Torment Torment: Tides of Numenera Thread

[hexer]

Judging by those book portraits, I see that them looking unfinished is actually a Numenera standard.

Hey, it's a PnP RPG book. You don't get a five-mil budget for those, and there's a ton of art there. As production values go, the Numenera books are significantly above-par. Maybe not quite up to 2e AD&D standards, but still pretty good.

(There's something about the style that I find off-putting though. A lot of those expressions have a snooty smugness about them that I don't like.)

I think their unfinished state and facial expressions are a mirror of the age we live in.
Artists lack focus and persistence in order to finish their work.
And facial expressions are akin to narcissistic selfies found all over the internet.

 

[vortex]

Samples

What is she holding in her hands ?

 

[Quillon]

Samples

What is she holding in her hands ?

Portable baby-maker.

 

[Luckmann]

Samples

What is she holding in her hands ?

It's not covered in the books. When it comes to many of the pieces used, especially those of fair complexion, I doubt they were actually made specifically for Numenera, but rather that they fitted the bill of "close enough" and were used as filler.

Edit: Here's the full piece. It's in the section for "Alternate Rules", and it really has nothing to do with the section. It's just filler art.

 

[Prime Junta]

What is she holding in her hands ?

Left hand, fan. Right hand is on her tummy. She's a biomechanical steampunk posthuman cyborg with a very strange bone structure.

 

[Lurker King]

I think you guys are misunderstanding Colin's statement about that Aligern portrait being "too white". Looking at the concept arts, it indicates that characters such as Aligern and Tybir do have brown/black skin color. Of course it would not be ok to change the characters' basic features in a portrait. It's like drawing a blond Durance portrait.

Bullshit. Didn't you read what was actually said? Monty Cuck went in and gave "empathic feedback", in order to enforce the idea that in the future, nobody can be white. This isn't anything new, either. Monty Cuck Games have been known to enforce this in regards to the Numenera IP in the past.

Don't forget this gem:

Especially that last underlined bit is very telling.

Roxor blamed SJW fanaticism as one of the causes of bad writing in cRPGs, and some posters dismissed this criticism as far fetched. Where are those people now?

 

[Luckmann]

What is she holding in her hands ?

Left hand, fan. Right hand is on her tummy. She's a biomechanical steampunk posthuman cyborg with a very strange bone structure.

Yeah, I hadn't seen that particular piece (I haven't read through most of the Numenera books, I skim a bit, after deciding on playing Cypher Systems/Gods of the Fall instead, at some point) but it really doesn't fit Numenera. It's probably the weirdest piece in the Core book. She looks like she's part alien, part elf, and part human, in a steampunk setting, not science-fantasy. I would've expected her in The Strange, not Numenera, and definitely not in the section she's in. She's obvious filler art, and very out of place.

Roxor blamed SJW madness as one of the causes for bad writing in cRPGs, and some idiots dismissed this criticism as far fetched. Where are those people now?

When you hire people based on what they think, what signals of virtue they send out, rather than based on who they are and what they can do, you're bound to end up scraping the bottom of the barrel. Priorities shine through, and it's obvious that they tried to write Tides of Numenera as their idea of a socially conscious literary masterpiece, with the predictable result of it being 70% purple prose for the purpose of moralizing how unique and precious everyone is. The game never really asks the question as to how much one life matters, other than in the most hamfisted of ways, but it does it's darnest of trying to tell you the answer.

Remember when Ravel asked you what can change the nature of a man, within her maze? Compare that to when Whateverhernamewas asks you the question as to how much one life matters, in Miel Avest. It's pathetic.

 

[Parabalus]

Roxor blamed SJW madness as one of the causes for bad writing in cRPGs, and some idiots dismissed this criticism as far fetched. Where are those people now?

I wish you could blame it being garbage on SJW MADNESS, but that's so far down the list of problems the game has it's almost blameless. I noticed only one murky comment in the antepenultimate area, it just isn't relevant, even on a #Dragonspear scale. The game's writing is just crap, not because of an agenda, but because of the lack of love/talent.

 

[Sigourn]

Not sure if people are behaving intentionally retarded in this thread, or they are just like that.

Anyhow: Monte Cook is free to design his setting however he wants. My criticism towards it is that it feels bland having every single character be mixed race. I would be saying the same if every character was blonde with blue eyes, or light skinned with black hair, and so on. In Torment, this translates as every NPC looking the same in a game where NPCs already look the same thanks to the shitty graphics.

I'm pretty sure the guy thought it would be "cool" to have everyone in Numenera be of mixed race, you know, spice things up. But by spicing things up with an original concept, the setting suffers as a result. It just isn't as interesting when every NPC looks the same.

 

[Lord Andre]

I think Tybir was drilling his drill sergeant.

What ? I'm just sayin'...

 

[Luckmann]

Roxor blamed SJW madness as one of the causes for bad writing in cRPGs, and some idiots dismissed this criticism as far fetched. Where are those people now?

I wish you could blame it being garbage on SJW MADNESS, but that's so far down the list of problems the game has it's almost blameless. I noticed only one murky comment in the antepenultimate area, it just isn't relevant, even on a #Dragonspear scale. The game's writing is just crap, not because of an agenda, but because of the lack of love/talent.

So you're going with correlation does not imply causation? Fair enough, I guess, but I'll stick to my anecdotal evidence that shit people nets you shit writing.

It was clearly more important to them that the game told you how bad slavery is than to give you interesting options on how to deal with something, it was more important to them that the portraits weren't too white than to actually have good portraits, it was more important to cater to console peasants than to the PC master race, and it was more important to have a black homosexual male as a companion than an actual interesting one - Riastrad would've been infinitely cooler, but he was neither black nor homo enough to qualify. Gotta hit those diversity quotas.

I think Tybir was drilling his drill sergeant.

What ? I'm just sayin'...

This is, in fact, fairly explicitly made clear, that yes, Tybir was drilling his drill-sergeant.

Spoiler

Tybir strikes me as a bottom bitch, though.

 

[Lord Andre]

It was clearly more important to them that the game told you how bad slavery is

Even that sucked. The minute I saw "slaver" over those faggots' head I was like bingo! - free lootz for every one. I wait for a level up, buy a healpot and bust on the scene like "Hello there citizens ! How there you bla bla, I can't abide by bla bla (scan thoughts: I have the perfect excuse to kill you for lootz you poor helpless suckers)". Turns out I can't kill them immediately... . There's not even an option to invite them to a nearby alley to sell them some discount priced goods...

 

[Lurker King]

I wish you could blame it being garbage on SJW MADNESS, but that's so far down the list of problems the game has it's almost blameless. I noticed only one murky comment in the antepenultimate area, it just isn't relevant, even on a #Dragonspear scale. The game's writing is just crap, not because of an agenda, but because of the lack of love/talent.

You are not seeing the big picture here. Political correctness and social militancy can literally kill a cRPG, if not a whole studio, in one of the following ways:

- You can hire people, or choose a setting, based on your political agenda, instead of how talented and interesting they are.

- Narrative cRPGs are essentially about choice and consequences, role-play; but this is impossible if you can’t tolerate certain moral choices and points of view. The result is that your choices in a political correct cRPG will be unnaturally constrained by political points of views.

- SJWs hijack everything they touch in order to push their agenda. If a developer is a SJW, xir (LOL!) will use this as an opportunity to insert xir agendas, even if it ruins the setting, the story, makes characters unbelievable and unpleasant, etc.

- Since political correctness is a form of moralism that feeds on fear, the artistic vision that will find its way into the game will be naturally bland and mediocre, in order to avoid any form of impoliteness and unacceptable behavior. So the problem is not just that you have a restriction of choices, but that the choices available are bland, stereotyped and uninspired.

- SJWs are entirely devoted to their mission and tend to be dismissive about games, which are perceived as minor things. If a developer has this mentality, he will not play, analyze or think about cRPGs as much as he should. It is hard to have any spare time to play Underrail, or analyze how much the game improve some features of Fallout, if you are too busy retweeting stuff about Trump. That explains why developers that were successful in the past can't make a decent game now. Game development is a complex intellectual activity. If you are not fully engaged or consider it as just a job to pay the bills, you will not make good games. There is no way around this.

 

[Rostere]

I think Tybir was drilling his drill sergeant.

What ? I'm just sayin'...

Tybir is such a scoundrel, he is basically the homosexual alter ego of Brian Fargo. I'm supposed they didn't name him "Fagro".

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Even our brothers in animal kingdom are complaining to Brian about T:TON.

"Hack, hack! hack!" they say.

 

[Chris Avelltwo]

Durance is mentally Aryan though

Durance is a literal true Aryan. Which is to say, he is an Indo-Aryan Zoroastrian Fire-Worshiper.

Magran's fire casts light in dark places.

 

[Lord Andre]

Magran was a whore woman and Durance was a friend-zoned beta mela throwing a tantrum for attention.

 

[KK1001]

Bad writers are bad writers are bad writers. Monte Cook's Numenera is badly thought-out mystery box nonsense, and Colin McComb is a hack. Both of these things are independent of whatever ideology they believe. Hamfistedly cramming your ideology into a work will, more often than not, sink that work entirely, but it can and has been done (Riefenstahl and D.W. Griffith being the most prominent examples).

Video game writers are Dumb People who couldn't hack it in more respectable fields. PS:T basically destroyed Avellone's work ethic, and he's the closest thing the industry has to a real writer. If McComb were a fucking objectivist or anarcho-syndicalist or (choose your favored ideology) and injected his ideology into TTON in the same hamfisted way, it would still be bad.

Occam's razor, people. Blaming the SJW boogeyman instead of the lazy hack writers assigned to this piece of shit is missing the giant ass tree in front of you.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

There's no end of stuff that call's bullshit on the whole concept of a billion years into the future.

As soon as I heard the game was set a billion years into the future I knew it was going to be horseshit. Even sci-fi doesn't bother going that far for its fantasy because once you go that far its inconceivable what humanity would be like.

And inconceivable means... inconceivable.

The idea that everyone is the same is probably more correct than not, but not from racial melding, but from the fact that humanity would likely gradually transform from being carbon/water based to something more ephemeral:

And the only reason that writer ^ put them in human shape is so that the viewer has something they can conceive. The reality of 1 billion years, assuming we even got that far, would likely be so removed from anything we currently are able to conceive that 'we' wouldn't even be 'us' anymore.

And aside from the nitpicking of what 1 billion years might be like, the mere fact that someone has even decided to promote the idea that their vision is 1 billion years in the future inherently proves that the person creating that vision is going to provide something really shit, because they don't understand the first thing about the fundamental concept of creating relatable/logical fantasy.

Right off the bat, on day one of development, the first point of the start of the retardation should have been called out, someone should have said "One billion years? Don't talk bollocks".

 

[Prime Junta]

billion years

To be fair, they are aware of that absuridty; one of the central conceits of the setting is that humans mysteriously reappeared in the Ninth World a few thousand years ago. Nobody knows how long they were gone or who or what brought them back, but several of the predecessor civilisations were nonhuman.

 

[Lurker King]

Bad writers are bad writers are bad writers. Monte Cook's Numenera is badly thought-out mystery box nonsense, and Colin McComb is a hack. Both of these things are independent of whatever ideology they believe. Hamfistedly cramming your ideology into a work will, more often than not, sink that work entirely, but it can and has been done (Riefenstahl and D.W. Griffith being the most prominent examples).

Video game writers are Dumb People who couldn't hack it in more respectable fields. PS:T basically destroyed Avellone's work ethic, and he's the closest thing the industry has to a real writer. If McComb were a fucking objectivist or anarcho-syndicalist or (choose your favored ideology) and injected his ideology into TTON in the same hamfisted way, it would still be bad.

The problem with this point of view is that you consider SJW activism as just another political point of view despite abundant evidence in contrary. It is not. It’s a tyrannical virus that hijack everything that comes in contact with.

You also assume the misguided idea that good writing in cRPGs means the same thing than good writing in literature. cRPG writers are not writers in the traditional sense of the word, because they provide gameplay tied to a narrative structure. If they are good writers, the marriage between gameplay and narrative is harmonious. Thinking that narrative in games should have the literary depth of Shakespeare doesn’t make any sense.

Occam's razor is trivial, people. Everyone who disagree with us think they have the most parsimonious hypothesis.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

billion years

To be fair, they are aware of that absuridty; one of the central conceits of the setting is that humans mysteriously reappeared in the Ninth World a few thousand years ago. Nobody knows how long they were gone or who or what brought them back, but several of the predecessor civilisations were nonhuman.

Ok, so how does that conceit have any tangible relevance? What makes it different from simply "in a galaxy far, far away"? Is the game an investigation into why humanity was 'brought back'?

 

[Popiel]

Ok, so how does that conceit have any tangible relevance?

No. The setting makes no sense and never did.

 

[DeepOcean]

You are not seeing the big picture here. Political correctness and social militancy can literally kill a cRPG, if not a whole studio, in one of the following ways.

To design a good setting you must understand that to every human conflict there are two different sides with arguments. If you think you are the righteous one and everybody else is wrong, you will only look things on your limited understanding and create cliches of the people that disagree with you making for really boring storylines. I'm reading a collection of adventure for shadowrun, Shadows of Underworld where a gay boy that is oppressed by stupid traditionalist family fall in homo love with an spirit he summoned and there is an human nationalist politician that is supported by a fascist society that literaly wants to kill metahuman babies (what is kinda funny because leftists are the kings of killing babies).

Shadowrun is full of this stuff but most of the time the writers try to not be so annoying preachy, they failed this time, so I deleted the PDF and didn't bothered into continue. So yes, ideology blindness can ruin an story with its tendencies of creating endless boring cliches but how this apply to Torment?

There are the comments of Mr. McCuck but on the game itself I didn't notice any outrageous example of preaching and forcing stuff up to make a point on the game, I didn't pick up Tybir because I found him boring but he was equaly boring to everyone else. I just found outrageous examples of plain bad writing but I don't think if Mr. McCuck liked Trump it would make him a better writer.

 

[Prime Junta]

billion years

To be fair, they are aware of that absuridty; one of the central conceits of the setting is that humans mysteriously reappeared in the Ninth World a few thousand years ago. Nobody knows how long they were gone or who or what brought them back, but several of the predecessor civilisations were nonhuman.

Ok, so how does that conceit have any tangible relevance? What makes it different from simply "in a galaxy far, far away"? Is the game an investigation into why humanity was 'brought back'?

Nothing really. It's kind of a shit setting. A kaleidoscope of weird with no coherence to it.

You could run a campaign investigating it and make up your own explanation. They have said they won't ever provide a canonical answer for it, just so you can do whatever you want with yours.