Just a little bit Numenous.

Shanna Germain's link to the short movie STRAND, recently got my interest in Numenera fired up again. Which led to a discussion of the game with Anne & Josh.

In the course of conversation it came up that, while interest was expressed in the world and setting, certain things about the Cypher system hadn't set right with some of us.  In the subsequent days, this led me review my own laundry list of issues with what, at first glance, seems like an elegant system, but on closer inspection seems a bit kludgy.

This in turn started the brainstorm as to how to fix things. Or at least patch them up while still making them compatible with published materials I enjoy:

• Fewer Dice and Calculations - Dice rolling seems needlessly complicated (adjust difficulty with multiple factors, multiply result, then roll against?  I tried to fix this once in the old CY6HER post awhile back and took a page from that.  The d20 is removed and uses just a d6 for all rolls instead.

• Cyphers - I don't personally mind one-use items, but the idea that you can only have so many at a time seems a bit of annoying. Although I do get why they were trying to push that, and I think it works better in a clarke-tech sort of setting like Numenera where different items don't cooperate with each other, the explanation in the book seemed a little pat with mention of "radiations". I haven't gone to great lengths to fix this, but tried to simplify a little and equivocate more on what the incompatibilities represent.

• A Stat Too Few - There are three core stats: Speed, Might & Intellect. This bugs me more than it maybe should. My complaint is that one mental stat covers a lot of ground, while Speed, and especially Might are a lot narrower in scope.  This seems like it makes it too easy to pour power into all abilities even vaguely related to the mind, senses or social skill.  I broke part of this out into an optional additional stat called Intuition to cover the social and sensory side at least.

• Fiddly Character Creation - Character creation at first appears deceptively simple with it's three stats and "I am a [descriptor] [type] who does [focus]." which at first feels improvisational, until you realize very quickly that each of those bracketed words actually takes you to a set of predetermined options later on that just break up your main choices into more bits and pieces.  I went a little way toward simplifying the [descriptor] piece of this.

• Edge vs. Pool - This is more a personal issue of mind, but:  I'm okay with the idea of a Pool representing reserves of power you have to spend on things related to a stat. But I felt something like Edge, innate level of strength and competence, should play a more significant roll as well. Something to always add to rolls, instead simply lowering Pool costs.  I tried to simplify the language of how Edge and Pool are combined and clarify things, but I couldn't go as far as I'd liked in this direction while keeping the system conveniently backwards-compatible with the original game.

• Human after all - In a setting that takes place a BILLION years in the future, I thought there would be fewer recognizable humans among the player characters. So I was kind of disappointed to find not only are humans the default (you can play others, but only a couple options are provided, and not near the front of the book), but nearly all the PC-centric artwork is of humans.  I tried to remedy this by positing a section on making your own Abhumans and creating a couple other options from some of the creatures found in the core books.

• It's only a model - The ad text for the game seems to pride itself on how unknowably weird the detritus of the future would be. But certain bits of the stories and flavor, once I actually dug through the book a bit, seemed to give the impression that: No gods or true mind powers here, even if it is really wonderous and weird, it's all pretty much explicable through technology, just at an advanced level.  As an alternative, I've included a flavor option for various forms of less Clarke-style magic to exist.

• Familiarity breeds contempt - A bunch of the Numenera described seemed almost too easily identifiable.  I didn't actually try to fix this with my own work, but instead recommend using a combination of the tables in Kevin Crawford's Mandate Archive: The Dust to reskin existing cyphers and artifacts as something less immediately identifiable.

The result of all this, something I'm tentatively calling the CRYPTIC SYSTEM.