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Numenera?
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@Jennkryst Does this mean you are starting a Numenera MU?
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring It means I am shrugging my shoulders and offering to help with the book-keeping and +job work and maybe give plot ideas to people far more capable of actually doing stuff than I.
Like, I’m still trying to climb out of the funk and RP on characters that already exist, on games that already exist, so this might help, or it might boot me back into the pit, who can say for sure?
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The more I skim over these books and like … spend actual monies on the things because the FLGS had the Bilbo Baggins Birthday sale and junk…
We got a great generic system that is entirely thematic for weird shit to happen in. You want Horizon Zero Dawn robot animals? Thematic. You want cool cybernetic stuff? Thematic. You want wilderness majik? Thematic. You want Spelljammer (thematic) that isn’t a hot mess (5e design team just dropped that ball big time)?
LETS GOOOOOO!
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst Now I want all of those things :C
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@Jennkryst said in Numenera?:
You want Spelljammer (thematic) that isn’t a hot mess (5e design team just dropped that ball big time)?begin derail
I bought the boxed set the day it came out, and I read the monster manual first because I was actually driving to the gym and glancing at pictures at stoplights is a lot easier than reading. I adored everything I was seeing! It got me so jazzed!
Then I read the player’s guide and was so let down because it gave me nothing to work with to understand the setting.
hopefully end derail
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@Jennkryst said in Numenera?:
The more I skim over these books and like … spend actual monies on the things because the FLGS had the Bilbo Baggins Birthday sale and junk…
We got a great generic system that is entirely thematic for weird shit to happen in. You want Horizon Zero Dawn robot animals? Thematic. You want cool cybernetic stuff? Thematic. You want wilderness majik? Thematic. You want Spelljammer (thematic) that isn’t a hot mess (5e design team just dropped that ball big time)?
LETS GOOOOOO!
The Cypher System is suuuuper underrated. I got to go to a panel featuring Monte Cook when Numenera was still being kickstarted, and it was neat to see him talk about the design behind it. Numenera (and the Cypher System) is basically what we would have gotten in the d20 system if WoTC had told him and the design team, from the get go, to design a generic “Catch All” system instead of to design 3e D&D.
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@GF I understand the setting because I was a huge AD&D spelljammer nerd. They did a great job with new monsters and changing the Phlogiston (interstellar space outside of each solar system was basically hyper explosive fog) to Astral space.
They also provide 0 rules for making new solar systems beyond ‘lol, just make it up yourself’, or ways to have ship to ship combat beyond ‘fly up next to eachother and board the other ship’. Meanwhile half the pages in the book are just ship stats and deck plans, which… why are there stats when youre just going to board? It’s space where a whole bunch of actual rules could have been put, but that would have been helpful, here, buy other books to kitbash rules from, or pay other creators on D&D Beyond to do it for us, kthxbai.
ITS ANNOYING, and worthy of a short derail.
Anywho.
Given Numenera is all about DISCOVERY and EXPLORATION and like… mushes tend to be static places like a single city or area where players will invest their stuff. If it’s a city, people are going to go on longer and longer journeys as they have to explore farther and farther away. So now you’re handwaving travel time. Or maybe you pull a Battlestar game and set them on a moving city or something. Or teleport shenanigans. Or any number of things.
Just. If it is a static location, you got the possibility of multiple groups going into the same ruins again and again. Or make up reasons why they can’t. Or something.
Like, I got ideas on how to make the things work and plot seeds to throw out! I’m just also dealing with the no-rp energy funk that NewGame will obviously be the cure for, right?
RIGHT?!?
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst Once upon a time, I wanted to make a fantasy archeology MU*, with shades of Annihilation and thought about the same problem, in that people tend to blow through content at a very high rate of speed. (See also Arx trying to keep up with people’s hunger for clues).
Keeping exploration hunger fueled is a big issue. It might be a place to look towards coding and procedural generation to some degree. Say, a ruin that has a shifting, changing interior backed up with a bit of code, where every time a new group goes in, they get a room that throws some ideas and potential cyphers at them to use, then saves that room and displays it to GMs on command to decide if it’s got some fun hooks for an ongoing plot, or remains a one-off.
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@Pyrephox Yeah, you can delve deeper, return with keys or new cyphers to unlock secrets like a Zelda Dungeon, come back with a MASTER OF MAGNETISM to learn about hidden switches (or other rooms linked thematically to different focuses), venture through the Datasphere… tons of things.
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I have dm’d numenera a dozen times for different groups at cons and in the group of friends. I have never once gotten bad feedback on the setting. Because it alllll works. It lets you be free. Awesome setting and execution for what it is trying to do.
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@Jennkryst What you need is a static starting area… say 16 rooms of grid that represent the starting village. The rest of the grid is generated as the world is explored by the people playing Discovery characters while the village is expanded and upgraded into a bustling city by the Destiny characters. Maybe have some major plots baked into uncovering certain grid squares, but the majority of them are randomly generated or otherwise minor spaces in the world. That’s just what I came up with thinking about it for a few minutes.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring Yeah. Past a certain point, you’ve explored all the local area, though. At a point it takes people longer and longer to go explore, and if they are gone for a month, are timestopped from being in the city.
Which… admittedly, could reasonably take longer than the mush exists. But it is a thing! Or we get some Destiny people to build FastTravel points!
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst said in Numenera?:
Which… admittedly, could reasonably take longer than the mush exists. But it is a thing! Or we get some Destiny people to build FastTravel points!
And also gives people a reason to rotate through their alts. Player 1 Character A is going to be gone on a long trip, possibly never to return, so they start playing Character B while the timer counts down.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring On the one hand, some folks won’t alt. On the other hand, I just had the realization that if the ruins are close enough, there could be multiple single-scene excursions into it, so you don’t have to get the same group on again and again and again.
Which… does feel a bit more like a revolving door, and means that people might get hurt and just not press on. Everyone will always be at 100%.
Still. Bunch of ideas that can be worked with.
Edit to add: what if we Stargate Atlantis it, and make the whole damn city a ruin to explore?
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst Could just pull from SG-1 and Atlantis and make it where there’s a ruin to rebuild into a city and a weird teleportation system that takes players to and from ruins, and then also if some players want to do the whole “we’re traveling through the wilderness a long distance because we want road trip adventures” they can do that too, and maybe end up in some of the same places with teleport access.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring Make the fast travel to take investment/effort to build and maintain… possibly a resource to use. Maybe even XP since there will be a theoretical cap to how much can be spent on stuff character advancement.
I’m just randomly spitballing ideas here, no thought has been put into making this actually work on paper, let alone in practice.
Edit to add: and given that there is a tier 5 teleport for Nanos, and a number of Teleport artefacts/cyphers, the real trick is going to be figuring out how to balance stockpiling of equipment.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
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@Jennkryst said in Numenera?:
Edit to add: and given that there is a tier 5 teleport for Nanos, and a number of Teleport artefacts/cyphers, the real trick is going to be figuring out how to balance stockpiling of equipment.
My thoughts on this:
- Ensure that the depletion mechanic for Artifacts (at least the ones that have depletion) is always checked, perhaps even by automating it in the code.
- Have very thorough guidelines for awarding cyphers to players, so that while people may horde them, they aren’t gaining just piles and piles of them week to week.
- Possibly house rule that the Cypher limit applies to owned cyphers. A Tier 5 Nano can only own 5 Cyphers total. They may lose or use some, and gain others in the future, but can only own whatever their limit is. If they’re at their limit and discover a new one, they can decide whether to dispose of one and take the new one after its been identified.
- I’m honestly not sure how I’d work in the Destiny crafting system to this, as I haven’t played with the Destiny side of Numenera yet.
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I’d reward people somehow for using cyphers in the same scene that they get them. Cyphers have always been the hardest part of Numenera in actual play - it goes against every hoarding instinct players have, and it’s hard for GMs to come up with a steady flow of interesting, useful one-shot objects to keep tossing out there.
This would definitely be where I’d use code+crowdsourcing - encourage everyone to put potential cyphers in a database that GMs can then either consciously pick from or just roll and get granted a few randomly. If you want to be SUPER cool, you could even set something up that would create random items under some parameters.
And then, of course, reward people for using them almost immediately.
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Given that people can go to a merchant and buy specific cyphers (maybe another option for excess XP, making sure that the inventory is in stock), they could easily have like… a standard load out, or whatever. When they are in the field or in a plot, of course, they wont have time to run and find an NPC to buy replacements from.
I need to look into Destiny, too. Need to figure out why BadStuff
doesn’t happen to merchants for having too many cyphers at a time. -
Turnover of Cyphers in your pool is just part of the flow of the game. Also, between the core book and various supplements, there are already hundreds of cyphers to use, in addition to several sets of charts for randomly generating new ones, and assuming the game includes Destiny, crafting them.
As far as NPCs and Cyphers go, I believe that’s purely up to the GM.
I think with proper staff oversight and a tiny bit of incentive, Cyphers aren’t that big of a deal.
