Understand that what follows is a critique, not a "negative review" and certainly not a value judgment on the game, its authors, or its players. I'm not reviewing or even bothering to drill down into Numenera; I'm assuming the reader already knows the game to some degree, either by reading the text or from actual play. Rob Donoghue did a detailed analysis when the game came out, you can read it if that's your thing.
My thesis is that the Cypher System, and Numenera as its purest expression, is 2nd edition AD&D as it was played (rather than as it was written): rulings over rules, exposition as narrative, balance primarily as an afterthought, and rewards for entertaining the GM and table play contribution outweighing, if not supplanting, rewards for combat and treasure-hoarding. Internalize this, and you'll know whether or not Numenera is for you.
Numenera's core system is simple enough to write on a business card: the GM sets a difficulty. Before rolling, the player can reduce the difficulty by expending resources. The player can expend resources to reduce difficulty, sometimes to a point where rolling is unnecessary. The player then makes a pass/fail die roll. If there are no overly-complex or barely-used rules to wrestle with or discard, the GM can concentrate on her tasks as moderator, facilitator, and narrator.
By modern RPG standards, Numenera's GMing methods feel retrograde. The GM advice in Numenera talks about things like pacing your narrative, about what to do when your story goes off the rails. When Monte Cook talks about narrative or story in Numenera, he's not talking about it in the indie game sense of a collaboration between players and GM, but in the sense of boxed text in an adventure module. "The narrative" is the story that the GM presents to the players, not the story that they create together. Player contributions are assumed to be reactionary, not revolutionary, to the narrative. The mechanics are simplified for the purposes of reducing, not eliminating, GM preparation. The assumption is that there will be GM prep, that the GM has a scenario in mind for the players to experience and that deviation from that scenario requires correction.
Character abilities in Numenera aren't mathematically balanced against each other, and characters aren't mathematically balanced against opposition. Properly optimized characters can thoroughly run roughshod over an insufficiently-prepared GM's plans, and Numenera's answer, much as in classic D&D, is to restrict the players through a combination of GM fiat and player-shaming: rather than the "yes, and" or "yes, but" responses espoused in modern GMing, there's a strong endorsement of "no, and you shouldn't want that, anyway."
What Numenera does right is that it takes all those rules that, in a traditional RPG, exist seemingly to only make a GM's job look harder than it is, and almost completely disposes of them, then wraps the remaining system up in an attractive package that is almost, but not quite, entirely like D&D.
AD&D 2nd edition wasn't the first game where the majority of the player base took to the basic mechanics and flat-out ignored the rules in favor of ruling on the fly; that was likely Vampire: the Masquerade. Well, let's be real: it was likely every goddamn RPG ever, but if there was actual data proving there were more Vampire and WOD GMs who had no idea how their game works than any other RPG's GMs, I'd completely fail to be surprised. And that's a feature of Vampire/WOD, not a bug: the strength of that die mechanic is in the ease of learning it, and how applicable it is across a broad spectrum of situations and obstacles.
And Numenera was far from the first RPG to dispose of much outside of a central game mechanic and leave the details to the GM. My first encounter with that sort of thing was Over The Edge back in 1992, but the subject matter of post-Cold War conspiracies and oft-metafictional high weirdness on a fictional Mediterranean island is about as far from D&D as it gets.
It's been said that, even when he's not writing D&D, Monte Cook writes D&D, and I have trouble arguing with that. Given the full freedom and funding to make whatever game he chose, he made a science-fantasy D&D in the style to which he seems most accustomed -- not the overly-fiddly 3rd edition, but the more loosey-goosey, GM-centric 2nd edition. There are more specific similarities, the discovery of which I leave up to the reader. The important thing is that Numenera makes GMing look as easy as it is. Which isn't to say it's not difficult, but it's nowhere near the feat of simultaneous mathematical, organizational, performative, and narrative prowess that many traditional RPGs have made it out to be. And any game that grows the GM base is a net good for the hobby.
JOESKY TAX: Alternative character advancement rules for Numenera and the Cypher System. Unplaytested.
Many Cypher players are displeased with having to spend the same resource on character advancement, rerolls, and limited benefits. I think a lot of players are adopting house rules similar to the following; I just prefer the Apocalypse World-style phrasing.
When you spend XP on immediate benefits (Numenera, pg 110), mark experience. When you have marked four experience, reset experience to zero and apply one character advancement (pg 112). Character advancement rules otherwise apply. Spending XP on short-, medium-, and long-term benefits (pg 111-112) is unaffected and is not marked as experience. Experience advances (pg 119) are not affected.
XP still have to be earned, and have to be spent in the moment to be applied towards advancement. Players who blow through a lot of rerolls or consistently refuse GM intrusions may end up advancing faster than others; raising the advancement threshold to seven or eight experience marked, or providing more XP sinks in the form of short-, medium-, or long-term benefits to be purchased might slow advancement down to a more acceptable pace.
By default, "marking experience" is a simple hashmark on a character sheet. Optionally, GMs might have players record a single-sentence summary of what the XP was spent on, e.g. "I barely escaped a collapsing building," or "I eluded the slavering jaws of a chirog". Mechanically, this does nothing, but it adds flavor to the character, giving them a stronger place in the world.
