Fictions & Fragments

I've realized lately that I'm doing something very different from the play examples in Cypher System books. I've been telling my players the difficulty levels of everything before they roll. I think this is because the majority of my games have been one-shots, demos and short arcs at home. But I like it! There's been little consistent growth in play, so it's been natural for me to make things really transparent for players. Here's what I mean: A player attempts a task. They describe it, saying what they want to do. I tell them the difficulty number (i.e. 5) and what they have to roll to beat it (15). We use Skills and Assets to modify the difficulty. They get the opportunity to apply Effort. Then we roll. That's how I've been running the game. I notice that the Play Examples in the book and most games I've seen keep difficulties secret. I think this is a natural thing in role-playing games but I don't know if I like the practice. It seems to...

I recently ran my first streamed Numenera game. The following are the notes I made for the session. This was a one-shot, so I focused on the scenario and how players would respond to it. I don't typically create a lot of notes for a game so I feel this is a good representation of my prep. I also feel like there are a couple things that really add to a Numenera game: XP cards and  a Cypher Deck. The XP cards make it easy and fun to trade in XP during the game, which I really like. The Cypher Deck makes the chore of generating random Cyphers painless and fun. I definitely recommend these products! The adventure notes follow with additional after-game notes made in italics. The Dangerous End Background Sallice A settlement on the edge of the Steadfast, Sallice is dangerously situated but the opportunities are too good to pass up. Recently the market for Numenera found in surrounding ruins has made Sallice a target. More raiders and abhumans are appearing, attem...

This Saturday I did my first Twitch stream of Numenera. I've been streaming D&D for about 11 months and this was my contribution to the growing energy of the Numenera 2 Kickstarter. The group that we assembled was mostly first-time Numenera players. The exception was a friend who has played Numenera twice with me before at Meetup events. It was a blast! I made myself nervous with my initial scenario, which was intended to tie into the Ellomyr narrative of the Kickstarter. As the KS campaign went forward my scenario fell out of touch with what had been unveiled. I tried a couple of revisions but knocked out my final scenario that morning in about 45 minutes. The players were amazing. They went through the Numenera Player's Guide in the days before the game and got their characters set. They developed connections between themselves and gave me a lot of detail to work with! As much as I love reading the Numenera setting, my players immediately started declaring details an...