Musings on tabletop roleplaying. A mixture of homebrew ideas, observations, and theory discussion; plus occasional reviews, utilities and inspirations. Verbose, amateurish, under-edited, over-written, not especially serious.
So after all that talk of failures, and a few conversations, I was thinking about the actual GM Intrusions in Numenera, and I got curious. What sort of googlies does the rulebook actually throw out?
The foci are a weird and wonderful array of special abilities, no doubt perfectly suited to display the scope and versatility of the GM Intrusion. Let's see what exciting opportunities, plot seeds and wildcards Monte has chosen to throw in here!
There are basically three topics in this miniseries. Thread one is about (mechanical, die-rolling) failure per se and how it feels to me as a player. Thread two is about failures, interestingness and the Fail Forward/Roll Dice or Say Yes sort of concept. Thread three, today's topic, is about the interaction between failure, narrative and the coherence (in the non-Forge-jargon sense) of the play experience.
So, what am I wittering about today?
There's two interrelated ideas here. I'd like to begin by talking about how various types of failure affect the coherence of a game, and the table atmosphere. Then I'll discuss the relation between spontaneity/improvisation and narrative coherence. Finally, I'd like to tie these back into the main topic of the miniseries, by talking specifically about the way mechanically-mandated spontaneity affects coherence.
So a couple of us played another game of Numenera recently, and despite our initial hesitation and previous concerns, we had a good time.
We are actually implementing one of the rules I thought up: combining the two sets of XP rules by making it so that you have to spend XP on a reroll or a benefit, before it transfers to your "actually learned something" pool. The idea behind this was twofold: firstly to make sure everyone roughly balanced out, and secondly because I actually find that mechanic quite elegant. Your nebulous "experience" lets you achieve something within the game (like recovering from a near-failure, or gaining familiarity with an activity, etc.) and that learning experience builds towards you gaining a permanent benefit. Of course, the permanent thing you gain may not actually relate to what you learned, so... look, I tried.
We did once again run into the sense of vague disappointment when you look at the low-level abilities. This can happen a lot; it's very tempting to keep feeling like the next level will be the one where you're finally awesome and completely satisfied with your character, and it never is.* But examining the low-level Numenera powers does seem to show up that they are genuinely quite limited.
* I actually think this is an argument in favour of sometimes playing non-levelling characters (basically iconics) rather than always using levelling systems. In theory, you should be able to make a character who does what you want them to do, and then play without that vague shadow of dissatisfaction and anticipation distracting you from what you're doing now.
For example, the Nano is the 'esoteric powers' type, and I tend to associate that with having an array of different mystical capabilities even at low level. I think most people do. Unless you're playing (or reading, or watching) in a setting where the majority of player characters do Weird Shit, I think the assumption is generally that the Weird Shit Doer is defined by breadth. Generally speaking, you have some sort of dynamic like: the Fighter, the Thief and the Mage. Or, the Brute, the Face and the Mystic. Or, the Merc, the Tech and the Psychic. Even in Warhammer 40K, where often the whole party do quite similar things professionally (especially Deathwatch), the psyker ends up as the one who not only interacts most with anything supernatural, but also has the broadest range of knowledge in general, and has access to several different psychic powers of which most can be used flexibly.
This is partly because magic-type stuff is very strongly associated with intellect in most games I've run across. That doesn't have to be the case (as I've discussed before). But because it is, magic-users and psychics are typically also very intelligent, and so typically know a lot of things. They may have access to skills other people don't, which essentially gives them new subsystems to play with. They may just get more Skill Points or whatever you're calling them, and so get to be accomplished at more types of task than others.
A further complication is that, because a spell (and I'm just going to stick with "spell" here) allows you to break the normal rules of the game and indeed of physics, each spell essentially creates a new subsystem for you. The spellcaster can now do A Thing that other characters cannot do; they have a new tool to apply to problems.
If you consider the D&D wizard - and I know that's not the only comparator, but it's the one staring you aggressively in the face - then a starting-level wizard from 3rd edition onward typically knows a handful of cantrips plus two or three individual spells. Moreover, some of those spells are quite specific (typically combat spells), but utility spells often leave a lot of room for creativity: you can do a huge amount with mage hand (minor telekinesis), prestidigitation (basically any minor magical trick), unseen servant and so on. You can play tricks, gaslight NPCs, distract monsters, drop objects from a height, impress NPCs, carefully arrange large numbers of small objects in complicated arrays to do things at a distance (set off a trap, injure an enemy, break down a door, pull a lever, press a button...), convince an NPC that food has been poisoned, convince an NPC that food hasn't been poisoned, pass objects between cages suspended in the air, retrieve something from a grating...
What the Nano can do is, in comparison, extremely limited and often very specific. The Hedge Magic esotery is roughly equivalent to prestidigitation, but there is no mage hand. The Push esotery allows you to shove a creature or object violently away from you, but specifically can't be used to push a lever or otherwise interact with the environment. The Scan esotery lets you scan a three-metre cube and determine the type of material and energy present, but it's relatively expensive and is an instantaneous thing, rather than a lingering ability. Other abilities can be used all the time, like Ward (permanent armour) or Onslaught (an attack which, for a Nano, is usually free).
But on reflection, I don't think there's anything specifically wrong with that. What can the other characters do? Well, the Glaive gets a selection of static bonuses to their combat abilities, and a couple of general physical boosts. The Jack gets a little from the Glaive and a little from the Nano. In other words, as far as I can see, the Nano isn't less interesting than the other two; it's just that the Nano isn't significantly more interesting (in terms of variety and scope), and I think we are generally trained to expect that.
The Nano begins with two of the following abilities. "Permanent" means always-on. "Without limit" means your Edge lets you cover the 1-point cost of an abilit without spending from your pool so you can do it as many times as you want under normal circumstances:
* Onslaught does 4 damage at range, or 2 damage ignoring armour but to Intellect (this is, in almost all cases, functionally equivalent to all other damage). This is as good as a Medium ranged weapon, or better if the target is heavily armoured. Medium ranged weapons are pretty expensive - ammo is particularly expensive. None of your "20 arrows for 1gp", this is 12 arrows for 5gp, which is as much as medium armour, most weapons, and so on. Getting free unlimited ranged attacks is genuinely valuable. You can even use it to destroy terrain and objects through patient attack, which isn't feasible for an archer.
**"short range" is the second distance category, about 50', which is really quite a long range to be able to forcibly shove an object from.
The Glaive begins with two of the following abilities:
I would note that at low levels, much of the time, the first ability is strictly worse than not using it. For example, fighting a Level 2 creature with Armour 2 and 6hp, a Glaive with a medium weapon does 2 damage normally. Do you want to kill the not-particularly-powerful enemy in 6 rounds, while making it always slightly less likely that it causes you 2 damage, or do you want to kill it in 3 rounds and allow it half as many attacks?
Similarly, because Glaives can wear at least 2 points of armour without penalty, and this is quite a lot of armour, the last option is mostly there to allow for playing a character who's narratively unarmoured without a substantial effectiveness penalty.
The Jack begins with two of the following abilities:
So... one of these choices actually gives you a new ability (Hedge Magic). Three of them increase damage, and they're just the same power tailored to different weapon choices. One is a small mechanical boost to defence. One essentially allows you to wear armour at all.* The other makes you tougher when not wearing armour.
* Wearing armour you are not Practiced in (which is not the same as training, you cannot Train in armour) causes you to lose points from your pools once per hour. This is directly equivalent to taking damage. If you wear heavy armour for 12 hours continuously, you will die. Strictly speaking, simply putting on a suit of armour and sitting still all day is fatal. Oh, and you incur a cap on your Speed Pool size until you take it off.
Examining that list, it looks to me as though the Nano is still relatively interesting. The Glaive has exactly one "new ability" and it's a minor mechanical combat trick with exactly one application; all the others are strict mechanical tweaks relating almost exclusively* to combat, and the only choice is whether you want free extra damage. The Jack has one of the Nano's options (Hedge Magic) that gives a new ability; all the others are strict mechanical tweaks relating almost exclusively to combat* and the only choice is whether you want free extra damage. The Nano has one permanent boost that relates mostly to combat*; one new attack form that is at least as good as most weapons and more flexible than any (although if you have it, using it or not is hardly a choice); one new ability to gather information that's of broad application; one new ability (Push) that's usable inside and outside combat, though its application is relatively restricted; and one new ability that can be of wide application depending on player creativity and GM flexibility.
* Defensive benefits are of course useful whenever you might take damage, so there's some occasional application in dangerous bits of exploration.
Of the five Nano options, I think three are genuinely reasonably interesting specific abilities to have, Ward is more of a narrative choice that you want to be tough, and Onslaught is kind of a no-brainer but not strictly obligatory. Knowing two of those (of which one is probably Onslaught) is a significant limitation compared to being a wizard in D&D, no doubt about it. Yet this isn't D&D.
There's a side issue as well, which is that Nanos are always trained in numenera. That is, they are trained at dealing with the magical-scientific weirdness of the setting, the weirdness so pervasive that the entire setting is named for it. If there's a weird machine, a forcefield, an artefact, a monolith, a robot, a cypher, a gadget, a woobly monster or anything like it, they can know stuff about it, and quite possibly interact with it, better than anyone else in the party. I know it's not a choice on the player's part, but I think that's a genuinely meaningful benefit in terms of doing the weird shit.
Ironically, although I started out focusing on the Nano, I think what this best demonstrates is that the Glaive feels dull in its choices. The fact that you have choices at all, but none of them do a great deal, is weirdly I think more disappointing than not having those choices and just getting a flat +1 boost to damage.
To be honest, the bit of Numenera characters that seems coolest is the foci. You have options like: Bears a Halo of Fire, Commands Mental Powers, Controls Beasts, Controls Gravity, Employs Magnetism, Exists Partially Out of Phase, Fuses Flesh and Steel, Rides the Lightning, Talks to Machines and so on. Don't those sound cool?
Okay, some sound less cool. Carries a Quiver and Entertains are completely mundane things anyone can do - they just offer mechanical bonuses. Crafts Unique Objects is, like most things that hang on crafting systems, suited to a very specific playstyle. There's several fighting style ones that, in a game which I consider to be pretty forgiving of flavour, just don't quite seem necessary when I can just say I'm Fighting With Panache. And Works the Back Alleys is frankly unfortunate.
I have already written extensively about the baffling inclusion of Howls at the Moon.
Let's take a look at the actual abilities though.
I think in some ways the best comparators here are the X-Men. No, really. Think about these splats. They're the same kind of one-phrase descriptors you'd slap on a mutant with one shtick.
Wears a Sheen of Ice feels a bit like Iceman. But you can't control ice, shape ice, craft barriers, walk through ice, walk on ice, or anything like that. You're just a bit armoured with ice.
Rides the Lightning just lets you shock people. You can't impress people with lighting powers, repel or absorb electrical attacks, control machines with a touch, stun robots, or actually ride any kind of lightning. You can recharge powerful magical items, if you have any.
Employs Magnetism lets you move one metal object around fairly slowly. I actually think this is the most interesting of the powers, which is why I chose it this time - it's genuinely quite flexible. You can't usually use it in combat, but there's a lot of possibilities in the exploration end of things. Technically you can also use it to fly by just standing on something metal.
Controls Gravity doesn't actually let you control gravity in any sense. You can just levitate a bit. You can't walk on walls, make heavy objects float to carry them around, pin enemies to the floor, make incoming arrows fly up into the sky, and so on.
So although the Foci sound very flavourful and fun, they are actually far more restricted in most cases than we tend to expect. I think they fall into an unfortunate uncanny valley: they sound like a Fate Aspect or a handwavy superpower or perhaps a Mage Arcana that lets you do a wide variety of thematically-appropriate stuff, but they are mechanically extremely traditional and more akin to a heavily-balanced D&D spell or special ability.
People, most definitely including me, tend to have D&D in their heads when playing Numenera. This is entirely natural. It looks like D&D, it's by one of the designers of D&D, you basically play a fantasy adventurer like in D&D, you have a fighty one and a magicky one and a tricksy one like in D&D, you roll d20s like in D&D. But it is a genuinely different game that works in some genuinely different ways
D&D has Race + Class. Numenera has Descriptor + Type + Focus, and your Type is very much not mechanically equivalent to a D&D class.
Numenera is also keen to remind you that Cyphers are a major part of the game; you are supposed to use them regularly. I believe they play a bigger part in determining not only how powerful you are, but also what kinds of things you can do, than is the case of magic items in D&D. I am very sceptical as to whether this is a good thing; it depends on what the game wants to be, but it does appear to work against its stated position on what defines your character.
I think one of the deceptively-different facets of Numenera is that the weight of abilities falls differently to other games that it looks like. Most trad roleplaying games tend to emphasise the specific named rule-bending special abilities that your particular class, splat or species grants you.
A Numenera character is not equivalent to a 3rd+ edition D&D character in terms of named special abilities.
A Numenera character in some ways significantly surpasses a 3rd+ edition D&D character in terms of generic ability.
I think Numenera is less about applying special abilities than D&D is, and expects a more wide-ranging style of play. I think in a lot of cases, the special abilities are the equivalent of a TV character's shtick that they apply once per episode to significant effect, rather than something they do continually. Of course, you can use most special abilities multiple times per day, but you get the idea.
I think Numenera expects you to spend more time doing things that aren't specifically on your character sheet, because you are generically quite competent at absolutely everything. This requires quite a big change of mindset and I think it's something I struggle with, at least.
The most obvious example is that when we first played, we had a Glaive and a Nano and a Jack, and as the Nano I kept talking about how we weren't any good in combat. This is completely, 100%, factually untrue. We were exactly as good at hitting things with weapons as the Glaive was. The Glaive had some special abilities that gave damage bonuses or special riders in combat, and had a bigger pool of Might points to spend on attacking, and was allowed to wield Large weapons.
The latter is actually the major difference, because doing 6 damage minus armour is massively better than doing 2 or even 4 damage minus armour, considering most things have about 12hp. If the thing has armour, this can be the difference between "reliably hurting Thing" and "being mechanically unable to hurt Thing at all unless you roll a 19 or 20", which is like the difference between zero and infinity. If the thing has no armour, this is the difference between killing it in two hits and killing it in six hits.
I did some maths.
It's almost impossible to overstate how important armour is in this game, and the impact of that on weapon choice. The crucial take-home is that Nanos absolutely require the Onslaught power, because (unless they choose to take a weapon they're not proficient with and suffer permanent penalties) it is the only way they can reliably harm an enemy with 2 points of armour, which is relatively common - many low-level enemies have 2 armour, though higher armour is thankfully relatively rare.
But still, we were entirely competent in combat. Compared to, say, a D&D wizard, who can easily be so ineffectual at attacking and so vulnerable to damage that it's genuinely a party liability for them to try and fight, a Nano is a very competent combatant.
But forget combat for a minute. This is one of the non-obvious subtleties of the Numenera system.
If you want to sweet-talk a Level 3 NPC, you need to roll a 9 on 1d20. Everyone is inherently equally good at doing this, even if they don't have an appropriate skill, and your chances of success are quite high. You can even spend points from your Intellect pool to drop that to, at worst, a 6+ on 1d20. In contrast, sweet-talking a guard in D&D would likely be a Moderate DC15 (roll 15+ on 1d20), meaning that only an actively charismatic PC is liable to succeed.
Similarly, everyone can climb cliffs, leap chasms, sneak!, tinker with machinery, or attempt to decode ancient writings. There are some characters who are actively skilled in those things, but the benefit is relatively small (a +3, basically, so +15%).
What this means is that a lot of the time in Numenera, any character can attempt to react to a situation in whatever way seems sensible, and their chances of succeeding are far higher than a D&D-attuned brain tends to estimate. And this is something that's genuinely difficult to adjust to. I know, because I ran into these credence issues from both directions when playing Deathwatch. I regularly wanted to apply skills when I had a remarkably small chance of succeeding despite expensive training, and I tended to underestimate the likely effectiveness of certain combat tactics.
So I think what Numenera expects from you is different, in a way I haven't quite worked out yet; and partly as a result, I think the named abilities on your character sheet tend to be either of limited use, or constant benefits that feel mechanically dull. I think you need to step high, wide and plentiful with gleeful exuberance, and expect that the system and the GM will support your far-reaching interpretation of what you can reasonable attempt. Of course I can do this. I'm a hero.
It reminds me in some ways of, for example, a lot of pulpy and action films. Of course the protagonist can fool the guard. Of course the protagonist can solve the riddle. Of course the protagonist can fly the plane. And so on.
I don't think these excuse Numenera from the fact that these abilities seem underwhelming. How a game makes you feel is important. I think this particularly in the light of its presentation: much is made of the idea that You Are An Adjective Noun Who Verbs, whereas mechanically you're very much more of a Verbing Noun who is a bit Adjectival, and I think if looked at holistically, you are actually An Adventurer Noun Who Verbs and Is a Bit Adjectival. That is to say, I think that the bulk of your effectiveness in Numenera actually comes from being a Player Character, with your Noun and Verb giving you a small package of abilities to colour your capabilities, and your Adjective being of very small benefit.
It's not what I'd do with an Adjective Noun who Verbs system, not at all. But I'd like to try and play it for the game that it is, not the one I'd expect it to be.
I'm getting the sense that Numenera suffers from a continuing tension over where it wants to fall on the loose spectrum between a Traditional RPG and a narrative game.
A very high proportion of abilities are actually just rather bland purely mechanical benefits: a flat bonus to this, or training (equivalent to a bonus) in that. I'm not sure why these are thought to make your character cooler. The names sound cool, but do they feel cool?
Mostly what I feel makes me cooler is Being Able to Do a Thing. It's being set apart from others in a qualitative or semi-qualitative fashion: being able to break the rules, or to interact in a way others can't, or to understand something others don't. Or, in a low-mechanics game, it's flavour and character and background. And I can't help wondering if, despite being very mechanicsy and trad-RPGish, Numenera would actually like you to focus on the latter and treat any mechanical benefits or new abilites as mere perks. But I think in that case, its approach of having specific and discrete powers works against that, at least by setting expectations.
On the one hand, Numenera offers you a template that looks a lot like trad-RPG Race + Class. Yet as I've argued, much of your mechanical competence comes from simply being a Player Character, which feels more storygamey.
On the one hand, Numenera offers you an array of foci that seem to be broad-brush archetypes of Stuff You Can Do, as I'd expect in a storygame - is "Covered in Fire" not an ideal shorthand for a flexible story-focused game? Yet mechanically, they offer you a single specific benefit, and often one which is a pure bonus with no additional flexibility or options to make your character feel more interest; something more typical of a Trad RPG.
One the one hand, Numenera seems to offer a Fighter, Mage, Rogue triad that defines your playstyle and capabilities, exactly what a Trad RPG tends to do. Yet the latter two, at least, are much more combat-ready than their Trad RPG niche generally permits, partly because they have far less in the way of niche abilities.
On the one hand, Numenera has specific templates that offer specific powers that do specific things, which feels very Trad. But on the other hand, you are encouraged to make up your own skill lists and to try things you have no particular training in, which feels very storygamey.
On the one hand, Numenera has no particular rules for combat: you can attempt anything, there's a flat target number for the enemy based on how "powerful" it is, and the GM simply determines what modifiers might apply and exactly what the outcome means. This feels like a loose, flexible narrative combat system from a storygame. Yet almost everything in the rulebook is a monster that hungers for your flesh and can't be negotiated with, and there's a simply but highly mechanical damage system that goes as far as having fixed damage amounts and subtractive armour, which means some characters literally can't hurt some others, which feels quite Trad to me.
On the one hand, Numenera has a quite specific setting with very highly-described locations, artefacts, monsters, individuals, political systems and even local economies. Yet it's also very handwavy about exactly how any of this is supposed to work as a functioning world, what anyone actually does with their time, what life is like for the people, and all the other details that allow you to run a simulationist-by-default campaign.
And of course, to top it all off, Monte Cook then goes and tells us that actually what's really important about the system is... the cyphers. The ten-a-penny one-shot minor magical items you roll up on random tables from looting enemies and ruins. He describes these as "more like abilities and less like gear", and goes so far as to name the entire game mechanical system The Cypher System. And the thing is... given how limited and specific most of the actual chosen character abilities are, quite often having a cypher that can do X will indeed be at least as powerful as anything you can do, and they do indeed grant a meaningful expansion of your capabilities. Sometimes a dramatic one. You can easily have one cypher that lets you climb sheer surfaces, one that offers remote viewing at unlimited distance, and one that translates any language. Bearing in mind you'll typically start play with three abilities, at least one of which is usually a flat bonus... that's a big increase in options.
The end result is that I never know which lens I should be looking at the game through: am I thinking like a mechanical Trad Gamer who knows exactly what I can do and how and when, or a narrative Storygamer who takes cues from general descriptions to collaboratively create a wonder-filled story of exploration and adventure? The truth probably lies somewhere in between, and it's hard to find.
I think Numenera is perhaps more sophisticated than I initially gave it credit for. Unfortunately, I think context will hinder it. You can only play a game in the context that exists. I don't think the expectations raised by all the games that have come before allow us to approach a game with classes and levels and specific special abilities and modifiers, like Numenera, with a mindset that what's really cool and important about my character is how I think about them. Particularly when the game iself tells me otherwise - tells me that I'm an Adjective Noun who Verbs.
When I think, at the core of it all, when all pretence is stripped away, I'm a guy walking across a desert of broken civilisations a billion years in the future, breathing nanotech and looking up at artificial stars, scavenging forgotten miracles for a few measly shins.
Hi, Numenera. Long time, no see! I actually haven't heard much about you for a year or so either. No, I didn't mean... well... it's just, y'know... nobody seems to be playing you? It's kind of sad now that I think about it.
So I was listening to Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice while running seven miles down a major road in the rain over a series of hills, as is my wont, and Michael Cule was talking about his attempts to get to grips with Numenera. They resembled my own so strongly that my heart went out to him, and indeed to the game, and it got me thinking again about why it is that I just couldn't get to grips with it.
The start of episode 23, and about 50 minutes into episode 24.
Numenera feels like fog; like the fragments of an intriguing dream you clutch at upon waking, trying and failing to reconstitute the fractured sensations into a meaningful whole. Or, more prosaically, like a bunch of pieces from different, but exquisite, jigsaws.
This post is based on the Walking Eye Numenera review of a while ago. It started life as a comment that, as so often, got out of hand. As such it probably isn't as coherent as I'd like if you haven't listened to the podcast, which you should.
There's naturally a certain amount of discussion about the mechanics, and one thing that is bound to come up is the slightly odd choice in Numenera of doing things based around Difficulties 1-9 (or arguably higher) that represent numbers 3-27 on your d20 before you manage to modify them. In brief, you establish a difficulty, you use a range of skills, effort and situational modifiers to adjust that difficulty, and then you multiply it by 3 to see what your target number is.
While the 3s thing in Numenera is a bit strange, I’m pretty sure that multiplying by three at the end is the simplest way to use this system. If you set challenges to Difficulty 12 instead of 4, then each change in difficulty means adding or subtracting 3, which is a little faffier to track; or, as I'd tend to do, tracking how many changes are being applied, then multiplying the net change by 3, and then applying it. Early on, the numbers will often be very small, and so the multiplication isn't much different from addition.
This post is inspired by a combination of listening to more KOTN Numenera and a comment of Dan's on a post a few months back:
If a player tries to do something with a very limited ability, the GM is usually likely to let them get away with it, because that ability is seen as being low-utility and because a lot of GMs like to "reward creativity" (whatever that means). By contrast if an ability is very broad in scope, the GM's natural instinct is to rein it in. "Yes I know you've got a skill in Doing Anything but I can't just let you roll it for *everything*."
This is, once again, not a criticism of the KOTN playstyle, just some observations. I'm sure I've seen similar cases before, this is just the one that caught my attention.
One of the characters has the Talks to Machines focus, and I'm pretty sure at least one of the other podcasts I listened to also features this ability. Something I can't help noticing is the contrast between its description and how it tends to work out in play.
You can activate or deactivate any machine you can see within short range, even if normally you would have to touch or manually operate the device. To use this ability, you must understand the function of the machine, it must be your size or smaller, and it can’t be connected to another intelligence (or be intelligent itself).
This is a pretty useful ability, so obviously it comes up for quite a lot of use. Now, I only noticed this recently and don't really fancy relistening to everything to get some stats (the disadvantage of audio over text, I suppose) but there's something interesting about what happens when a player tries to use it: very frequently, the GM calls for a roll.
It doesn't sound unreasonable, and I'm not sure that it is, but I'll point out that there's nothing in the text which indicates a roll is called for. What this power lets you do is turn a machine on or off without physically touching it, providing it's not an AI or interfaced to an AI.
But being able to turn machines on or off is a very useful power, and obviously some machines are advanced or complicated or plot-relevant and it makes sense to call for a roll to turn those on or off at a range, so...
...does it?
It seems intuitive, but why? Why should this ability require a roll, bearing in mind that the mechanics do not at any point ask for a roll? It's actually fairly limited to begin with, assuming you're reasonably sensible about "understand the function" and the size constraint. Compare it to the Leads ability "Command", which lets you force a creature to obey one non-damaging order - my gut feeling is that it's unlikely anyone would demand a roll for that. And I'm certain that if you took an ability that lets you spend 1 point to add to your melee damage, nobody would demand a roll to use it successfully "because this creature is hard to damage".
I think partly this kind of feeling comes from the fact that Distant Activation grants you a new ability, rather than enhancing an existing one. Another aspect is, as Dan says, its broad applicability - there are a lot of machines out there, and activating machines could help you overcome puzzles in a way that inflicting damage more effectively wouldn't. Essentially, this ability grants you a new tool to overcome obstacles or achieve ends, rather than enhancing an existing one, and I think this is where the instinctive conservatism creeps in.
Increasing damage doesn't feel like a game-changer because it simply makes an existing ability more mechanically effective; combat is slightly less of a challenge, but then there are many mechanical factors that can make a combat more of a challenge in return. Giving commands to a creature is a significant ability, but there are other ways to influence creatures to do something you want - persuasion, threats, tricking them with body language or feints, setting up situations in which they'll do what you want, and so on. I suspect also that getting somebody to do one limited action for you is of more limited use than you might think. Often there's no advantage over just doing it yourself, and at other times the advantage you gain (perhaps by disarming an enemy in a fight) has to be balanced against the action spent giving the order.
Distant Activation mostly allows you to do, at a short range, something you could probably do with physical contact. There are a few exceptions: it can open a door from the wrong side, or even detonate (or deactivate) a bomb, even if you don't have the clearance normally required. In general though, what it's going to offer is an alternative way to do something you normally could anyway, such as create a distraction, open a lock, or avoid detection. You could use it to turn off certain kinds of weapon, or detonate a grenade, although in the latter case you'd be blowing yourself up as well.
One of the difficulties is that this power very quickly gets fuzzy in a way that some others don't. Adding damage is just adding damage, non-damaging orders offers room for grey areas but is fairly explicit. In play though, people immediately jump to using Distant Activation on parts of machinery, such as electronic locks on a bulkhead door. Can you use it to start a car engine? I'd say not. Turn on a lightbulb? What about activating one lightbulb from a set? Can you fire a loaded mortar with it (I think so), or the cannon of a tank (probably)? How about deactivating the cooling fan in a mainframe? Or closing the protective shutter on the end of the death-laser approaching you?
If you think about it, Distant Activation applied strictly isn't that much of a game-changer compared to many other abilities. Phasing through solid objects is a huge advantage and a relatively common sort of power. Sensing thoughts is amazing. Travel powers like flight, tunneling or teleportation can completely alter the challenge posed by a problem. I'm inclined to say that the best way to ensure Distant Activation and other such unique abilities don't end up unbalancing things is to carefully apply the restrictions and abilities built into the power, rather than calling for additional rolls when it seems inconvenient.
Recently I started listening to Knights of the Night's Numenera series after Roo Sack Gamers pointed me there. One of the party chose the focus Howls at the Moon, gaining a form of lycanthropy. Listening to the episode and thinking about the situation, I found it quite interesting for a couple of reasons. This post is loosely based on some feedback I sent them. It contains spoilers for their Numenera podcasts.
This was an idea outlined to me by Dan. I don't remember whether it was his, or someone told him, or he read it somewhere. Anyway, I thought it was interesting.
Essentially, the idea here is that the design of the traditional D&D paladin class uses behavioural restrictions with punishing costs to counterbalance the class' advantages. They gain foe-smiting, evil-detecting, magic horsies, healing powers, and an array of generally pretty kickass stuff for being a knight in shining armour. In return, they must be good, lawful and noble, with a code of conduct governing what they can do without losing their powers.
The problem comes about because of a discrepancy in where these elements fall. The benefits of the paladin accrue almost exclusively to the paladin personally, letting them kick ass in combat, be pretty awesome in social situations, bring righteousness and justice, ignore diseases, and so on. A number of the powers can be used to help others, and should be, but all classes have some ability to help their allies.
In contrast, the restrictions on the paladin affect everyone. A paladin's moral code restricts the entire party in what course of action they can choose, because they cannot reasonably permit acts that they consider evil or unlawful. A paladin that takes a "see no evil" approach when allies are torturing a prisoner is not roleplaying well (if their morality permits torture, they wouldn't need to leave the room). This leads to the common view of the paladin as having the proverbial stick: they need to be either naive or ruthless with the rest of the party unless all are entirely selfless and law-abiding. The party may well feel unable to use deception, poisons, or sneaky tactics to overcome obstacles, if the paladin insists on a stand-up fight and always gives foes a chance to surrender. Perhaps they don't feel it's acceptable to take a reward, or demand that a quest be accepted. They should seek judgement on evil characters - and they can always tell who's evil. No pragmatic deals, no half-measures. Because of the need to maintain their code, the paladin can effectively become the arbiter of morality with a casting vote on the party's actions. They don't play well with more complex parties featuring characters with looser morals - which is just about everyone.
Having now listened through some Numenera actual play, I noticed a couple of things that felt worth mentioning as an addendum.
The Roo Sack Gamers used an awful lot more Effort, Cyphers and other modifiers than we tended to, and this lead to a much more variable set of target numbers, as well as changing the balance of fights. While we were quite cagey about Effort, and used it about twice, they took it as a core mechanic pretty much straight away. In some cases this allowed them to crush enemies savagely, but in others it backfired due to poor rolls and/or overEfforting. If you’re expending Effort to adjust your success rate, both in combat and outside it, that effectively causes hit point loss, which means fights that might have been simple otherwise become a lot more challenging. I feel like that somewhat addresses Dan’s issue of the fixed target numbers making things bland, as well as our sense that combat wasn’t very difficult. It doesn't, however, address Arthur's concern that spending Effort always harms you while only occasionally helping.
Arthur also suggested Numenera feels like one of those games that can only really be run as intended by the designer, due to their very idiosyncratic setting. Certainly, I felt that Numenera didn't convey a single strong vision to me and give me a sense of what the world feels like. However, Roy seemed to have got a solid grasp on something, whether or not it was what Monte Cook had in mind, and I found the presentation as convincing as most other fantastical settings tend to be. He was fairly easily able to improvise largish chunks of content without me being able to tell what was planned and what was improvised - in fact, I assumed he might be running or adapting a published adventure, but having asked him, apparently not.
The assaxin problem remains, and the subtractive armour system looks like it is going to throw up occasional issues. In the RSG campaign, there was one fight where a character completely shrugged off all his hits because of heavy armour. Very bad defence rolls can still increase the damage to break through armour, and one option would certainly be for the GM to adapt by having intelligent enemies switch to other tactics when they realise armour’s too thick – trying to knock down or disarm a PC, for example, or grapple them and expose the PC’s weak points to another enemy. I suspect the main issue is going to be, as with the diablodon, when PCs find themselves unable to inflict damage on enemies. With light weapons doing only 2 damage, it’s relatively easy (as far as I can tell) for a non-Glaive PC to find themselves needing a 17+ to get bonus damage in order to inflict any injury at all. Again, perhaps at this point they need to start playing cunningly and finding other ways to defeat enemies, but it could easily get just plain annoying, at least if the combat is hard to avoid. There's only so many combats based around setting up indirect tactics you want at a time.
This recording comes mostly from a laptop mic, and so the audio quality is dubious. I recommend listening on speakers rather than headphones if possible. Many apologies.
Here begin the spoilers for the starter scenario The Beale of Boregal, and as always be aware that our podcasts are not entirely family-friendly.
We basically chew the fat about our feelings on Numenera, the scenario and some general RPG stuff. It was a pretty mixed experience: Arthur was not impressed, Dan hasa variety of issues with it but is strangely drawn to it nevertheless, K really just wanted to play Dying Earth, and I quite liked it but struggled to get a handle on the setting and expectations.
This discussion goes all over the place. We talk about a lot of little aspects that didn't really come up in play, and do some analysis of the mechanics and setting now that we've seen a bit more of things.
We talk about the importance of having similar expectations for a game to creating suitable characters (and thus the advantages of group chargen), and the difficulty of forming a firm impression of the setting. On the whole, with only Arthur having read the book, we came away with the feeling that it's basically a mashup of all sorts of things that Monte Cook thought were cool, but with no overriding coherent aesthetic that tied it all together for us. I expound on the dearth of proper ecology in RPGs, and on flavour balance between classes. Arthur finds the magic/tech balance unsatisfactory considering the source material cited by Numenera.
GM Intervention is considered a bit with some discussion of FATE's Aspects and their relative merits discussed. In passing, paladins are judged and found wanting - I've personally always thought they're inappropriate as a base class and possibly as anything but a very specific PC with a very specific background in a very specific group. Connections also come up, and while we like the idea they seem riddled with pitfalls.
The Nibovian Wife briefly annoys us all, but there's already tons of discussion of that particular issue, you can find it easily.
We also do a very small amount of levelling up with the handful of XP we've earned. It isn't particularly riveting.
Hope you enjoyed it; again, many apologies for the recording quality. I'll try to do better next time.
This recording comes mostly from a laptop mic, and so the audio quality is dubious. I recommend listening on speakers rather than headphones if possible. Many apologies.
Here begin the spoilers for the starter scenario The Beale of Boregal, and as always be aware that our podcasts are not entirely family-friendly.
Despite Arthur's efforts, the move from the early scenario to this concluding chapter feels a bit disjointed to me. I'm not entirely sure why - the hints about where to go next aren't any more tenuous than in many another game. I think part of it is my setting issues again, or perhaps more accurately, issues with how I'm perceiving different parts of the setting. In my head, the first section is that sort of generic fantasy period where you have wandering adventurers but also relatively egalitarian societies and no sumptuary laws or universal serfdom; the middle section I pictured as being in a Heyeresque setting, basically Regency Bath with more mutants and metal face piercings; and this part appears to be set in a kind of Wild West frontier town run by a council of necromancers. I had a certain amount of trouble reconciling these as being with a couple of days' travel.
That aside I quite enjoyed this section, despite it not really offering you much freedom of approach. We got to do some stuff that wasn't just fighting things, and Arthur took some very sensible decisions about the final encounter, including switching out the dialogue for something that felt more natural (and Arthurlike), and nixing the boss fight they seem keen to include. As written, this is asking for TPK.
Let me expand on that a bit. Boregal is a Level 5 enemy with 20 Health and - importantly - Armour 2. Basically, he builds himself a body out of random junk lying around and then goes to town on you. As I've mentioned before, small numbers are significant in this system, and that Armour 2 makes Boregal entirely immune to attacks from anyone with a Light weapon; in this case, the Nano and Jack both. Barring a roll of 17+ there was no way we could have injured him, leaving the job to Dan's Glaive. She would have been doing typically 5 damage per hit after Armour, so four successful attack rolls needed at a base chance of 1/4 (Level 5 means 15 to hit), although she could have knocked that down a bit a few times with Effort. But frankly she would probably not have had the chance. Boregal has two main attacks, both psychic. One will target a single PC, causing 6 points of Intellect damage and negating their next turn; this would have taken a 15 to resist, and Glaives ain't good at Intellect stuff, so there are good odds of Boregal stopping her attacking on several turns while also inflicting damage. With a small Intellect pool, two hits would be enough to Impair her, reducing her chance of critical hits and making Effort more costly. Two more hits would probably cripple her. There's really no reason to attack anyone else, as Boregal's effectively immune to their damage, but if he wanted to he has an attack that damages everyone for 6 Intellect. Basically, all he needs to do is spam the stun attack until the Glaive drops and then fry everyone else.
As if that weren't enough, there's a suggested GM intrusion: psychically take control of a character and have her fight her friends for two rounds. That's all you need, really.
I have to assume that nobody is actually running this encounter as written, because it's completely psychotic as far as I can see.
The town as written is a little more interesting that we found out in this adventure. With time short and after a few distractions, we sort of wanted to finish off this one-shot, and so we missed out on really finding out any details of the town. That being said, the adventure introduction is frustratingly opaque; it feels like it's almost telling you stuff but then veering off at the last minute leaving only hints. Quite what is supposed to have happened I can't make out despite reading the whole thing.
This recording comes mostly from a laptop mic, and so the audio quality is dubious. I recommend listening on speakers rather than headphones if possible. Many apologies.
Here begin the spoilers for the starter scenario The Beale of Boregal, and as always be aware that our podcasts are not entirely family-friendly.
With a bit more experience of the game, I might have tried to find a way to drive the broken hounds elsewhere rather than killing them. It would fit the character better and killing stuff famously doesn't get you XP in Numenera.
As I mentioned last time, there isn't really all that much discrepancy in our combat ability here; the most significant one is a (roleplaying) choice of Asperity's not to take any ranged weapons, which means Tasha and Arvil look cooler due to picking off broken hounds before they even reach us (with, admittedly, multiple jammy rolls). I think the use of illusion powers was good here. We didn't really understand the stat pool economy here, which means we just plain didn't use any Effort, when in fact it would have been quite sensible in a fight when we were very near comfortable civilisation for rest and recover. The downside is that most Effort useful for combat comes from the Might pool as I understand it, which directly undermines the same stat most enemies target, increasing the chance of you getting penalties. This is where abilities based on other stats have a clear advantage.
Similarly, we hoarded our cyphers rather than hurling them around like confetti, which I think (based on further reading and listening) is exactly the wrong approach. Ah well.
There's a substantial talky-over bit here, which is unfortunate. One half is me using my sense-stuff powers to search the garden, and discovering an oddity buried amidst the plants - a crystal sphere that shatters and reforms. The other half is Dan explaining the "Carries a Quiver" focus, which at the time we mistakenly thought distinguished your character by allowing them to use a bow. In fact, bows exist in the normal equipment list, just like crossbows. It was funnier when we thought otherwise.
I mentioned in a couple of places that I've been listening to Numenera actual play and picking up some thoughts that way. Ooh, poetry! Ahem. The one I've started with is The Roo Sack Gamers. They have a relatively small back catalogue, but with turns out to be because old episodes are shifted to Archive.org for hosting space reasons.
Numenera-wise, they've played through a couple of chapters (9 episodes at time of writing) in what's obviously a bit of an arc. I haven't picked up a clear indication of whether they're running prewritten stuff with added bits or largely homebrew content, though my instinct says the latter. I've found it pretty enjoyable to listen to, and because they're basically novices it's interesting to hear them working through rules issues and see their approach to the game. It seems noticeable that playing with lots of Effort and using high combat rolls to inflict penalties instead of extra damage makes the combat feel much more varied. They actually change their approach throughout the episodes (unconsciously, I think) as they sound out different playstyles, and talk about this a bit in ep 7ish.
Audiowise I found it good quality, very clear (very little cross-talk or ambient noise that I noticed) and pretty well-presented. Things like introducing yourselves at the start of episodes can make a difference to how easy things are to follow - I should probably think about that for our recordings... They also have a melodious array of what I would tentatively call southern US accents, but my expertise stops there.
This recording comes mostly from a laptop mic, and so the audio quality is dubious. I recommend listening on speakers rather than headphones if possible. Many apologies. It's also fairly short (22 mins) because that was just where it made sense to split the episodes.
Here begin the spoilers for the starter scenario The Beale of Boregal, and as always be aware that our podcasts are not entirely family-friendly.
I liked the dream plot hook more than I might have expected. It just seemed to be quite well-articulated, and it was genuinely intriguing as a setup. Plot dreams are a bit of a cliché, but I felt it was a decent example of the idea.
This is where I started to find the setting a little confusing, because spa towns with psychologists felt like something more suited to early modern civilisation than to an age with wandering adventurers. On reflection it's not so bad - the Romans had baths in Bath, after all, but then they were relatively civilised too. I think the idea is perhaps that there are areas of civilisation and other places are wild and unknown. Perhaps when I actually read the rulebook it will solidify a bit in my mind.
At this stage there was a bit of a sense that we were all somewhat useless, but that's quite misleading. I think the issue is that it feels rather like D&D, but you have very few obvious abilities, most of them aren't combat-focused, and all the numbers associated with you are small. The Glaive doesn't have a load of stuff that makes them obviously better at combat than the Nano. Actually, we kind of had it backwards: everyone in Numenera is basically really quite good at Stuff. K worries about how she'll be totally ineffectual, but her character is precisely as good at hitting stuff as anyone else, and can take the same amount of damage. It's only really damage inflicted that varies. The most noticeable thing for me was that my "wizard" is the most resilient one in the party. As we mentioned, having a number of +2 is pretty damn good in this system.
This is, I think, the worst-affected episode, because it features the section where my recorder actually packed in. Again, my apologies, I did my best to retrieve it. If we were one of those super-organised groups who have impeccable table discipline and dedicated recording equipment it would probably have come through a little better, but that's not really our style.
Here begin the spoilers for the starter scenario The Beale of Boregal, and as always be aware that our podcasts are not entirely family-friendly.
In this episode Arthur attempts to give us a plot hook. This proved a bit of a difficult one because, as people point out a couple of times throughout this series, the setting is distinct enough that it's not especially clear what tropes we're working off. Broadly speaking I think K is riffing on Dying Earth, whereas Dan was maybe playing it more like a heroic adventure? I'm not really sure where I'd categorise my approach, I suppose I was taking an ambling exploration sort of tack.
This is a genuine problem I still have with this game: the relative flexibility of characters and the range of setting elements seems like you could be using it for anything from John Carter of Mars to Dying Earth to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser to Stainless Steel Rat, as well as for technomagic versions of genres ranging from Regency romantic adventures to pirate romps to The Tribe-like daily survival dramas. Obviously some would work better than others and it's got an obvious bent towards adventuring of some kind, but it's not entirely clear what kind of adventuring that is, because it's neither D&D (with known playstyle) nor obviously based on any particular set of fiction or films that you can emulate. How self-interested and self-absorbed are the characters? Are you expected to leap at the merest hint of a plot hook, to wander around poking things aimlessly, to have your own goals to follow, or to basically look out for yourself? On top of that, how much are characters expected to understand the world around them, and how much of it is supposed to seem weird and wonderful to them?
It seems like when you look into it a bit more (I've done a bit more reading around and listening to stuff), the assumed playstyle is one of accepting quests readily and exploring on the side. I'm still not entirely sure, though, and must get round to actually reading the rulebook.
The adventure design here is a funneling branch, so that whatever you do leads you back towards the intended endpoint. I'm okay with that, especially in a starter adventure, and there are a number of choices you can make that still end up with finding the source of the problems. Because it's basically a static threat, that makes sense - there isn't really any logical way to deal with that kind of problem without going to confront it, and wandering off elsewhere is outside the designer's purview.
This structure actually builds in a bit of genre flexibility, because if you don't particularly fancy an escort quest for some random stranger, you can rush to the aid of the village, or go and investigate the disturbances if you prefer to think of it that way. The escort quest is more suited to a questing knight or relatively civilised kind of approach, whereas a more combat-oriented and thrill-seeking group, or indeed one that's interested in what's going on but not particularly bothered about doing random favours, can go to the village.
As I've mentioned a couple of times before, a few months back Arthur ran us a playtest game of Numenera. I did record the session, but it was plagued by technical problems and with one thing and another it's taken a while to beat into some kind of shape. About two-thirds of the recording was done on a laptop built-in mic rather than the dedicated recorder I normally use, and it makes a noticeable difference. I'm putting it out there, and it is listenable (I always test podcasts on earphones before release, mostly walking to work beside a busy road) but some parts are a little tricky to catch and there are a couple of sections I had to cut and narrate. I do apologise.
This particular episode is basically spoiler-free as we go through the Numenera character generation process, taking rather longer than we expected. This rest of the series is a colossal mass of spoilers for the starter scenario The Beale of Boregal, and in general our podcasts are not entirely family-friendly, so be aware.
Character generation was maybe what really got my attention for Numenera, because the idea of being an Adjective Noun who Verbs is attractively simple. In practice, as so often, it proves to be a little more complicated. To be fair to Numenera, I think it had bad luck here. One thing is that the players had bought into the ANWV scheme quite hard, and were a little thrown by the extra layers of detail. Another is that we were inclined to rush ahead, and I notice that Arthur had to hold us back several times as we started wanting explanations of things we hadn't yet come to. Being quite mechanically-minded as a group, this is a bit of an instinct, but disrupted the flow of character creation and slowed things down.
I haven't actually run it yet, so take this with a pinch of salt, but... my impression is that the way to handle first-time chargen in Numenera is perhaps to pause before opening the books, and to ask people to take it lightly, and just write down the crunchy details of their choices without worrying about what the crunch means at this stage. There are bound to be a couple of things you will want to explain, but pausing to define everything as soon as it appears isn't actually that helpful. Explanations made too early can very easily be more confusing than helpful, so that before too long you're explaining complex mechanics that make much more sense when they actually come up, when all you needed was to pick your hair colour.
There's quite a bit of crunchy details associated with chargen, which does make it more complicated than it initially seems, but most of it doesn't really need explanation at the time, only noting down to be dealt with at a later stage. I suspect that if you took this tack you could probably do first-time chargen, with reading-out of options, in fifteen minutes or so.
The main thing I might do to ease chargen is to attach a one-line explanation to some of the less intuitive Adjectives and Verbs, allowing people to make choices based on general consequences rather than the details. For example, it's not at all obvious that being Sneaky would make you slower or less agile, or that being Clever means you're street-smart rather than learned. This seems particularly important where drawbacks are concerned, given that some Adjectives have drawbacks but not all, and that some drawbacks may be deal-breakers for a character - several Adjectives make you bad at social skills, for example, which can easily clash with a character concept.
Part two of my first impressions of Numenera from our game last weekend, begun here.
Contains mild spoilers for The Beale of Boregal, the starting adventure for Numenera.
I was well impressed with this. This is about the slickest system I can think of, maybe excepting BRP. Even there, the fractions of skill and modifiers can turn a simple d100 roll into something that feels complicated, while Numenera's system felt slick. In part that's because you're not using your stats, but fixed target numbers for success, which can be modified based on circumstances or by spending stat pools (I never bothered). To some extent that means the DM is doing the work, but it seemed like they were quite minor adjustments, and more importantly quite simple. We mostly ended up rolling on better than 50% chances, even on combat rolls for the Nano and Jack, which means succeeding most of the time. I think most them were more like 80%.
I think the best way to express it is that I never felt like the system got in my way. Admittedly it was a fairly short introductory scenario and we didn't try anything that complicated, but then it's not necessarily complicated things that expose snags in the ruleset. It's actually making me really tempted to reconsider making a very pared-down version of Monitors, although I'd have some issues with the magic/tech distinction... On the hypothetical downside, I can see that if things remain as simple as that throughout, it might start to feel simplistic for the action-and-adventure kind of game it seems to be aiming for. I don't know how it felt from the DM's perspective (Arthur?).
From my point of view, in this particular game, I quite liked the fact that even the magic (including the esoteries I didn't take) seemed really very simple - a pleasing combination mixture of mechanics that were quite simple, like Ward or Onslaught (magic bolts), and things with no actual mechanics that rely on GM interpretation of a description, like Scan. It's not what I'd want for Call of Cthulhu, but it felt appropriate here, in this setting where technology and magic fade into one another. Of course, it does rely on have a GM comfortable making those calls, and on the GM and players agreeing.
I initially though the levelling system was ultraslick as well. It seems that the GM can make a "GM intervention" by giving the affected player two XP tokens (I think you can reject these, but I didn't see the point and it sounds like that's quite punitive). You keep one and give the other to another player. Now I misinterpreted Arthur's brief description of the levelling rules and thought you could buy one upgrade with each XP, which would have been very simple and quite nice. In reality, it costs four XP to buy an upgrade, and you get a few XP for missions as well as the GM intervention ones. I assume there are good balancey reasons for this, and apparently you can use the tokens for things other than buying upgrades, but it was still a mild disappointment. My own fault, though.
When you do have four XP, you can buy one of a set of upgrades (increasing a Pool, an Edge, a Skill, ...something else, or buying a new special ability). Each can only be bought once. When you've bought four, you move up one Tier, and gain new abilities from your Noun, Adjective and Verb. The limit is almost certainly because otherwise you'd just buy Edge and use all your powers all the time.
While I found the rules and options quite fun, I think all of us struggled with the setting. It was hard to get a sense of what the place was like, and how it "worked" - how do people behave, and how does that interact with our place in society? What kind of people are we supposed to be, and how does that compare to NPCs? How do both of those interact with our OOC goals of having adventures? It's a little tricky to establish your specific identity without understanding what you're fitting into or contrasting with. Because it wasn't obviously based on a real-world culture or history, or even an obvious fantasy setting, it was a bit tricky to work those things out.
I think in general, there's a bit of an issue with what you might call "hotchpotch" settings in that while they nicely mix things up and break away from the same old tropes, their variety can make it very very difficult to get a feel for the setting. The more divergent the contents are, the harder it is to have intuitions about anything. A setting that mashes up the Court of the Sun King and 1950s America is odd but means drawing conclusions from two sets of cultures; a setting that also grabs elements from the Aztecs, Victorian industrialism, Tolkein, Clark Ashton Smith, stonepunk, Star Trek and Warhammer 40,000 is going to be very hard to interpret.
To be fair, Numenera isn't the latter. However, it's a science fantasy setting that's very divorced from anything familiar, and that means no tropes to draw on. I found it somewhat confusing even in the short time we were there. One minute it was caravans in the waste, and stone circles that curse anyone who breaks hospitality; shortly afterwards we were in a spa town being asked to visit a garden that grew nanotech fruits and alien metals so that a psychiatrist could cure our NPC of possession. We fought dogs with bird-skull heads. Even at the most basic level, wilderness camping reads like Conan the Barbarian, spa towns read like Georgette Heyer and psychiatrists are clearly neither, so I couldn't tell what level of civilisation we were experiencing. Did people brawl in smoky taverns and rob snake temples, or exchange quips in the Royal Institute of Adventurers? Was our place more like petty mercenaries, Victorian explorers or some kind of special agents? Were there libraries, doctors, supermarkets, insurance?
Similarly, the wildly variable levels of what I might call available technology were a little odd. I've no problem at all with magic-as-technology or technology-as-magic, which are both fun. However, due again to the hotchpotching, I couldn't initially guess what might be generally available in this setting, as opposed to being unique artefacts, though I decided in the end it's broadly faux-medieval like most fantasy, with odd technological trinkets here and there. Early on, though, I wasn't sure if it might be more like Star Wars, with people riding hoverbikes to the nearest solar station for a bowl of porridge before the witch-burning.
In some ways I think the technology situation may actually be quite similar to that in Warhammer 40,000, with a low baseline tech, specific known technologies that can be exploited but aren't understood well enough to generalise, and a plethora of unique artefacts that nobody really understands. It also seems like it shares the Imperium of Man's suspicious attitude to technology, or at least to people who get too involved in it.
I think one source of the disconnect comes from the Ninth World thing, actually. This means many things are very different from what we're used to, to the point that I don't think a single one of the monster entries was a recognisable creature. There was the germ of an idea here that I tried to articulate to the others and I don't think I succeeded, but let's try again...
In reality, one of the ways we understand the world is classification. Things come in types and patterns, and we can use the similarities to draw general conclusions. For example, animals come in broad types, materials can be roughly grouped, so can professions or cultures. If a fictional setting presents us with identifiable types, then we can predict some things without being explicitly told them, and it gives the sense of an understandable world. In contrast, if everything we encounter is unique and different, they become a set of things to memorise.
Numenera seems to lean heavily towards the unique model. Not only are the monster entries all novel, but they all seemed to be radically different from each other. There weren't, for example, recognisable genera of creatures or classes of war machine. I also didn't get a sense that the monsters related to any obvious non-monster creatures that existed in the setting. Now this mildly bothers me as a biologist (which doesn't really matter), but I also feel like it makes things that little bit more difficult as a player with zero starting knowledge of the setting. Similarly, because every location seemed to have a somewhat arbitrary level of technology, I couldn't get a feel for what the technological capabilities of the prevailing culture actually were - or whether there was a prevailing culture at all. When you can't assume that recognisable groups exist, your ability to make OOC predictions about the gameworld is limited, which is an issue when IC you should know these things.
To put it another way: if the starter scenario had featured youngsters riding up to our camp on an elephant to report that their village was being besieged by buffalo, and we'd been sent to retrieve herbs from a garden occupied by a wolfpack, we would have had an intuitive sense of the kind of threat presented by these creatures and the ways they might be likely to behave. As it was, we couldn't tell whether the "pallones" (floating razor-edged jellyfish, apparently?) would have slaughted everyone within minutes and immediate help was needed, or were just kind of annoying. The broken dogs were a bit more predictable by dint of being doglike, but if you'd called them something else and given them five legs I'd have been just as clueless. Basically it's a matter of tropes.
I'll cheerfully admit that I'm a bit weird about this, but I think it'd make a lot of fantastical game settings more robust if the designers at least briefly considered how biology works. You can have any creature you like, but species don't arise in isolation; they evolve from similar species or are left behind when relatives die out. Reptiles are really quite variable, but you can spot the similarities and predict some things about them. Same with birds, or felines, or arachnids. It's particularly striking when you have sentient species that appear to have no relatives whatsoever. I'm not saying you need sound scientific explanations, but I am saying that if you have a species of human-sized sentient ladybird and no other insects bigger than a palm or with any level of intelligence, that's an anomaly. Humans are pretty isolated as species go, but we still have a whole swathe of primates.
Magic and technology are good explanations, but you're still usually turning something into something else, if nothing else because doing things from scratch is both hard and largely pointless. Are you really going straight to human-sized sentient ladybirds, or wouldn't you have started with dog-sized beasts of burden and kept making better ones? And again, once you create a cool magical servant beast, do you start all over again next time, or make a new model every year? Either way, you're likely to end up with a group of recognisably-similar creatures.
I'm not really in a position to review the scenario, since I haven't actually read it and as I said our game was a bit disrupted. It does seem that Arthur refined it a bit for us, since I've seen mention of fluff we managed to escape and some mildly tiresome NPC behaviour that he sensibly ignored.
The adventure didn't really seem to leave much room for flexibility, basically asking us to visit a couple of locations and do specific things there. Given it's apparently a questy sort of game that's not entirely surprising. Also, starter scenarios are amongst other things an opportunity to introduce mechanics in a controlled way, and that aim doesn't mesh too comfortably with sandbox play. That being said, the way the adventure consisted of specific one-room locations (effectively) made it feel more linear than I think an equivalent scenario set in a single location might have; essentially you're going from Camp Room to Doctor Room to Dog Room by fast travel, and so there's not much opportunity for creative approaches. Not something to completely slate it for, it's just something I notice in retrospect.
On the other hand, I did quite like the premise of the adventure when we'd worked out what it was, and it seemed like something you could actually have done (or do) rather more with, especially if the last section offered some ways to dig into the history a bit in future adventures (which it may do, I don't know).
It seemed like the general consensus was that people had a reasonable time with Numenera, but didn't really see much reason to play it instead of a system we already know. The two that came up were D&D (inevitably) and Dying Earth (on account of some similarities in setting). Certainly I think if you're looking for adventure and already know D&D fairly well then there's a lot to be said for sticking with it. On the other hand, I did feel like there were some interesting differences, and in particular I do wonder whether Numenera might suit some people who wouldn't necessarily care for D&D. Its main strengths there are the relatively simple mechanics and the different background. The mechanics are slick enough that players really don't have to fuss over maths or rules complexities, which is more than can be said for any edition of D&D. At the same time, people who aren't really into fantasy or just want a change might find the Miyazaki-like world appealing, and I suspect a keen GM could tweak things to create a more familiar setting for such players. So I have the impression it might be quite a good game for people new to gaming.
Dying Earth is a call I can't make, because frankly I know virtually nothing about it. I've read precisely one Jack Vance short story, as far as I'm aware - not part of a deliberate policy, I just have a ridiculous number of unread books - and if it was a Dying Earth tale it seemed quite different from what the others have talked about. I've played one game of Dying Earth, and to be honest I found it a struggle. I had the same problems with the setting that our non-Warhams friend had playing Deathwatch, perhaps exacerbated by the fact that we didn't spend any of our game killing stuff, which does tend to simplify matters. So I really had no idea how to play my character, what to do, what the world was like or how to approach the game. As far as I was concerned, then, Numenera was no more unfamiliar as a setting, and it was more approachable for me because I'm au fait with doing escort quests and killing monsters for people, whereas Dying Earth didn't offer me anything familiar to hang on.
So while I'm not in a desperate hurry to go and play some more Numenera, I'd certainly be up for it in the future, and I have an anime-enjoying friend or two who I think would appreciate it.
Oh, and just to get this off my chest: I'm all for people incorporating more actual Gaelic into their games, but in a fantasy setting full of name soup, is it really completely outrageous to think you could expect players to pick one of the real spellings of "beale" as beul (Scottish), béal (Irish) or beeal (Manx)? It's just a really weird thing to do. Nobody has games featuring black-clad ningers throwing shurryken at samyoureye, is what I'm saying. < /rant >
At the weekend, as we are wont to do, Arthur, Dan, me and another friend sat down to try out Arthur's shiny, shiny new copy of Numenera. And as I am wont to do, I'm going to gab on about it.
Contains mild spoilers for The Beale of Boregal, the starting adventure for Numenera.
Actually, one of my biggest take-homes from the session is how disjointed it felt. None of that was Arthur's fault, and I feel a bit bad about it like. I mean, first sessions are quite often a bit awkward, and in this case Arthur's the only one who'd read any of the rules or setting, so there was the inevitable sort of pauses and waiting bits during chargen while each person made up their mind and wrote stuff down. I don't think there's anything we could've done about that. I did say at the time that RPGs should come with three spare copies of the chargen rules so you can all do it at once, but as people pointed out, the rules you need tend to be a bit dispersed and it'd be hard to do. It's a nice idea though, and I might try it out if Monitors ever gets off the ground (which is most likely if my house gets launched into space by a fracking accident).
Like a lot of the time, I'd brung along my dictaphone and was recording the session to put up here, except the batteries were apparently knacked after a big game last weekend. I had some spares, but somewhere between being rechargeable and maybe not the best, they only lasted ten minutes a pop. So I interrupted things a couple of times to ferret in a bag, and eventually Dan grabbed a laptop and tried recording on that. No idea how it turned out yet. But obviously that was a big interruption to the game, and it's to Arthur's serious credit that he took it so well. Soz, mate. Next time I really need to just put fresh disposable batteries in at the start and not muck about, or else shrug it off if we lose the recording (although that does seem like it'd be a shame).
There was also an important work call for our fourth player, which she could do even less about, and we had to call a halt for a while and then chatted a bit about it afterwards. Again, reasonable enough, but it does throw the game out when you stop in places you hadn't planned for. So I think between all that we were all just a bit less focused than we could've done with being. I thought (and think) that was a shame, both for Arthur's game and for Numenera, because in that situation you're that much less immersed in the game and that much less able to appreciate it.
The chargen for Numenera is a little bit more involved than the "you're an Adjective Noun who Verbs" that hooked me in the first place, but it's still along AD&D lines, or even Deathwatch, rather than Pathfinder. The time mostly boiled down to Arthur reading stuff out for us and then explaining it - quite often we didn't really need to know X at the time, but of course you don't know you don't need to know*, as Colin Powell might have said if he played RPGs - while the effort was mostly a case of writing down the relevant details so we wouldn't need to ask Arthur to look it up again later. With better knowledge of the system, most of the time could've been eliminated and we'd have had less to write down. Again, if it's the sort of thing you played a lot, you might all have a rulebook and speed things up even more.
As nearly always, we did group chargen, which we all favour for various reasons. In the case of what I tend to call podtests, I think it helps because a) taking a reasonable spread of things makes it more interesting to listen to, and b) explaining to the others what you (think you) did, why, and what it means for your character and the group is actually really damn helpful for a listener who's never played the game before. And you get the back-and-forth, which again helps people understand what you're doing, as well as cutting down on schoolboy errors or misreadings.
While it's possible to create something similar to, say, a D&D character, I deliberately went and picked a combination you just wouldn't get in another game, with my Rugged Nano who Wears a Sheen of Ice. That's quite substantially because I wouldn't get to do it in another game and I thought it was cool. I also think it gives the game a better chance to show off its own moves; with picking familiar options I think it can get unfair because you could end up judging a game on how it plays when you're unconsciously trying to replicate another game that it isn't. The character difference gives a mental break that signals to you that it's a different kind of game.
We actually rolled randomly to allocate the three "classes" (Glaive, Nano and Jack) between the three of us. Here, interestingly, Dan said he'd thought I'd end up as a Nano because I always struck him as the sort of person who plays wizards. That's interesting to me primarily because I've actually never played a wizard or wizard-equivalent in any RPG until Numenera. In fact, I'm a bit notorious for playing spiritually-inclined dwarves. The lack of wizardry is down to a few things, none of which is a lack of interest in wizards. Primarily, my early RPing was with experienced players in NWN, and not only had I never played before, but I also don't play MMORPGs or anything, which meant I was really paranoid about not being able to handle a complex and fragile class at the same pace as everyone else. So I went for tough, simple and largely support characters. While I've branched out a bit since then, I do tend to play with more experienced gamers (and GM for less), which means it's a natural trend. I suppose I could also say that one of the things about wizards is, in most games you're really restricted on the amount of wizarding you can do, which for me makes them less appealing than other classes that can do their thing more often. Anyway, this time was going to be different.
Off the top of my head, I've played:
But of course, everyone remembers the dwarves.
I was really pretty happy with my character. Being a Nano gave me a vaguely wizardy theme, although interestingly the limited number of starting abilities and my choices meant I basically did the same stuff as the others. Of my two "esotery" (spell) choices, I took Ward and Scan. The first one gave a permanent defensive bonus that stacked with my Sheen of Ice armour to make me the toughest person in the party. Given I had an armour of 2, that was a bit of a shock, but it's a low-modifier game from what I can see; in practice it meant I could halve the damage from most attacks. Scan allowed me to sense and analyse nearby items, materials and organisms, with a kind of psychic radar, which I just thought was cool. I didn't take any offensive abilities, and to be fair the pool is quite small (there's precisely one that does damage, plus telekinetic pushing). The impression I get is the game wants you to mostly work in roughly the same way, with different approaches and probabilities because of your builds; this doesn't seem to be a game where Fighters Fight, Wizards Cast and Rogues Disable Traps. Hit chance and damage essentially came from the weapon, with Dan's chosen special ability granting +1 damage, which looks paltry until you realise that translates into between +25% and +50% by weapon. Yeah, Numenera seems to be a low-numbers game, which means every point counts.
My Rugged choice made me a kind of wild-man, with an affinity for animals and plants, which I thought was a nicely interesting combination with wizarding. A bit of the Radagasts, I suppose, though I didn't think of it at the time. Sheen of Ice meant I was permanently dusted with frost and insensitive to cold, and on a whim I could freeze ice out of the air around me into crude armour. This would be decent in the first place, although mostly I took it because I thought it was well cool, but combined with Ward it was really pretty good - not sick, just a good synergy. Obviously going for Ward cost me the chance of flexibility, but I felt like being solid at a small number of things was a better choice for a first shot.
There was some brief discussion of whether this was going to be a bad combination, because in some games choosing non-obvious combinations is a pathway to problems. I felt like this wasn't going to be one of them, and from what I saw that was right. I think basically PCs get to be competent at stuff, and while your class modifies your three stats, your other choices give you other stuff instead. Notably, it seemed like everyone was basically equally good at fighting, with small variances because Dan's glaive had bigger weapons and her powers granted slightly more damage. There was none of the massive gaps you might find in a Fighter Wizard Thief party, and it was kind of fun that my job as the wizard was actually to stand at the front and soak damage because I was covered in ice and slay Broken Dogs with my Shredder claws. Sorry, I haven't entirely got over just how beast that was.
Another interesting thing, especially compared to our Deathwatch games, was that the shopping part of the game took about two minutes, which was mostly Arthur reading out the names of the weapons we could choose from and Dan vacillating over just how big a sword Tasha needed because game-mechanically it almost always makes sense for assassins to use a greatsword even though it's farcical. We really didn't need anything but starting gear, and quite a bit of that didn't see use. Adventuring kits were untouched, and none of us even used any of our cyphers (one-use magic items). In the first go at a game, you do tend to concentrate on the core mechanics, and we didn't feel hard-pressed at any point - I think I took two hits the whole game, and that was it for the party. Also, until you've got a feel for the game, it's hard to know how much you're supposed to use limited abilities, as you don't know what the turnover is like.
One thing we did find a bit odd was the connections mechanic. Each character has a reason for having set out adventuring, which you choose from a short list (one per... Focus? possibly). While you do get a choice, we couldn't really see anything that felt suitable - not least because we weren't particularly sure what the initial adventure was. Once we found out, I ended up choosing "I need the money", which isn't a very good reason to go into the wilderness and climb a huge rock if I'm honest. However, nearly all the options seemed to be "I persuaded X to let me come along" or "I thought Y needed my protection", so it seemed very easy to end up with a party who'd all convinced each other to go but had no actual reason for it. More of a buddy film than an adventuring party, y'know?
The game does seem to be generally trying to make characters feel connected. Each Focus will affect one other player in a specific way, which is sort of vaguely interesting mechanically, though it doesn't particularly strengthen the party as far as I'm concerned. In my case, my ice armour would also spread to our Jack if he was nearby; the Jack also knew that Tasha was an assassin, while Tasha could see through all his illusions. A bit of a mixed bag to me; I think something more like Traveller chargen offers a better chance to build connections between characters that mean something to the players. Another slight issue is that you're making these decisions before you really know anything about the other characters, which is always a potential problem. In principle, though, I appreciate this.
* There are known ignorances: things we know we need to know. There are known unignorances: things we know we don't need to know. There are unknown ignorances: things we don't know we need to know. And there are unknown unignorances: things we do not know we do not need to know.
On the one hand, this is pure frivolity. On another hand, I think it's actually kind of relevant in gaming, almost to the point where I might write something more substantial about it (feel free to bagsy it, though).
More to come soon.