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View Full Version : What's your opinion on Numenera?



kraftcheese
2016-01-09, 09:34 AM
Has anyone here played it before? I know "what's it like?" is a big, vague question but...uh...what's it like?

Have you had fun with it? I've read a bit about it but I can't really get my head around how it plays.

NichG
2016-01-09, 09:46 AM
I've played one session of Numenera and several of The Strange, which is closely related. I think the most important point is that the cyphers really are the cornerstone of the system. Its very easy to just sort of forget about making sure that cyphers get used and refreshed, but if you do that then I think the system feels too constrained. I think the core idea of cyphers is really excellent though - it can keep things fresh by constantly changing the options you have available to you.

I do think the setting lore is a bit hard to get into. There's a lot of 'what', but almost no 'why', which can make it seem arbitrary in a lot of places and generic in others. That in turn makes it a little difficult to run unless you already have a strong idea to go with to fill in some of the blanks or tie things together.

Edit: To add, the problem I had from that arbitrariness is, when I was trying to make a character I couldn't really get any idea of 'what might a person in this world actually desire to accomplish?'. What's the big tension? What motivates exploration and discovery beyond 'just because'? Etc.

mephnick
2016-01-09, 01:00 PM
I found it to be the most frustrating "rules-light" system I've ever tried to run but it's really hard to explain why. I'll try though.

To start with the atmosphere and theme, the setting's Cool Thing (all magic is really old tech) relies on player meta-gaming, but for their characters and the NPCs to act naturally. In D&D you see a troll and it's just a troll and that's cool. In Numenera you run into a ravenous digging monster but that's not cool, the cool part is your players realizing it's actually a mining excavator run by nano-bots. The cool discoveries and encounters are purely for your players and not their characters. "Oh, this giant glowing religious script is actually a coca-cola ad LOL" kind of thing. But the characters don't know about that tech, so the players have to act like it's weird magic. That reliance of reference to real world knowledge to understand the "magic" of the setting completely disassociates me from the setting.

On the mechanics side, the system does nothing to achieve its stated goals of discovery and exploration. The cypher system is kind of cool, but because of the limit the players will generally hang on to a couple of good ones and just abandon half stuff they find. The system tells players not to hold on to cyphers and use them freely, but many of them aren't useful in every situation so why would you use them? I found myself as a DM feeling pressured to design my encounters around what items the group had found so that they could use the main mechanic of the game and that's pretty much the opposite of my style.

This is getting rambly, but other problems I had were the XP system being reliant on whim (thus the XP system doesn't mechanically reward players for achieving the system's state goals). There being absolutely no guidelines on the economy of this setting (one player wanted to pay someone to have an electric current tied to his axe and we couldn't even figure out how money worked, so we handwaved it like everything else in the game) and the main part of the setting is bog standard fantasy that added nothing to fuel my imagination.

TL:DR I was really excited when I read the book but found the system lacking in almost every area. If I have to hand-wave everything mechanically your setting better be awesome or I don't need your book. Numenera doesn't have a setting, it has an idea. Sorry, not enough for me.

NRSASD
2016-01-09, 01:22 PM
I've played a couple sessions of Numenera as a GM and I'm... not a fan, to be honest. As mentioned, the cypher system is really neat and gives a wide degree of versatility, and the GM intrusion mechanic can be fantastic. But the setting is waaay to open for me to come to grips with, so I'm very uncomfortable trying to run a story in it.

The cypher system is great fun because it supplies the party with a constantly changing supply of one use items they are encouraged to spend to solve whatever problems arise. These range from the mundane, like grenades and health kits, to the bizarre, like a glove that can launch a 5lb object into orbit. Letting the PCs play and improvise with these devices is quite entertaining, because you'll never know what bizarre scenario will happen next.

The GM intrusion mechanic is both the hardest to use and the most interesting mechanic of Numenera. Since I grew up on 2nd edition D&D, it's a mechanic I struggle to use effectively, but a well-played intrusion is incredible. Basically, it lets the GM alter the story and shake things up directly through fiat, but also gives the PCs a chance to veto it if they feel the GM is out of line. I'd try to explain it but this guy is much more eloquent and concise than I am: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/35499/roleplaying-games/numenera-the-art-of-gm-intrusions (GM Intrusions)

My big problem with Numenera is the setting. Set 1 billion years into the future on Earth, 8 intergalactic civilizations have risen and fallen in the intervening time. Earth is a graveyard for all of these civilizations, and there is so much technology laying about that nothing is impossible. Crystals that people grow as food? Check. Mutant gigantic bird/things that are cheaper and more popular than cars? Sure. Crossbow wielding telepathic droids? You betcha.

While this gives the GM limitless potential to play with, it's also so unconstrained that a sense of scale, power, or influence (something vitally important in a solid D&D campaign) is impossible to feel. Should the players be threatened by a grizzly bear when they have a scavenged starship engine as a weapon? Can a character with a crossbow reasonably expect to injure a swarm of nanomachines in humanoid form? Does an entity of interdimensional power care about conquering a small village? Numenera would say "Yes, of course" to all of the above.

NichG
2016-01-09, 11:38 PM
The frustrating thing is that I think it would be salvageable with enough of a concerted effort to create the necessary cross connections to really understand motives and needs, and create consistent sets of goals.

For example, in such a world where miracles are exclusively one-off, perhaps there should be tension between accepting the bounty of history's garbage, versus relying only on what can be learned and made systematically. Maybe someone laments the fact that as much as people rely on the Numenera, their presence makes it impossible to ever study the rules of the world itself enough to understand how or why they work. You can't do a physics experiment if some ancient psionic weather system is tweaking them according to your mood, while some ambient nanite cloud is trying to repair your apparatus into a Buick and failing due to interference from the self-aware internet in orbit constantly hacking it to keep it from destroying civilization.

Another motivation to decide on must be - what do the old things want and know? Are they stagnant - only the totally habitual behaviors standing the press of time? Or totally inwardly focused?

Because something from those eras with full knowledge of how to manufacture their Numenera should be a dominant force upon the world unless they have no desire to be. Therefore, why do they have no such desire?

All of these things feel answerable, but it's work that needs to be done to run a satisfying game. And it feels like having answers to these is something the system explicitly wants one to avoid.

kraftcheese
2016-01-09, 11:41 PM
The frustrating thing is that I think it would be salvageable with enough of a concerted effort to create the necessary cross connections to really understand motives and needs, and create consistent sets of goals.

For example, in such a world where miracles are exclusively one-off, perhaps there should be tension between accepting the bounty of history's garbage, versus relying only on what can be learned and made systematically. Maybe someone laments the fact that as much as people rely on the Numenera, their presence makes it impossible to ever study the rules of the world itself enough to understand how or why they work. You can't do a physics experiment if some ancient psionic weather system is tweaking them according to your mood, while some ambient nanite cloud is trying to repair your apparatus into a Buick and failing due to interference from the self-aware internet in orbit constantly hacking it to keep it from destroying civilization.

Another motivation to decide on must be - what do the old things want and know? Are they stagnant - only the totally habitual behaviors standing the press of time? Or totally inwardly focused?

Because something from those eras with full knowledge of how to manufacture their Numenera should be a dominant force upon the world unless they have no desire to be. Therefore, why do they have no such desire?

All of these things feel answerable, but it's work that needs to be done to run a satisfying game. And it feels like having answers to these is something the system explicitly wants one to avoid.

That's what I thought about it from what I've read; I mean like another poster said earlier, theres plenty of "what" but not much "why" in the 9th World.

Knaight
2016-01-10, 04:13 AM
System wise, it feels thoroughly lackluster for a number of reasons, starting with how the choice to make so much of the system a shared baseline that you can only tweak by spending active resources causes the characters to mechanically feel too similar (though part of it is the specific implementation, as the Gumshoe systems do the same thing with no issue). That leaves the setting, which has similar issues. There's the timeline, with the ludicrously long time spans used that stretch credulity, there's how shallow it feels, there's just a lot of things about it that aren't that good.

It's a shame, as the core concept is a lot of fun, and had it been better implemented there could have really been something there.

kraftcheese
2016-01-10, 04:18 AM
Do you folks reckon it would be better to just incorporate the interesting world ideas (ancient tech as magic, post-post-apocalyptic setting with layer upon layer of ancient ruins) into a system that is actually fun and kinda works?

NichG
2016-01-10, 04:23 AM
Do you folks reckon it would be better to just incorporate the interesting world ideas (ancient tech as magic, post-post-apocalyptic setting with layer upon layer of ancient ruins) into a system that is actually fun and kinda works?

I'd rather keep the system and redo the world, honestly. I don't think the world is all that unique.

NRSASD
2016-01-10, 12:46 PM
@Kraftcheese: Yeah, that's what I'd do. The other thing I'd do is establish how many galactic level civilizations there were, and what each one's theme is. One could be the organic tech (we grow fleshy monsters instead of building robots), one could be Star Wars, one could be psychic, etc. Make sure each empire has a theme, so you know what you can expect when describing ruins, artifacts, monsters, etc. That way, you can begin to narrow down what kind of technology is actually available commonly in the present day without running into the infuriatingly ambiguous answer of "ALL OF IT" that Numenera likes using.

I.E. edit the world so it has boundaries, and use whatever system you're most comfortable with. Assuming you can tweak it enough to make it work