http://www.montecookgames.com/why-not-d20/
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I haven't looked into Numenera so far, and aside from Torment 2 (where the dice rolling will be taken off my hands by the game anyway) i'm probably not going to get into contact with the system at any point in the near future.
That said, also don't see the point of this system, it sounds basically like a weird back and forth before settling on a DC that comes in increments of 3 (since you multiply the difficulty level by 3)
I suppose the nice thing about it is that you do your math with more manageable numbers (we are going in a range of 1-10) and afterwards just roll a d20 and don't have to add your +24 skill bonus.
I am also skeptical toward the "players do all the rolls" thing. I can only guess at how monsters and npcs are statted compared to PCs, but with this system it sounds like they have a different stat system than PCs, which if it is true, I would loathe. I don't like inconsistency like that, it singles out PCs as weird special cases and i think any given creature should be playable the same way from both sides of the GM screen.
The way monsters in DnD4 are built already bothers me to no end.
Anyway but that is just an if case, that i don't know about yet.
Another thing i don't like about players rolling all the dice is, that you as a GM lose control, you can't fudge rolls, and if you make a mistake, like making an encounter too powerful, there is little you can do to stop it from killing PCs that didn't deserve it.
It's no fun to murder PCs through no fault of their own.
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Ahem...not liking the engine or thinking it would work as well or better with another engine is not quite the same as is the engine broken?. I think, if you do indeed like Monte Cooks work (and even if you don't) and take him seriously, making up a thread implying a broken engine without anything more than the fact that you dislike the engine (without even having tried it out) is not the best thing to do.
Edit: I am still waiting for my books to ship, so I will reserve my judgement of the system for now.
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I GMed Numenera one time. The Task Difficulty was not a problem to use. It meant the players didn't have to do a lot of adding and subtracting every round. With DCs, a number to be added to a d20 roll has to be calculated every round and the modifiers can shift (flanking, boost spells, charging, etc all change attack modifier for example). As the GM, I quickly moved a number between 1 and 10 up or down a couple of places and multiplied it by 3. Quick and easy.
As was pointed out by many people before the game released, the real challenge is in the pools. With pools representing both survival and success, the player has a learning curve of when to lower TD or not.
Also, there is a lot of crunch in Numenera. Players juggle three pools of constantly shifting numbers, various random cyphers, special abilities, special gear, and more. I'm sure after several games it would become routine but the learning curve is there.
Is the game less complex than D&D 3.5. Yes. But is is not intuitive, at least to me. It will take some practice to get it flowing smooth.
One of my players disliked it so much we had to give up on it. Which is a shame in my opinion, as I see real potential in the system.
*headscratch* how does this differ, functionally, from a d20 with half points added in?
I GMed Numenera one time. The Task Difficulty was not a problem to use. It meant the players didn't have to do a lot of adding and subtracting every round. With DCs, a number to be added to a d20 roll has to be calculated every round and the modifiers can shift (flanking, boost spells, charging, etc all change attack modifier for example). As the GM, I quickly moved a number between 1 and 10 up or down a couple of places and multiplied it by 3. Quick and easy.
With DCs you could work out something quite similar. You don't even need to change any rules. You could give the GM your attack/check/save/etc. bonus and the gm subtracts it from the DC, and there is your number that you need to roll naturally.
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Basically, you are swinging up or down 15% a step a small number
of times (0-3) instead of up or down 5% many times. Also, you rarely have to roll over a 20, keeping the roll of the d20 more meaningful. Trying to hit a number of 6 means much more of a challenge in Numenera than in D20 fantasy.
Monte's reasons: Numenera dice rolling.
Quoting:
"I am currently working on the premise of using the d20 as a task resolution die, but without a lot of situational or character skill or ability modifiers, and a different set of assumptions about what it means to be good at something. Basically, things like skill and favorable circumstance don’t add modifiers to your roll, they change the target number you’re looking for. While this is mathematically similar, the target number is reduced in large, meaningful steps that are quite different than a +1 to the roll, most importantly because you can reduce the target number down enough steps for assured success if you’ve got a lot going for you (or the task wasn’t that tough to begin with).
What that means is that you’re not often adding much to the roll. Most of the time, nothing at all. It makes task resolution–and in particular combat–move much, much more quickly if you’re not waiting for people to add together numbers (or to ensure they have all their various miscellaneous modifiers accounted for). Setting target numbers never has to involve ridiculously high values, even for really tough opponents and/or PCs. If you’re never adding more than a bit to the roll, the d20′s numerical steps become 5% steps, more or less, which is intuitive and easy to work with."
from Monte Cook
Other than the multiply by 3 after everything I see no problem with that.
Players making all the rolls? I seen that before... I think it was Buffy The Vampire Slayer and seemed to work fine from what I heard.
On the other hand, I am more accustomed to systems which cut down on rolls by having the rolls made by GM on the side.
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Ive run a few test scenarios with it. Some of them were specifically given playtest scenarios. But a few of them were completely off-the- cuff, zero prep situations. It took me no time to get them rolling, and all I had to do was think "on a scale of 1 to 10, how hard should this opponent be?"
Armed with that decision, and the simple mechanics, we had a great time.
The mechanics take a bit of work to get used to, but it left us all the time to get fun and creative with how we overcame the challenges.
I'm looking forward to playing in it some more.
I'd like to hear more from those who have played it - all the pools and edges and who gets to employ them when turned what I had hoped was a simple and elegant system into a headscratching read. If it ain't intuitive and easy to understand from the start I'm happy to consign a system into the complex basket.
I also understand Monte is doing another kickstarter for "The Strange" with Bruce Cordell that also uses Numenera's system - they are calling it the "Cypher System". Which is unfortunate for me, because regardless of whether the cypher system is so called for the cyphers/one use items or not, cyphers were one part of Numenera I absolutely hated - they completely destroyed verisimilitude and ironically burst the 4th wall for me in a completely gamist way.
Other random thoughts:
* The book is absolutely beautiful.
* I am a longtime post-apocalyptic fiction and oldskool Gamma World fan, but I found the Ninth World fairly uninspired. A bit too kitchen sink for my tastes and the aliens seemed to be tacked on as a player choice at the last minute.
* The amount of character's focuses and descriptors to choose from is criminally small.
For the OP... I mentally downgraded your review as soon as I read the term "broken" in the title. Broken, as a descriptive term, is overused and conveys very little real information. It also irritates the H3ll out of me. I read your review anyway, this game was on a short list of birthday presents for me (and I "know" I'm getting it) and, obviously, I'm interested in it. Your review is better than your title. I like most of what I've heard about this game, but reasonable criticism and discussion of it is welcome and enlightening. Just lose the overused trendy descriptive terms even when used as a rhetorical question / title...
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RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32, 2011 Top 16
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One unmentioned reason to not simply use the D20 system is because a new system, even one mathematically similar to the D20 system, allows MCG to not use the OGL in any way. One big result of this is that it therefore avoids the part that says the OGL only applies to RPGs. For the Numenera Torment video game, they could therefore use the Cypher system as written, which isn't allowed if the game had used the D20 system. This is one of the reasons a Pathfinder computer game can't use the Pathfinder RPG mechanics.
Well, toward pools and player complexity. Could it be that the DM is to focus on story with supereasy mechanics, while the player can have his complexity of management?
I am also skeptical toward the "players do all the rolls" thing. I can only guess at how monsters and npcs are statted compared to PCs, but with this system it sounds like they have a different stat system than PCs, which if it is true, I would loathe. I don't like inconsistency like that, it singles out PCs as weird special cases and i think any given creature should be playable the same way from both sides of the GM screen.
The way monsters in DnD4 are built already bothers me to no end.
Anyway but that is just an if case, that i don't know about yet.
When players make the rolls, they are engaged in the action. If their defense has no meaning other than a number, they wait to see if they are hit and feel no control themselves.
EDIT: Also, making a playable version of a monster, I think, shouldn't use the monster rules. The monsters are made to fight once and die. They are given specialties that make an encounter with it different than fighting another humanoid. Giving that design to a player makes the player too different from one made to last and be adaptable, which is what the normal races are for.
Another thing i don't like about players rolling all the dice is, that you as a GM lose control, you can't fudge rolls, and if you make a mistake, like making an encounter too powerful, there is little you can do to stop it from killing PCs that didn't deserve it.
It's no fun to murder PCs through no fault of their own.
You should trust your players to know when to run. This situation shouldn't happen often, but when it does, it usually is fairly clear. If the players just barely didn't make it, it may have been down to a few rolls in either direction. But if it's a slaughterhouse, then they didn't realize it was a good time to run.
I, as a player, had to make a very specific wish that an encounter didn't happen in order to save the party. It was something we could have avoided, but we stumbled away into it anyway through our own actions. I was very glad that day that I had saved the wish that saved the party.
Well, toward pools and player complexity. Could it be that the DM is to focus on story with supereasy mechanics, while the player can have his complexity of management?
Certainly. At our table we divvy up certain GM duties to lighten the load, and give players something to do. Our GM doesn't handle the total loot or even initiative, really.
I am also skeptical toward the "players do all the rolls" thing. I can only guess at how monsters and npcs are statted compared to PCs, but with this system it sounds like they have a different stat system than PCs, which if it is true, I would loathe. I don't like inconsistency like that, it singles out PCs as weird special cases and i think any given creature should be playable the same way from both sides of the GM screen.
The way monsters in DnD4 are built already bothers me to no end.
Anyway but that is just an if case, that i don't know about yet.
When players make the rolls, they are engaged in the action. If their defense has no meaning other than a number, they wait to see if they are hit and feel no control themselves.
EDIT: Also, making a playable version of a monster, I think, shouldn't use the monster rules. The monsters are made to fight once and die. They are given specialties that make an encounter with it different than fighting another humanoid. Giving that design to a player makes the player too different from one made to last and be adaptable, which is what the normal races are for.
I wasn't saying that players should make monsters. I wouldn't let a player in my campaigns be for examle a chimera. And i realize that the way that a monster's "level" is measured differs from how you measure a PC. What I'm saying is that i like the design philosophies and mechanics to be the same. For example in DnD at least since 3.0 and up to and including pathfinder every creature is measured in Hit dice first. For a player character these come from class level, for monsters its racial hit dice most of the time, but they always follow these rules: You always gain skill points, feats and ability increases based on your number of HD (skills are determined by class or creature type, are added on every HD and vary from 2+Int to 8+Int, feats are always gained at every uneven HD (or in previous editions at 1st and every multiple of 3) and ability increases are granted at every 4th HD) also you gain a number of hit points with each HD (as determined by the type of die and your CON mod) and your Base attack and base save bonuses increase with each HD as determined by your type or class. In Pathfinder the base attack bonus was even taken one step further, and be directly tied to the type of HD (d12/d10=full, d8=3/4 and d6=half)
So monsters and PCs are made from the same basic ingredients making both sides of the GM screen consistent with each other. When monsters are made by a completely different set of rules, or worse, no rules at all, but simply mashing stats together until they pose about the right challenge, it feels (at least to me) like the two sides come from completely different worlds and adhere to different laws of phyiscs.
Another thing i don't like about players rolling all the dice is, that you as a GM lose control, you can't fudge rolls, and if you make a mistake, like making an encounter too powerful, there is little you can do to stop it from killing PCs that didn't deserve it.
It's no fun to murder PCs through no fault of their own.You should trust your players to know when to run. This situation shouldn't happen often, but when it does, it usually is fairly clear. If the players just barely didn't make it, it may have been down to a few rolls in either direction. But if it's a slaughterhouse, then they didn't realize it was a good time to run.
I, as a player, had to make a very specific wish that an encounter didn't happen in order to save the party. It was something we could have avoided, but we stumbled away into it anyway through our own actions. I...
I think it varies depending on the players and the situation. I almost had a TPK once because the players just didn't want run.
Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, when they don't, even after you try to explicitly warn them, you have to either let them die or pull extremely implausible deus ex machinae out of your sleeve.
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When monsters are made by a completely different set of rules, or worse, no rules at all, but simply mashing stats together until they pose about the right challenge, it feels (at least to me) like the two sides come from completely different worlds and adhere to different laws of phyiscs.
Why should monsters, outside of humanoids (possibly), adhere to the same rules as PCs? They are generally completely different creatures.
What exactly is a "hit dice"? Does your character know how many he has? Do you know how many you have? What "level" are you exactly?
I don't really see much reason that monsters and NPCs should adhere to arbitrarily defined rules meant to balance PC races and classes.
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Why should monsters, outside of humanoids (possibly), adhere to the same rules as PCs?
Because they exist within the same world and operate under the same natural laws.
I wasn't saying that players should make monsters. I wouldn't let a player in my campaigns be for examle a chimera. And i realize that the way that a monster's "level" is measured differs from how you measure a PC. What I'm saying is that i like the design philosophies and mechanics to be the same. For example in DnD at least since 3.0 and up to and including pathfinder every creature is measured in Hit dice first. For a player character these come from class level, for monsters its racial hit dice most of the time, but they always follow these rules: You always gain skill points, feats and ability increases based on your number of HD (skills are determined by class or creature type, are added on every HD and vary from 2+Int to 8+Int, feats are always gained at every uneven HD (or in previous editions at 1st and every multiple of 3) and...
I am also skeptical toward the "players do all the rolls" thing. I can only guess at how monsters and npcs are statted compared to PCs, but with this system it sounds like they have a different stat system than PCs, which if it is true, I would loathe. I don't like inconsistency like that, it singles out PCs as weird special cases and i think any given creature should be playable the same way from both sides of the GM screen.
The way monsters in DnD4 are built already bothers me to no end.
Anyway but that is just an if case, that i don't know about yet.
When players make the rolls, they are engaged in the action. If their defense has no meaning other than a number, they wait to see if they are hit and feel no control themselves.
EDIT: Also, making a playable version of a monster, I think, shouldn't use the monster rules. The monsters are made to fight once and die. They are given specialties that make an encounter with it different than fighting another humanoid. Giving that design to a player makes the player too different from one made to last and be adaptable, which is what the normal races are for.
I get what you're saying. I just don't agree, I guess.
To me, for the various monsters, even in PF, a number of those mechanics have no player-based parallel anyway, what with racial-based class features and bonus feats for no reason other than to make it work. Plus, most of the time the monsters have higher ability scores by default, so gaining bonus points there is arbitrary.
I like that the monster rules themselves are largely consistent, but having that carry across game roles doesn't concern me one bit.
That said, as a player, when I have a tough character, I'm also usually the one staying behind so the rest can run. If I wasn't there in that capacity, we might not have made it a few times, so yeah, groups can differ on the TPK issue.
On topic, I can't convince my group to play Numenara, though it has interested me at least. I gave it a quick read through, and I like it just fine, but I'm having enough trouble getting them to play my game, much less someone else's.
I've only played in one session so far (was sick during the second one, and have prior engagements for the next couple), but I can comment a little.
I hadn't read the book at all before playing, and have only read the character creation stuff, so there are obviously going to be elements I don't entirely understand (cyphers and oddities for example, I've got no idea what the point of those are).
I found combat very simplistic. A little too much so for my liking. The fact that all weapons of a given category do the exact same damage for every hit feels weird to me.
It also seems to be very easy to create powerful combinations of skills early on without really meaning to. For example, without intending to cheese my character, I built one who had the second level of training in speed defences as long as I wasn't wearing armour, so I reduced the level of difficulty for speed defences by 2. What this ended up meaning was that as long as I rolled a 3 or higher, I couldn't be hit by most of the enemies. The highest roll I had to make was a 6 to dodge the leader of the mooks.
That said, I didn't find it at all difficult to figure out the edges/pools/effort system. Seemed to work incredibly well, and after 10 minutes of play I'd picked it up pretty easily. Likewise, the difficulty ratings aren't as hard to work out as you seem to expect. As soon as I worked out it was multiples of 3 I didn't even have to think about it anymore.
Overall I like the system, but there's no way it'll ever become my main game. Those are staying as Pathfinder, World of Darkness and Shadowrun.
Why should monsters, outside of humanoids (possibly), adhere to the same rules as PCs?Because they exist within the same world and operate under the same natural laws.
Not necessarily. Many monsters are magical by nature, and by definition don't operate under the same natural laws. You're also making the mistake of equating arbitrary PC creation rules with natural laws. The two are not the same.
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...I wasn't saying that players should make monsters. I wouldn't let a player in my campaigns be for examle a chimera. And i realize that the way that a monster's "level" is measured differs from how you measure a PC. What I'm saying is that i like the design philosophies and mechanics to be the same. For example in DnD at least since 3.0 and up to and including pathfinder every creature is measured in Hit dice first. For a player character these come from class level, for monsters its racial hit dice most of the time, but they always follow these rules: You always gain skill points, feats and ability increases based on your number of HD (skills are determined by class or creature type, are added on every HD and vary from 2+Int to 8+Int, feats are always gained at every uneven HD (or in previous editions at 1st and
I am also skeptical toward the "players do all the rolls" thing. I can only guess at how monsters and npcs are statted compared to PCs, but with this system it sounds like they have a different stat system than PCs, which if it is true, I would loathe. I don't like inconsistency like that, it singles out PCs as weird special cases and i think any given creature should be playable the same way from both sides of the GM screen.
The way monsters in DnD4 are built already bothers me to no end.
Anyway but that is just an if case, that i don't know about yet.
When players make the rolls, they are engaged in the action. If their defense has no meaning other than a number, they wait to see if they are hit and feel no control themselves.
EDIT: Also, making a playable version of a monster, I think, shouldn't use the monster rules. The monsters are made to fight once and die. They are given specialties that make an encounter with it different than fighting another humanoid. Giving that design to a player makes the player too different from one made to last and be adaptable, which is what the normal races are for.
I suppose it's a matter of personal preference, but I find it bothersome when i look at for example 4e monsters and even NPCs and how they just work entirely differently from pcs.
Maybe just a bit of OCD.
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Not necessarily. Many monsters are magical by nature, and by definition don't operate under the same natural laws. You're also making the mistake of equating arbitrary PC creation rules with natural laws. The two are not the same.Why should monsters, outside of humanoids (possibly), adhere to the same rules as PCs?Because they exist within the same world and operate under the same natural laws.
On that we shall have to simply disagree. To me, they are the same. The rule system of the game is the rule system of the reality played in it. Simple as that.
Like Threeshades, the fact that the PCs and monsters in 3.x/PF operate under the same basic building blocks is a severe plus to me, and other systems where this is not the case I find irksome.
That said, I didn't find it at all difficult to figure out the edges/pools/effort system. Seemed to work incredibly well, and after 10 minutes of play I'd picked it up pretty easily. Likewise, the difficulty ratings aren't as hard to work out as you seem to expect. As soon as I worked out it was multiples of 3 I didn't even have to think about it anymore.
Cool. Thanks for the heads up TG. I just found it a headache reading the mechanics, and found the lack of tacit examples frustrating. Glad to hear it was easy to play.
That said, I didn't find it at all difficult to figure out the edges/pools/effort system. Seemed to work incredibly well, and after 10 minutes of play I'd picked it up pretty easily. Likewise, the difficulty ratings aren't as hard to work out as you seem to expect. As soon as I worked out it was multiples of 3 I didn't even have to think about it anymore.Cool. Thanks for the heads up TG. I just found it a headache reading the mechanics, and found the lack of tacit examples frustrating. Glad to hear it was easy to play.
No worries. Like I said, I didn't actually read the book at all apart from the character creation and advancement, so it may have helped that I just had someone say to me "This is how X, Y and Z work." Either way, I found that it clicked very quickly.
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The main thing that caught me about the OP was the idea that players rolling all the dice is somehow a bad thing. I personally love player-facing mechanics, so I don't find players rolling all the dice problematic, but based on what I've read Numenera only explores one part of what makes player-facing mechanics engaging.
I've always gotten the impression from Monte Cook that he loves being a GM and his writing (all the way to the D&D 3e DMG) oozes the idea that being GM is the funnest part of running the game. As such, I think that he chose to incorporate player-facing mechanics into Numenera as a way of making the GM's job easier and to allow them to focus on describing the world and narrating the action instead of bogging them down with dice-rolling.
Player-facing mechanics are great, because they can really encourage proactive play as opposed to reactive play. This is readily apparent in the philosophy of games based on the Apocalypse World engine: the action is supposed to emerge from player choice and action, so the mechanics are built in such a way that dice-rolls only trigger as a consequence of players describing their characters' action and intent. However, based on what I've read of Numenera, it only seems to go half-way.
Combat is a prime example. In a traditional game of D&D, players roll their attacks and monsters roll their attacks. Sometimes players roll to oppose monster attacks (the good old saving throw), but even then the roll emerges as a reaction to something the monster does, not as the consequence of something the character does. In Numenera all rolls are on the player, so monster attacks, instead of being GM-rolled, prompt a saving throw-like roll from the player.
That's all well and good, but the die-roll is still invoked as a reaction to something a monster does instead of being prompted by something that the character does. I'll use a D&D example to illustrate my point:
GM: The dragon rears its head, opens its mouth and unleashes a gout of flame at you. Roll a saving throw.
PC: *roll* 16.
GM: Good job! You quickly jump out of the way of the dragon's breath weapon, ducking behind a pillar, its flames only barely singing you! What do you do?
While in this example the player rolled the die, they did so as a reaction to the GM telling them to do so. Also, the entire action was narrated by the GM. Let's look at the same example, but this time with the assumption that die rolls are prompted by character action:
GM: The dragon rears its head, opens its mouth and unleashes a gout of flame at you. What do you do?
PC: I'm gonna do a cool action movie dive for that pillar over there, hoping that I'm quick enough on my feet to get there before being burned alive.
GM: Okay, roll a saving throw.
...and so on. Obviously, in this situation the player could've chosen not to do anything, which would've been equivalent to them defaulting to fail on their saving throw.
It's a subtle difference, but I personally think that the strength of player-facing mechanics lies in being able to turn a situation that in most games is purely reactive (i.e. avoiding an attack) into something where the player is proactive in the narration. Even with player-facing mechanics, if some of the rolls that players need to make are still largely reactive, it runs counter to one of the best possibilities opened up by player-facing mechanics.
That said, I understand why Monte Cook adopted player-facing mechanics: he wanted to make the GM's job easier and allow them to focus on narration instead of having to roll dice all the time, but I also feel that he could've gone a bit further with player-facing mechanics by making all player made rolls emerge from character actions instead of being prompted by the GM, but that's just me.
I still have to give Monte Cook kudos for adopting player-facing mechanics, because anything that helps me focus on narration and describing an evocative world over dice-rolling is a welcome change, because rolling dice and running the math for monsters is easily one of my least favorite things about being a GM. I love rolling dice and running the math as a player, but that's because I only have one dude's math to worry about instead of a huge bunch of goblins or something. ;)
Keep in mind there are players that would stand there and take the dragon's breath on the proverbial chin every time unless prompted to roll a saving throw.
Personally, I like the concept of proactive player rolls versus reactive, as well. On the other hand, I definitely know some folks that prefer to just hang out and roll some dice when prompted.
I had the opportunity to GM a one-player session the other night. We messed about with a mock combat (a single Broken Hound, which was quite uneven but let us test out some things) and then went ahead and started playing.
The scenario was just something I had been thinking about for a few days and I had scribbled down a few names and just a couple of numbers. No real prep other than that.
I guess the bulk of the game was roleplaying but we had no problem with the mechanics when they came up. The character was a very physical glaive and didn't spend many points except from Intellect.
We ended on a cliffhanger as a scary combat robot warmed up to face the character. I'd have to say it was the easiest GMing I've ever done...but we'll see how it goes with this much tougher combat.
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Keep in mind there are players that would stand there and take the dragon's breath on the proverbial chin every time unless prompted to roll a saving throw.
Personally, I like the concept of proactive player rolls versus reactive, as well. On the other hand, I definitely know some folks that prefer to just hang out and roll some dice when prompted.
Oh yeah, that is an absolutely a valid concern, but I think it's mainly a learned habit and not something we as players are hard-wired to do: I've run Dungeon World and other PbtA games for complete newbies, and when told "Shit is about to go down, what do you do?" they've immediately responded with cool backflips, diving for cover, or bracing their shield for the oncoming onslaught. The idea that a player should actually describe their character dodging is mainly novel to most players because games like D&D have taught us that the default state is that rolls like that are reactive.
Personally I think it's one of those habits that's good to unlearn, because not only does it lead to more engaging play, it also increases player agency. One of the things that sort of gets to me about the reactive saving throw is that it almost always follows a script of "GM narrates attack, prompts player for a roll, player rolls, GM narrates the result," where the only input from the player is the roll. That's why I think it's important to add "player narrates what their character does as a reaction to the attack" as a step before the roll is prompted, because it gives the player agency over how their character reacts to a given situation. A lot of the time it doesn't matter mechanically (i.e. one character might do the aforementioned cool backflip, while another might dive for cover, while another might curl into a ball and cry, all of which I would personally put under the same mechanic of Reflex save or whatever the game in question calls it) but it means everything in terms of what type of character flavor the player gets to inject into the narrative.
But yeah, this is neither here nor there as far as Numenera is concerned. I'm not sure whether player-facing mechanics and agency would merit a thread of its own, but I might consider starting one.