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 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Sir Arthur C. Clarke Numenera is a new science-fiction tabletop RPG from Monte Cook, known for hundreds of different tabletop books, most notably being a main contributor to the cult-classic Planescape setting. Numenera is heavily inspired by the works of Moebius, Gene Wolfe, Walter M. Miller Jr. and many other fantastic visions of strange worlds and the far future of our own.  The Setting Numenera takes place in the Ninth World, Earth one billion years in the future. Civilization is built upon the bones of the previous eight— Civilizations of utterly unfathomable power, who filled the Earth's core with continent-sized machines, built empires across the stars, tore open the Multiversal veil and transcended reality. Earth has been a wasteland, a battlefield, a paradise, and even a galactic hub in the billion year gulf, but now sits as a museum of dead gods and kings ground to dust. Like the famous quote, technology (referred to as Numenera) is indistinguishable from magic for the average Ninth Worlder— With strange devices possibly hundreds of millions of years old, a person can only hope the strange glass slab they found in a river plays delightful music instead of materializing swarms of bloodthirsty nanobots. With monoliths floating in the sky and tombs of Numenera beneath your feet, the secrets of the past wait to be unearthed.  The System The Cypher System is custom built for Numenera, and highly emphasizes adventure and story over numbers and dice. Chargen and combat are extremely light, XP is only gained by discovering the world (You could hack at rats all day, but you'll only get XP if you find an ancient subway under a field or re-align orbital satellites) or through 'GM Intrusion' (For example: You might have skewered that man-sized crow, but for 2 XP your blade can get stuck in the wound and slip from your hand). This creates a system with the goal of, to quote Cook himself, "Discover new things or old things that are new again."  The Numenera Another unique feature is the technology itself. The technology of worlds past is filled with strange energies and unknowable purposes, and has been deemed 'Numenera' by citizens of the Ninth World. Numenera can be anything from a metal rod that creates light to the rusted jumpgates drifting around Neptune. Cyphers are single-use bits of technology that characters find and use often. Each character has a cypher limit, and carrying any amount over that can have strange effects. Cypher Examples: A poison that implodes the target's brain if they think about a specific memory; a forehead crystal that lets you tap into the wireless internet that still shrouds the entire planet. Artifacts are more permanent tech, such as weapons, armor or vehicles. Artifacts are rare and highly prized. Artifact examples: A box that can form a mile-long corridor of breathable atmosphere; a wing of shiny metal that lets you soar into the skies at blinding speeds. Oddities are assorted doodads that don't really seem to have much purpose, or are pure novelty in nature. Oddity examples: Matchsticks that release smoke in the shape of strange creatures and faces; floating cubes that keep small rooms at exactly 0 Celsius. Discoveries are structures, ruined cities and the like. Discovery Examples: An ancient Earth-to-Moon shuttleport; a massive clock that doesn't run on Earth time.  The Products Numenera already has a decent amount of supplements out, and plans to add much more more. You can find all of the latest offical books and supplements at Monte Cook Games' DriveThruRPG store.  Other media Pen and paper isn't the only format for Numenera. Tales from the Ninth World - Three short stories about the inhabitants of the Ninth World. Written by Monte Cook and Shanna Germain. TORMENT: Tides of Numenera - Spiritual successor to the greatest RPG ever made Planescape: Torment, Tides puts you in the role of the Last Castoff, the final shell of the Changing God. As the Angel of Entropy comes to destroy his creations, you will traverse the Ninth World and beyond to find the answer to your question: What does one life matter? Release date early 2015. saberwulf fucked around with this message at 08:56 on Nov 1, 2013 |
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Nov 1, 2013 06:26
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(Reserved for assorted junk.)
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Nov 1, 2013 06:26
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If you run this system, do not follow the example of play and be a misleading jerk like Monte apparently is. In a system where being good at something costs HP, that makes you a double jerk.
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Nov 1, 2013 06:46
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Numenera is really disappointing. The three classes are Fighter, Wizard, and Fighter/Wizard. Fighters are there to get beaten up so that the the wizard isn't. They do this with their good hp and ability to wear armor that drains their hp slower than it does for other classes. They can train themselves in such amazing skills as jumping and swimming. They can spend their Might and Speed points to "perform feats that others can barely imagine". Such things as "spend 1 might point to deal an extra point of damage if you hit" at first level to their amazing capstone ability of "Make an unarmed attack after you make a normal attack." Oh, and to be clear, Might is also your HP, so if you're on the front lines and using your abilities, don't expect to last long. Wizards use Intellect as their prime stat, because they are smart. They train in Numenera, which means they can identify and use all the weird science-magic junk that's lying around. They also get Esoteries, which are magic spells. At level 1, their magic is the sucky prestidigitation and magic missile variety, but at level two they get fireballs, mind reading, and at level four they can mind control anything, and their capstones are Control Weather and Move Mountains, which do exactly what it says on the tin. Wizard/Fighters have a little of both and aren't very interesting. Another INTERESTING thing about Numenera characters is the Character Focus. Every character has something unique about them, like Bears a Halo of Flame or Works Miracles or Wields Two Weapons at Once. It's kind of like 13th Age's OUT, only there's a set list with concrete mechanical benefits. Now, any class can have any focus, but of course it's not going to be that easy. Bears A Halo of Flame makes you into a pyromancer, and you can spend your intellect points to give yourself fire armor, a firesword, fire tentacles, all that cool stuff. At first, you might be thinking "Oh cool, something for my fighter to get, since he's not using those points anyhow". Nope. Because Edge. Each stat has an Edge rating, which works as a flat discount to your abilities. So your Fighter can get the Halo power, but unless they're gimping their combat abilities--which they already need to divide their edge between two stats, Might and Speed--they're going to run out of points fast, while the wizard will be using all of these things for free. That's okay though! You can still get the totally cool Might based Focuses. Like...um...Masters Weaponry. Who doesn't want a +1 bonus to damage with one type of weapon? For the record, there are 28 focuses--foci?--and most of them either involve social skills or magic rely and so rely entirely on Intellect, while the martial ones either give small passive bonuses or split the powers between Speed and Might. Martial capstones are things like "deal +3 damage" and "automatically KO a level 3 or lower enemy". Magic capstones are "summon level 5 fire elemental for free" and "make any enemy crushed by gravity and paralyzed for one minute for free". Numenera is almost like a parody of what people think about Monte Cook. Quadratic_Wizard fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Nov 1, 2013 |
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Nov 1, 2013 10:15
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Man, I love running this game. Been on a One Piece kick recently, so it's a maritime adventure, starting with the PCs (a Wereshark Brock Sampson, a fish-girl mutant/aspiring marine biologist, a bounty-hunter/poacher/stingy jerk who has an inter-dimensional folding chair he uses to wrassle, and a fighter pilot from a previous age that was kept alive by his jumpsuit and has gone nuts for oranges) all starting a riot in and then breaking out of jail, roaming a city paved with zoo exhibits of varying types, looking for the fish-girl's pet amphibious catfish and trying to steal a Phoenix, which may or may not be a robot, from the governor. I like the system itself, too. I like hp fueling the pc's crazy bullshit ideas, I like how easy it is to improvise challenges and enemies, I like the the compel equivalent is called "DM Intrusion" (giving me the chance to play the Phoenix Wright "OBJECTION" sound clip over Roll20), and I like random tables for cyphers giving every member of my group an explosive device of some sort. This is a cool as heck game and I like it.
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Nov 3, 2013 08:58
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Quadratic_Wizard posted:That's okay though! You can still get the totally cool Might based Focuses. Like...um...Masters Weaponry. Who doesn't want a +1 bonus to damage with one type of weapon? To be fair, this is a little better than it sounds, since levels go up to 6 and weapons do between 2 and 6 points of damage. (It's also a little worse than it sounds, since one of the level 1 generic focus abilities that anyone can take is just +1 damage with everything. Yyyyyyeah.)
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Nov 4, 2013 16:06
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I think I've said it before but the best idea to come out of this for me is that if you pick a focus of "Who heals" other people can go all "Touch the hem of Jesus' robe" on you and spend their own actions to cure their far-future nanoleprosy or whatever. Or rub your belly for luck or whatever. The focuses really are weirdly split, though, since you have to pick, for example, between "Is secretly a robot" and "Knows the ancient trick of using _TWO SWORDS_"
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Nov 4, 2013 20:15
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I figured that was to let people play more down to earth characters, where most foci are kinda out there. They could stand to be more appealing mechanically though.
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Nov 4, 2013 22:47
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I have a blast running this game. The rules are pretty simple to get going and you tell some interesting stories where you can mix sci-fi and fantasy elements seamlessly into one world. Honestly I think the simplicity of the mechanics is part of the beauty of the game since it lends itself to be more story driven.
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Nov 6, 2013 09:04
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For months I have been wondering why there has no been no thread in TG about Numenera. I don't really play PnP RPGs anymore, but I still like reading cool stories about them and such. I though this would be right up everyones alley. The setting seems so interesting and almost original, plus the addition of Torment being set in "Numenera" made me think it would be a sure fire hit. Can anyone illuminate me as to why it seems to be so under the radar ?
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Nov 6, 2013 13:21
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There's a two-word answer to that. Monte Cook. AKA the man who thought 'World of Darkness d20' was a good idea.
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Nov 6, 2013 13:30
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There are a lot of games without threads of their own, and I think Monte Cook generally not being very popular on this forum has been a factor. I am surprised it hasn't gotten more attention since release though. e: yep
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Nov 6, 2013 13:33
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Elfface posted:There's a two-word answer to that. Monte Cook. AKA the man who thought 'World of Darkness d20' was a good idea. From an outsider looking in he seemed to be a really enthusiastic guy, and as someone who is intimidated by PnP RPGS because of all the crazy rules and monstrous stat sheets (this may or may not be true as I am not in anyway experienced) I thought this extremely simplified system that encouraged stories and cool characters seemed like a great idea. I would be very keen to try to play this game but I am not sure where to look in the UK.
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Nov 6, 2013 15:08
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I really really like the setting but something about the mechanics leaves me cold. When I ran my first game all I wanted to do after a while was use Dungeon World mechanics instead.
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Nov 6, 2013 15:57
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Looselybased posted:I really really like the setting but something about the mechanics leaves me cold. When I ran my first game all I wanted to do after a while was use Dungeon World mechanics instead. I haven't read the book, but I was actually sort of excited about Numenera when it was first announced, because all of Cook's talk about the game was really encouraging: a science fantasy game with a focus on exploration and narrative instead of killing dudes and gaining more cool powers. What's not to love? That said, having read a few reviews it sounds like the game's system doesn't really support that concept, and it has a few design choices that designers should already know to avoid, including having your abilities double as your hit points, and treating one resource as both your experience points and metagame manipulation resource, meaning that you have to choose between a better chance of success now or more power later. When Monte first started talking about the game it sounded like he wanted to do something along the lines of PbtA or Fate with the game, but the impression I'm left with is that Numenera is an awesome setting desperately in need of a system that better supports its concepts. I might still get the game, if only to see if I could adapt it to PbtA or Fate. The problem with the former is that PbtA games favor the playbook model and usually have a strict limitation of only one character of a certain playbook in play at the time, but using something like World of Dungeons (which is almost classless already) as the base would probably help. Fate would obviously work: the "I'm an [Adjective] [Noun] who [Verbs]" bit becomes your high concept, and from there you can just go through the rest of the steps as usual.
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Nov 7, 2013 00:33
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Looselybased posted:I really really like the setting but something about the mechanics leaves me cold. When I ran my first game all I wanted to do after a while was use Dungeon World mechanics instead. Isn't this pretty much the definition of everything Monte Cook does though? Cool setting, neat ideas, bad mechanics. Why would this be any different?
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Nov 7, 2013 02:36
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I've been a pretty die-hard Monte Cook fan for a long time. He's not just a very visionary setting creator, he's an amazing interpreter of his own ideas: he can concisely explain magical settings in a way that makes you want not only to play in that world but he leaves the world open and available enough for you to participate in creatively; you can add your own unique touches seamlessly. He builds powerful scaffolding while still leaving great hooks that just taste like catnip to me. In my experience, there is no greater sandbox creator in roleplaying games. And his adventures! I could go on. I was stoked to hear about Numenera! Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds by way of Planescape? gently caress yeah! And Numenera often lives up to all of my expectations and sometimes even beats them. I don't regret buying the big book at all! It's gorgeous and oozes sparkly, creative ideas like a RIFTS book made by a sane person. I can't wait to start playing in this world! Using the Dungeon World rules.
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Nov 7, 2013 04:40
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Saguaro PI posted:If you run this system, do not follow the example of play and be a misleading jerk like Monte apparently is. In a system where being good at something costs HP, that makes you a double jerk. The most hilarious part of this is that this is literally the first thing the GM does to engage with the rules in the example of play. Lie to a player about a check the player spent points on that the GM knew would be useless. The book's remaining GM advice isn't much better, which wouldn't be so bad if Numenera wasn't hip-deep in GM freeforming.
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Nov 7, 2013 14:45
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Glazius posted:The most hilarious part of this is that this is literally the first thing the GM does to engage with the rules in the example of play. Lie to a player about a check the player spent points on that the GM knew would be useless. Would it be  to copy/paste that exchange from the book? That sounds pretty heinous.
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Nov 7, 2013 15:20
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Monte Cook posted:GM: Perhaps. e: quote:BRUCE: I'm going to check around there first-search for anything strange or dangerous. Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 16:37
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Why is this a bad example? Are you guys seriously implying that it's not OK for the GM to let players waste resources on failed endeavors? Every search has to end with discovering something interesting?
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Nov 7, 2013 17:02
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Mirthless posted:Why is this a bad example? Are you guys seriously implying that it's not OK for the GM to let players waste resources on failed endeavors? Every search has to end with discovering something interesting? quote:The GM knows there's nothing to find at the doorway, but she muses for half a second as if pretending to figure out a target number. This is kind of the issue. Since every action in the game cost resources its kind of lovely to lead the players into a situation where, even if they rolled Well they'd receive nothing, not even information, for their resources spent and luck. At that point you're just taking away points from them in a needlessly boring and time consuming manner when you could be, I dunno, giving them an actual challenge to spend that poo poo on or at the very least something that's not just wasting everyone's time. There's never been anything fun about standing around a room and rolling to see you find something and then waiting around till one player figures out the specific thing the DM wanted them to look at and now that you're spending valuable resources on it it's extra unfun. ZenMasterBullshit fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 17:30
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I've run one session of this and actually really like the system so far. It's definitely pretty wonky balance-wise, but in unexpected ways and nothing unmanageable. Also the setting rules even if you don't like the mechanics.
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Nov 7, 2013 19:24
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The biggest thing I've done with Numenera and my group is not even let them look at the list of Character Focuses, because the selection in the book is laughably bad, and it doesn't say you can make up your own anywhere so some players think they have to pick one of them. It goes a ways toward balancing out the party. There's still wizard supremacy but I haven't figured out how to fix it, and it hasn't really come up.
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Nov 7, 2013 19:36
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:This is kind of the issue. Since every action in the game cost resources its kind of lovely to lead the players into a situation where, even if they rolled Well they'd receive nothing, not even information, for their resources spent and luck. At that point you're just taking away points from them in a needlessly boring and time consuming manner when you could be, I dunno, giving them an actual challenge to spend that poo poo on or at the very least something that's not just wasting everyone's time. There's never been anything fun about standing around a room and rolling to see you find something and then waiting around till one player figures out the specific thing the DM wanted them to look at and now that you're spending valuable resources on it it's extra unfun. Not everything the players do has to bare fruit, though, and a world where there is uninteresting stuff is going to be more interesting from a roleplaying standpoint in the long term simply by virtue of being more immersive. Ending up in a bad position later on because the party made dead-end choices can make situations tense that otherwise wouldn't have been. This doesn't strike me as an egregious failing on Monte Cook's part. The DM doesn't even encourage them to waste energy and resources searching - they just allow them to do it, which is exactly what the DM should be doing. If I'm GMing a campaign and my player tries to poison a poison-immune monster, should I have to tell them beforehand so they don't waste their poison? Seriously, the GM has a job to make things fun, but why should it be the GM's responsibility to vet the decisions of the players?
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Nov 7, 2013 20:00
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Potential houserules to fix Numenera? Right now, thinking 1. You have a fourth pool called Health, equal to your Might pool. When you would take Might damage, subtract it from the Health Pool instead. Since Might normally acts as the de facto HP stat, it's really no fun to make the fighter have to hurt himself just to use effort or his cool abilities. 2. At tier 2, 4, and 6, Glaives gain an extra point of Edge. At every tier, Jacks gain an extra point of edge. The maximum Edge for both classes is equal to their Tier. Every single Nano ability keys off Intellect, which is willpower, intelligence, and charisma all rolled into one. This levels the playing field just a bit so that the other two classes 3. When you choose to spend Effort, you can decide after the roll rather than before. When you roll before, there's always a flat 15% chance that that level of effort will have had an effect, meaning the other 85% of the time, the effort you spent did nothing. That's just sloppy. 4. When you take a Focus, you choose the prime stat all of its abilities function from. Because gently caress Monte.
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Nov 7, 2013 20:26
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This reminds me a lot of The Sleeping Imperium setting made by Ken Hood back in the early 2000s. He used both d20 and Fudge rules at various points along the way. Unfortunately, most of his work has been removed from the internet due to him trying to get some fiction published using the same setting. edit: I guess at least some of it has been saved (the setting stuff is toward the bottom of the page): http://www.angelfire.com/games4/doctorwhoeyespy/sleepingimperium.html whydirt fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 20:37
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Mirthless posted:[snip] To be fair, I haven't read any of the game itself, but I've heard a fair bit of discussion and commentary, here and elsewhere.
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Nov 7, 2013 20:48
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You don't really NEED to spend resources for anything but powers though. You CAN spend Effort on rolls, but from my reading most actions a character will take already have a greater than 50% chance of success, after factoring in external advantages that characters have thanks to skills/abilities or have gained through roleplaying. Honestly after reading the book, the only situations I think I would bother spending Effort in are when the DM tells me that I need to roll above a 17 or when working against what's been shown to be a reasonably competent NPC. You don't just hemorrhage hp the second you step out the door.
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Nov 7, 2013 21:44
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Mirthless posted:Not everything the players do has to bare fruit, though, and a world where there is uninteresting stuff is going to be more interesting from a roleplaying standpoint in the long term simply by virtue of being more immersive. Ending up in a bad position later on because the party made dead-end choices can make situations tense that otherwise wouldn't have been. This doesn't strike me as an egregious failing on Monte Cook's part. The DM doesn't even encourage them to waste energy and resources searching - they just allow them to do it, which is exactly what the DM should be doing. No but there's a bit of a difference between poisoning an immune monster and spending resources to check whether or not this is the one door that actually matters to the plot/goal of the party. The immune monster thing has a very obvious tell that the players can learn from (ie "The Poison doesn't effect the monster!") as opposed to the example of play given by the book where the players both expend resources on something that's 100% pointless AND rolls low so they can't know whether or not if it was the roll that meant nothing happened or if just nothing happened period because this action was always going to develop into nothing which isn't being 'realistic' or 'immersive' it's just wasting time and plain unfun. I've got no real feelings about the game, but that example of play is really lovely and not exactly unexpected from Monte Cook. ZenMasterBullshit fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 22:00
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:No but there's a bit of a difference between poisoning an immune monster and spending resources to check whether or not this is the one door that actually matters to the plot/goal of the party. The immune monster thing has a very obvious tell that the players can learn from (ie "The Poison doesn't effect the monster!") as opposed to the example of play given by the book where the players both expend resources on something that's 100% pointless AND rolls low so they can't know whether or not if it was the roll that meant nothing happened or if just nothing happened period because this action was always going to develop into nothing which isn't being 'realistic' or 'immersive' it's just wasting time and plain unfun. While I still disagree with your point, considering the souce, yeah, I can totally see where you're coming from. Monte Cook was responsible for pretty much everything people hated in third edition. If anything, the most unexpected thing about the example is that the GM didn't deliberately antagonize the players into wasting resources.
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Nov 7, 2013 22:16
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Mirthless posted:Why is this a bad example? Are you guys seriously implying that it's not OK for the GM to let players waste resources on failed endeavors? Every search has to end with discovering something interesting? Yes. Yes I am. FATE is a similar engine with a limited resource players can freely spend on rolls, and the GM is explicitly instructed to only call for rolls (outside conflicts) where success and failure would both have interesting results. Obviously you can't do that with Numenera - either success or failure will result in nothing happening, depending on why you're rolling. But I don't think it's unreasonable to only let players roll when either success or failure will have interesting results.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:42
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I've been out of the tabletop RPG game for awhile now, but Numenera had me interested again. I haven't GM'd in forever but am planning on getting something going with a few pals. The setting to this seems really appealing, but I guess the mechanics are pretty divisive? I'm wondering if I should give this a go or try something else, like Dungeon World which was mentioned earlier. Accessibility is going to be a big factor. I don't have a lot of experience GM'ing and the people I'm planning on playing with don't have a lot of experience running characters. What's going to be my best bet?
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Nov 8, 2013 05:31
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BTW there appears to be a new RPG kickstarter from Monte Cook Games, along with Bruce Cordell, based on the same system as Numenera, which is called The Strangequote:Monte Cook Games is thrilled to announce its next big tabletop roleplaying game: The Strange! Written and designed by Bruce Cordell and Monte Cook, The Strange is a game that crosses multiple worlds, called recursions, which player characters can explore and defend. In The Strange, your characters change with each world they travel to, taking on new aspects suited to help them function in that recursion's unique laws and structures. But dangers found in these recursions threaten not only characters, but also our very own Earth. If characters persevere, however, they can not only save themselves and Earth, they may even gain the ability to create a recursion of their own!
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Nov 8, 2013 05:33
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apophenium posted:I've been out of the tabletop RPG game for awhile now, but Numenera had me interested again. I haven't GM'd in forever but am planning on getting something going with a few pals. The setting to this seems really appealing, but I guess the mechanics are pretty divisive? I'm wondering if I should give this a go or try something else, like Dungeon World which was mentioned earlier. Accessibility is going to be a big factor. I don't have a lot of experience GM'ing and the people I'm planning on playing with don't have a lot of experience running characters. What's going to be my best bet? Numenera is a rules-medium game. This is the worst possible type of game: the kind of game that will satisfy the fewest number of people. It will do more to make you a good improv-proficient DM than D&D will (but less than Dungeon World) and it will do less to make you a setup-proficient DM than D&D (but maybe more than Dungeon World). The characters your players will make will be more interesting than D&D PCs (their character sheets will have at least one adjective on them, which is one more than D&D) but those characters will be far less interesting than any character made with FATE. Character creation won't take two hours like D&D, but it'll definitely take longer than 30 seconds like Dungeon World. Character creation in Dungeon World is ridiculously simple and will allow the players to spend way, way more time deciding things like their back story and motivation and what have you. Character creation in FATE will force the players to engage their characters in the world and each others' back stories. Character creation in Numenera is mostly numbers, but doesn't take as long as D&D so you'll certainly have time to discuss other stuff. FATE is really into its characters and engaging the PCs based on who they think their characters are. (You don't say "I'm a fighter with Weapon Focus: Longsword, give me a +1 to hit", you say "I'm Irish and this is pub brawl, give me a +1 to bash this guy's head and drink a Guiness at the same time.") This can be hard to do really right, but is so, so rewarding when you do. You shouldn't be intimidated though. Rules are here: http://fate-srd.com/fate-core-menu Dungeon World is really into dialoguing with the players. It empowers players to try things that won't always work (failing a roll gives you XP) and lets them choose their own foils (they will often get "succeed but with consequences" roll results and will get to pick their own consequences). Then the DM gives them more troubles that they have to work through. In practice it's lively: the players try something, the DM makes their life harder and back and forth, back and forth, and as a bonus eliminates the "I rolled bad so my turn did nothing" feeling. Numenera takes both those ideas and twists them in ways I don't appreciate. The "I'm a [blank] [blank] who [blanks]" creation method seems fluid and creative but discourages actual creativity by making anything you make up have too much rules heft to be quick to implement (or balance...) and kinda flummoxes it by making a real right-brain-plus-left-brain affair. And the GM intrusion rule is okay in theory, but adding foils to the adventure is so basic to the role of the referee that there is no fine line between "GM intrusion" and "making the adventure more interesting", there is no line at all. (Monte, you are a dick.) I'll stop before I get more bitter and try to stay on point. Numenera, if you read it, might be a breath of fresh air if you've really only played D&D or crunchier RPGs. But, like I said, it's really just a half-way point between D&D/board game-style RPGs and more creative improv-style RPGs. Read those FATE rules, read the Dungeon World thread here, see what you like, ask some more questions. Given the experience level you gave us, I can't imagine Numenera will be more accessible than FATE or DW.
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Nov 8, 2013 09:46
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Mirthless posted:If I'm GMing a campaign and my player tries to poison a poison-immune monster, should I have to tell them beforehand so they don't waste their poison? Seriously, the GM has a job to make things fun, but why should it be the GM's responsibility to vet the decisions of the players? It's more like the monster is an illusion, but you're making it eat their poison anyway.
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Nov 9, 2013 00:56
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Heart Attacks posted:It's more like the monster is an illusion, but you're making it eat their poison anyway. On the other hand, you can reasonably set up situations where players will want to expend resources searching in order to ensure that nothing's there. Say, for instance, you've just hit them with a mix of encounters, and a couple of them involved stealthed dudes, mimics, or some other monster that benefits from ambushing unsuspecting prey. Expending resources to ensure that the area is safe can be a good idea for the players in that scenario, and the gm certainly shouldn't try to stop them from doing so.
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Nov 9, 2013 08:41
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Dirk the Average posted:On the other hand, you can reasonably set up situations where players will want to expend resources searching in order to ensure that nothing's there. Say, for instance, you've just hit them with a mix of encounters, and a couple of them involved stealthed dudes, mimics, or some other monster that benefits from ambushing unsuspecting prey. Expending resources to ensure that the area is safe can be a good idea for the players in that scenario, and the gm certainly shouldn't try to stop them from doing so. If that actually made the area safe (or unsafe on a failure) I'd agree with you, but as you've presented it, it doesn't. What you should be benchmarking it against is what would happen if the PCs never made a check at all -- would they rest in safety and nothing would happen, or is there actually something there? Really, this is more a matter of framing the check. Torchbearer assumes the PCs will be in hostile territory when they try to make camp, and asks for a check to find a safe place. Dungeon World calls for rolls only when you're on watch and something approaches the camp. Either one is an appropriate structure.
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Nov 9, 2013 11:55
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Dirk the Average posted:On the other hand, you can reasonably set up situations where players will want to expend resources searching in order to ensure that nothing's there. Say, for instance, you've just hit them with a mix of encounters, and a couple of them involved stealthed dudes, mimics, or some other monster that benefits from ambushing unsuspecting prey. Expending resources to ensure that the area is safe can be a good idea for the players in that scenario, and the gm certainly shouldn't try to stop them from doing so. Maybe, but if you're running a game where any given door might be trapped, and the only way to know is to search, and searching costs at least 1 hp, and everyone has 10 hp, and yeah, there are 10 doors...
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Nov 9, 2013 16:40
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papasyhotcakes posted:BTW there appears to be a new RPG kickstarter from Monte Cook Games, along with Bruce Cordell, based on the same system as Numenera, which is called The Strange. I'm mainly interested in this because of it's crossover potential with Numenera. The idea of the party coming across some giant servers in the Ninth World then foolishly putting on the helmets next to the computer and getting sucked into a world of code with no obviously way to escape sounds like a fun set-up for a three or four session mini-campaign. I agree that the right word for the rules is divisive. I really like them, especially 'the health is power' mechanic, but I can completely see why people wouldn't. Heart Attacks posted:Maybe, but if you're running a game where any given door might be trapped, and the only way to know is to search, and searching costs at least 1 hp, and everyone has 10 hp, and yeah, there are 10 doors... Two points here, 1. there's more than one person in a group, they can combine the searching between them and 2. unless I've missed something, searching a door while not under time pressure would be a free action, they'd only be expending effort if they wanted to search particularly hard? CottonWolf fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 19:01
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