When I get down to read the thing, though, I found its just your typical medieval fantasy game (
![confused :confused:](./images/smilies/confusedyellow.gif)
Anyone around here have read the actual thing ? What are your opinions ?
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To be fair, that is the ultimate consensus of the Den about almost any game you can name.Zaranthan wrote:We don't like it.
Sigh. We just don't learn from our predecessors. In 1967 Roger Zelazny wrote "Lord of Light", a masterpiece of a book, which has trappings of fantasy, but is actually a sci-fi story in the futuristic world without magic. And in 1969 Roger Zelazny wrote "Creatures of Light and Darkness", a book not as great as "Lord of Light" was, but interesting in its own right. A story with the trappings of sci-fi which is actually a fantasy story in the world where gods punch each other to death via time magic.8d8 wrote:I learned something from Numenera:
You can describe the things that happen in a fantasy setting in a slightly different way and suddenly you're in a futuristic world that doesn't have magic.
It's just a fantasy setting with a theme that only matters if you like meta knowledge.
What do you have so far in your deconstruction, K?K wrote:
I've actually been deconstructing this problem for a while in an effort to make a setting that is a true blend of these things. Settings like those found in Endless Legend or Numenera are closer than older settings like Star Wars, but there is still a lot of room for improvements.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
]I want him to tongue-punch my box.
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
To be fair, most current governments and politicians also can't make functional economies, and those guys don't have to worry about magic in their equations, so I don't see why people expect game designers to do any better. If an RPG designer(s) could design functional economies, they should probably be elected to run their countries, not waste their time in the gaming industry.Blicero wrote: The book spends a lot of time detailing about its setting, which is weird and pointless, because there is nothing resembling a functional economy or whatever.
Because fiction has to make sense.maglag wrote:To be fair, most current governments and politicians also can't make functional economies, and those guys don't have to worry about magic in their equations, so I don't see why people expect game designers to do any better. If an RPG designer(s) could design functional economies, they should probably be elected to run their countries, not waste their time in the gaming industry.Blicero wrote: The book spends a lot of time detailing about its setting, which is weird and pointless, because there is nothing resembling a functional economy or whatever.
Koumei wrote:I'm just glad that Jill Stein stayed true to her homeopathic principles by trying to win with .2% of the vote. She just hasn't diluted it enough!
Koumei wrote:I am disappointed in Santorum: he should carry his dead election campaign to term!
Just a heads up... Your post is pregnant... When you miss that many periods it's just a given.
]I want him to tongue-punch my box.
The divine in me says the divine in you should go fuck itself.
Gotta keep reality stranger than fiction. It's the law.Leress wrote:Because fiction has to make sense.maglag wrote:To be fair, most current governments and politicians also can't make functional economies, and those guys don't have to worry about magic in their equations, so I don't see why people expect game designers to do any better. If an RPG designer(s) could design functional economies, they should probably be elected to run their countries, not waste their time in the gaming industry.Blicero wrote: The book spends a lot of time detailing about its setting, which is weird and pointless, because there is nothing resembling a functional economy or whatever.
Far enough that I'm in the "setting up iconic locations for the setting" phase.Leress wrote:What do you have so far in your deconstruction, K?K wrote:
I've actually been deconstructing this problem for a while in an effort to make a setting that is a true blend of these things. Settings like those found in Endless Legend or Numenera are closer than older settings like Star Wars, but there is still a lot of room for improvements.
This is not true. Like, last time the world economy had troubles like 2009, the entire planet spent ten years of people starving to death in the streets while food rotted unpicked in fields before the Nazis got into their whole genocidal race war thing and accidentally started the world economy back up again in desperate opposition to them (amongst also triggering some hundreds of millions of extra deaths).maglag wrote:To be fair, most current governments and politicians also can't make functional economies,
What a surprise, a libertarian. I suppose if you say they should immediately assemble themselves a system of government and laws to regulate the market and provide for the common good, that might even be true. It's a shame it took thousands of years and many bloody revolutions before that happened and wealth could grow, eh.O.S. wrote:Nobody can design a functioning economy. They have to assemble themselves.
You realise of course, that having a descriptor is something Nano can do as well? At which point a Nano has cool powers from two sources. Descriptors themselves are problematic. On the one hand you have "Carries a Bow", which ammounts to a weapon focus. There's "Controlls Gravity", which gives some small magic powers. There's Telepathy (don't remember the name), which allows you to maintain a giant mind control net at all times. There's Something Electricity Related, which is the only written way to recharge artefacts. And there's Artificing, which points you to the nonexistent crafting rules.Kawazu_Delta wrote:I ran a Numenera campaign for about a year after it came out. Instead of the included setting, I ran it with more of a weird west tone, which basically amounted to marginally higher standards of living and southern accents for NPCs, and re-skinning ranged weapons as six-shooters and rifles. Observations, in no particular order:
- A lot of people mentioned in another thread that most players won't spend XP for re-rolls. This proved to be true. After a while, I stopped doing the DM intrusions unless someone rolled a 1, because there's ultimately no equitable way to spread the punishment around.
- The idea behind cyphers, that PCs would have a reason to cycle through one-use magic items without hording them, is cool from a design perspective. In the game i ran though, players either horded them or forgot they had them. So I had to either stop them from appearing as treasure, because they couldn't carry anymore, or make up some bullshit rules for selling them. That's right. The rulebook has no rules or guidelines whatsoever for selling cyphers, oddities, or artifacts.
- Even though Nanos get more cool shit than Glaives, any of those characters can choose a descriptor (or whatever the term is) to pick up some cool magical-esque abilities. The biggest mechanical problem we ran into was that by stacking enough armor, our glaive could basically ignore physical damage from any beastie that wasn't capable of turning the rest of the party into spaghetti.
- The presentation of monsters makes it very easy to manage as a GM. Knowing that a monster is level 3 gives you all the basic information you need to make it fight. Likewise, having players roll all the dice is design that I like.
- We had a lot of fun. Or I did, anyway.
Of course. If you take "carries a quiver" you've got no one to blame but yourself. But a Glaive with a bangin' descriptior and a Nano with a bogus descriptor aren't wildly disparate. And while the gulf between Glaive and Nano is very real, it's not as egregious as the gulf between a fighter and a wizard. Glaives get earlier access to heavy armor (which is major), and, as far as I can tell, there is no way for any other kind of character to become proficient with heavy weapons. At all.Longes wrote: You realise of course, that having a descriptor is something Nano can do as well? At which point a Nano has cool powers from two sources.