Cyphers, Numenera, and YOU!

Numenera is an incredibly awesome game.  I've already gone off about it, but if you don't own it or don't know about it, you should probably check it out (and likely buy it) here: Numenera by Monte Cook Games

One of the brilliant things about Numenera is the Cypher and Artifact system.  The true beauty of it is that it takes William Gibson's writing philosophy of "The Street Will Find Its Own Use" and injects it straight into a faster-than-light drive.  Boiling it down, Cypher in Numenera are remnants of bygone technology that now do something useful in a manner they were not originally intended.  An unstable power core from an old vehicle is a grenade.  An old portable entertainment system is now a displacer cloak style adornment that broadcasts multiple images of you for a few minutes.  A charged energy crystal can be affixed to your armor to deliver a nasty jolt to anyone attacking you, or to your trusty weapon to make it a combo weapon/taser.

And that's not even touching on the artifacts.

This article is a reference document for some of the custom  cyphers that I have come up with and used (or have yet to unleash) in my Numenera games.  Cyphers with similar effects can look wildly different.  One unstable power core that is now a grenade can be a rusty hunk of strange metal, while the next one could be biomechanical, or completely organic, or even stranger.  I've included how I personally envisioned them, but if you decide to use one from this list, please change it up as you desire to make it fit the mood and environment in which it is found.  That's part of the glory of Numenera... you always have to keep things weird.

Temporal Stones.
A blue glass orb with a red panel on one side that seems to be filled with a grey liquid or gas.
The stone is activated by thumbing the panel, then thrown (or slung) towards the target.  If the stone strikes the target, the target repeats the last action it took.  If a cost was paid for that action, no additional points need to be spent.

Hazy Shade of Spray
A small crystal canister that appears to contain small stormclouds.
When used, it fills the immediate area with nanites that travel near the canister.  The nanites will attach to any invisible or clear item and project scintillating light.

Brickwash:
Small glass orbs of thick brown/red liquid that feels like a gritty paste.
When smashed and rubbed  on the skin, it hardens the body against assault, granting 2 pts of armor and lasting 1 hour.  For the duration, all speed defense tests are one step more difficult.

Moonfruit:
A pale white fruit about the size of an eyeball.
When eaten, the PC can see in the dark for 28 hours, but their eyes glow a pale white color and they can not speak above a hoarse whisper.

Three-Eyed Squid Stone
Small, six inch statue of a mass of tentacles  -- When activated, 3 glowing gold eyes appear in orbit around it.  Activates for 10 minutes.
Creates an extradimensional field which removes organic and mechanical life forms from the dimension, though they remain visible.  All affected life forms can still communicate, but no combat or external effects can be used, and nothing the life forms do can affect the rest of the world.  A life form can still use esoteries, skills and powers on itself, however.

Kiss of Karu'zul
Small vial of black liquid which, when shaken, produces a faint musical chiming
When quaffed it will heal 1d6 might and restore half that to a pool of the imbiber's choice.
Side Effect:  Makes everything taste like rotten meat for two days, and causes all body fluid to become acidic and/or explosive.

Mechanical Jackalope:
Glass and steel statue of a small, two headed ground rodent with horns, antlers, or antennae.
When activated (stays active for 2 hours) the statue animates and begins to scan the area for bits of salvage, cyphers, or artifacts.  The good part is that it finds things.  The bad part is that it doesn't discriminate what it finds, and will occasionally activate/destroy things in the course of digging.

Unrelenting Past
A white orb full of thick blue goo
When eaten, nanites restructure the user's brain to give them total recall of memories.  Also, anything experienced for the next two weeks can never be forgotten.

Groundserpent Oil
A small clay bottle of spicy smelling liquid, also produced in pill form
Made from the prismatic ground serpent, this externally applied liquid gives a boost in confidence and a unique aroma to the user, who then counts as 'trained' in all matters of social interaction for the next four hours.

Antennae Grub
An odd, metallic caterpillar about three inches long
When placed on the head, it burrows several hind legs in to the skull and begins to transmit sonar-sight in to the forebrain.  Lasts for 28 hours.

Rain Bomb
A six inch diameter crystal orb full of white ooze with several wires attached to the outside
When broken, this cypher creates a sudden storm effect.  Player rolls d20 for result:
1 - 2 feet of ground fog over short range
2 - waist high fog for short range
3 - light snow in area for 20 mins
4 - heavy snow and wind in area for 10 mins
5 - sudden cold multicolored rain for 10 mins
6 - 40 mph musical winds for 10 mins
7 - 60 mph silent winds for 10 mins
8 - a searing sandstorm for 10 mins
9 - hail, pea sized, for 5 mins.  Unarmored/unsheltered individuals may take damage per GM
10 - blizzard like snow for 30 mins
11 - heavy rains for 8 hours, may cause flooding
12 - thick, pea soup fog for 5 miles, lasting 4 hours
13 - temperature drops by 40 degrees for an hour within long range
14 - vicious hail, up to golf ball sized, can do considerable damaged to unarmored/unsheltered individuals
15 - blizzard for 2 hours
16 - torrential downpour, 1 hour, monsoon strength.  Might test to not be knocked off footing when trying to move.
17 - tornado
18 - rain of frogs
19 - pick one from table above
20 - pick two from table above

Double-headed circuit snake
A small blue box with a cable coming out of two opposite sides.  Ends of each cable end in a jaw-like clamp.
The circuit snake is a power conduit/transformer that will route power from any device to any other device, and will not overcharge the receiving device.  After it is done, it fries out, and destroys itself.  This can be very useful in recharging depleted artifacts.

Seeds of Shas-Balu
A soft, spongy orb that explodes in a non-damaging puff of ochre spores when thrown or suffers an impact.
The shas-balu is a quickly growing fungal life form that is highly aggressive.
-- If thrown during the daytime the spores cause choking, coughing, blindness, and possibly death.  Might defense vs. diff four or take 5 points of might damage and go blind.   Also speed vs. diff 4 or take 5 points of speed and you can not communicate vocally or physically from coughing and shaking.
-- If thrown during the night time the spores will grow in 4 rounds to a highly evolved fungal predator that will last until dawn unless slain.
Shas-Balu
Health 25
Level 4
Armor 3
Trained in tracking, sneaking, and hand to hand
Takes double damage from fire and cold
Any electrical damage done to the Shas-balu heals it instead of harms.

Bifuricaine
Usually injected, sometimes a pill form.
When taken, a large black discoloration appears on the skin.  The taker ceases to feel all pain and gains 10 might pool for 1 week, as well as +5 to all recovery tests.  At the end of 1 week, the PC falls into a coma from which they can not wake for 1 day, during which the discoloration begins to swell and grow into a fist-sized tumor.  Sometime during that day (usually when no one is watching) the tumor detaches and rolls/floats/digs its way through the ground to get away.  One week later, a complete clonal copy of the PC begins to track it down in order to slay the PC.

In Which I Discuss Kitchen Sink Games...

A number of games in the past have been declared to be “kitchen sink” style games.  If you haven’t heard this term before, please allow me to define:

A kitchen sink game is a game which includes damn near everything.  It has swords, sorcery, psionics, futuristic tech, cavemen, zombies, ninjas, intergalactic travel, small villages possessed by demons, and darn near anything else your fevered imagination can come up with.  Kitchen sink style games run on the premise that if there are cool things, then putting cool things together make things even cooler.  Sometimes they work, sometimes they fail miserably.

In this article, I’ll review what have been a few of my very favorite kitchen sink style games to experience, because even when the game is horrible, it still tends to be damn fun.

First off is my very first experience with a Kitchen Sink game.  It is, also, the worst on the list.  It also has the most incredibly awesome retro name ever… like something out of the 50s, almost.  I introduce to you, fellow gamers, BattleLords of the Twenty-Third Century.

Kind of like a kitchen sink... and a blender... powered by antimatter.

See? I wasn't joking.

Lets just step back and take a look, shall we?   What do we have here… we have a human in the upper right with some sort of explosive doodads.  We have a massive lizardman with a lazer gun on the upper right.  Smack dab in the center is a gigantor freighter/war thingy of space chasing some poor schmuck in a pleasure yacht past some moons.  In the lower left there’s some creepy half-face guy with a lazer sword.  On the lower right… uh, I don’t know what that is, but it’s pretty messed up.  I sure wouldn’t want to meet it in a dark alley.  Then at the very bottom there’s a psionic big-head-alien type guy with a finger full of light.  Up at the very tippy top, right under the title of the game, is an Evil Menace With Glowing Eyes (EMWGE) as required by law.

Oh, and there’s another spaceship wedged in there in the lower left, you know, because it wasn’t ‘futuristicy’ enough for them.

Wow… that’s a lot.  And the thing is that all this stuff is in the actual game.  The humans, of course, are humans.  The big lizard guy is called a Ram Python, and they come from a very backwaters and barbaric swamp world.  They’re basically hand picked from the best and then taken to a more civilized reach, because if you gave these guys  guns they’d eradicate the entire world without thinking about it first.  Spaceships are, well, you know, spaceships.  They come in all sizes, and we won’t go into that right now.

Now, the guy in the lower left, he’s pretty cool.  He’s an Eridani SwordSaint.  Yeah, that’s not like the title of his caste or anything, that’s what they call the entire freakin race.  A WHOLE WORLD of people who worship the sword, in all of its myriad forms.  Even laser swords, which, IMHO, is cheating… but I’m not a swordsaint, so what the hell do I know?  The whole race is very bushido, and they’re all built like action stars.  Ironically, they since they ALL worship swords (every last one of them), there’s no florists, or cobblers, or bakers or anything.  Just swords, I imagine.  Never mentions anything about The Sacred Blade Bakery in the book, so I just imagine that they don’t exist.

I could go on and on about the races, but instead, I’ll just sum up.  Here’s the “quick list” on the types of races you can play:

Human – Everyday Joe Human, very versatile.

Gen-Human – Genetically Modified Human.  Roy Batty+

Orion Rogue

Python Lizard

Ram Python

Chatilian Empath

Cizerack

Mutzachan

Mazian

Orion Rogue

Phentari

Zin Rigeln

And then there’s the Aeodronian, Andromeni, Ashanti, Fott, Gemini, Goola Goola, I-Bot, Ikrini Geomancer, Jezzadeic Priest, Kizanti, Misha, and Tanndai Techknight. And that’s just the stuff that your GM doesn’t make up on the fly one night when half drunk and realizing he doesn’t have anything planned for game in 2 hours.

One of the things I do remember liking very much about the game is something that completely threw most of the rest of my gaming crew for a loop:  It is classless and levelfree.  Everything is based on earned skills and stats.  Stats are strength, manual dexterity, IQ, agility, constitution, intuition, charisma, and my personal favorite: aggression.  SECONDARY stats (because 8 is not enough) are Tec Knowledge, Military Leadership, Persuasion, and Bargaining.  Each stat and skill is run on a percentile system, and it is possible (AFAIC) to go above 100 percent.

What makes the game truly and gloriously kitchen sink is the ability to have the game run in any setting on any world type you desire… as is common for many intergalactic games.  TYPICALLY the game is much like ShadowRun.  You are hired by an intergalactic megacorp to go do some sort of deed somewhere.  You are some sort of a merc or other form of ‘deniable asset’ to help them complete a goal, and you should expect that they’ll try to screw you over in the end.  However, it’s very easy to stray from this… one of my favorite games involved us starting as veteran characters who had been stranded after a crash landing on a jungle world.  No comm net, limited power, and only as much ammo as we’d brought with us on the ship… which was rapidly depleted due to the amount of indiginous, player-eating wildlife we encountered in the first four hours of the game.  I think we lasted a total of maybe six hours before the last brain was eaten.  Total Party Kills are the best!

As for system… it’s clunky, but effective.  The matrix (that’s the combo of magic/psionics in the game) is tough to understand at first, and combat can span lengthy minutes with each combat round if players aren’t up to par on the rule set.  Overall, it’s a great game in concept, and admittedly I haven’t played it since the first edition rolled out… it is my highest hope that they’ve revamped the system itself to a point where it is far more fluid.  My hopes are mildly dashed though, by taking a look at the character sheet, and seeing pretty much the same thing I saw years ago.

On a d20 scale, this game rates about an 11.

NEXT we have one of the most expansive Kitchen Sink Games ever.  This game came out in 1990, the brainchild of a man known as Kevin Siembieda.  It has, quite literally, everything.

It’s a little game known as Rifts, and it’s got about 60 expansion books detailing alien races, orbital colonies, every continent ever known by man and then some that aren’t, dragons, ninjas, cybertechnology, mutant dogs trained to drive power armor, floating prison cities, and about 90 bajillion other things that I can’t list off of the top of my head.

Of all of the Kitchen Sink Games, Rifts stands at the top of the heap for having EVERYTHING.  It even has Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

That is literally a kitchen sink that the big ugly alien is flying on. Surrounded by well endowed dish washers.

As with most Paladium games, everything skill based is run on percentile.  There are levels, and clas… no, that’s not being fair.  There’s so many gorram classes and races that they actually had to change how classes and races were done.  There are OCCs, RCCs and PCCs.  OCC stands for Occupational Character Class.  This is what you and I would have, as humans.  We are humans, and as such, we’re versatile enough to be mechanics, scholars, scientists, snipers, lawmen, porn stars, and anything else we really want to be.  On the other side of the coin are the RCCs, which stands for Racial Character Class.  RCCs tend to be OBNOXIOUSLY powerful, due to the fact that they’re a stop-gap measure against having a dragon uber sniper who wears glitterboy power armor… which is still something you can do if you’re smart about it (all you really have to do is shapeshift, but I digress).  PCC stands for Psychic Character Class.  PCC doesn’t -technically- exist in Rifts, as it is a hold over from other Palladium games, but it tends to help draw an easier-to-understand line in the sand which can save some new players from utter madness.

To give you an idea of how many different things you can play in Rifts, here’s a small rundown:

OCCs:  There are over 255 Occupational Character Classes for Rifts, including City Rat (basic lives-in-the-city criminal), Warlock (casts spells, uses the undead), Shifter (magician who hops dimensions), Saloon Girl (self explanatory), Juicer (someone who has an implanted drug factory that shortens their life span but gives them near supernatual physical ability), and 4 varieties of Ninja (no, I’m not making that up.)

RCCs:  There are over 150 Racial Character Classes for Rifts, including Dragon (6 kinds), Godling, Tritonian Sea-Wolf, Anti-Monster, Dog-Boy, Gargoyle, Lycanthrope, Oni, Tengu, and Valkyrie.  Some of the RCCs are so sickeningly powerful that they can realistically take on an army by themselves and come out slightly scathed.

PCCs:  Psychics are more limited in scope, having about 30 to 40 types, but having some of the darn coolest names in the game, including Shifter (dimensional hopping mage), Mind-Melter (uber offensive psychic), Blaster (blows things up with her mind), Freezer, Zapper and Nega-Psychic.

Am I forgetting something… OH YEAH, actual freakin races.  These are races that tend towards the more-potent-than-humans side of the equation.  Asgardian elves, goblins, giants, scorpion men, lions, tigers and bears. OM(G)!

The beautiful thing about Rifts is also the most terrifying.  The game is DEEP, with a lot of commentary on social mores, racism, and other such actual topics that make a game truly enjoyable.  It includes every level of technology, from stone age wooden clubs to self-tracking limited yield nuclear MIRVs that can phase into and out of existence.  The precise problem is that, eventually, damn near every game of Rifts ever played devolves into a shoot-em-up, with the biggest guns left standing.  It usually starts innocently enough… a group of friends get together, someone plays the ex coalition officer, another plays a rogue scientist, maybe one or two people have some power armor and a laser weapon.  Soon enough, the GM makes a mistake and wipes out 3 people with one grenade… because they’re all ’soft’ characters.  Now, by then, the remaining members have levelled and gained some serious gear, which means the new gen characters either have some serious catching up to do, or they start off ‘buffed.’  And if they’re going to be buffed (which is usually the option chosen), then why not allow someone to play a young adult dragon as an RCC?  This offsets everything, and leads to a rapid escalation of armament akin to the US/Soviet cold war.  Before you know it, your PCs are hunting down phasewalkers and Splugorth slaving rigs, and all sorts of other wonders of the world with guns that can quite literally destroy small towns with an errant shot.

Rifts is a truly glorious game, if the GM can keep things in check… unfortunately, it is very common that in order to keep things in check, he or she has to wipe out PCs or figure out some clever way to strip away a ton of gear and several powers… and even that tends not to work.  The majority of Rifts games I’ve been a member of, and run, have ended with either a TPK (Total Party Kill), or with the GM attempting a TPK (as they don’t know what else to do because things are so wildly out of hand) and then throwing their hands into the air in frustration after the third army gets decimated by the player characters.

Rifts, as a basic concept, is beautiful.  The world has endless possibility.  The whole backstory is incredible… it takes events through the world, both human successes and failures, and gives birth to a reason for having massive amounts of psychic energy unleashed due to mayhem and death which end up ripping open interdimensional rifts.  Through these rifts returns magick, dragons, demons and alien explorers looking to both help and exploit the human race.  If you can strip out all the uber powerful crap, Rifts becomes a game of high adventure in which the broken spirit of the world struggles onward against impossible odds.   The problem is that all that uber powerful crap is REALLY well written, and is very enticing for both players and GMs alike.

The system runs like a dream, with the former caveat.  Palladium games have always been pretty slick systemed… but Rifts can bog down when you have uber powerful characters.  For example, if you want to snipe someone who’s normal, you roll to hit, and if you hit, you roll damage.  That’s it.  However, if you have an uber sniper who’s sniping someone uber powerful, you have the roll to brace and set up your sniper shot, then you have 8 modifiers to the ‘to hit’ roll.  After you roll it, the target can potentially get a chance to notice the shot coming.  If they do notice it, they can potentially auto-dodge the shot, and if that misses, they have a chance to auto-parry the shot with whatever weapon or power they currently have active.  After that, if they take the hit, certain RCCs and OCCs have the potential to ‘roll with the punch’ of the sniper bullet… if it makes it past the phase or other style of energy shield that the uber character is most likely employing.

That’s as far down the rabbit hole as I’m going with this particular example, because I don’t want to get any deeper.  To sum up, it can get pretty disgustingly complex.

Rifts is not a bad game, mind you, in fact it’s probably one of my favorite games ever… easily within the top five at least.  But only if the GM is able to keep a proper grasp of the game, and guide it with a loving and firm hand.  The first time the players get access to a Naruni market, or other ‘high end’ seller of goods the game goes down the toilet if the GM budges on what they can and can not buy.

All in all, it’s about a 16 on a d20. Badly run Rifts average about a 5 on a d20.

Which brings me on to my next review.  This game started, in concept, in 1987 as a companion to WarHammer Fantasy Battle.  WarHammer 40k is world renown as one of the best sold table-top wargames of all time.  In 2008, Black Industries and Fantasy Flight Games got together and released the RPG version of this incredibly well fleshed game.

Dark Heresy was the first section, which details the life and struggles of up-and-coming Acolytes who are working for an Imperial Inquisitor to stop the incursions of the aliens, the heretics, and the mutants.

Why yes, Ma'am, I am completely badass. Thankyou very much.

Rogue Trader is the second section of the game, which is a bit higher power.  In Rogue Trader, you take on members of a crew to a Lord Captain, a man or woman who owns their own starship and is working to profit off of the frontiers of man in any way possible.  Ironically, with most Rogue Trader PCs, if they ever met the counterparts run in Dark Heresy, a mighty gun battle would ensue.  While Dark Heresy focuses on keeping everyone in line and purging the unclean, Rogue Trader focuses on skirting the rules and morals of a dystopian society in order to turn the largest profit possible.  Having played both of these systems, I must say that Rogue Trader is by far my favorite, as it seems to have more character freedom than the earlier counterpart.

What makes this a kitchen sink game is much the same as my first example, with BattleLords.  DH/RT (Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader) takes place in the mighty Empire of Man, which spans a large portion of interstellar space.  Through this venue, you can have ship-based games, corporate style games, military campaigns, explorations of deep nether reaches of space or in fact other dimensions, or on-the-ground-in-the-mud primitive style games.  One of the backgrounds for PCs is to come from a Feral World, and it’s long been my intention to entice one of my GMs into running a game that begins with all the PCs living on a Feral World and rising to the top.  Through our heroic acts we would, of course, eventually be noticed by the Empire of Man, and brought up to train our skills for the good of mankind… but again, I digress.

Classes in DH/RT are very similar to WarHammer 40k, but allow you to get much deeper into the mindset of some of the singularly odd unit types that you see within the table top tactical assault game.  In DH, common classes are Arbiter (lawman), Assassin, Inquisitor, Cleric, Tech-Priest, Guardsman, Imperial Psyker, Adept (smart guy) and Scum.  In RT, the more advanced requirements of the game put you at a higher starting standpoint than in DH.  For example, the Tech Priest in DH is someone who is learning the mysteries of the Omnissiah, where as in RT the Tech Priest becomes the Explorator, which is a fully indoctrined Tech Priest who has made the great pilgramage to Mars and has welcomed the machine spirit into his or her very body.  Starting play as an Explorator gives you access to servoskulls (human skulls which are filled with a small engine, sensor arrays, and typically small arms to help the PC in tasks), servitors (basically a servoskull that is a whole human instead of just a skull… a cybernetic slave), and a mechadendrite (a massive machine arm that comes out of your back that can be fit with damn near any device the player desires.)  Despite the power level difference, both games are exquisitely written, with massive amounts of trivia and knowledge for old fans as well as new.

Systemically, both games are brilliant.  Running off of d10s exclusively, skills are easy to understand and use by a new player, with character advancement being a bit more in depth.  Each skill and stat can only be raised a set number of times, so having a good set of opening stats is very important.  Both games are easily as deadly as they are beautiful as well.  Technology is highly advanced, but the human body is pretty much the same on a basic level.  Laser guns are potent enough to scorch stone at 200 yards, which means if the PC gets hit in an unarmored location, it is very likely the last scream they will ever emit.  Healing arts are equally advanced, but the first requirement to healing is survival, which can prove to be quite the chore in the wrong situation.

Whether you want to play a low born feral worlder, a member of a hive planet (a world so civilized it has no wilderness left), a politically oriented void born (born in space), or a noble with a knack for assassination… or any of a thousand other concepts, these games are for you.  They are glorious pieces of roleplay engineering who should be experienced by all.  Even if you don’t intend to play, the knowledge and concepts alone are exceptional, and the art is top notch.

Any stalwart fan of WarHammer 40k will probably be screaming “But Space Marines?!  WHERE ARE THE SPACE MARINES?!”  Don’t worry your pretty little head, darlin… they’re out there. It's called DeathWatch, which does detail the life and times of a Space Marine, doing battle in the name of the Emporer of Man.  

Yes, that's a chainsword.  The original chainsword.

Real Space Marines... not those watered down StarCraft sissies.

Across the board, these games get a 17 of d20, only losing points for the somewhat clunky advancement practices, which do take some getting used to.

Which brings me to Numenera. This is literally the only game I've ever played that scores a Nat 20 on my crit-o-meter. Not only does it have everything, but the rule set is angelic. Which isn't really surprising, considering the source. Lovingly hand crafted by Monte Cook and polished by Shanna Germain, it allows the player to pursue any creative outlet they may desire, and it allows (and encourages/requires) the GM to be as outlandish and weird as possible.

There's some things I've gotta explain here...

Let me start by kind of brushing the surface... which is a bit like explaining what the ocean is by offering you a glass of salt water.  Numenera is the world Earth after a billion years.  After the humans came and left, several more races were created/rose/evolved to advanced civilizations and then left/transcended/destroyed themselves.  Now, after a billion years, the humans are back (a fact which was noted with some concern by a certain group of cephalopods) and they're struggling to survive.  Boiled down, it's a post-apocalyptic sword-and-sorcery game where nanotechnology, bio-engineering, cybernetics, aliens, and transdimensional superstuff are all common place.  That's kind of as simply as I can put it.

Let's take the cover of the book for instance.  See that big shaft right in the center?  That's the Amber Obelisk.  It hovers 500 feet in the air, and stretches 1500 feet in to the sky.  It is named the Amber Obelisk because it is both colored amber and slightly translucent, just like the stone.  Normally things like this don't just hover, but it does.  It also has some rings that orbit it as well as some strange, massive gears that are visible when the sun is shining from behind it.  What does it do?  What is it's purpose?  What does it mean?  Is it a god?  Is it a superweapon?  You got me.  But that's kind of the point of Numenera.

Numenera is a roleplaying game that is deeply devoted to the idea that exploration and discovery should be the focal point of a campaign.  You aren't really there to kill abajillion orcs (or abhumans, as the case may be)... you're there to figure out WTF the ancient races were thinking, what they were building, why they were building it and how it can help the world advance (or be destroyed.)  Most games give experience based on how much crap you killed, or how cool you looked doing it.  Numenera gives experience based on what the heck you figured out.  Did you kill abajillion abhumans?  Great.  Good for you, buddy, but if you didn't figure out why the abhumans were doing what they were doing that made you have to kill them, then you're kind of SOL from an experience point perspective.

Now the one thing that is confusing for new players in Numenera is how rolling works.  It's a target number based game that uses only D20s... and the target numbers are generated off of the creature level multiplied by 3.  You can spend your pools (hit points, most would call them) to modify that target number, as well as use skills and technology.  The beautiful thing about the system is that it is only confusing when you look at it.  If you just get your players to start playing the system, they'll pick it up in a snap.  And any lingering confusion is completely counterbalanced by one very awesome game mechanic:
The GM never rolls.

That's right.  In one fell swoop you eliminate half of the time for combats and other time-wastey actions.  If the player wants to hit an NPC, they roll against the target number.  If they make it, they hit.  If the NPC wants to attack the player, it does, and the player makes a defense check.  If they make it, they don't get hit.  It's that simple.

Okay, there's like one time the GM rolls.  And it is specifically made mention of in the book with a tongue-in-cheek joke about how the GM never rolls.  It's truly lovely.

I can not recommend Numenera enough.  I had the luck to play through it in beta with a very good friend, and it captivated me from day 1.  I didn't even have all the rules, and I knew it was the game for me.

Thanks for reading!