The Gaming Den

Given the highly original concept the game is grounded upon (Earth in a distant future after eight civilizations rose and collapsed, lefting the world a big junkyard of ancient and marvelous detritus) I was curious about Numenera since the beginning. I came to it from two distinct standpoints: 1) Tekumel and Jorune, two similar "sci-fantasy" settings that I like, and 2) Gamma World for D&D4, with all those wild weirdness in character types and possibilities.

When I get down to read the thing, though, I found its just your typical medieval fantasy game ( ). Like they got Forgotten Realms and applied a sci-fyish paint job over it. This disappointed me greatly.

Anyone around here have read the actual thing ? What are your opinions ?

Zaranthan wrote:We don't like it.

To be fair, that is the ultimate consensus of the Den about almost any game you can name.

The setting is D&D with a coat of futuristic retarded paint on it. Your chainmail is made out of plastic now. Wooooo.

The mechanics are stupid, and look like Monty saw Apocalypse World, said "Hey, that's a great idea!" and then botched his game design roll. Wizards are the only ones who get nice things, and, unlike fighters, don't cast from hitpoints. So everyone is a Nano.

As soon as the players seem to understand something about the past, change it.
p. 364 Corebook

Fuck you Numenera. Unraveling the mystery of the previous ages is the only thing the setting has going for it. But the corebook says never let that happen because they're supposed to be so unknowable and incomprehensible. Well if I can never learn anything but bullshit why am I supposed to play it? Its a scifi setting where people scavenge the tech of eight progenitor races instead of one. Whoop dee fucking do.

It's all just a copout so they didn't have to actually have to try and come up with anything interesting for any of the previous ages. P. 130 has a few sentences on the previous ages abilities and that's it. The rest is all put on the GM.

The bit where you get constant stream of minor one-use magic items but cannot hold too many of them at once before you cause a singularity is kind of interesting.

As a player, I would be more okay with Mister Cavern telling me "when you stab the dude, your sword gets stuck in his gut, here's some XP for the intrusion" than I would be with Mister Cavern saying "when you stab the dude, your sword get stuck in his gut". Likewise with "you fall down the hole and some of your stuff breaks, here's some XP for the intrusion" vs. "you fall down the hole and some of your stuff breaks". I am not sure I would actually be okay with any of those options, it would depend on the group dynamic. But Numenera makes that sort of dickery-by-fiat more palatable to the player.

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. And the overwhelming assumption for adventure design seems to be that each week you encounter a Steve or town of Steves. So characters have no real incentive to interact with the organized society that gets so many pages dedicated to it.

A lot of people (myself included) react poorly when you have a resource (XP) that can buy either short-term benefits or long-term character advancements. Some people do not.

Like Longes mentioned, fighters don't get nice things in the core book. The player splatbook gives fighters slightly more interesting things to do. It also gives rogues unique powers of their own.

Numenera is an interesting premise. The first paragraph of the intro promises a setting that I'd really like to play.

The problem is that the game is not that. It's a basic RPG produced in the "content mill" style where lots of the abilities are obvious bad choices, a lot of the options are not interesting, and a lot of the design goals were not met. The setting and game do deliver on a playable game, but not one that substantially improves over a half-dozen games that specifically try to deliver the same experience.

My biggest complaints are in the scope of the game. Everything is small, from abilities to what passes for magic items. Throwing in awesome stuff like pink dinosaurs and laser beams and then actually making everything mechanically small ruins the whole aesthetic.

That being said, I do like a few of the ideas. Monster design is stripped down, and I find that interesting. The attempt to do multi-path character advancement is something lots of people have tried, so another iteration is at least another example of how to not do it. The wound system has some interesting bits.

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.

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.

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.

The blending of sci-fi and fantasy tropes is potentially powerful stuff, but right now there just isn't a mixed setting that doesn't just reskin fantasy tropes with sci-fi trappings. For example, Star Wars is still stuck 100% in concepts rooted in medieval fantasy instead of sci-fi even with space ships and robots everywhere.

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.

Star Wars is 'backdrop' science fiction: there's a nominally futuristic setting, but the story itself is pure fantasy. The SF elements serve as color only.

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.

What do you have so far in your deconstruction, K?

What are some sci-fi tropes? How would you distinguish them from fantasy tropes?

It seems to me that Star Trek and Star Wars have a very different sort of feel to them, and both are different from Battlestar Galactica, but I'm unclear on where that's "tropes" or "setting" or "fluff" or other things.

K, have you tried Skyrealms of Jorune ? While sketchy, I think it succeeds in blending Sci and Fantasy in a cohesive way.

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.

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.

maglag wrote:

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.

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.

Because fiction has to make sense.

Leress wrote:

maglag wrote:

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.

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.

Because fiction has to make sense.

Gotta keep reality stranger than fiction. It's the law.

Nobody can design a functioning economy. They have to assemble themselves.

It's possible, though, to design a non-functioning economy. That's quite easy.

Leress wrote:

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.

What do you have so far in your deconstruction, K?

Far enough that I'm in the "setting up iconic locations for the setting" phase.

maglag wrote:To be fair, most current governments and politicians also can't make functional economies,

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).

Even fucking ISIS feeds people in 2015, our unimaginably worst governments now are better than pretty much every single one of them in the 1930s, and the best ones now are utopian beyond the imagination of people living just a generation ago. Sweden right now is probably more TOS than TOS was.

Obviously it could be better, but it probably will be too.

O.S. wrote:Nobody can design a functioning economy. They have to assemble themselves.

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.

I wonder how much influenced kickstarters are by name recognition. I mean, Im not saying Numenera has no value at all (its system looks good) but it seems the name "Monte Cook" may have been a strong factor in this kickstarter.

Also, see John Harper. The guy has a considerable following (myself included) and I bet it was a considerable factor in the BitD KS funding last month. Though BitD dont look flawed/lacking/disappointing as Numenera does.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That said, in a game where you're meant to be rewarded mostly for discovery, Glaives still don't do anything other than fight. That seems like a major oversight.

Bonus Numenera lulz: 'Carries a quiver' does not actually provide the character with a quiver.