Numenera experience

[alcyone]

I ran 2 Numenera games, going through the introductory adventure "The Vortex". It's a neat game, the production quality is that top notch Monte Cook style (I still keep Arcana Evolved around though I have never played it, just because it's such a nice book.) The mechanics are interesting, and I really wanted to give them a try. One of the main conceits is the GM doesn't roll dice. Everything is a roll on the player's part. The GM's main job is to convey the setting and encounter particulars, and to occasionally throw a wrench in the works (this happens on dice rolls, like fumbles, but also when the GM pays the player an XP point for the privilege of breaking in).

It's true, it saves the GM a lot of work. But man, it makes the job kind of boring. Like 4e, it made me think, do you really need me here? Do you need ANYONE on this side of the screen?

I'm going to run a few more games of it and see how it sits with me, but I just find myself wanting to play more C&C.

[Treebore]

I like to run about 6 sessions before I decide about an RPG. There are RPG's I am now a big fan off, but would not be if I had only given them 3 or 4 tries. Sometimes it takes that 5th or 6th session for it all to just click together, and be cool enough to keep using.

[alcyone]

Well, we are I think 4 games in now. We will need one more to finish. Right now my impressions are:

- It's fun, but mostly the world and characters are fun. They'd be fun whether we used the system or not, since we mostly try to make games we play fun, and that's not especially hard.
- I don't have anything to do but set difficulties, intrude, and make the world happen. I still don't like that much.
- NPCs are weird. Something like a henchman/retainer really doesn't work in numenera unless you stat them out and let the players run him. Why? GMs don't roll dice, and while monsters are basically one number, they don't actively roll anything. And it's nearly impossible to run monsters against monsters in Numenera. Some people have suggested ways to do it, but they aren't satisfying.
- Players don't usually do things in terms of bonuses but instead raising and lowering the difficulty level. That can be hard to grasp, and there are lots of ways to do it. They have to do this both when attacking and defending, and it turns into a bit of math calculating effort and edge and considering all applicable contributors to the difficulty. Some are up for it and some aren't depending on what kind of game they like.
- Intrusions still bug me. If you don't intrude enough no one gets XP. Paying XP to do what I do constantly in D&Dish games is sort of weird.
- It's not clear what is an intrusion and what is part of the adventure. If you like to wing it from scant notes they are one and the same. If you run a published adventure, they are almost spelled out which is which. If you are writing out a fairly complete adventure before play, it seems like you'd want to make most things part of the scenery and not planned intrusions. Hard to say.

We'll give it one more session I think.

[Treebore]

Yeah, I only own this in PDF, and I haven't felt any great need to try and play it. While it has a lot of "cool" looking stuff in it, and interesting ideas, when I read through the first 50 pages or so, nothing bout it mechanics wise grabbed me and told me I needed to give it a try. Frankly I kept thinking I like the FATE approaches much better. Plus I've never been a big fan of mixing fantasy and sci fi together so heavily. I've always wanted a greater degree of separation.

[jdizzy001]

I find this interesting. For me, to be free of dice rolls as a dm would be great. I would get to be a narrator instead of a rules lawyer. I'm glad I found this thread too because I've been reading reviews of numenera and all but 1 have been negative. The mechanics looked fascinating, what is making them so clunky? What did you like about the game? Are there any redeeming qualities? Could the system work better in a different genre?

I found the intrusion rule to be very reminiscent of mouseguard. The narrator could do similar things in that game (give checks or xp, for messing with a character).

[Arduin]

I find this interesting. For me, to be free of dice rolls as a dm would be great. I would get to be a narrator instead of a rules lawyer.

Easily done in C&C or D&D type games. Just have the players roll everything. In combat it would about double their rolls but... It WOULD free you as the GM from rolling dice.

[DMSamuel]

I have the game, but I haven't cracked it open yet. The reason is this great series of posts by Rob Donoghue, whom I consider to be one of the great RPG analysis minds of this RPG era.

Here are links to his Numenera Overview/Analysis/Review:
Numenera: The Rules
GM Intrusion: Compels and Aspects
How to Judge Numenera
Numenera Setting Stuff
Numenera Critters
Numenera Tech and Toys
GM: Using The Rules
More GM Stuff
Numenera Wrap Up
Sorry for the link bomb, but it is a great analysis of the game from one of the designers of FATE, so it's worth it if even only one of you finds it useful.


Personally, I am more interested in MCG's next game, The Strange, which I backed for the core book (and that is how I got the Numenera core too). The Strange uses the same basic mechanics as Numenera, but it has multiple worlds, so you have the option of playing straight fantasy or sci-fi + fantasy, or straight sci-fi, or somewhere in between.

I am veeeery curious to see how well the mechanics translate to a fantasy type of game.

[alcyone]

I find this interesting. For me, to be free of dice rolls as a dm would be great. I would get to be a narrator instead of a rules lawyer. I'm glad I found this thread too because I've been reading reviews of numenera and all but 1 have been negative. The mechanics looked fascinating, what is making them so clunky? What did you like about the game? Are there any redeeming qualities? Could the system work better in a different genre

I think I resent that there needs to be an explicit rule allowing me to challenge characters, that is what I do!

Things that are clunky are the players sort of negotiating their turn in terms of applying Effort and calculating their actions, there's a little min-maxing going on with that and not everyone really understood it well enough for that to go smoothly. There are also stunts a player can do to disrupt monsters, but since monsters are really mostly reactive it doesn't make any sense. It's hard to explain.

For example, a player may choose to do a special move, "bash" on an opponent. It does this:

“Your attack inflicts 1 less point of damage than normal, but dazes your target for one round, during which time the difficulty of all tasks it performs is modified by one step to its detriment.”

Well, monsters don't make rolls. So you would need to figure out how to couch this in terms of what the player can do. A player might also use the "distract" effect on a creature, which again expresses itself in terms of changing the difficulty of tasks, which makes sense when its happening to a PC, but no sense when it happens to a monster, since monsters don't really _do_ anything, they are just numbers that players roll against.

There are certainly redeeming qualities. The campaign setting is interesting (but I found it similar to Tekumel, Jorune, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World and many other interesting settings). The book looks really nice like so many of Monte's books do, and the artwork is excellent. The genre doesn't hold the system back. If you like players making rolls, the GM being someone who pays to be a thorn in the side of the characters, and having to adjudicate the weird rules I mention above, it's a fun game.

You do need to be able to sustain the weirdness. I think it's considerably harder than say, Call of Cthulhu, because EVERYTHING is supposed to be weird, yet at the same time ubiquitous. This isn't adequately explained, though if you read the supporting fiction it helps. In Metamorphosis Alpha, if someone finds a gun, you might spend a session describing it as a pointy stick with bumpy bits on the side that slide or can be pulled, with a hole in one end, until someone rolls to figure it out and shoots themselves in the knee. In Numenera you do the same thing, except it's not something familiar like a gun, it's something that happened on a world in our very distant future and in the Ninth World's distant past, so when they figure it out, it's still mysterious, you can't go "*wink*, it's a gun". It's still an incomprehensible piece of weird science fiction junk that you'll end up describing in terms of its apparent effect but not its original function. That is hard to keep up with.

The GM has to pay players to intrude. It's not clear what is an intrusion and what is your adventure sometimes. Do you put a trap in the room, or do you make the trap an intrusion? What is part of the scenery or plot and what is you messing with people? If you don't feel like being a dick, you won't intrude, and no one will get XP. That dynamic is weird.

My players mostly liked the game a lot and weren't really sure why I didn't. So that is something in its favor; it just wants the right GM.

[jdizzy001]

As a CK, don't we always "pay" to intrude? Everytime we throw a monster at the group we are intruding, and when they overcome the obstacle we give them XP. I know it is a little bit different in Numenera, but it doesn't sound too far from where one normally DM's. An example given in one of the reviews I read went like this: You set up camp for the evening and volunteer for first watch. As you spent all day trekking in the desert, you are unable to stay awake. Your character falls asleep (Here is your XP or you may spend 1 XP to stay awake).

It's a little different than we are used to from classic RPG's, but from what I have read, the game revolves more around collaborative Role playing as opposed to Roll playing.

Again, this is coming from someone who has only read reviews and has not played the game, but is interested in trying.

[alcyone]

As a CK, don't we always "pay" to intrude? Everytime we throw a monster at the group we are intruding, and when they overcome the obstacle we give them XP. I know it is a little bit different in Numenera, but it doesn't sound too far from where one normally DM's. An example given in one of the reviews I read went like this: You set up camp for the evening and volunteer for first watch. As you spent all day trekking in the desert, you are unable to stay awake. Your character falls asleep (Here is your XP or you may spend 1 XP to stay awake).

It's a little different than we are used to from classic RPG's, but from what I have read, the game revolves more around collaborative Role playing as opposed to Roll playing.

Again, this is coming from someone who has only read reviews and has not played the game, but is interested in trying.

Doesn't feel the same to me. For one thing, the player gets to veto it, it never happened.

"While you are fighting the bandits, a third pops up over the hill to snipe you with his rifle"

"Here's some xp. No he doesn't."

I find that jarring. Anyway, do play it and let us know how it went.

[jdizzy001]

I find that brilliant. What a trade off, either allow the narrator to beat you up (and award you extra XP), or slow the PC voluntarily slows their character's growth rate in order to prevent the rope they're swinging on from fraying. I will look into buying the book and trying the game.

[alcyone]

You might enjoy a lot of the more "narrativist" games out there that revolve around scene-editing, strong player control of narrative and extreme player agency.

You certainly can do that with D&D rules, despite lots of screaming to the contrary, but lots of those other games have a strong philosophy of supporting the dramatic over the random, the character arc over the story arc.

Me, I like to throw a bunch of people into a setting and see what happens to them. The setting doesn't care, the dice don't care, and the deeds of characters with the odds stacked against them who must make calculated risks become the story. Not that this sort of risk/reward isn't supported in a transactional model, but I prefer the gamble of the uncaring dice.

[Arduin]

Meh, give me the "uncaring" sandbox experience. You can't determine that the car isn't running into you down IRL and you can't determine that the orc reinforcements didn't arrive to beat your PC in my game. For me it would be like playing chess and telling my opponent that he did NOT just put my King in check, when he did. I could see my Great nephew liking that kind of game though.

[DMSamuel]

Me, I like to throw a bunch of people into a setting and see what happens to them. The setting doesn't care, the dice don't care, and the deeds of characters with the odds stacked against them who must make calculated risks become the story. Not that this sort of risk/reward isn't supported in a transactional model, but I prefer the gamble of the uncaring dice.

Meh, give me the "uncaring" sandbox experience. You can't determine that the car isn't running into you down IRL and you can't determine that the orc reinforcements didn't arrive to beat your PC in my game. For me it would be like playing chess and telling my opponent that he did NOT just put my King in check, when he did. I could see my Great nephew liking that kind of game though.

Yes, I'm with these two when it comes to my main RPGs. When I run C&C (and D&D, Traveller, Savage Worlds, and Hollow Earth Expedition, for that matter), it is the randomness of dice that adds to the game (not player narration) which causes PC reactions - which ultimately makes the story a great deal of fun for me. Because of that I find many games with a great deal of player narration feel like they are missing something for me. Not that they are bad, they just aren't my preferred style of game.

That's not to say that sort of narrativist game doesn't have it's good points. In fact, the Dresden Files RPG (a FATE based game) uses the FATE point economy brilliantly. The way that the parts of the game work together evoke the feeling of being in the Dresden Files universe - like you could write a novel about the session and it would perfectly fit within the Dresden milieu. It is quite a neat effect, and I enjoy the game, but it still isn't my preferred style.

[Treebore]

Yep, I definitely prefer the DM and the dice (pure chance) as my "adversaries". I play for the unknown and the adrenaline rush of beating the odds. Still, I do give the players some "control", which is why I implemented my Luck rules, so if they want a re-roll, or to avoid dying, they can temporarily or permanently spend their luck points.

Like my last game session, the dice royally screwed two of the players, they both rolled Nat 1's on their save, and died. They both had the option to permanently burn a luck point to be at Death's Door and stable, and both did so.

I should probably also point out that you cannot spend a Luck point to re roll a fumble. Hence, their death, and need to permanently burn a Luck Point to avoid the outcome of death.

[alcyone]

Yeah, I talk a good game but I DID take the luck point .

[jdizzy001]

Well Brethren, I picked up a copy of numernera for dirt cheap ($25!). I'll let you know how it goes for me.