Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Beta Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Neanderthal]

Spoiler

Pity wi all that life an oddity that protagonist looks to be most borin fucker in whole world.

 

[Parabalus]

The balance™ in the new version seems completely borked. Since now you can use your companions' pools to do checks it feels almost impossible to fail them(intended?).
There are almost no might checks, INT outnumbers speed and might combined probably by a factor of 2 or 3, or are checks hidden if you don't have enough edge/skills? Didn't get that feeling.
Physical stats were also useless in PS:T so it kinda fits I guess.

The rest is much better than the first version, it got polished quite a bit, another half year of spit and shine should put it in a prime place for release.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

Every screen posted looks like it is from a different game. And while most are certainly alien and colorful, they clash with the bland UI and character portraits. And the combat screens are hidden behind a lot of icons.

 

[AetherVagrant]

Every screen posted looks like it is from a different game. And while most are certainly alien and colorful, they clash with the bland UI and character portraits. And the combat screens are hidden behind

The ui and character portraits in the first beta were bland and very clearly warned as being placeholders. Character portraits dont bother me though anyway, BGs were crap, M&M have always been pleasantly retarded.. Underrails are clones of the same dude with different accessories.. The updated beta's ui is slicker and fits the world much better. So far the worlds aesthetic feels plenty cohesive, and battles are no more cluttered with icons than D:OS.

Not sure how i feel about the shared pools for skillchecks. Maybe certain tasks should require a minimum base stat check before a character can exert points. Weak scholar shouldnt be able to move a giant stone or break down a barrier even if he spends his 3 might points on it... But so far my party membera can blow all their points on dialogues and skillchecks while my nano saves his for spellcasting to no detrimental effect, despite him being the "smart one"

 

[Coma White]

Not sure how i feel about the shared pools for skillchecks. Maybe certain tasks should require a minimum base stat check before a character can exert points. Weak scholar shouldnt be able to move a giant stone or break down a barrier even if he spends his 3 might points on it... But so far my party membera can blow all their points on dialogues and skillchecks while my nano saves his for spellcasting to no detrimental effect, despite him being the "smart one"

If I understand the Numenera rules right; performing roleplaying actions takes points out of your pools until they're replenished, right?

If so; what's even weirder about this system is my nano spending points just to pass a knowledge test or something. What's actually happening when I do this? Is my nano like draining his brain energy to do this? When he runs out of points; is he just tired of thinking now? The more he thinks, the stupider he gets? I just don't really understand what these pools actually represent, if spending them on vastly different types of actions indeed consumes the same resources.

 

[Prime Junta]

Think of it as a fatigue system. If you rack your brains to solve a problem or recall a complicated piece of knowledge, it tires you. A bigger Intellect pool will let you do this more times before resting. OTOH a higher Intellect edge will let you perform better consistently with less fatigue. The two go together.

 

[Coma White]

Think of it as a fatigue system. If you rack your brains to solve a problem or recall a complicated piece of knowledge, it tires you. A bigger Intellect pool will let you do this more times before resting. OTOH a higher Intellect edge will let you perform better consistently with less fatigue. The two go together.

"I'm way too tired to finish translating (Intellect) these arcane runes. But I have more than enough strength (Physical) to wrestle the sword out of this guy's hand."

Am I autist, or does this seem fucking weird to anyone else?

 

[Prime Junta]

Think of it as a fatigue system. If you rack your brains to solve a problem or recall a complicated piece of knowledge, it tires you. A bigger Intellect pool will let you do this more times before resting. OTOH a higher Intellect edge will let you perform better consistently with less fatigue. The two go together.

"I'm way too tired to finish translating (Intellect) these arcane runes. But I have more than enough strength (Physical) to wrestle the sword out of this guy's hand."

Am I autist, or does this seem fucking weird to anyone else?

It's not a simulationist system. The design objective was to allow players to affect their chances of success by choosing when to make a bigger effort, and to keep they system as simple as possible. Realism/verisimilitude always was of secondary importance. (It's also broken in a number of ways IMO but that's a different discussion.) Chapter and verse:

The first [dream] was a roleplaying game system where players got to decide how much effort they wanted to put into any given action, and that decision would help determine whether their action would succeed or fail. This would be a simple but elegant system where sustained damage and physical exertion drew from the same resource (so as you became wounded, you could do less, and as you became exhausted, you were easier to take down). Where your willpower and your mental "power points" were the same thing, and as you drew on your mental resources, your ability to stave off mental attacks waned. And where it was all so integrated into the character that it was easy to process and keep track of.

(Monte Cook, from "Dreaming of the Future," the introduction to the Numenera corebook.)
​

That said, I do think physical and mental fatigue are, to an extent, two different things. I can be mentally fatigued after a long day of coding and still want to go for a run or a bike ride.

 

[Coma White]

I guess I just question a system designed from the ground-up to limit hard-and-fast the player from doing awesome things. In my experience as a GM, I love it when players stretch their brains and come up with awesome shit to roleplay out (within logical reason of course). I'd only ever wish to raise the stakes; never put a stop to it.

 

[Prime Junta]

I guess I just question a system designed from the ground-up to limit hard-and-fast the player from doing awesome things. In my experience as a GM, I love it when players stretch their brains and come up with awesome shit to roleplay out (within logical reason of course). I'd only ever wish to raise the stakes; never put a stop to it.

IME the opposite is true for Numenera. Effort and Edge are awesome-button mechanics. Training can give you max 2 levels bonus, whereas Effort gives you 1 level per Tier. In the mid-Tiers (3-4) that's already more than training. The recovery mechanic is also extremely forgiving, not to mention that cyphers which restore Pools are common. The upshot is that you'll have players doing awesome shit so constantly that it stops being awesome. Moreover, they very quickly figure out how to ration their pools -- if there's a tough task to be done, they won't pick the specialist; they'll pick whoever has the most pool left of it.

IME this makes it very hard to calibrate mechanical challenge in Numenera. If you do it by the book (1 = trivial, 10 = impossible), from tier 2-3 up everything is trivial because of Effort; if you calibrate it near the higher end you'll just have the players Efforting and resting their way through everything. If you calibrate it past that, well then you can only get through things using cyphers, which means that the character mechanics stop mattering altogether.

I.e. the system doesn't really work as intended. I had much more fun with any edition of D&D that I ran; at least in it most of the mechanical screw-ups gimp you, which is something that's much easier to deal with as a DM.

 

[Infinitron]

Torment sourcebook review by Prime Junta: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ex-review-torment-the-explorers-guide.109812/

 

[Coma White]

Torment sourcebook review by Prime Junta: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ex-review-torment-the-explorers-guide.109812/

I really like the art here.

 

[SymbolicFrank]

So, everyone is average in everything, but they can spend hours concentrating on one thing to get it perfect?

 

[Prime Junta]

So, everyone is average in everything, but they can spend hours concentrating on one thing to get it perfect?

Doesn't take hours. You just declare that you're spending max Effort on it. If you run the numbers, you can have characters succeed automatically on Heroic tasks at tier 3, Immortal tasks at tier 4, and Impossible tasks at tier 5. A specialised tier 1 character who's spent 4 XP on extra Effort will have better than 50-50 odds on beating it, if a sufficiently good Asset is available. Plus you can spend 1 XP to reroll if you failed the first time. Awesome!

 

[Lurker King]

That shitstorm about health bar on Inxile foruns was glorious. So much LOL content:

Decoupling health from the pools is an insult to a player's intelligence. "Oh, my god people are so stupid they'll get confused if they don't see HP". From design standpoint you're missing excellent battle design opportunities when your oomfy might oriented fighter gets impaired quickly against int targeting attacks. Why it takes 10 seconds to design a complex combat encounter in PnP and you've got "complications". Why are people fine with the pools as they are intended to work in PnP and in PC format it's "OMFG let's derive health!"? No build will stand out now, just pump up endurance and you're universally good against any threat. A large portion of what makes Numenera stand out has been taken away. I'm wondering how much more you're going to vivisect Numenera PnP in favor of stupidity.

You still betrayed the system. Sorry. Im sure your normiebucks will keep you warm at night. Never backing a fucking inxile project again.

Planescape Torment is a meme by this point. There were a lot of people backing this game based on its meme status as "that great game that was like whoooa so deep." You don't even know. (...) Do you think that having pools as health really punishes players for not understanding the core rules of the game? It's three pages of rules man, this isn't Baldur's Gate. There are fewer rules in this ruleset than most, it is in fact, a rules-lite game by its very definition. If they can't understand the rules for a game DESIGNED TO BE UNIQUE AND DIFFERENT THAN OTHER VIDEO GAMES, then they lose out, THEN ADDING BORING REGULAR RPG CONVENTIONS LIKE A HEALTH BAR FOR THE SAKE OF LETTING UNINTELLIGENT BOORS FORCE THEIR WAY THROUGH THE GAME WITHOUT HAVING TO IMMERSE THEMSELVES IN THE WORLD, THE CHARACTERS AND THE RULESET IS A BETRAYAL OF THAT IDEA.

/facepalm

That's why we can't have nice things anymore. Need to face the reality: actual CRPGs are a thing of the past, true gamers are a dying breed, and I guess it's time for us - the few remaining dinosaurs - to stop caring.

Dear inXile, why don't you add quest compass while you're at it? It's what your backers really want, after all...

I think I understand now why Kevin Saunders had to leave.

 

[veevoir]

It's a righteous shitstorm though. I salute those heroes, sacrificing time and electrons to butthurt so we dont have to... who am I kidding, probably most of them are from Codex.

 

[Infinitron]

Most of them are The Game Analists.

Another fun thread: https://forums.inxile-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=15892

 

[Lurker King]

It's a righteous shitstorm though. I salute those heroes, sacrificing time and electrons to butthurt so we dont have to... who am I kidding, probably most of them are from Codex.

Probably because most backers are causal storyfags who can’t understand a combat system if their lives depended on it. What will make or break this game is the story and the writing. The setting is already shit. I already got some bad vibes from the adjective diarrhea in a few passages. InXile and Obsidian don’t even pretend to care anymore. They are shameless dumbing down their games to please dumb players. I'm glad I didn’t back this.

 

[Daedalos]

Nothing yet (including the beta content) suggests that this game will be bad.

 

[Infinitron]

Holy crap at retroquark and anonymous6059's walls of text. >_>

That forum is infested with autistic people. I bet sea misses the Codex at this point.

 

[Darth Roxor]

That forum is infested with autistic people. I bet sea misses the Codex at this point.

> implying sea isnt a massive autist

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Oh, so there's actual proper drama still on their forums?

I mostly stopped peaking there when the anon604545 started posting his ramblings. The guy is dumber than a sack of potatos hanging from a hot air baloon.

 

[Kem0sabe]

Holy crap at retroquark and anonymous6059's walls of text. >_>

That forum is infested with autistic people. I bet sea misses the Codex at this point.

I bet he misses the old codex that lapped up every inxile newsbit. New jaded and more wise codex, not so much.

 

[Roguey]

Wasteland 2 ultimately got an overall positive reception, sea just couldn't handle the edgy haters, who have always existed on this site.

 

[Daedalos]

And add to that, I know for a fact, that Torment will be extremely well recieved at KODEX, once released. Be edgy and hate it in public, secretly play it 7 times. That same old routine.

The edgy tryhard haters are the minority here. Always the loudest voices screaming with the purest autism.