Sockfuzz
Villager
I think their feeling at the time was that, with an 18, they were basically guaranteed to succeed even if they spent no points from their pool; therefore, they points they did spend were "wasted" because they didn't have an actual mechanical effect on whether they succeeded or not.I have the first edition of Numenera, and I have my nitpicks, but I think it's a really smart game. I have no idea how a well-earned success can be "wasted." A failure, sure, that sounds like a waste of Effort, but the value is in the telling: how did the character try harder accomplish the feat, and what happened when the important roll went awry? Or succeeded?
Which like, yeah, that's not how dice work at all, and they didn't know they were going to succeed when they spent those points - but I'm not sure there was any amount of logical explaining that would've made it feel less bad to them. It was purely an emotional reaction, and their whole experience with the system was soured over it.
I like to think that Current Me would've handled the situation a lot better than Me From 2017, but I haven't had such a strong negative reaction to a mechanic either before or since.