In my years, I've run into quite a bit of this. Things that have some good ideas, but they're buried under some novel 'to be different' mechanic. Say, an amazing world but it's saddled with a dice system that seems based not on odds, but on the fact the designer wanted to use a doubling cube as a mechanic.
I've found it to be much like any other fantasy RPG, just with weirder tech to it. Most of the creatures are there hostile, although there are lots that aren't or at least have unusual motivations that can be used as a way to negotiate with them, and there's plenty of ruins and weird locations to explore. Numenera does expect there to be more exploration than anything else but, like many fantasy games, spends more time on the combat section than on exploration; it could definitely benefit from having non-combat encounter tables. It's possible that the books actually have those tables and I missed them; I certainly haven't read all the setting books and could easily have skipped over them in the books I was reading, since I was reading them for fun and not as a potential GM. The books do have tables for random cyphers, and at least some of the exploration should be about not only finding the cyphers but how they affect the players and world.
Ah. So the mechanics don't really differentiate between different kinds of activities. That's why it felt weird to me. Thank you.
Yeah, it's unusual, but at least it's easy to remember!
Becoming less unusual over time... a number of commercial releases recently include aified extended task mechanic which gets used as the core for personal combat conflict, social conflict, and sometimes more conflict types, such as espionage (Dune), Mass Combat (Dune), Duels (Dune, L5R 5)...
I think the problem here is, to put it bluntly, there's only so much you can do within the paradigm of OSR (or classic D&D from which it claims to draw its inspiration). The reason we went on to other things is really pretty simple, it was a very niche game concept that did a pretty small number of things reasonably well, and was frankly terrible for everything else! This is why 1e trended into trad and 2e was explicitly trad.
I'm not sure why anyone would find it UNUSUAL, I mean, BRP (CoC, DQ, etc.) has essentially one mechanic for everything, you roll d% and try to hit a target number. Certain multiples of the target number may produce better/worse results, and combat has some additional rules to handle active defense (parry or dodge) as well as action economy, but its still ESSENTIALLY all the same thing. And games like CoC, which doesn't really focus on combat and elides most of the fancier DQ combat rules, pretty much IS 'single unified mechanic'.
Unusual in comparison to the OSR/LU games Micah prefers.
I think they could possibly work on creating different settings, something other than Typical D&D With The Serial Numbers Filed Off. Different monsters, for one--too many of them rely on standard D&D monsters, possibly with different names for the ones not released to the OGL. While I don't own DCC, what I've read about wizard corruption is a good example of what I mean, because it automatically paints a different world than a typical D&D world, and a setting could really lean into something like that. They could even do different races. Even though I personally hate race-as-class, which many/most OSR games seem to use, a game could do something other than elf, dwarf, halfling, and maybe (half)orc. A setting with gnomes (crafting/illusion), minotaurs (martial/maze-walking abilities), mushroom-folk (druidy casters), and, I dunno, sugar glider-folk (gliding/climbing/sneakiness) is going to at least feel very different than every other OSR game out there, even if the mechanics are 90% similar.
Except that Classic was NOT 8+ for everything!!!
Well, I'm rather fond of subsystems, so for me it's a good thing that D&D-derived systems are still going strong.
Yeah, but at some level its skilled play in a totally defined dungeon-esque environment. I agree, you can alter the feel of the monsters, use slightly different types of environments (space ship, ruins, etc.) but at some point its still basically a D&D-like combat system, some form of D&D-esque logistics, similar sorts of archetype-as-class, level-based advancement, etc. The nut of each game is really its 'process of play' and that's definitional to OSR, pretty much. So you can get SOME variations, but a lot of the 'feel' of a game comes from the stuff that defines it as OSR, so you can only move so much away from that.
The basic rule is 8+. Yes, specific common applications of each skill are documented, and a pretty fair number of them give slightly different numbers for specific things. Its up to the GM as to precisely what the target number is, technically. The thing is, if you vary that much beyond the range 6-10 things don't work, so 99.9% of all checks need to hit an 8 or maybe a 7 in actual practice. And again, yes there are situational modifiers possible, in attacks, etc. Its still one simple unified system.
Original Gamma World is a lot of fun, and doesn't really feel like D&D, despite sharing a good deal of DNA. Genre makes a big difference there, I think.
Well, yeah, that was my point. If there's only so much you can change mechanically and stay OSR, then change the cosmetics. Make it so the game looks like more than just another clone.
Yeah, it feels pretty different, but I would note that one big reason is that advancement works differently. You basically start out in GW as almost equivalent to a 10th level D&D PC, and leveling up means almost nothing. Instead its all about gear acquisition. A PSH with a vibro-blade and sheath armor is cannon fodder, but the same PSH in Powered Assault Armor with a Laser Rifle and a bunch of batteries is a god.
Oh yes. One of the problems with translating modern versions of D&D to sci-fi and similar settings is they underestimate the importance of gear to the genre. Cool techno-bling is vital I think to the sci-fi experience.
