Comment by Razengan
7 years ago
If you try to make your stories too future-proof you end up making it look like just magic. It may also become harder to relate to.
See Numenera [0] though, set a billion years in the future, while still keeping a sense of familiarity.
The authors of the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual in the early 1990s sidestepped unforseeable computing progress by referring to 'kiloquads' of storage and never relating it to contemporary measurements.
Since part of its purpose was as a writer's guide that terminlogy slipped into the shows and was quite believable when some character expressed surprise that a tiny chip could carry '15 kiloquads' of data. It worked very well.
I'd argue it's poor writing that needed to refer to the amount of data, for anything. TNG really lost its way in technobabble.
Numanera makes me go "meh", because it seems to mostly be an attempt to put a gloss of exoticity over tremendously unexciting game mechanics.
The mechanics are supposed to get out of your way and Numenera’s Cypher system seems to do that job well.
The setting too leaves a lot of room and options for a good DM to expand into and build upon.
You can base almost any kind of story in Numenera, with tech levels ranging from primitive to medieval to hyper-sci-fi.
"You can use it with any kind of story" is a bad thing, not a good thing. A game's mechanics should reinforce its story or themes. Even the granddaddy of generic games, GURPS, has this in some measure in the way its mechanics reinforce a gritty, high-tension feel where every single HP and FP is precious.
2 replies →