TM and © 2014 Monte Cook Games, LLC.
Monte Cook has always been a designer who brings great things to the gaming table. That said, I’ve been avoiding the Cypher System in its earlier incarnations, as Numenera and The Strange, because I didn’t feel like I needed another game with a built-in setting. Now that I’ve had a chance to review a copy of the stand-alone Cypher System rulebook, I admit that I should have paid attention earlier.
The Cypher System is a narrative roleplaying game system that might actually get played by simulationist roleplayers like me. It has enough cool ideas to tempt me to play it and it also looks perfect for solo games.
Although reading through the book has been a joy, I can’t help but suspect that the real strengths of the game will be shown through use.
What is The Cypher System?
This game takes the core roleplaying engine out of Numenera and The Strange, placing it into a generic format and offering the system to GMs of any setting:
“The Cypher System Rulebook adapts the Cypher System to an unlimited range of campaigns and genres, giving you the complete rules set and hundreds of character options, creatures, cyphers, and other resources. It’s everything you need to play virtually any game using the Cypher System rules.” (Monte Cook Games website)
On the surface, it’s just another d20-rolling variant… but that doesn’t do the game justice. The Cypher System is an innovative and not-too-crunchy narrative game that offers enough nifty features to grab the attention of a simulationist.
What’s Cool?
1. Characters from exciting concepts
First of all, the game is character-focused: roughly half the 411-page book is stuff on character creation. The coolest feature is the way it uses a simple character concept-building idea and riffs off it extensively.
In short, your character is described using a simple one-sentence formula:
“I am an adjective noun who verbs.”
In other words, you describe your basic character idea in a very broad sense. Yesterday, for example, I created a character called Typhon Flame:
“I am a virtuous Crusader who hunts demons.”
What the game does really well is to take that idea and provide you with a host of choices about exactly which adjectives, nouns, and verbs to build your character from. Your character type forms the noun; your descriptor is the adjective; you choose a focus as your verb. Each of these has concrete mechanical impact on your final character design.
2. Stats and their use
The next cool thing revolves around the three core stats that characters all have: Might, Speed, and Intellect. What I like most is the way in which the value of each stat provides a pool that you can tap into when you need to overcome an obstacle.
To briefly outline the mechanics, each obstacle (or task) is rated in difficulty from zero to ten. The difficulty level can be modified by your character’s skills or by applying effort (read: spending points from the stat pool); once the difficulty is modified, the d20 is rolled against a target number which is three times the final difficulty value. You want to roll high, to beat the target number. Oh, and if you can reduce the difficulty to zero, you don’t need to roll at all.
I really like this approach to tasks because eye-balling the difficulty from 1-10 is pretty intuitive. On top of that, the modifiers are pretty straight-forward (e.g. -1 to difficulty for being trained in a skill, or -2 for being a specialist in that skill). Finally, the ability to apply Effort to the test wins for me: I love the idea of my hero putting in the extra “umph” when I feel they need it; burning some Might (for example) to strike an enemy with my sword feels “right”.
3. Lots of genre advice
You have to bring a bit to this game, much as you would to any generic roleplaying system, because it’s… erm, generic. If you want to play a fantasy game, for example, you need to decide on some core parameters for the setting you want to play in. What the Cypher System provides is loads of great advice and examples.
For starters, each of the character types (sort of like character classes) offers options that can be calibrated to any setting. Next, the descriptors and foci are helpfully sorted into lists you can adopt based on the genre of play. Finally, there’s a host of creature examples in a bestiary that will help you to get started with interesting foes.
If that wasn’t enough, there is a really chunky and useful – not to mention highly down-to-earth and honest – Gamemaster chapter with loads of extra advice. I spent a couple of hours reading this (even as a Gamemastering veteran) and finding lots of cool stuff to ponder over. It’s a good read!
All in all, you really do have the toolkit to run any game in the most common genres in that single book. And if you can’t be bothered to do the rather minimal set-up Monte Cook advises, then you can always enjoy the game in its own pre-designed settings: Numenera or The Strange.
What’s Naff?
The most naff thing in the Cypher System is the use of a single d20 for tests. That is, for some reason I can’t quite pin down, the largest barrier to playing the game. Whether it’s the flat progression and “swinginess” of that die mechanic or just that I have suffered too much trauma at the hands of d20-based systems, I can’t say. Suffice to say, however, that this is NOT a d20 derivative: there is not another single mechanic in the game that I can easily label as such. In fact, the game is much more innovative than it at first appears. This really is something to put aside so you can appreciate what Monte Cook has produced.
Next on my naff list is that the baseline of power in the game is definitely cinematic and not at all “zero to hero”. As a child of the Old School, I find that this might be the key issue that I have with the game. It seems to be a thing in the narrativist gaming style that they want to play seriously high-powered characters from the word go. To my taste, this immediately undermines the verisimilitude of modern and horror games (two genres the Cypher System aims to emulate) because heroes have lots of cool abilities with which to succeed. That being said, I think that it is easy to customise the game to taste given that there are so few actual parameters to fiddle with. I believe that customisation is one of the things the game’s “cyphers” (one-shot abilities) are supposed to be about too.
Finally, I’d complain about the fixed damage from attacks. In short, your weapons are either light (2 points of damage), medium (4 points), or heavy (6 points). While it’s cool that damage goes straight on to the injured stat, I will admit to missing a random damage roll. Of course, that’s probably the Old School in me screaming again: there’s nothing wrong per se with fixed damage, and it’s purely a matter of taste.
What would you do next?
This is a game that definitely deserves play and further exploration. It also immediately strikes me as a good candidate for solo roleplaying because of the highly customisable play experience combined with the fact that only the player rolls dice.
Yesterday, I created Typhon Flame to see how the character creation rules work. This illuminated the game in many positive ways and encourages me that taking the game for a spin would be a lot of fun. The barrier, as ever, will be in finding a group to test it with.
On the solo front, this game is worth exploring for use with other solo tools. I think it would work well with either Mythic or ALONe. The most appealing elements are the easy-to-eyeball difficulty rules combined with the ease of creating foes; I’d also add that the fact of only the player rolling dice makes it easier to convert to solo.
Overall, the Cypher System is an 8 out of 10 game and worthy of a look.
Game on!
