NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shanna Germain" data-source="post: 6630448" data-attributes="member: 6747519">My pleasure! I’m going to tackle these questions in order:-That’s probably more a question for Monte than myself, since he is the really the mind behind the Cypher System. I think that we do consider it to be setting agnostic, but in an adaptive way. What I mean is that each game we’ve put out uses the Cypher System but the rules are tweaked slightly to integrate more closely with the game’s setting. You can see a lot of this at work in the upcoming Cypher System Rulebook, where there are sections on how to shift the rules to fit better within each genre. They’ve really easy adjustments, but they really make a big difference in the gameplay.When we first started Numenera, we didn’t expect it to take off, and we weren’t even planning to do more games (there was no such thing as Monte Cook Games at that point), so at first the rules were designed solely with Numenera in mind. -I think that there are many different kids of negativity, some good and some bad. Constructive criticism, deconstruction of art, and other types of negativity that are actually designed to be useful and conversation-creating can be a great asset. But to me, negativity with the sole purpose of making someone else feel bad (or making yourself feel good) is mean and useless. I have pretty thick skin—I don’t know that you can make a living as a creative person without out—but it still gets to me. And when I watch young or new artists get completely devastated by something that someone says just to be mean, it makes my heart hurt. Being a creative person is really hard, putting yourself out there is so hard… why make it worse for someone else? Why not support each other? (And I do think that support includes the positive negativity that I mentioned).  -For No Thank You, Evil! it was a bit of trimming, but it was also more of breaking the rules apart and then putting them back together in a slightly different way. The rules needed to have levels for different age and developmental levels in a way that the other games didn’t, and we needed to be able to give kids lots of room to be creative without making it so free-form that parents or GMs felt like they were herding dragons! -We work closely as a team, and I think more than roles, we each try to play to our strengths. Monte is brilliant at game design and development, as well as coming up with wild and imaginative ideas. He really has a good sense for how the game will play at the table, and what players and GMs want. Bruce, too, is so imaginative and creative, particular with scientific topics and ideas. He builds incredible worlds—some of the stuff he came up with for "Worlds Numberless and Strange" just blew me away. I am kind of a jack of all trades, who steps in where I’m needed. I really love world- and character-building, creating those little details that get people really excited. And, definitely, inclusion is important to me—I think it’s really important to all of us, I’m probably just the loudest about it!</blockquote>

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