Numenera anygood?

Im thinking of picking it up used at a local mom and pop shop. I dont know mich about it. Are the rules well laid out?How's combat? Thanks homies.

It gud. The rulebook isn't the most well laid out but I've read far worse ones. Mechanically it's a very solid game in which the players have to keep track of very little on their sheets and have to burn resources to be able to perform tasks well making the game a delicate balancing act of when to burn your hp for good shit and when to lame it out.

You want Gumshoe Dying Earth. It accomplishes the same thing with a cohesive set of mechanics rather than a poorly edited rules lite clone of 3.5

It has some problems, but they are thankfully, fixable.
The biggest problem it has is the xp system, which as it stands, has the problem of being used as both traditional xp as well as fate points, which means you might just have a character be horribly underleveled because they were unlucky. The fix is just to separate xp into shortterm and longterm xp, with short term xp obtained via normal GM interventions and only used as fate points, and long term xp given for rewards, and used to level up.

The combat system is pretty light, and there are multiple trap options in character building (in traditional monte cooke fashion).

It comes with the major advantage of being a very easy system to GM though.

Cool setting. Lackluster, uninteresting mechanics.

I've GMed it. Essentially this. Except the setting isn't even that different from your standard D&D fantasy fare. It just has a sci fi coat of paint on it.

Except that D&D has been sprinting toward setting orthodoxy for two decades, while Numenera encourages weird.

EXP is only a big problem if you aren't handing out enough.

only superficially weird, though. It's still just a lot of standard D&Doid fair with a thin, Gene Wolfe colored veneer

>Numenera encourages weird

It has three classes: renamed rogue, renamed wizard, renamed fighter

It has "nanomachines" which are just reskinned spells

Coriolis, Nova Praxis, Genesis and Starfinder are all better than Numenera.

>PF
>orthodoxy
>literal vore spells
Heh. You're cute.

It’s great. Numenera 2 is coming out in 2018. Middle of the year for Kickstarter backers a little after that for allYou might want to hold off until then.

I'm cool with just picking up the core book and seeing how i like it. are the supplement books worth it?

Hey OP. So since release I've exclusively GM'd Numenera for my group (other GMs have done other stuff but as I bought into its Kickstarter I had to get my money's worth). I'd say I have a good feel for it.

This is very true, but if you play with wimps they'll never spend Effort and never do anything super cool, because they're scared for their "HPs." Basically you do all your stuff by spending the points tab are also your HP, so players who are too cautious will often boil down to "move and attack" to not "get hurt."

This is my exact thoughts on it, I tell players that any intervention XP not used in a session has to be spent on an XP boon (there are several in the book like learning a skill or establishing a contact, they don't increase level but are benefits nonetheless). It also is incredibly easy to GM, everything boils down to "Assign a difficulty level, target number is difficulty x 3." Everything.

These are all valid statements as well, but I think the "generic fantasy IN THE FUTURE!" is intentional, it's meant to be different but easy to get into. I agree there are way better sci-fi settings, and you could even use Numenera in a lot of them.

I recommend the Technology Compendium if you run across it, it adds more Cyphers and Artifacts, which are always handy. Character Options I and II are also good choices if you have players who like having a ton of options for character building. Everything else, just pirate PDFs unless you run across a physical copy really cheap.

Stop shilling your damn game, Monte.

Mess of a setting, shallow mechanics.

care to elaborate?

I wish I was Monte, he got a ton of money for making Future Greyhawk with Octopuses and Spaceships. I mean come on the cover literally has Regdar the Fighter on it.

If it’s only a test then core should suffice. If you do end u- getting sup-laments the rules being added or changed don’t affect enemy stats or invalidate them in any way.

Tg hates it because it’s monte cook. All the nu,a fans are on other websites. Too much rules autists here.

Numenera DM here. It advertises I itself as rules lite but it's really not. It's more rules-bland. As I said here , everything boils down to things having a 1-10 level and the players roll a d20 against the TN.
Character creation boils down to "I am a [adjective (Brash, Swift, Clever,gives a couple small bonuses and a hindrance)] [noun (fighter, thief, or mage)] who [verbs (these are either really cool, like having lightning or gravity powers, or they're lame, like shooting arrows really well or dual welding)]
Character options are largely "get a plus when doing this thing" or "do some damage when you do a thing." They're simple but not interesting.
The core of the game are cyphers, basically one-use magic items that the GM is meant to give out like candy (players can only hold so many at a time or bad stuff happens, from illness to implosion). Some are basic, like weapon enhancements or magic grenades or potions, others are really powerful (one is a nuclear rinse that kills everything in a ten-mile radius with radiation). Since they're one-use only, they're (intentional) not very balanced. If the players nuke a city, they have to deal with the consequences.

As for the setting, as multiple people have pointed out, it's not bad, it's just nothing new. The current era is built on the remains of several billion years worth of past civilizations, so technology is commonplace but not necessarily well understood. Somehow most everyone is human, though. There's kings and bandits and queens and a mystical unknown adventure area, it's generic fantasy painted over with a sci-fi brush. A lot of things that I wanted to know more about are left really vague, telling GMs "it's your story!! Do what you want!"

I love the game for what it is, generic science fantasy with an easy-to-use system, but I don't pretend it's the best one ever. We have fun with it, but we also play a lot of different stuff. If the book is cheap, get it. I wouldn't buy it full price.

Its rad, you need to use the cypher book for some fixes like armor, and the two character addon books are essential

Steal the concept, run it in a better system. Numenera doesn't do anything interesting with what it has.

I realize two words strung together might be too much, but the phrase was "setting orthodoxy"

Question: are the Character Options for Numenera only printed in paperback?