Torment: Tides of Numenera - Does NOT Use The Cypher System!

[dark_flame42]

It appears that the Cypher System (The RPG System used for Numenera) proved too difficult in development to convert to game formant so they've totally remade the entire system. As an avid player of the tabletop game of Numenera, here is some things I've observed in the game that don't match the RPG format.

1. The most glaring change is the addition of a Health Meter into the game. In the Tabletop game only NPC characters have health to represent how much damage you need to do in order to take them out. In the Tabletop game, your "Health" is more abstract, being a function of your pools as a whole. When you take damage, it goes against your pools, with reductions based on the nature of the attack. A sword to the face would inflict Might Damage, a crippling poison would do Speed damage and a mental attack would do Intellect Damage. So instead of using this system they gave player characters health like NPC's and included stat pools as a seperate feature. I suppose they did so to keep things consistant. In tabletop, the system works because the book fully agknowledges that PC's are treated compleately different to NPC's, something that might not be as acceptable for a video game.

2. The Numenera Tabletop uses a d20 system where you try and equal or exceed a target difficulty of the creature's level x3. It appears that in Torment, they've gone to a pure percentile based system with each buff roughly giving a 5% bonus to succeed. I suppose they made the change as a percentile system seemed easier to implement.

3. Weapon Damages are not consistant with the weapons you use. In the Tabletop game a Greataxe does the same damage as a Greatsword and pretty much every weapon of the same category did the same damage and had a modifer of 2, 4 or 6 depending on the class of weapon. Only artefacts, cyphers, effort or type abilities modified this. Of course this was not followed by NPC's as many non-human creatures have natural weapons and abilities that can be more or less powerful than conventional weapons. In the Torment game, weapon damage can vary quite a bit and different weapons do different levels of damage, with 14 damage the highest I've seen (For a 2 handed greataxe). As for the change, I believe that was to give some variation to the weapons rather than saying an Axe and a Sword should do the same amount of damage.

4. The way Pools, Effort and Abilities function are different. In the tabletop game, using some abilities and effort draw from the appropiate pool and the cost is reduced by edge. This of course weakened your character as those pools also influnce how much damage you can take before dying. In Torment, your pools are utterly independent from your health and while using up the pools can mean less effort later, zeroing out a pool has no adverse effects on your stats. I actually like this change as it lets you have a resource pool without penalizing your character overtly by using it.

Now I am definately on the fence about these changes. I am a great fan of the tabletop game and its system but the innovations done in Torment also are rather intiutive and deal with some glaring issues in the tabletop game version. It does make me think though. If Torment does not use the Cypher System as it was designed is there a new edition of Numenera in the works? Will the Tabletop game adopt the system designed for Torment or will future Cypher System games make use of the system developed by Monte Cook? We'll just have to wait and see I suppose.

By the way, the next game in the series should be The Strange! I'ed love to see the Chaosphere, Ardeyn, Ruk and numerous other worlds be incorporated into a video game format!

[Astral Projection]

Nice write up. Adding health separate from pools sounds like a good change.

[Coniglio Robotico]

Originally posted by Astral Projection:

Nice write up. Adding health separate from pools sounds like a good change.

I'm also a tabletop player since 2013 and it was definitely a good change. They tried to use the pools in the alpha but it was frustrating as hell, haha

[Virtia]

Re: #2, unless I'm mistaken, I've only ever seen bonuses in this come in 5% blocks. 5% difficulty stepping directly maps to a d20-based system -- it's just an aesthetic difference of how to present the same concept.

While personal preference will certainly play a factor in this, I generally find the raw percentage representation to be easier to follow as long as I'm not literally playing with dice. Still, the game is being mechanically faithful to the PRPG here.

[Death2Gnomes]

faithful? hardly. its a perversion of it. IMO, there are no usable shortcuts to game design without kneecapping the real game.

[Lyle]

I enjoy a good old Health Pool. Since there is mostly reading to be done, no need to make combat unecessary complex.

[uriele85]

If I don't remember wrong you also have one action per turn (that's either movement or attack, and the long/mid/short range is less tactic than it is in this game.... or at least is how we play The Strange).
The only glaring problem I see here is the dis junction between health and pools (something that has been noticed before). Using a D20 instead of a D100 is mostly a matter of convenience (multiply x5 your results, give a range, and voila' same probability distribution). The point is that the game doesn't have inhuman feats (skill check like the one that requires 21-30 in the boardgames), all skill check are achievable without effort or edge... theoretically (and I remember wrong, the lowest % for an action is 5%, that if you divide a D100 by 5 is 1/20, that's a crit in the Cypher system so that at least is kind of consistent).
Cypher is not a tactical war game system, is not made for miniature like a DnD or GURPS would be, so I think that they had to modify it a bit to make it "gameable" (even if it's obvious that combat is not the focus here, and a pacifist root is probably closer to the Cypher system and the best way to play the game). My real problem is the balance of the game: it's too easy to level up (compared to what happens in Cypher), no GM intervention (that means you cannot randomly fail), and in the end you can always easily have 95-100% possibility of success using edge+effort without ever running out of any resource in your pools.
And if you are a P&P player... what do you think of the fact that you identify immediately exactly what cyphers and artifacts do, and how to use them. They are supposed to be long lost tech scrapped from the previous worlds (also hoarding cyphers doesn't seem to have any significant side effect in the game, some mild malus to your overflowing pool)

(on the silly side, it's kind of fun that for how I leveled up, Rhin, a preeteen "defenseless" girl is the goon of my party, I used her always to threatened my enemies with force ALWAYS succeeding (thanks 100%)). The other thing is that 100% in this game is really an 100% chance, there is no possibility of critical failing.

[Drunk POS Evenglare]

Even though it doesn't use the exact system, I think the transition is pretty damn close in terms of how the game "works" even if the health is seperate. Im actually pretty happy with it. It makes the changes needed for a PC transition while still keeping the spirit of the game, and in a broad sense, the mechanics in tact.

[TheSeaker]

I thought the same way at first when they changed too a health bar. But, really, it doesn't make a big difference. The game still feels like Numenera to me and that's all that matters. I actually liked the way they handled damage, though. The tabletop version wouldn't have worked well in a video game.