They can also be subtle if you’re running a game without obvious fantasy elements: a stroke of luck, a haunting song, a bolt of inspiration. Cyphers might be potions, pills, nanotechnology, smartphone apps, gadgets. Unsurprisingly, they are the Cypher System’s ‘big thing’. If you’re not familiar with the concept, cyphers are essentially single-use abilities that characters pick up in the course of their adventures. The focus becomes them as characters, not the gear they’re carrying.Ĭyphers are fun.
Some players won’t like this very much, as they want the opportunity to optimize, but, to me, a character’s equipment isn’t of much narrative interest anyway, and I welcome the chance to handwave it a bit. There also isn’t much of an economy: items are essentially expensive, very expensive, inexpensive, or somewhere in the middle, and a few very rare items are ‘very exorbitant’.
There are optional rules for making weapon types a bit more distinctive – crushing weapons ignore armour, slashing weapons are more effective on unarmoured foes – but the crunch is minimal. All light weapons do 2 damage, for example, and armour is essentially just damage reduction. (I see ‘free’ intrusion, by the way, because GMs can actually make intrusions at other times, too: the only difference is that the player normally gains XP for an intrusion, but on a natural 1, they don’t have a choice.) In other words, a quarter of your d20 rolls in combat are going to be interesting.
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In the Cypher System, 17s, 18s, 19s, and 20s offer you slight boosts to your attack rolls, like the chance to stun an enemy or deal extra damage, and 1s give the GM a free ‘intrusion’: a complication of some kind, rather like the ‘compel’ mechanic in Fate. Most of the time, rules as written, your roll is either a success or a failure. In D&D, a 20 is an automatic hit and a crit, and 1s are automatic failures, but only on attack rolls and death saves. I wasn’t twiddling my thumbs by any means – I found I was constantly thinking up target numbers, for instance – but my turn was over very quickly, and the focus was more on description and imagination than dice rolling and rules calls.ĭice rolls offer varied degrees of success. Having players roll all the dice frees up the GM considerably. (I wrote about this in more detail in my previous post here.) The system does a great job of facilitating different genres and playstyles.Ĭombat is fast and narrative-led. ProsĬharacter creation is streamlined, intuitive, and relatively speedy. Before I start, a hat-tip: Justin Alexander’s system cheat sheet was a godsend, and if you are thinking of playing a session of the Cypher System, I highly recommend you have it in front of you. Here are my observations at the end of a three-hour session.
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