Numenera

Is this game bad or just unpopular? I almost never see discussions and when there are some people are just shitting on it. Why?

Other urls found in this thread:

numenera.gamepedia.com/Tides
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

Its got a setting that's basically modern art. Its a few smears of color and then "you come up with the rest, man. The reader brings as much to the story as the writer!"

Thats what turned me off. Not because I dont want to write my own lore for an entire fucking planet, though thats part of it. Its more to do with the fact that if you dont have enough detail in your default global setting, then players arnt clued in to the implicit tone of the game without you going in on the back end and doing a really great job in writing all that extra shit.

Well said. I don't know the whole backstory of the creator dude but I'm underwhelmed by the concepts introduced.

I saw a good analysis comparing the "moral tension" of games and how they correlate with appeal. A game like WH40K has diehard fans, D&D has their alignment system, and Numenera just has no moral backbone

Turns out people want fucked up moral situations more than a blank canvas to paint on

It is a great idea. The Earth is unfathomably older and intelligent races have risen and fallen countless times... and then weirdly Homo Sapiens come back, without memory or technology. They salvage and try to understand what they can as best they can. I like that idea... the approach though, was to simulate weird future role playing though.

I like weird role playing... but I want an underlying system of WHY it is like that.

>It is a great idea. The Earth is unfathomably older and intelligent races have risen and fallen countless times... and then weirdly Homo Sapiens come back, without memory or technology. They salvage and try to understand what they can as best they can. I like that idea... the approach though, was to simulate weird future role playing though.

This is in theory. In practice, it's D&D spell effects with a techy-sounding name.
It's not a good game.

>Its got a setting that's basically modern art. Its a few smears of color and then "you come up with the rest, man. The reader brings as much to the story as the writer!"

thats exactly what i hated about the 2 missing primarchs when they first thought them up.
its like, how can i take this fanmade whole legion made up by an edgy 12 year old seriously or canonically

doesnt numenara have some 5 color wheel morality thing going on?

numenera.gamepedia.com/Tides

I assume this is what you mean.
I find it lacking, trying to seem profound without a stark contradiction. New Age flighty shit. The best moral frameworks are about hard clashes.

>Is this game bad or just unpopular?
It's not a bad game, it's just that not everyone likes open-ended nature of Numenera, like in case of this user Numenera has interesting concepts and fun playground for world-building. System is pretty elegant, light-weight and reinforces narrative play-style. I enjoy GMing it a lot, because I can play with whatever gonzo concepts I want. A lot of people mistreat Numenera as fantasy in fancy decorations, which isn't the wrong way to do it, but I think, that rulebook describes pretty clear the way to handle it in a sci-fi/post-apoc way.
This Saturday I will GM the final session of my Numenera campaign. My players said, that it was one of the most entertaining campaigns the played.

>I almost never see discussions and when there are some people are just shitting on it. Why?
Most of shitting is generated by people, who simply don't like Monte Cook. I can't blame them for it.

Tides are more related to new Torment game rather than tabletop.

I GM Numenera too and I completely agree with everyhting you`ve just said, though I would have preferred if the setting was more developed and less disjointed.

The setting is plain and full of wasted potential.

The mechanics are uninspiring and annoying to work with (okay so do you want to take 2 might damage or spend 1 speed life for a chance of not losing any might life?)

I like the idea that all characters have a 'unique super power'.

>A lot of people mistreat Numenera as fantasy in fancy decorations
Like the developers, for example.

Gonna have to agree with both of you. Really wanted to like it and you two put my issues down better than I could.

Launching off the 40k and DnD examples, if this is a helpful addition to the thread, 40k's strength is being able to pack a TON of character into a few lines or a throwaway quote that really sets the tone. DnD has always communicated the expansive nature of the rules and game so it never really needed the character because that would detract from the whole idea.

Numenera tries to do both and seems to fall on its face. Also, the setting is just too positive. It's a turn off because it doesn't really feel like there are any stakes but it didn't go weird enough to make that not matter.

What do you guys think of the setting? Is it salvageable or is the core concept borked?

>Numenera has interesting concepts and fun playground for world-building. System is pretty elegant, light-weight and reinforces narrative play-style.

You should try playing actually narrative games from time to time, not rules-light games that Cook thinks are narrative.

> A lot of people mistreat Numenera as fantasy in fancy decorations, which isn't the wrong way to do it, but I think, that rulebook describes pretty clear the way to handle it in a sci-fi/post-apoc way.

Most of the cyphers are literally stuff taken from D&D with different fluff. It's very innovative game... If you only played 3.x the rest of your life.

>Most of shitting is generated by people, who simply don't like Monte Cook. I can't blame them for it.
Why is this? I'm new to Veeky Forums.

I didn't say, that it's the best system ever or the most original game out there, I merely stated, that it's enjoyable for me to run. I have fun with it, my party has fun with it, and because of that, I'm willing to ignore some of its flaws.

>You should try playing actually narrative games from time to time
Like what? There are a lot of systems I want to try, but I'm always open to new suggestions. It would be much nicer to recommend something rather than making random assumptions, don't you think?

Ever heard of 'ivory tower' design? It's when you have deliberately "wrong" player choices in character progression. Cook applied that when he was working on the third edition of D&D.

>Like what? There are a lot of systems I want to try, but I'm always open to new suggestions. It would be much nicer to recommend something rather than making random assumptions, don't you think?

"Narrative" is a tricky word when talking about RPGs, but the way I use it, it means either that the game is built around telling a story, with rules that determine who gets to do it (see Fiasco, Ten Candles, and a ton of other indie press games), or that there are at least ways to include bits of narration that have meaningful impact in the game, like Fate.
Leaving aside the Veeky Forums posturing, Numenera is neither of these things; it's a game with a light but still pretty traditional system in its construction. I will admit that, despite not liking it at all, the one thing that IMO is interesting is the way characters are made, the "adjective noun who verbs" thing; that's elegant and approachable, but still not narrative in the least.

>Most of shitting is generated by people, who simply don't like Monte Cook. I can't blame them for it.

What is the deal with Monte Cook?

I understand your point now, but Numenera's character creation is actually the main reason I consider it reinforcing narrative aspect. Not a "narrative-driven", merely "reinforcing".
In my GMing style, I try to build most of the campaign's narrative out of player's input right from the session zero, rather than trying to make some grand-scale story where party just happened to be random passers. And in case of Numenera, I didn't have to work a lot with the players in order to create a foundation for narrative, because character creation alone makes solid interconnections between party members and the game world.
A big portion of my current campaign's narrative was built on this foundation. That is definitely a "reinforcing narrative aspect" in my book.

>I understand your point now, but Numenera's character creation is actually the main reason I consider it reinforcing narrative aspect. Not a "narrative-driven", merely "reinforcing".

Ok, but you're still picking elements from a predefined list, it's not freeform "tell me about your character" like in Fate. I do wish that more games used something so simple though.