with a good gm to take advantage of it, can be interesting
-Super easy to GM, from what my GM has told us, he loves Numenera just because of how absurdly easy it is to GM. Being easy to GM is good, because it makes it much easier for them to improvise new content.
-The system's biggest problem has an easy fix (detailed below)

Cons:
-Using XP as both traditional xp and fate points is terrible game design, I get what they were trying to go for, but mostly it just ends up with circumstances where somebody will be really unlucky and have to spend xp to reroll or die several times in a row and be an entire tier below everybody else. (this can be fixed by separating XP into "short term" and "long term" xp, with short term xp being used to reroll and for short term benefits, obtained by the normal system of GM intervention, while long term xp is used for leveling up or long term benefits, and acquired as a reward for questing)
-In classic monte cooke fashion, the player end of character creation is filled to the brim with trap options, and absurdly broken options. also, the Jack is just the best character class, there is actually LITERALLY no reason to play anything else, because they can basically be as good casters as nanos while being as good physical combatants as glaives while also having some of the best skills in the game unique to them.

Cont.

Cons:
-the "cypher" system suffers from problems, either having "too cool to use" syndrome, where the party will hoard cyphers and never use them, or the party unloading all of their cyphers in what was supposed to be a boss or something, which can make bosses feel anti-climactic
-Having to spend HP to effectively concentrate on actions is fucking stupid, and doesn't make a lot of sense, you can basically fall unconscious by concentrating too hard on a crossword puzzle.

I for one love it,but a lot of the official stuff available is lack luster and leaves you wanting. Its really good for making your own campaign (which is all I do in it), the system is unique and imo really fun.

I rationalize it as: yes the pools are your ability to dig deep easier and longer, and the skills/assets represents how good you are/what you can do. So if you're skilled in breaking stuff, that could mean you are simply strong enough to smash anything easily or you are skilled enough to know a lot of weak points.

I'm no mechanical whiz but it struck me as off that the fighter types cast from hit points and someone went through and made an exhaustive list of which monsters damage what hit points and found that the rogue hit points get hit by like two monsters.

That reminds me of how I made a character who could easily achieved "impossible" feats of might by tier 2, which because that level of skill check is the farthest you can go, effectively means that I could break anything with my fists.

>rogue hit points
Alright, color me intrigued. What's up with that?

Not that user, but I think he means that there are only two types of monsters that do Speed Damage.
Speed being the preferred stat for Jacks, which is the equivalent of a Rogue.

Really what
said

Pros:
Simple rolls, stats, chargen and encounter planning.

The setting is pretty much ADVENTURE with as much janky shit you can throw in.

Can run hardcore to heroic with litthe fudging on part of the GM

Cons:
Some wonky mechanics and the chargen make it harder to hack for specific purposes

Do not expect deepest lore or well placed hooks in the setting

Untested powers and classes, because Monte

Pros: Incredibly cool basic concept of a far, far future game where fantasy and sci fi are more or less the same thing. At its best, it reminds me of Dune, of Eclipse Phase and of Phantasy Star IV all at once.

Cons: Stuck too conservatively to its D&D roots in the setting (abhumans there to be laserstabbed, feudal pastiche without any signs of feudal economics, focus on combat in practice despite the text wanting to talk about a focus on exploration, etc), not to mention really poorly thought out societal structures and cultures. If you're a socioculturally oriented nerd, you're gonna want to rework all that shit.

YMMV: The system. I don't hate it, but I feel like some of its innovations fall flat to me. Skills and health being the same spendable pool is trippy. The collective indie game stuff with the GM interventions and the players deciding things, that doesn't do it for me.

I think it's a really great idea, but if you wanted to make a real campaign out of the concept you'd have to reinvent a lot of wheels.

wtf does Numenara have to do with /pol/?

NuMen Era, also the creators of Numenera are huge SJWs so these threads attract /pol/ posters and anti/pol/ posters so its hard to get an actual thread discussing the game.

There is a box about genders in one of the books and Monte ate a penis-shaped cake once.
Also the joke Nu-Men Era

I just thought people didn't discuss it because Cypher System is shite.

...

That guy looks positively disgusted.

Anyone got a PDF of this? I'm morbidly curious.

There's also that, Monte Cooke's a fuckhead

That's not a guy, user

You are supposed to receive more than enough cyphers so you can use them like if they where another hability of your character and not a one time ultimate power.

The last point is not entirely true. Using more effort to solve a problem will taxate your body and or mind. Just in the real world.
If you fall unconscious by putting effort into a crossword puzzle that means that you where already physically exhausted and with your mind at its limits before attempting said puzzle, in that situation using too much mental effort will effectively make you collapse.

I dunno, I still find the concept pretty absurd, but even if I didn't, it is still just not a very fun mechanic to play with in my opinion.
It creates lots of feels-bad moments, like, say you expend effort in an action to defend against an attack, and then you get hit anyways, it is like getting hit twice, and you are actively being punished for using the system.
Conversely, you might have a situation where you expend effort, and don't take damage, and then you find out later that the enemy you expended effort to avoid getting hit by does less damage than you did to yourself by expending effort.
Or even that you expended effort and found you didn't need to, so you did damage to yourself for no reason. It just kinda feels bad to ever have to expend effort, especially in combat.

I agree that the system is weird to play with in combat. But it's not for what you where saying and it is misleading for the OP

I quite like the setting for the other cipher system game, The Strange. Won't rules and potential for magical realm bullshit has always put me off playing though

*wonky rules

>wonky
They're straight up are non-functional.

You are non-functional
I have run 2 campaigns and played in 3 and had only minor issues solved with optional rules in the core book.

Look at those two. All the lust and passion of a dead fish. Great cover for your "love and sex" book.

The crunch is pretty shit, the fluff is meh even if there is some neat ideas. Overall it's forgettable.

Since there's already a bit of discussion here (but not wanting to hijack or anything), could Numenera work as the base system for a Deltora Quest game? How might you make that work?

I thought the chargen was perfect for adapting the setting, I mean if you think of any character you can easily describe them as an adjective noun who... because of the reliance on character gimmicks. Steven/Nevets is a great example of this. Then as I got around to reading through the actual classes though, my idea kinda started to fall apart, especially since personal magic is pretty light limiting things to just two classes...