To this day I play the MMORPG for Star Wars the Old Republic, having played and met the developers for the previous MMO, and I recently spoke on a panel podcast about my thoughts on George Lucas and Star Wars here. I’ve played every licensed Star Wars roleplaying game that’s come out. I've found players start asking all sorts of questions with Cypher System games, because they are vying for ways to lower their target number, which in turn enriches the narrative.I’ve made adaptations for Star Wars in almost every game system I’ve used. It gets players thinking about what tools and bonuses they can gain in the fiction, and keeps them away from rolling dice unprompted. Overall I think that while it isn't intuitive for d20 system players to do this kind of calculation before a roll, it actually helps a lot.
The advantage here is that it means you don't roll for the check, and thus cannot get a natural 1, which is a free GM Intrusion. You've now turned a Challenging Level 5 climb into a Routine Level 0 climb, thus making it automaticly a success. Your friend is an expert climber and they Help you with the climb, lowering the difficult to 0. You have a set of climbing tools, which counts as an Asset lowering the difficulty to 1. So you use it and pick Climbing, so the Difficulty drops to 2. Your character isn't Trained in Climbing, but you use a Cypher which allows you to temporarily become Specialised in any skill until the sun sets. You use a level of Effort, spending 3 Might to lower the Difficulty to 4. Take for example a cliff you need to climb which the GM has decided is a Level 5 Difficulty. As such my collection of cool Cyphers grows and grows, without requiring a tone of upfront prep or on the fly creativity mid session.Īs for 'Pool Points moving the Target Number rather than the roll itself' I think one of the key concepts is that by doing so you remove the need to roll. I do this on small note cards and my plan is to make slightly more than I give out in each session (by randomly drawing from the stack of cards). In my experience there is a lot of use in prepping Cyphers as part of your campaign prep. They are a core part of the system, as is obvious by the name, but it is easy to make them kind of dull still. I know what you mean about making Cyphers intersting. If I ever run it again (which I likely will not - Savage Worlds fits my tastes as a generic far better), this would be a house rule I'd implement. Mind you, we had a longer history with Pathfinder 1e, and bigger numbers just felt better for everyone. Pool Points moving the Target Number, rather that affecting the roll itself - this one just felt weird to the whole group. Never could quite figure out when to make use of it, as it felt very vague and arbitrary. GM Intrusions - I like the idea, but it never felt natural for me to make use of it. To be fair, they've always been bad at using their resources, like spells or per-day abilities when we played Pathfinder. Spending HP to boost rolls that rarely seemed to make a difference for them, and it seemed like a larger risk than what its worth to them. Pool Points as HP - my players greatly chaffed at this, more than anything.
Cyphers themselves can be very interesting, if you know how to make them interesting.
But here was the hang ups I encountered when I ran Cypher: I did a short run of Cypher many years ago, between a Shadowrun campaign and returning to Pathfinder. I really don't hate or even dislike Cypher system, it just sounded a lot better on paper than in play, for my group.Įdit: I also love the setting for Numenera, but use it for other systems. Cyphers are very much the same as Omega Tech in Gamma World 7e, so it was very easy to port them into my Cypher Gamma game. They are so great for pushing players to solve problems without combat (thank goodness, because as I said, combat just felt like a slog). The concept of one-use disposable magic items, aka "Cyphers", I have lifted wholesale and use in everything else we play as my players loved them. Also, the "difficulty levels" where every 3 points on the die is a "level" annoyed everyone as "just trying to be different for the sake of it." I've heard the argument that it smooths swingy die rolls, but nobody felt that at the table, instead, they just felt like we were spending time on a system that wanted to be different, more than better. Combat, with hard defined damage, meant if you got into combat, it was a slog. It felt very "flat" for lack of a better description. I was excited to run it, everyone wanted to play it after character creation, and it just didn't hook us once we actually did play it. We tried Numenera, Shotguns & Sorcery (a pulp fantasy Cypher-based game), and a version of Gamma World I cooked up in Cypher, and it just fell flat for my groups.