This is a pretty interesting thread and I'm glad it got necro'd.
A few months ago I thought 13th Age was the newest, best thing and I'd never heard of Numenera. Now I'm wondering if
it's the newest, best thing. For me and my friends, we played D&D forever and followed along without much thought about it until 4.0 completely changed our habits. It was so... not what we wanted that we took a step back and went out in all directions, finding all sorts of new ideas and cool stuff. Now that I've seen all the amazing ideas that are out there, I have a hard time imaging playing something even remotely like 3.5 ever again.
Recently, I've been interested more in 5.0 and my frustrations with their "nah let's just make 3.5 again" approach in some of the playtests led me to 13th Age. It was great because it had a lot of wonderful ideas about playing D&D-like games that definitely make them better and I wished 5.0 would have. But when we played 13th Age, we still got that same old D&D flavor in our mouths. It's such a great cross between 3.5 and 4.0 that I would have LOVED it three years ago. Now I don't think it's enough.
The reason I'm posting is because the talk of Vampire above. We got back into that during our D&D hiatus and our Vampire game was probably one of the top three games I've ever run - maybe the best. We got into a discussion about this recently and the short version is that I realized that when D&D, 13th Age, and let's face it - a zillion other games create characters, they all start with one simple question:
what do you do. It's the very core basic building block of your character: your class. It's how you define yourself in the world and at the table. And it's an incredibly limited, ever-so-
American way to look at the world!
Vampire, by contrast, starts with:
what kind of personality do you have. It's right there, in the character creation. Sure, they call it "clans" and some people might mistake clans for classes, but it's so very different. It makes you think about the game in an entirely different way. You might have a role, but that's not what defines you. You are defined by your outlook on life. And somehow that makes all the difference with us.
13th Age didn't last long at our table, although it brought some great ideas and I'll still be using them for many games to come. But the thing that makes Numenera more interesting to me at the moment is that the core of the character is defined differently. It's not just a collection of powers tied up in a class - although it mostly is, and frankly it may also not last long for the same reason. But it's also a descriptor and a special thing you have that makes you different from everyone else. 13th Age called it "one unique thing," and that was awesome. But Numenera seems to push this idea a little further. And the idea that something like "charming" is at the very heart of who you are is the closest non-White Wolf game I've seen at getting the idea that
personality - not
occupation - is what truly defines the most interesting characters. There are a billion rangers out there in fiction. Why can I only name two or three off the top of my head?
So my ridiculously long answer to the OP's question is: I have hope that someday soon, our quest to find a game that defines characters in ways other than by their job - but is flexible enough to expand to other genres in generous ways - will succeed. 13th Age wasn't it. Maybe Numenera will be. Or maybe it will be something else.