Minor game stuff from around the web for commentary...

[Longes]

Further, all previous arguments about the status of solars compared to other exalts is pointless because using the game as written there is nothing in the game that is challenging to a competently built dragon blood much less any of the celestial exalts.

A dragonblood, no matter how competent he is, can not solve the problem of Wyld devouring the world. And neither can Sidereals nor Lunars. Only Solars have Wyld-Shaping. A dragonblood can't cure the death plague, because only solar magic can do that. A dragonblood can't remove deathfields, because that's Solar Circle Sorcery.

[Username17]

I ran a game of exalted with 3 permanent members and 3 floating members for 18 months when I was getting my undergrad. There is no game here. The storyteller has to rewrite the whole game to even make it a game.

Pretty much this exactly. Like Scion, Exalted isn't so much a game as a pitch for a game followed by a lot of shovelware text that doesn't actually go anywhere because it wasn't really designed. Like Scion, the pitch is kinda cool. Only instead of "you play the half-mortal children of public domain deities who use their newfound powers to fight Titanspawn" it's "Basically D&D, but it starts high-powered and everyone has an explicit powersource so no one calls bullshit if the Fighter is able to control the weather, chop a dragon in half, or jump up to a cloud castle."

And let's be honest: both of those are pretty cool pitches, which is pretty much the entirety of why people keep bashing their faces against the wall trying to make these "games" work. But in neither case is there an actual game. Scion doesn't even have an action resolution system, just a combat system that is clunky and also broken. Exalted has a bit more than that, but is in many ways even less usable because it doesn't take place on a world that's "basically Earth" so you can't even really just go freeform and have the effects of actions kindof work out. Characters are supposed to do big, world affecting actions, but despite the insane wordcount the world is not fleshed out enough to do that. Even if the rules were coherent enough to tell you how many people you could win over to your side through your valorous deeds and friendship speeches, the demographics aren't written down anywhere to tell you whether any particular number of followers constitutes regional acclamation or not.

I genuinely would like to play D&D where everyone had power sources so the warrior types got to break through the VAH ceiling and we went straight to the dragon fighting, kingdom conquest, and nation building. But Exalted isn't that. It's just a pitch for that. To actually have a game of that, someone would have to write it.

And so people ask "If Exalted is so fucked, why does it still have fans?" And the answer of course is that it basically doesn't. Exalted books aren't published or put in stores, literally all of OPP's presence is online. The few miserable souls who rant about Exalted online aren't the online presence of a community that gets together on weekends to play and mostly eschews online message boards - that's all of them. Since its announcement several years back, 4,368 people backed Exalted 3. A lot of them were hoping that they'd finally "get it right" and fulfill the promise of the cool sounding pitch that the previous editions failed on. And of course, they were disappointed. But that is not a lot of people. Remember that 4th edition D&D was closed for lack of interest because they only sold hundreds of thousands of books. Runner Havens for SR4 was considered a failure because it took several years to sell through its initial print run of thirty thousand books. This is the "core book" for a "new edition" of a known title, and that's all the hope and interest it got.

-Username17

[fectin]

Numenara got 4,658 backers.

[Longes]

Numenara got 4,658 backers.

And where's Numenera now?

[ishy]

Well they are currently on kickstarter asking people to fund a numenera movie

And the torment numenera RPG almost had 75k backers.

[Longes]

And the torment numenera RPG almost had 75k backers.

That's mostly because it is made by inXile and markets itself as "Planescape: Torment" spiritual successor.

[erik]

Numenera lost me when they resorted to a billion years to explain a whopping 8 societal collapses. And people still look like white people apparently and speak early 21st century American English of course.

That alone made me feel like a sub-tweenager was consulted for the fluff and turned me right off. That detail is probably not important at all but just as a Snickers still in its wrapper may be delicious and edible, I don't want to touch it if the wrapper is covered in poop.

That and for my sci-fantasy game I dabble on I wanted to use the word Numen to describe fury-like entities akin to the Calderon series. Now it feels tainted by association.

[DSMatticus]

And people still look like white people apparently and speak early 21st century American English of course.

Could you elaborate on these? Because they sound like crazy person complaints, especially the second one. Fuck, Game of Thrones is 21st century American English minus overtly modern expressions plus some ye olde terminology for shit. If you are creating media intended for consumption by an early 21st century American English audience, you're going to write the dialogue in early 21st century American English. And sure, "everyone is white people" is weird and dumb, but it's also an almost ubiquitous standard so it's a difficult thing to claim as a deal-breaker.

[erik]

I don't know for a fact that their language is English or are just presented as such for convenience. So I'm probably being overly harsh on that.

It's mostly just that 1 billion years is a mind-boggling amount of time and it offends me that they're anything remotely familiar like humans in the art that I've seen from an admittedly small sample size. My complaint about caucasian representations is just a personal desire for more diverse ethnic representations in gaming art and if ever there is call for it then its in a species set so far into the future that it isn't even fathomable.

Ultimately all my complaints are rooted in the Billion years. That's long enough for single-celled organisms to evolve into people godammit. Numenera should be the adventures of our evolved gut flora.

[edit: googling got me results more like ~2 billion years to go from single celled organisms to man, but fucking still. Still. A billion years?]

[Longes]

My main complaints with Numenera are thus:

1. Core mechanic is shit. It is shit in many ways, but the most basic is that you spend HP on doing special actions. Glaives spend physical HP, Nanos spent mental HP, Jacks spend all three kinds of HP. 90% of the monsters and traps deal damage to your physical HP.
2. Nanos rule, Glaives drool. Top tier Nano can teleport at will, summon storms and (literally) turn rivers. Top tier Glaive can make two attacks per turn.
3. For the game that wouldn't shut up about how exploration driven it is, most abilities are purely for combat. In fact, Nanos are the only one who have non-combat abilities.
4. The setting is a generic fantasy with futuristic skin. You still wear chainmail, only now it's made out of bottlecaps. You still go into dungeons with your trusty sword, only now sword is made out of titanium and orcs are mutated humans from the previous eras.

[Korwin]

and speak early 21st century American English of course.

You want to learn a new language to play the game?

[tussock]

A billion years is another two supercontinents come and gone, with the second rather likely to not be gone because it'll probably cause a runaway greenhouse where earth loses the surface water, nearly all life, and also stops the internal magma currents and finally locks the surface. Which is to say, Mars.

But lets say that's still another cycle away, because we want to play there. Humans, give or take, are a million years separated from Chimps. Evolution never stops, random mutations are constant and speciation happens even without physical barriers. Realistically, we're going to split into new species at least every couple hundred thousand years.

1,000,000,000 years
200,000 years per major speciation step (10k generations).
5,000 species of post-humans between us and them.

It's not that they look like white people, it's that they look like people at all. Hell, it's that they're descended from us rather than any other random species that happened to survive the 3d4-3 giant space rocks that kill everything bigger than a chicken between now and then.

Maybe they just got the date wrong, stopped clock. Maybe it's a billion days, that's 3 million years, 30 great ice age cycles, 15 post-human link species. That gets you a bunch of possible species for the caves, including some semi-aquatic ones. There's still no real reason to have them look much like us though, particularly for hairlines and trivialities like the nose, ears, and major skin creases.

And it's cool, because the continents would all be close enough to the same positions, but most of the mountain ranges have to be rebuilt from scratch, so all the rivers and lakes and forests and deserts are in different places, so you can draw whatever you want as a map and still be familiar. But eh, that would've required Monte to look stuff up rather than just pull a big number out of his ass.

[Concise Locket]

That contemporary humans exist on Earth and only have about 500-800 years of history is the central thematic mystery of Numenera's setting. This is literally stated in the core book. The book also states that English is not spoken in the setting but English words have been used by the authors for ease of understanding.

Nothing else from the 21st century has survived. There are animals that serve the purpose of companion animals and beasts of burden but they are also nothing like dogs, cats and horses.

[erik]

That's better than I was giving them credit for and I think the 500-800 year bit is much needed in their setting pitch.

[tussock]

Isn't that the opposite problem? By the time we had steel swords and armour there was 5,000 year old pyramids and ziggurats and undercities that had been rebuilt over several times by then. No one could read the oldest inscriptions any more, but they were there. There's even older stuff out under the oceans, from the last ice age when they were lower.

OK, obviously they've time-travelled into the future. Went on a space journey and came back again, all near the speed of light, went a bit far and now it's another few centuries since they dismantled everything for raw materials and no one knows anything. Fine. Big mystery.

[Blicero]

Genuine question: What did you see that made you assume that English is spoken in the Numenera setting? Or do you just think that for every setting that features or is centered around Earth? Would you prefer that "The dialog in this book is written in English, but the characters in it are not actually speaking English because they live in the far future" be written in big letters on the cover of every Dying Earth, Viriconium, Book of the New Sun, Warhammer 40k, Battletech, etc. book in existence?

[erik]

Genuine question: What did you see that made you assume that English is spoken in the Numenera setting?

A total disdain for the author following the notion that humans are still humans 1 billion years later led me to assume the worst.

I'm happy to have been proven wrong here.

[Dogbert]

Will you people stop talking about Numenera as if the game intended in the least to be Science Fiction?

Tip: It's not. So please stop trying to make sense of it.

Numenera was just Monte's attempt at playing Moebius/Rene Laleaux/whoever authored Panzer Dragoon. It's Euro fantasy, period. When he started writing it, he was angry at WotC and d&d and its fandom, so he tried his hand at something that was as far away from d&d and everything it stands for as possible.

...and he failed, miserably.

Monte has lived all of his career in the d&d bubble and it's all he knows, the programming runs so deep in his brain it's hardcoded in his cerebellum by now, so "like d&d but better" is as far as he'll ever be able to distance himself from d&d; in Numenera's case, it's "Gumshoe does d&d" (and let me tell you, Ashen Stars does an infinitely better job than Numenera at the "get rich" minigame and feels a lot less anti-player even when Ashen Stars is pretty much a "screenplay simulator").

[ishy]

Numenera was just Monte's attempt at playing Moebius/Rene Laleaux/whoever authored Panzer Dragoon. It's Euro fantasy, period. When he started writing it, he was angry at WotC and d&d and its fandom, so he tried his hand at something that was as far away from d&d and everything it stands for as possible.

...and he failed, miserably.

First post in this thread seems relevant:

"Now the people who'd say this are awful."

Exactly. This is the sort of second guessing, look out of lawyers and loopholes kind of design I just don't want to do anymore. The epiphany actually came to me in the middle of a panel at a convention. Someone was asking a bullshitty question about some crazy loophole that no one I'd ever let in a game would consider and I said, "I don't want to design games for assholes anymore." It was supposed to be one of the defining hallmarks of 5e, but I don't know if that happened. But it is basically where the philosphy for the Numenera rules came from.

"I don't want to design games for assholes anymore."
...and it failed, miserably.

[Dogbert]

"I don't want to design games for assholes anymore."
...and it failed, miserably.

All assholes in the hobby raise hand!

[Longes]

"Story" games, like *World were getting popular, and Monty wanted on some of that action.

[Concise Locket]

I've played and run story games. I'm playing in a Numenera campaign now. It's not a story game. It uses a very abstracted combat system, though the option for miniature combat is available in the rules and my group uses them, but its basic D&D pedigree would be apparent even if it wasn't written by Monte Cook.

Nanos/Wizards do more "interesting" things but equally tiered glaives/fighters consistently deal more damage. As our jack/thief player is more invested in texting on her cell phone than playing I haven't fully experienced what they can do. At some point after 1st tier they can pick a skill or ability prior to encounter and use it as if they were trained.

[Ferret]

Jacks are basically "As much Glaive or Nano as you want to be, a level or two after the Glaive or Nano does the thing." I've only been through the rules once, and it was a while ago, but I don't recall seeing anything that Glaives or Nanos can do that Jacks can't eventually also do. There's just an opportunity cost in that you bought a Nano skill instead of the glaive skill you were eligible for.

Basically you pick up the Glaive surviveability skills early, then go all-in Nano.

[Longes]

TIL that Shadowrun 5 doesn't have, and will never have rules for nanoware. Nanoware is now evil, and if you get some, AIs come and possess you.

[Orion]

Exalted is a point buy game. The unique abilities for each solar caste are super underwhelming. You get as many cross-caste skill picks as you get caste skills, but because all of your cross-caste picks will be good, while several of your caste skill will be shit, generally more than half of your charms will be out of caste. Potentially much more than half, since some castes don't actually get the charms they need for their concepts. Solar creation is like playing Champions or something. It's totally absurd to compare it to 4th edition. A 4th edition character class has 4 starting powers. 4! And you get two of them. When each character class only supports two distinct characters, of course people are going to cry out for more classes. Exalted is a dumpster dive from day one, and nobody ever complained that there weren't enough charms to read through. That was the opposite of the problem.