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.
