So ... Cypher.

So... the Cypher system from Monte Cook. I have a love-hate thing about this game system.

With the explosion of upcoming Cypher games about to drop - the wildly successful Old Gods of Appalachia and Adventures in the Cypher System Kickstarter projects - I figure I better resolve my issues and maybe plan some house rules, because I see great potential in the Cypher system, but I also have some very bitter and jagged issues with the system.

Overall, I immensely appreciate the simplicity and elegance of the level mechanic for monsters and other threats. “It’s a level 4 Orc” tells you what you need to know about hitting it, and avoid being hit by it, and even how many times you need to hit it (if its HP is based on its level, though most monsters detailed in the various Cypher books don’t follow the formula exactly); Anything else the monster can do is a special entry in its writeup, but they’re generally pretty simple to use. (I am using the term ‘monster’ here very broadly: meaning any threat, opponent or entity challenging the PCs) I appreciate that the Players do the majority of rolling in Cypher: roll to succeed, roll to hit, roll to avoid being hit, etc… 

The three Attributes Pools.

Might, Speed and Mind. I appreciate the brevity and archetypes here. Could there be room for additional or alternative approaches? Body, Mind, Soul? HOWEVER: The idea that using your powers makes you weaker and closer to defeat by drawing from the same pools that serve as your ‘hp’ seems counterintuitive. When doing something cool and powerful is equivalent to taking a hit from a monster, one has to do the evaluation if your action is worth it. I have a workaround for this, so see House Rules later for my 'fix' for this issue.

Character Types, a.k.a. Classes

The core character ‘classes’ or Types as they are called in the core book are kinda weak IMHO, especially in their progression. I don't have a quick fix for this. Maybe replacing character Types with a broader application of the Adjective Noun that Verbs structure could work, but I am getting ahead of myself ...

"I am an Adjective Noun who Verbs" rocks

What Cypher has really inspires me with is the phrase “I am an Adjective Noun who Verbs.” In Cypher, you combine a Descriptor (Adjective), a Type (Noun) and a Focus (Verb) to create your character. It’s sorta like the equivalent of your Alignment + Race + Class in D&D. However, Cypher limits your characters to one such combination. Now granted in Cypher these are big defining elements. “I am a Swift Warrior who Dual Wields” embodies everything those words encompass. However it makes for rather one - dimensional characters.

I’m seriously interested in using the ‘Adjective Noun that Verbs’ structure as a Skill-based system instead:

• Let the Adjective be the level of experience/training (Novice, Expert, Master, etc…).
• The Noun is the skill, career or job title.
• And the Verbs is a specialization within that broader Noun.

(For simplicity I’ll refer to ‘Adjective Noun who Verbs’ as ‘ANV’ from here on.)

So for example you could have a Novice Marksman who Snipes, but alternatively be Expert Marksman who Dual Wields. You don’t have to have a Specialization. The trick here is that the Noun has to be simultaneously broad enough to encompass a clear set of actions /activities/ knowledge, but also narrow enough not to be abused as a catch-all for everything the character attempts to do.

The Adjective/level of experience would be the effective 'level' in that skill. In core Cypher rules: 'Novice' would give you a baseline chance to succeed. 'Trained' would give you a one step difficulty in your favor, and 'Specialized' would give you two difficulty steps in your favor. In other game systems your Adj level could determine how many dice to roll, etc ...

The Specialization would give a boon to actions in specific circumstances. These could be detailed written up abilities, or a free difficulty boon, or grant types of actions that wouldn't be possible without the Specialization.

E.g. You gotta be a Brilliant Doctor who's a Brain Surgeon to try to replace Spock's brain.

You could also use the ANV for things like social traits, reputations, titles, etc., where the Adj is the level/rank/notoriety, the Noun is the title, rank or position, and the Verb instead details the organization. A Junior Knight of the Order of the Rose, A Special Agent of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, a Notorious Enforcer of the Mendez Cartel.

A character would realistically be a collection of these ANV combinations, advancing in skill level and gaining specializations as they grow from experience, as well as gaining new ANV traits.

No One True Game Engine

No, this isn't a No True Scotsman argument. This is mostly a self-directed rant.

I have this problem where I keep trying to find/invent the 'one true' game engine to play all the games/settings I want to experience or run. Sadly, this is a bad habit that I gotta kick myself off.

I wanted to find that mythical One Game Engine with TURK (True Universal Roll-and-Keep), and I eventually gave up on the project because Roll n Keep can't do everything I wanted. I've tried again and again to cherry-pick my favorite mechanics from various systems and Frankenstein them together into something that does everything I want and nothing I don't. What I left off with at TURK was a complex and incomplete 'framework' that would need interpreting with every setting I wanted to use it in. Not only would you need a 'CORE' book, but a 'WORLD' book to tell you how to apply the Core rules to each setting. It got crunchy, which was one of the things I was trying to avoid.

Oh hubris, your aftertaste is so bitter.

The humbling truth is: Game engines/systems are tailored to produce their desired effects (whelp, at least modern games systems do. There was a time when everything had six stats, XP and levels and you rolled a d20 in combat and usually percentile dice for everything else...)

In no particular order:

RISK, as in the 7th Sea 2nd Edition, and the forthcoming 7th Sea: Khitai game, has a mechanical focus on using Raises generated by dice rolls as your narrative currency. Players and GM's then spend this currency to decide what their focus on the story details will be. I love some of the ideas in this system; it's a streamlined and evolved version of the original Roll and Keep that inspired me to write TURK in the first place.

D&D, especially 5th Edition, is great at high fantasy storytelling with an emphasis on exploration, combat and character power growth from those activities. Yes, out of the box it doesn't support character emotional and relationship growth, but there's nothing stopping a good GM from making pathos an essential driving force of a story. You don't need mechanics to do that.

Mekton and the FUSION engine are great at the grognardy-number-crunching-mecha-design and smashing stories. The Mekton Technical System is still my favorite because it focused on relative design choices, very flexible scaling and adaptability with a focus on anime physics and storytelling. The only thing holding it back is just how crunchy it gets with character design and advancement (nine primary stats and a variable number of derived stats?!?) and actual mecha combat could get really slow as well.

GURPS started as a wonderfully 'universal' system and was heavily focused on character over everything else. It suffered, i think, from trying to point-balance and option everything possible in character creation. Some of the later editions had VOLUMES published about character options. And don't get me started about GURPS Vehicles.
Okay just one gripe and then moving on: do I really, REALLY need to worry about the weight of the fuzzy dice I hang in my tricked out muscle car? Not to mention calculating the square surface area of the radio so I can determine how much damage it can take? (Fire, Fusion and Steel for Traveller TNE had the same problem.)

Burning Wheel is all about character drama in a gritty and hard way. It encourages player buy-in and adding to the game world and supports that mechanically.

FATE is fantastically abstract, generic and diverse in all the settings it's been used in, but that's also it's weakness. It depends on players and GM's having a firm and agile grip on how to use FATE.

2d20, specifically Star Trek Adventures, does a fine job of capturing the feel of principle-driven science-fiction storytelling. the Momentum mechanic makes intra-character cooperation and collaboration easy. The Infinity setting is just bonkers with the crunchy details that STA lacks.

Eclipse Phase, while a percentile system, does a fabulous job of showing how a game engine can reflect the setting; the separation of ego and morph and how they work together is a wonderful metaphoric mirror to the ideas behind a transhuman/posthumanist setting.

Cypher is fascinating for both it's innovation and return to really old-school themes involving bizarre encounters and devices. It DOES do interesting things with putting all rolls on the player's side of the table and making the GM's management of other characters easier and nominally having an open system for any kind of world-building and setting-making. See here for a separate post about other things I've taken away from my reading of the Cypher system.

Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy -both Forged In The Dark games- focus on storytelling with imaginative yet open-to-interpretation universes. This system sets up mechanical frameworks that quickly establish qualitative results that imaginative GMs and Players can color however they wish.

I really do need to embrace the wonderful variety of game systems out there.
Hell, I spend enough on collecting new and interesting games, I should bloody well use them!

Except percentile systems. To hell with them. They're too granular and fiddly and imply arbitrary limitations of capacity and ability. That and I just have terrible luck with them. (Ask me about my RoleMaster experience sometime and buy me a beer, and I'll spin you a yarn about the root of my antagonism towards %-dice based engines.)

I am a(n) Adjective Noun who Verbs

The Cypher system likes to summarize (or initialize?) character creation with a sentence in the structure of: "I am a(n) Adjective Noun who Verbs" and there's something sublimely cleaver about that. Cypher The choices then goes on to assign stats, powers and situational bonuses (also tied to the experience level of the character) to the character based on the choices you make when you choose your Descriptor (Adjective), Type (Noun) and Focus (Verb). The words themselves don't really indicate anything after that; they're just identifiers for the choices made. On the one hand, you know that every character with the ‘Adroit’ Adjective is capable of; On the other hand, you’re limited to the choices that have been defined with stats, skills and modifiers.

I like the idea of decoupling those defined modifiers for the most part, and return to just relying on the context of your Adjective, Noun and Verb choice. I feel this could work very well in a FATE kind of way where Aspects have mechanical benefits but are totally open to creation and interpreting in context.

We could even take this concept one layer deeper (what FATE refers to as the ‘fractal’) and consider how the same descriptive phrasing could be applied to not only player characters, but NPCs, objects and even places.

Consider:

• A Person who is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) who (Verbs)
• An Object that is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) with/that (Verbs)
• A Place that is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) that (Verbs)

Nouns define the quintessential function of the person, place or thing. For people, it’s their root career, story purpose, ‘class’, etc. For things it should encapsulate the general use, purpose and effectiveness of that type of thing. All Rifles fundamentally are the same; a firearm that requires two hands to hold and brace properly for use, etc. In a game with generic versions of a class of weapon or tool, all types of the same Noun start with the same base stats/values.

E.g. all pistols in 1st edition 7thSea were 4k2 weapons. All heavy melee weapons were 3k3, adding Brawn to the number of dice thrown. All longswords in D&D do d8 damage, and so on.

Adjectives are Enhancers which are boons when they are relevant to the situation, and added complications when the are inappropriate to the context of use.  (In RISK games, I’d adjudicate this as a free Raise when appropriate, and at least one Raise of Complication if inappropriate.) Against an opponent with the same or opposing Adjective, the bonuses cancel out.

A sniper who is forced into close-combat with a melee attacker tries to shoot their opponent with their longarm. The GM adjudicates the ‘sniper’ Adjective of their weapon means they have to overcome a 2-Raise Complication to not damage or loose grip on their weapon during the melee.

Verbs are Enablers and augment base abilities with additional or unusual functionality. For ‘magic’ items, this is where the special and magical ability is defined (e.g a longsword that drains life force). For modular and modified technology items, this is the added features/functions of the modifications (e.g. an Assault Rifle with an underslung grenade launcher; the grenade launcher is the added functionality.)

A soldier armed with an Assault Rifle with Grenade Launcher, is attacking a Brute Squad. The GM adjudicates that the Verb on the weapon lets them take out their Weapons skill rank in Brutes for a single Raise. BOOM.

Not everything needs Adjectives and Verbs in their descriptions, but everything must have a Noun. +Adjectives should be common, while +Verbs represent rare, unique and especially important or powerful people/places/things.

Another thought: could this system work with skills or other character traits? Let the (Adjective) be the relative level of experience/ability, the (Noun) be the broad skill, and let any (Verb) represent specializations or extra effects the character has associated with that Skill.

I’m an Expert Hacker.
I’m a Novice Archaeologist who Finds Lost Things.
They’re an Experienced Marksman who Dual Wields.

Thoughts?