Is anyone else having a hard time finding some place to sleep? Early on I pissed off the Cult of the Changing God, and they rescinded their offer to let me bed down and I haven’t found any place else.
I wonder if it’s all dialogue-driven and I’ve just been making the wrong choices.
I wonder if it’s all dialogue-driven and I’ve just been making the wrong choices.
I suspect it is, and half the fun or frustration will be working out the dialogue trees.
I just had a fascinating conversation with the Genocide, and got an offer to help rescue Ris…
spoiler
if the offer had come from someone more innocent, instead of complicit in the crime Ris is being judged for, I would have helped, but that retired Captain just felt…icky…so I am going to let Ris die.
There’s an inn in Caravanserai.
I really think I will have to play PS:T after this, I only put in about 10h once, begrudgingly even. I didn’t care (and still don’t) for AD&D and back then I also preferred games like BG2 when it comes to combat:talking ratio. But I haven’t been so completely enthralled with the main quest and the world in general in a loooong time. Based on what I’ve read the two games have similar themes so PS:T should be a treat once I get to it.
There’s an inn in the Caravanserai.
The game system in Tides of Numenera is interesting, I was just thinking myself that I need to find an inn as I’m a Nano and only have one Intellect point left in my pool. But then I released because I used a consumable and leveled up my Intellect Edge, I actually can’t even use that last point of Intellect until I increase my Effort.
Which feels completely unlike any cRPG I remember playing.
I remain pretty thoroughly on the record as disliking the Numenera game system (technically called the Cypher System) in terms of its core mechanic, but the peripheral stuff, like phrase-based character creation (man do I love that! It’s a more gamified version of Fate’s aspects and I think it’s fab) and worldbuilding are so good I am onboard for the digital game, at least. But the whole spending pools pre-roll for potentially no effect really bugs me a lot. I hate “do-nothing” turns in RPGs in general, but “spend important resources and then do nothing anyway” turns are much worse, IMO.
Give me something like 13th Age or Dungeon World, where even failures progress the combat/situation forward in meaningful ways (yes, I know that the Crisis system will be doing some fun things with failures, but as far as I can tell, in combat, it’s totally possible to just have a turn of “well I guess you missed so sorry” which bites when you’re throwing character resources at the roll).
What’s wrong with the Cypher system? In the game they are essentially consumables - pretty powerful too, considering the sparseness of combat encounters.
As for Effort, I love it. One of the more original systems I’ve seen in RPGs lately. I too wish the checks were a little more strict though, like in Age of Decadence for example. In tabletop you have to eat the loss but in the game you can just abuse the quick load.
Quick impressions:
Pro
Con
Sorry, the digital game here is affecting my terminology use. The base game system the Numenera tabletop game runs off of is called the Cypher System, and Torment is a digital adaptation of many of its rules (including cyphers, the little bits of consumable, uh, well, numenera that you can use for buffs. Man, Monte Cook Games, does every fuckin’ word in your game need to have two meanings??).
So when I say I dislike the Cyper System’s core mechanic, I’m specifically talking about the Effort pool management feature that you like and @Telefrog dislikes.
Spending resources upfront for failable rolls (esp. since spending enough to guarantee success will run through your resources too quickly to be viable) bugs me a lot. Failing rolls is a natural part of RPGs, and sometimes there’s even a risk-reward of trying a really big, awesome power that’s less accurate or whatever. . . but affecting your short-term viability by depleting difficult-to-reacquire-mid-combat resources in a “gamble” scenario really just irks me. I know. It’s a bit of a pet peeve for me.
I think the idea is that they are the limited resource you have to manage through the adventure, and force you to camp up to restore them. I don’t have a problem with that idea (which seems pretty common to me in RPGs). Also there’s no reason that a failed roll can not advance the story in some way. I like the system, but I’m not that familiar with other modern RPG systems.
It doesn’t even make any sense really. I’m talking to someone and I try to persuade him to give me his keys. I have to spend 2 points of intelligence to get him to hand them over. What? And for some reason that’s depleted my intelligence pool until I sleep or spray a recovery mist on my face. WTF?
You are expending Intellectual Effort to persuade him, the harder you try, the more mentally drained you are.
It makes total sense to me. You put in some effort to convince someone, in this case mental effort. After the deed is done you’re left mentally drained and cranky so when it’s time to convince someone else you just don’t feel like doing it (= not enough stat points in the pool) or you look for alternate measures, like strangling the information out of him :^).
Sorry, I really hate to drag the whole thread down with another in-depth examination of my personal issues with the direction Cook took in Numenera, The Strange, etc., but :)
Limited resources don’t really bother me at all. Fate points in Fate Core, Action Points in D&D 4th Ed, etc., are all awesome limited resource systems. Hell, even the classic Vancian Magic system in D&D and all its many imitators, where your wizards only get so many spell slots each day.
My issue is specifically the way that you spend resources before the roll in the Cyper System used by Torment. And that doing so can still lead to failure, unless you’re spending so much that you’ll quickly run out. That’s not a kind of risk-reward I, personally, enjoy. I find the idea of rolling, failing, and cashing in resources to push past the failure much more satisfying, frankly–a “get out of jail free” card, of sorts (which is how the Fate Points I mentioned before work).
I love when failure leads to interesting results, and in the tabletop game, the Cyper System encourages that, and it’s my understanding that the Crisis system here in Torment does so very often. But particularly combat, the idea of blowing a lot of Effort on a strike, then having it fail and having my turn amount to “sit there and look sad” just feels annoying.
That sounds like any other ‘x uses per rest ability’ in RPGs.
Sorry. That still doesn’t make any sense. Working my brain isn’t like hauling bricks or lifting sheet metal. I pitch proposals and have meetings as part of my job, and I’ve never had one or two encounters that by themselves completely drained my ability to talk to other people.
Without something in place like this, wouldn’t combat be too easy? The combat encounters I’ve had haven’t been very hard, and I’ve missed on and off and one of my party members is pretty much completely useless in a fight, to boot.
I mean, even in DnD you can just miss with your attack or you spell could be saved against. That seems like the same thing here. And with “Edge” you can have permanent bonuses to those types of rolls (right now I have a guy in my party that when using a medium melee weapon starts with two free might points on his attack rolls, and his default chance to hit is often 100% without spending any points at all).
My main character already has 14 points in his INT pool, and two points of Edge now as well, so I’m rarely low on INT like I was early on. It could be a problem that fixes itself as the game progresses and you grow in power?
That’s mostly a balance question, but Numenera’s not a game (talking tabletop here, again; I’m very early in the digital game) designed to just kill characters willy nilly in dungeon crawls. Combat should certain drain resources; I just prefer systems that do it post-hoc as compared to a-priori.
Specifically, I’m talking about the potential loss of Effort prior to the fail. With a generic failed attack in DnD, you just blow your turn. Here, you potentially blow your turn and resources, and the resources are gone before you even know you’ve failed. The saved-against spell is a better comparison, due to the use of spell-slots-as-resource in Vancian Magic (but then again, “classic” or not, I kinda hate Vancian casting for exactly this same reason).
This, too, is a balance question. Some might argue that “proper GMing” will scale encounter difficulties to keep the pressure on even high-Edge characters (particularly when they’re faced with challenges they’re not highly skilled in).
Not in the real world, but at the level of abstraction that Numenera works, it makes some sense.
Must be nice.
The problem with the effort system is not the cost at low level, but the lack of cost at high level. Once you get 3 or 4 edges, the average skill check yields 100% success for 0 cost. So the tests become irrelevant. It’s not very well balanced because you can generally choose anyone in the party for any test, and naturally characters will tend to accumulate edges in their specialties.