DM Fulcrum
Squire
Posts: 46 
Favorite D&D Class: Paladin
Favorite D&D Race: Dragonborn
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Numenera
Sept 20, 2015 8:04:26 GMT
via mobile
Post by DM Fulcrum on Sept 20, 2015 8:04:26 GMT
So, this last week and this next monday I will have played my first couple of sessions of Numenera. I have enjoyed what I have seen and come up against. That being said, by no means will I be switching to it full time over D&D but I do like the Game Mechanics, Storyline and Artwork which goes to credit Monte Cook who also wrote 3.5 Books Just curious if anyone else has delved into the Ninth World and what their thoughts were?
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Post by DM Chris on Sept 20, 2015 20:45:01 GMT
I have not but I have been rather intrigued by what they have done over there at Monte Cook Games. They have had a few very successful kick starters and because of that I am interested in checking out their work. I may be waiting until Christmas break to delve into it at all. Unfortunately, any extra reading right now during Seminary is out of the question.
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Post by friartook on Sept 20, 2015 21:03:21 GMT
Super happy to see this thread pop up. I haven't had a chance to participate in a Numenera game, but I've read through some books. I threw in on their latest kickstarter and I'm super excited to try it out.
I also have the Cypher System Rulebook, which is a more general introduction to Monte Cook's game engine. It also provides a lot of guidance for home brewing various genres and game types.
For the record, Monte Cook contributed to D&D 2e as well. He was the main author of the Planescape setting, one my favorites from that era.
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Samuel Wise
Demigod
Ready to Help...
Posts: 989
Favorite D&D Class: Warlock
Favorite D&D Race: Mousefolk
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Post by Samuel Wise on Sept 21, 2015 4:27:13 GMT
Unfortunately, any extra reading right now during Seminary is out of the question. No kidding, It's looking that way for me as well. School can do that! As for Numenara, I am interested in it, but I do not know too much about it. I still have to listen to the One Shot episode where they pla it, but I've heard a lot of chatter. What is it exactly and what makes it shine above the rest (or among the rest)? |
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Post by joatmoniac on Sept 21, 2015 6:58:41 GMT
Definitely listen to the One Shot episodes for Numenera! I would love to play some of the game to get a better sense for the mechanics and setting. Would be interesting to hear what people think set the setting apart from Numenera.
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Post by Vulash on Sept 21, 2015 13:50:20 GMT
There is a 5 minute podcast that explains the setting really fast for right before the One Shot Numenara - I thought Kat did a good job of the "fast description". Also, that One Shot is pretty funny so you might as well dig right in  I haven't seen anything beyond the one shot so I'm the worst to give you a description, but I think the main gist is that it's set on Earth in the "9th Age". So several major civilization "ages" have come and gone - I don't know which age our current world would be, 1? Anyway, it's sort of post apocalyptic and everything is built upon all the civ's of ages past, and all the tech items are "Numenara" and used for their powers, but not understood. I probably just butchered that so hopefully someone can do a better job  |
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Post by friartook on Sept 21, 2015 13:54:43 GMT
Unfortunately, any extra reading right now during Seminary is out of the question. No kidding, It's looking that way for me as well. School can do that! As for Numenara, I am interested in it, but I do not know too much about it. I still have to listen to the One Shot episode where they pla it, but I've heard a lot of chatter. What is it exactly and what makes it shine above the rest (or among the rest)? Numenera is a setting and a game set in the "Ninth World". The Ninth World is Earth, a billion years in the future. Nine great civilizations have come and gone over that time, some made heavy use of nanotech, some spanned galaxies, and some were not human. The game revolves around the people who live on Earth among the leavings and debris of these civilizations. The setting is summed up well with this Arthur C. Clarke quote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." PCs in this world explore the wastelands of the ninth world, discovering lost wonders, relics and "Cyphers", which are bits of ancient tech that can be repurposed into useful items or "spells". They are typically single use items that are being used for purpose not originally intended. For example, an explorer might salvage a piece of old tech. From this, he may be able to piece together a small device that, when triggered, explodes after a time delay (a grenade in effect). However, this device may originally have been a battery powering a futuristic lawn mower. The character generation is rather unique as well. Characters are generated and summed up based on a sentence: "An (adjective) (noun) who (verbs)." For example, one might want to play a tricky swashbuckling fighter. They would be "A Clever Glaive who Fights with Panache". Each of these terms, "clever", "Glaive" and "fights with panache" has a set of abilities and modifiers associated with it. There is no "leveling up". New abilities are "purchased" with xp. Players gain xp by overcoming challenges, making discoveries, and through the GM Intrusion mechanic (see 2 paragraphs down). The system is unique as well. The GM never rolls any dice. All die rolls are made by the players. If they are attacking, they roll against a monsters set attack number. If they are defending, they roll to defend against the monster's set attack number. These set numbers are based directly on difficulty level. So, if a monster of difficulty 2 (CR 2 in D&D terms) attacks your player, you will have to roll a defense check based on difficulty 2. There is a chart outlining how this works, but in general, each difficulty has a number associated with it, from 1 up 30, and roll of a d20 is made to see if the player succeeds. The player has several options for alter their d20 roll and for altering the difficulty of the challenge in various situations. Another innovation of the Cypher System is the GM Intrusion. When players are moving through the world, the GM may insert a challenging event. For example, the player may be climbing a cliff, and the GM may insert a GM intrusion that the rock face begins to slide. The player may accept or reject the Intrusion. If they accept, they gain 2xp and must share one of those points with another player. If the reject the Intrusion, they must spend 1 xp point that they already earned. If they have no xp to spend, they must accept. An interesting mechanic. I'm curious to see how it actually works at the table over the course of a campaign. |
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Post by joatmoniac on Sept 21, 2015 18:59:53 GMT
Definitely check out the One Shot break down for Numenera. It was done by Darcy Ross not Kat Kuhl, but still a really great crash course into the setting. Granted Friartook's description will get you all the info you need. So yeah, check out the One Shot intro here www.oneshotpodcast.com/one-shot/numenera-setting-introduction/ |
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Post by DM Kiado on Sept 21, 2015 19:14:43 GMT
I will check out this pod. I have the Numenera book, but I just haven't finished it yet. Real life keeps getting in the way of finishing it out and playing. Maybe we run one in the near future on FG or Roll20. Enough of us here dabbled to make it through the rules.
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Post by friartook on Feb 2, 2016 5:35:56 GMT
So, I've been playing a Numenera game over on Gamersplane. I have to say, I'm really not too happy with my first taste of the system.
A couple issues I've had:
The first is a very small problem, and one I could likely get over. I don't like rolling a d20 raw, with no modifiers. In Numenera, your abilities don't add modifiers to your rolls, they lower the difficulty of the check. So there's never any modifiers. I just feel naked being so totally at the mercy of the dice. But like I said, I think I could get over this one.
My second problem is a bigger one for me. I don't like how XP is an expendable resource. The core mechanic of Numenera is based on the GM intrusion. Basically, the GM adds a narrative complication to the game. You can accept the complication and deal with. In which case you gain 1xp and give 1xp to another player. If you choose to deny the complication, you may expend one of your own xp to remove the complication.
This sounds fine in theory, but in practice, it left a really bad taste in my mouth. It may have been the specific GM or the specific circumstance. It's only come up once. But I'm really disappointed. Anybody else had similar mixed feelings?
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Post by DM Kiado on Feb 4, 2016 23:42:56 GMT
So, I've been playing a Numenera game over on Gamersplane. I have to say, I'm really not too happy with my first taste of the system. A couple issues I've had: The first is a very small problem, and one I could likely get over. I don't like rolling a d20 raw, with no modifiers. In Numenera, your abilities don't add modifiers to your rolls, they lower the difficulty of the check. So there's never any modifiers. I just feel naked being so totally at the mercy of the dice. But like I said, I think I could get over this one. My second problem is a bigger one for me. I don't like how XP is an expendable resource. The core mechanic of Numenera is based on the GM intrusion. Basically, the GM adds a narrative complication to the game. You can accept the complication and deal with. In which case you gain 1xp and give 1xp to another player. If you choose to deny the complication, you may expend one of your own xp to remove the complication. This sounds fine in theory, but in practice, it left a really bad taste in my mouth. It may have been the specific GM or the specific circumstance. It's only come up once. But I'm really disappointed. Anybody else had similar mixed feelings? I have read most of the rules, and I am going to be GMing some friends through a quick game pretty soon so we can see if we like it, since our time is limited. Just reading it though, at first glance it sounds like a game that would be great on GP, but I don't know. I will add my take in a couple of weeks though after we play for a night. (Tomorrows game is cancelled.) |
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Post by friartook on Feb 5, 2016 15:43:30 GMT
Its possible it was just the GM and that particular situation. I'm reserving judgement. The only reason it bothered me is that I was really excited about the Cypher System.
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Post by DM Kiado on Feb 5, 2016 22:04:51 GMT
Don't let a first impression write it off though. I bet it can be fun as hell, or terrible, just like a D&D game at times.
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DMFunkopotamus
Commoner
Posts: 20
Favorite D&D Class: Sorcerer with nuclear bloodline
Favorite D&D Race: Demilich
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Post by DMFunkopotamus on Feb 7, 2016 3:20:36 GMT
I've run Numenera a few times, and have run it at both Who's Yer Con and Gen Con. I love the system, but running it, it's easy to make some errors that will make the game less than fun for everyone.
The first skill I had to learn with with distribution of the numenera. If you do that totally randomly, there'll be no way to ensure the players will be able to actually succeed at anything. So I always make sure I've got a set list of numenera before any game, some with randomly determined attributes and some with specifically chosen attributes. This way, I could be sure that the players were never given a truly insurmountable challenge, but could still be stymied if they didn't put any thought into how they used their cyphers.
The second skill I had to learn was when/how to use the GM intrusion. That was a lot trickier, since it can't be prepared the same way the cyphers can be. I eventually came up with a couple rules for myself. One was, every encounter gets at least one intrusion. And another is that every player gets an intrusion. I had to add a third rule to ensure the second one was met, and that was that the same player cannot get a second intrusion until at least two other players have had one.
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Post by galakan on Feb 13, 2016 23:53:20 GMT
My second problem is a bigger one for me. I don't like how XP is an expendable resource. The core mechanic of Numenera is based on the GM intrusion. Basically, the GM adds a narrative complication to the game. You can accept the complication and deal with. In which case you gain 1xp and give 1xp to another player. If you choose to deny the complication, you may expend one of your own xp to remove the complication. This sounds fine in theory, but in practice, it left a really bad taste in my mouth. It may have been the specific GM or the specific circumstance. It's only come up once. But I'm really disappointed. Anybody else had similar mixed feelings? So my group and I had a similar experience dealing with this. The thought of using XP in the way that they do in this game, essentially means if you have a string of bad luck you kinda prevent yourself from leveling. And that totally sucks. So the way we kinda got around that is that we split the "XP" up into two different points. One awarded at the end of a session/encounter that counts towards leveling. The other as an expendable resource like Fate Points (if you have played Fate) or Inspiration. That went WAAAAY better with my group of players. The other house rule that we decided to use was that you can expend effort AFTER you do your roll. One thing that kinda pissed off my players was the fact that if you spend a ton of effort and use your pool...and roll a 20 that would have gotten you the success anyway, it is a waste. Additionally if you spend effort from your pool, and roll a terribad roll, you then spend XP to re-roll and you are both wasting the effort you just applied AND you are spending XP so you are spending 2x as many resources and you can still end up rolling terribly after all of that and everything is wasted. That was how we ended up getting around it, and people actually had a lot of fun towards the end of the campaign. Maybe giving that a shot might help make your group's experience a little better too. |
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