Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Pre-Release Thread [ALPHA RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[7/10]

I'll take shit graphics over a mediocre nostalgia cashgrab anyday, thank you very much. Though something tells me I'll get both.

 

[prodigydancer]

There is no reason to believe that Torment's Crisis System will be anything like this.

Well, if it'll be some kind of initiative-based act-or-skip-turn, it'll be a downer. Such primitive systems may somewhat work for games like WL2 or SRR but in D:OS initiative felt awkward and tactically limiting.

 

[Infinitron]

Hey people just reminding you that Torment is a thing: http://tormentrpg.tumblr.com/post/121115558750/adam-answers-fan-questions

Adam Answers Fan Questions
Adam Heine has been active on our forums and his own personal web site recently, answering some questions from our fans.

First up, he answers questions on the game’s user interface, and some of the game’s puzzles and challenges:

Spoiler

Alessandro Gambino has two questions today:

a couple of questions that arose directly from my playthrough of Pillars of Eternity.

First question: As far I remember, in Torment we will have separate inventory screens for each character, won’t we? And if so, any hope you guys are reconsidering this part of the GUI?

I’m not sure where I might have mentioned separate inventory screens. If I did, it was either very early in design or else a mistake. Our inventory design is based on Pillars of Eternity’s – partially because we had just gotten their codebase at that time (so we could see how they were doing things) and partially because a single inventory screen for the entire party is just a good idea.

Additionally, as you mentioned in the full text of your question, Alessandro, TTON’s weapon sets will be representative, so a single weapon can be used in multiple weapon sets. See this update for more info on that.

My second question: in a another KS update you wrote (quote): “For us, a “puzzle” isn’t an attempt to divine the will of the designer, but rather an obstacle with multiple solutions involving various Difficult Tasks and their applicable Effort and skills”.

Does this mean that Torment won’t have any puzzle/problem with not-so-obvious solution? Which is to say: Will the puzzle-solving elements of the original game be dropped in favor of the effort management of the new one (please don’t do that. If you are not 100% convinced, I can send you my boxed copies of all Quest for Glory games, as a reminder of how you can have puzzles that feel like real puzzles even if they can be solved in multiple ways according to your character skills :D)?

I can see how your concern might arise from my quote. Rest assured that PST is our primary example in terms of how conversations are designed. “Puzzles” in TTON will take many forms. Simple ones might require one of a couple of Difficult Tasks, but many more will require you to talk to people and pay attention to your surroundings (or at the very least, they will be made much easier by doing so).

What we won’t do is, for example, require the player to decipher an elaborate and unique sequence of actions to collect an item they don’t even know they need. We also don’t want the player to get stuck because they missed some foozle or failed the wrong Task. We are trying to emulate a tabletop RPG session more than a graphic adventure, and that means doing the best we can to anticipate what things players will want to try, and implementing what might happen for each one.

Next, he also posted recently on our forums, speaking on item design:

Eschwenke, I’m glad you came to the forums with this question, because I understand it better than when you asked me on Twitter (sorry about that; Twitter isn’t always the best for in-depth discussion ).

Re: Oddities. Some Oddities will have a gameplay use, though usually not anything that the Oddity might have originally been meant for. More like situations where you might find, say, an egg the size of an ostrich egg but that perpetually sticks to everything it touches. It’s a pretty typical, inutile Numenera oddity. But then you find a hole just slightly smaller than the egg and you want to plug it up, and suddenly the egg has a use.

Unfortunately, we can’t do this everywhere with everything, not without running too hard into the adventure game problem of (1) hey why can’t I use this thing in *that* situation too? or (2) how the heck was I supposed to know I needed a fake mustache to disguise myself as the guy without a mustache? BUT it is something we’d like to do where possible because it is so very Numenera.

Re: puzzles. So far as I know, Bard’s Tale puzzle design is completely independent of Torment. (I say “so far as I know” because I’m not involved in BT4’s design). The puzzle aspects of TTON’s crafting system are kind of secondary to crafting itself. You attach a component to a sword because you want to do extra fire damage (say), but because of what the sword and the fire component are made of or how they work, they have different side effects – maybe good, maybe bad. Try the same fire component on different weapons, and you’ll get different side effects. Eventually you can figure out what’s interacting with what, but it will take some experimentation (or skill training).​

 

[Atchodas]

Pilltards given as reference way to much when they talk about TToN , has me worried ...

 

[Zombra]

There is no reason to believe that Torment's Crisis System will be anything like this.

Well, if it'll be some kind of initiative-based act-or-skip-turn, it'll be a downer. Such primitive systems may somewhat work for games like WL2 or SRR but in D:OS initiative felt awkward and tactically limiting.

I am quietly confident that the Crisis System will be super fun, though I have nothing to back that up with. Despite what ArchAngel said, we don't really know anything about how it will play except it will be turn-based in some form and not realtime. As I recall, crises will usually have multiple resolutions, meaning you don't have to kill your way through them. So it will be less bog-standard TB combat and more something entirely new. I'm sure however it turns out, it will be interesting, and even if it sucks, there's not going to be that much combat in the game anyway.

 

[ArchAngel]

There is no reason to believe that Torment's Crisis System will be anything like this.

Well, if it'll be some kind of initiative-based act-or-skip-turn, it'll be a downer. Such primitive systems may somewhat work for games like WL2 or SRR but in D:OS initiative felt awkward and tactically limiting.

I am quietly confident that the Crisis System will be super fun, though I have nothing to back that up with. Despite what ArchAngel said, we don't really know anything about how it will play except it will be turn-based in some form and not realtime. As I recall, crises will usually have multiple resolutions, meaning you don't have to kill your way through them. So it will be less bog-standard TB combat and more something entirely new. I'm sure however it turns out, it will be interesting, and even if it sucks, there's not going to be that much combat in the game anyway.

They said multiple times they will try to keep true to original rules and when they describe systems it is almost 1:1 with PnP rules (there were some small changes in some "class" abilities" and how effort works during combat), there is no reason why TB system will not be the same.
Crisis options by my guess will just be using your skills on interactable items during combat (or maybe they split your party and you have to survive with one half while other half does something else).

 

[Zombra]

There is no reason to believe that Torment's Crisis System will be anything like this.

Well, if it'll be some kind of initiative-based act-or-skip-turn, it'll be a downer. Such primitive systems may somewhat work for games like WL2 or SRR but in D:OS initiative felt awkward and tactically limiting.

I am quietly confident that the Crisis System will be super fun, though I have nothing to back that up with. Despite what ArchAngel said, we don't really know anything about how it will play except it will be turn-based in some form and not realtime. As I recall, crises will usually have multiple resolutions, meaning you don't have to kill your way through them. So it will be less bog-standard TB combat and more something entirely new. I'm sure however it turns out, it will be interesting, and even if it sucks, there's not going to be that much combat in the game anyway.

They said multiple times they will try to keep true to original rules and when they describe systems it is almost 1:1 with PnP rules (there were some small changes in some "class" abilities" and how effort works during combat), there is no reason why TB system will not be the same.
Crisis options by my guess will just be using your skills on interactable items during combat (or maybe they split your party and you have to survive with one half while other half does something else).

Interesting, I didn't see any of those comments but you may be right.

 

[tuluse]

That's because ArchAngel is wrong. They specifically stated combat was something that needed much more detailed rules than the pnp game has.

 

[ArchAngel]

That's because ArchAngel is wrong. They specifically stated combat was something that needed much more detailed rules than the pnp game has.

No. They said some "class" abilities are passive in PnP while here they will be active skills (and they described Who carries a Quiver as an example). Those are very small changes. And they described how effort will give its bonus vs all attacks in one round when in PnP it defends vs only one. No other changes were mentioned. And I am 100% sure they said they want to be true to PnP rules as much as they can.

 

[tuluse]

No. They said some "class" abilities are passive in PnP while here they will be active skills (and they described Who carries a Quiver as an example). Those are very small changes. And they described how effort will give its bonus vs all attacks in one round when in PnP it defends vs only one. No other changes were mentioned. And I am 100% sure they said they want to be true to PnP rules as much as they can.

I'm not going to search everything to find the quote, but Numera has a very very simple combat system. I mean just implementing a grid is already something that's not in pnp book.

Second of all, they had a vote to do real time combat. Is that in the pnp book?

 

[ArchAngel]

No. They said some "class" abilities are passive in PnP while here they will be active skills (and they described Who carries a Quiver as an example). Those are very small changes. And they described how effort will give its bonus vs all attacks in one round when in PnP it defends vs only one. No other changes were mentioned. And I am 100% sure they said they want to be true to PnP rules as much as they can.

I'm not going to search everything to find the quote, but Numera has a very very simple combat system. I mean just implementing a grid is already something that's not in pnp book.

Second of all, they had a vote to do real time combat. Is that in the pnp book?

Numenera. And not that simple. Only difference from D&D is there is no flanking. Grid can be easily used as each movement option has a specific value in feet. Immediate move = up to 10 feet, Short move = between 10 and 50 feet, long move = between 50 and 100 feet. The PnP system only says that it is not important to say the enemy is 65 feet away or 85 feet away as long as you need a long move to get to him. All ranges of skills and spells are then defined by immediate, short or long. It makes learning things simple but combat of similar complexity.

Real time combat would work like IE games did, but as they said they always wanted turn based combat but didn't open the KS with that.
Character can move immediate distance and attack (in D&D they can move 30 feet and attack), or move short distance (in D&D this is double move or 60ft) or run long distance with a successful Speed check (in D&D this is 3x 30ft or 4x 30 ft and you don't have a check but you can only run in a straight line).

 

[tuluse]

Numenera. And not that simple. Only difference from D&D is there is no flanking. Grid can be easily used as each movement option has a specific value in feet. Immediate move = up to 10 feet, Short move = between 10 and 50 feet, long move = between 50 and 100 feet. The PnP system only says that it is not important to say the enemy is 65 feet away or 85 feet away as long as you need a long move to get to him. All ranges of skills and spells are then defined by immediate, short or long. It makes learning things simple but combat of similar complexity.

You just explained more difference from d&d right after saying there's no differences besides flanking

Real time combat would work like IE games did, but as they said they always wanted turn based combat but didn't open the KS with that.

No they didn't, they said they investigated both and decided on turn based.

Character can move immediate distance and attack (in D&D they can move 30 feet and attack), or move short distance (in D&D this is double move or 60ft) or run long distance with a successful Speed check (in D&D this is 3x 30ft or 4x 30 ft and you don't have a check but you can only run in a straight line).

What about full attacks? What other move actions? What about special attacks like trip, disarm, charge etc?

 

[Infinitron]

How about you guys just ask Adam Heine instead of guessing?

 

[ArchAngel]

Numenera. And not that simple. Only difference from D&D is there is no flanking. Grid can be easily used as each movement option has a specific value in feet. Immediate move = up to 10 feet, Short move = between 10 and 50 feet, long move = between 50 and 100 feet. The PnP system only says that it is not important to say the enemy is 65 feet away or 85 feet away as long as you need a long move to get to him. All ranges of skills and spells are then defined by immediate, short or long. It makes learning things simple but combat of similar complexity.

You just explained more difference from d&d right after saying there's no differences besides flanking

Real time combat would work like IE games did, but as they said they always wanted turn based combat but didn't open the KS with that.

No they didn't, they said they investigated both and decided on turn based.

Character can move immediate distance and attack (in D&D they can move 30 feet and attack), or move short distance (in D&D this is double move or 60ft) or run long distance with a successful Speed check (in D&D this is 3x 30ft or 4x 30 ft and you don't have a check but you can only run in a straight line).

What about full attacks? What other move actions? What about special attacks like trip, disarm, charge etc?

Full attacks are done in addition to moving (which btw was only limited in D&D 3e, before and after D&D has no such limitation).
You can do anything you can in D&D. You can trip and grapple and all without a feat. You just roll your Speed or Might vs enemy defense. Or you can push them, or do anything you want. It is all Speed, Might or Intellect (+ bonuses from training) vs enemy Defense (which is usually their lvl x 3 on d20 roll).
Charge has a talent you can take that lets you do it without any penalty.

Of course, if the game will have all these options depends if they want to do animations for all of that. Since combat is not main focus I somehow doubt it.

 

[Zeriel]

How about you guys just ask Adam Heine instead of guessing?

Where's the fun in that?

 

[tuluse]

Full attacks are done in addition to moving (which btw was only limited in D&D 3e, before and after D&D has no such limitation).
You can do anything you can in D&D. You can trip and grapple and all without a feat. You just roll your Speed or Might vs enemy defense. Or you can push them, or do anything you want. It is all Speed, Might or Intellect (+ bonuses from training) vs enemy Defense (which is usually their lvl x 3 on d20 roll).
Charge has a talent you can take that lets you do it without any penalty.

Of course, if the game will have all these options depends if they want to do animations for all of that. Since combat is not main focus I somehow doubt it.

So there's not specific rules for that stuff, aka, it's more simple and would have to be specified in a computer game when a DM can't just on the fly come up with it.

"Full attacks are done in addition to moving (which btw was only limited in D&D 3e, before and after D&D has no such limitation)."

So which version of d&d is Numenera the same as then?

 

[ArchAngel]

Full attacks are done in addition to moving (which btw was only limited in D&D 3e, before and after D&D has no such limitation).
You can do anything you can in D&D. You can trip and grapple and all without a feat. You just roll your Speed or Might vs enemy defense. Or you can push them, or do anything you want. It is all Speed, Might or Intellect (+ bonuses from training) vs enemy Defense (which is usually their lvl x 3 on d20 roll).
Charge has a talent you can take that lets you do it without any penalty.

Of course, if the game will have all these options depends if they want to do animations for all of that. Since combat is not main focus I somehow doubt it.

So there's not specific rules for that stuff, aka, it's more simple and would have to be specified in a computer game when a DM can't just on the fly come up with it.

"Full attacks are done in addition to moving (which btw was only limited in D&D 3e, before and after D&D has no such limitation)."

So which version of d&d is Numenera the same as then?

Everything needs to be specified in a computer games. Don't know what is your point. Numenera rules say anything plausible can be done by rolling Speed, Might or Intellect vs Defense/Level. A computer game can turn that easily into as many actions as the devs want as the system is balanced around it already. Then special abilities/spells have additional effects but they also come down to Speed, Might or Intellect vs Defense/Level.

Combat is probably most similar to 5e if I have to choose one but it uses some ideas from different D&D versions (and since Monte Cook worked on 5e before he left it makes sense).

 

[Infinitron]

CMcC and Brother None interview

Torment: Tides Of Numenera
How inXile Are Bringing Pen-and-Paper To PC
Graham Smith on June 10th, 2015 at 5:00 pm.

I’m interested in Torment: Tides of Numenera [official site], but not for the typical reason around these parts – I’ve only ever played the first two hours of Planescape: Torment, to which the game is a spiritual successor. Instead, my interest is the result of playing the game’s other source material: Numenera, a pen-and-paper roleplaying game set a billion years in the future, which throws out much of the levelling, stats and combat of D&D-derived games in favour of a streamlined system that favours storytelling and improvisation above numbers and hard rules.

Curious about how many of the pen-and-papers unusual systems were being translated to a computer RPG, I spoke to inXile’s Colin McComb and Thomas Beeker – creative lead and associate producer, respectively – about bringing effort, cyphers, GM intrusions and backstories to the PC.


RPS: What made you choose Numenera as the base for a new Torment game – was it the story and world, or the mechanics?

Colin McComb: It was mostly based on the world. I did get to do some of the playtesting when Monte [Cook, the designer of the pen-and-paper Numenera] was developing the cypher system, but it was… When we were developing the idea for Torment at the very beginning, Adam and I defined four pillars of what would be necessary to make a Torment game, and one of those was a world that’s unlike any other, and Numenera’s got that in spades. I don’t think there’s any game out there right now that does anything anywhere near it. We saw that and Adam and I were like, ‘We gotta take that one.’ If possible, if Monte would licence it to us. It turned out he was pretty excited about it.

RPS: What’s your favourite thing about the setting?

McComb: Well, I’m a big Gene Wolfe nerd. The whole Book of the New Sun has been a huge literary influence. Shadow of the Torturer, Claw of the Conciliator, that whole series. I just love the idea of thinking about what it is that humans are going to become, what the world is going to become after we’re all dust. It ties in really well with our legacy question, too – what does one life matter? When you’re talking a billion years in the future, none of this is going to matter, that made it a natural fit as well.

But of the setting itself, just the fact that it’s so weirdly evocative and imaginative and cool.

RPS: What stuff are you lifting mechanically from Numenera?

McComb: Everything. We’re doing Effort, we’re doing the three pools, we’re doing cypher poisoning. We’re basically trying to make it as closely representative of the Numenera tabletop experience as possible.

Beekers: We have freedom to adapt it, because not everything makes as much sense. The focus of Numenera, a lot of it is on simplicity, which makes sense for pen-and-paper because it keeps the flow going. That’s not as big an issue for us, so we’re all choose to make things more complex in underlying mechanics but still keep the same flow going.

RPS: Can you give an example of an area where you’ve added complexity?

McComb: Obviously random number generation, any of the complex rolls that we’re doing, I don’t think we’re just going with a straight d20 under the hood. Then there’s the random encounter generation; we’re not doing a lot of that, but. Anything involving rolls.

Thomas Beekers: Just the way Effort works is a good example, because you kind of have to back and forth on it with a videogame, and we can do a lot of that quite easily in computer games. So we can throw little things out there to make it work for us, but I would say everything works essentially like the pen-and-paper.

RPS: Are you doing stuff with GM intrusions?

McComb: Yes, we are.

RPS: How does that work when there’s no GM?

McComb: That’s a randomised thing that’s going to depend on the number of sleeps you have, the… I’m trying to think of what things effect that without giving away any spoilers… There are things that are going to happen in crises – the encounters and the battles that you’ll have – where suddenly things will take a turn for the worse and you can choose to accept that or reject it and get the XP for it.

Beekers: But it does work differently. That’s a system that works very well in pen-and-paper and you really have to just make it work on computer, so we’re doing something similar but it’s different. We’re at the stage now where this is something you have to play to see how it works, so anything we say right now will be a bit up in the air because we’re going to have to play it and see how it works and then adjust it to make it work.

McComb: We don’t want to make any promises. We’ve learned a lesson on that.

RPS: Do you link character progression to backstory development in the same way as Numenera – that thing of, if you want to give yourself a particular skill, you come up with a backstory for your character to justify how you know it?

McComb: I think that’s currently the plan, yeah. We want to make sure that we have a good story reason for everything so it seems seamless, and interactive as opposed to just, ‘Woop, you hit a tier, and now you can cast a fireball!’. Because that makes it feel like, ‘But what did I do to get that?’ I’ve been designing games for twenty years and I still don’t know how to cast a fireball, so maybe I just haven’t hit the right level yet.

RPS: Given the Effort system, does that radically change how you balance the game over the course of it? Because the Effort system allows you to make certain tasks trivial for your character if you’re actually good at it.

McComb: But it’s depleting your pools.

Beekers: The question for balance is not the Effort itself, it’s the depletion of pools and how you recharge it. So when we’re looking at Effort we’re mostly looking at management of pools and estimating how many points someone has to spend, and how many rest opportunities we want to give them, because you cannot rest anywhere in the game. You cannot be constantly recharging your pools, because that would make everything free, but we have our methods of limiting that.

McComb: Yeah, we’ve got an urgency mechanic that we’re trying out that we want to make sure works and that it’s not just annoying.

RPS: So that’s changing the rest system from the thing of–

McComb: Oh, you still get the four rests – I still get the instantaneous, the ten minute, the one hour, and the overnight – and it’s the hour and overnight that we’re trying to rope in. But each of those things increments the urgency, and if you do that too many times it’s possible that it’ll trigger a GM intrusion essentially.

RPS: That’s interesting.

Beekers: That’s sort of the same mechanic in Numenera where a GM would say, ‘But you can’t really rest right now.’ It’s the same logic, we just have to figure out a good pacing and presentation for it that doesn’t feel annoying to the player.

McComb: Right, like Mask of the Betrayer had the spirit-eating and even George said that it annoyed him. Our lead area designer is George Ziets and he was the creative lead on Obsidian’s Mask of the Betrayer, and he said that he just found it really frustrating and annoying and he wishes he hadn’t included it, so we want to make sure that our urgency mechanic is not annoying.

RPS: Most computer RPGs are based on the D&D model of combat and stats and progression. Does making it more based on something like Numenera, which is less well-known because it doesn’t have that history, does it make it harder to get players to understand or relate to it?

McComb: I don’t think so. It’s going to depend on the tutorialisation that we do in the early part of the game, but from what we have developed right now it seems like we’ve got a pretty good natural progression of accreting these skills so they’ll feel natural to the player.

Beekers: But I think we do have an awareness that we have to tutorialise, not necessarily more, but be aware of the fact that some of these systems are not going to be intuitive. Some of these concepts like not getting XP for a kill is something that we have to present in a way that does make sense to the player. It’s new enough that you just have to tutorialise it better, whereas with a D&D game you can just be like, ‘ach, everyone already knows how this works anyway.’

RPS: Similar to the XP thing: cyphers appear really special but most computer RPGs throw loot at you all the time. Do you expand the loot system so… will I be raking through bins like a binraker, picking up loafs of bread?

McComb: Everyone on the design team has expressed great distaste for the ‘Why would somebody hide something like this?’. Why are they going to be hiding their loot bag inside a barrel of ale?

Beekers: That’s not going to happen. But that’s actually the good with Numenera, because cyphers are not necessarily things that you pick up that someone dropped there. It’s part of a machine that you cobbled together into a tool, and that’s how we present it at times as well.

McComb: Yeah, and I don’t think we’re going to have totally destructible environments where you just go through and smash everything in a pottery shop and he just stands there and watches.

Beekers: I think the interesting challenge of cyphers for us is going to be because– I do the item design for the game, it’s good and fun to come up with unique cyphers, but the angle is so different because usually the player’s instinct is, ‘I’m going to hoard all this stuff and keep it for a big boss,’ but we have to make players understand that you get cyphers all the time and you have to use them all the time. At first opportunity.

McComb: Have you guys done cypher poisoning yet in your game?

RPS: No.

McComb: You’ve got a cypher limit, essentially. If you start carrying more than that, the chance of something really bad happening – explosions, mutations, you know.

Beekers: It’s not a hard limit [on how many you can carry], but the things that will happen are so bad that it might as well be. Really nasty things can happen.

But if you’ve played the Numenera pen-and-paper you’ve probably felt how different that feels and your instinct adapting and being more open to just using the item right away. I think that will actually be really cool in Torment, if we do it right.

McComb: Monte is always saying that the cyphers are essentially one-shot special powers. Think of it as potions, but even accumulated faster than potions, so it’s something that you’re always finding and always using.

RPS: You mentioned taking pieces of machinery. How does that crafting system work relative to other computer games?

Beekers: It’s a bit closer to modifying and cobbling together weapons than…

McComb: It’s not like Minecraft. Each item is going to have slots essentially that you can attach stuff to, to create like magnetic effects or fire effects or gravity effects. So suddenly you’ve got a gravity-disrupting sword and you hit someone with it and weird things happen… I don’t know that we have gravity in the game.

RPS: Does Monte play games of it and give feedback?

McComb: Right now it’s mostly describing things to him. We’ve got some builds out, but I don’t know that he’s actually played them.

Beekers: I know that we’ve provided them to Monte Cook Games, but it’s kind of in that stage where it’s not that useful yet to play. It needs to hit a certain point and then we’ll probably ask him to play it for at least a few hours to give us feedback, but he’s not constantly playing rough versions and giving feedback. That’s one of the reasons we like working with him, he’s not like a hands-on license holder, he’s not constantly in our stuff reviewing everything.

McComb: I think he’s pretty confident that we’re respectful of his license and his ideas… The fool. [laughs]

This article was originally part of the RPS Supporter Program. Thanks for supporting RPS!

 

[ArchAngel]

RPS: What stuff are you lifting mechanically from Numenera?

McComb: Everything. We’re doing Effort, we’re doing the three pools, we’re doing cypher poisoning. We’re basically trying to make it as closely representative of the Numenera tabletop experience as possible.
-------
Thomas Beekers: Just the way Effort works is a good example, because you kind of have to back and forth on it with a videogame, and we can do a lot of that quite easily in computer games. So we can throw little things out there to make it work for us, but I would say everything works essentially like the pen-and-paper.

As I said..

McComb: That’s a randomised thing that’s going to depend on the number of sleeps you have, the… I’m trying to think of what things effect that without giving away any spoilers… There are things that are going to happen in crises – the encounters and the battles that you’ll have – where suddenly things will take a turn for the worse and you can choose to accept that or reject it and get the XP for it.

I think they got this other way around. If you reject GM intrusion you lose XP and you gain XP if you accept it.

McComb: Right, like Mask of the Betrayer had the spirit-eating and even George said that it annoyed him. Our lead area designer is George Ziets and he was the creative lead on Obsidian’s Mask of the Betrayer, and he said that he just found it really frustrating and annoying and he wishes he hadn’t included it, so we want to make sure that our urgency mechanic is not annoying.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! And I got attacked by so many people here for saying the same

 

[agris]

In Numenera-speak, is a GM intrusion a random encounter?

 

[Infinitron]

In Numenera-speak, is a GM intrusion a random encounter?

http://www.adamheine.com/2014/03/ama-gm-intrusions-and-messing-with-time.html

 

[ArchAngel]

In Numenera-speak, is a GM intrusion a random encounter?

No, it is an added complication to the situation. Sometimes used to spice things up, sometimes to make a encounter harder if it turns out what was planned is too easy, sometimes a result of player stupidity and sometimes used to nudge players on the "right" path.

Random encounters are pointless in Numenera as players gain little from combat (only some new equipment or cyphers). For the same reason trash combat is mostly pointless except to drain some resources from players so what is later planned is more dangerous.

 

[agris]

Thanks guys.

 

[tuluse]

Nice selective quoting, when my original point was that they're making combat more detailed:

The focus of Numenera, a lot of it is on simplicity, which makes sense for pen-and-paper because it keeps the flow going. That’s not as big an issue for us, so we’re all choose to make things more complex in underlying mechanics but still keep the same flow going.

Well well well

 

[ArchAngel]

Nice selective quoting, when my original point was that they're making combat more detailed:

The focus of Numenera, a lot of it is on simplicity, which makes sense for pen-and-paper because it keeps the flow going. That’s not as big an issue for us, so we’re all choose to make things more complex in underlying mechanics but still keep the same flow going.

Well well well

Which does not make anything I quoted not true. And they say they will keep the same flow and I already did say before that they are changing some of the passive class skills into active ones.