Cypher System Rising

 As the weeks have gone by I've begun to settle on a system with consistency: Cypher System. I mean sure, I've run this plenty in the past, but I've honestly not run it in a good while and I think maybe now it would be the ideal solution to my doldrums. 

Cypher System does have some warts, though. It's a player-roll facing system, meaning the GM never really needs to roll dice except maybe for some random cypher charts or something. 99% of the time the players roll to attack, roll to defend, roll to take action, etc. So this does mean that the core conceits of the system depend on player honesty and understanding of this mechanic. A player who unfaithfully does not report a roll of a 1 which incurs a GM intrusion, for example, is defeating a key story-telling element of the game. 

The second issue with Cypher is really user-dependent: the system's dice pool methodology has some "numbers that mean other numbers, and ways of making tasks reduce in difficulty that also mean converting to numbers" sort of approach that can seem simple enough to some, and can be oddly baffling to others. I know that when I first got Cypher System I sat on it for like a year or two because the core conceit of the system seemed so counter-intuitive to me, and felt like it would be a real hassle to teach people. I eventually pushed past that (long, long ago) and quickly grokked and loved the mechanics for what they are, but this has always proven to be a problem for at least two of my regular players. One of them has actually expressed keen interest in playing it though, despite my recalling she was very frustrated with the system in the past.....so maybe she (like me) suddenly grokked it. 

The third and final issue I have always had with Cypher (and other players of the system as well) is that XP gain is pretty quick, and the rules as written make it that way. Your characters advance over 6 tiers of play, the system's version of leveling and in each tier you have four advances which cost 4 XP. In addition, there are a range of temporary and circumstantial benefits that can be gained by spending XP. In the past, and this tends to reflect the first edition of Cypher, it was easy to see PCs gain power creep by advancing fairly quickly in tiers (especially if they horde XP for long term advancement, as that only takes 16 XP to hit a tier cap). This led to a problem where the PCs were improving overall power level faster than the GM could readily account for it (a polite way of saying that you could plot out threats that in a matter of sessions become trivial and inconsequential for the players to overcome). 

My first few campaigns of Cypher System (all in the first edition) ran into this issue, as I would tend to hand out enough XP through GM intrusions along with 1-2 XP at the end of the session, and the players hoarded XP so they tended to tier up every 4 sessions or so. After 20 sessions the PCs were approaching tier 5 and the storyline (and my newbie GM experience at the time) meant my plot was pacing for a group about half that power level, and they were already hitting what felt to me like godlike levels of performance with boosted Edges, talent pools and effort levels. In Cypher System, higher stat values often simply mean that difficult tasks at tier 1 by tier 4-6 often become "descriptive sentences in which the GM explains how cool you are" as you step past a task...unless of course the GM wants to drop an intrusion on you.  

Under the Revised rules there's more wiggle room baked in to how one goes about handing out and allowing XP to be spent, so I think this will pose less of an issue. The new rules emphasize options such as requiring players to spend XP awarded in-game to be spent in game, and XP between sessions (so end of game, for goals met, story arcs progressed, etc.) to be retained for tier advancement. The GM can award XP at a slower pace as well by focusing only on XP gained through character arc advancement, and between-game awards amending that total for specific "group/plot" goals. They give the GM a lot of leeway, in other words.

In addition, as the group levels up I have since wrapped my own head around the idea that higher level threats and concerns in Cypher System are (and should be) more about discovery, cosmic revelation, and existential threats of unusual nature, and the things which were of dire nature at tier 1 are now just footnotes along the way. 

Either way, I am looking forward to this planned excursion, and I have been pretty exclusively focused on what I can do with Cypher next. I am still mulling over the idea of Numenera vs. one of the Cypher genre settings (or maybe Magnus Archive which is rather cool), but its definitely going to be this.