Cypher: The Best Game to GM?

I would put Cypher System and the incredible Index Card RPG in the category "best games to GM." These two game-changers redefine the concept of tabletop gaming and deconstruct the notion of traditional tabletop games into base concepts and rebuild the entire experience from there.

I love them so much since they break with the notion that tabletop RPGs need to be complex, with paragraphs of rules for specific things, such as a wild shape, and require encyclopedias of spells, treasures, gear, and monsters. My Pathfinder 2 collection is already the size of my entire Pathfinder 1 collection, with two shelves filled, and that game isn't stopping anytime soon. Some games get too big to play, and when I sit down to referee them, my mind blanks at the complexity and scope of all the material I need to master, and I end up not playing.

With Cypher and Index Card, I will walk by a table with my current game and a few character sheets on it, and I will sit down and begin playing for a while - without touching one book. I will update my journals, advance the story, and leave it there for the next time. I don't need to sift through paragraphs of specific rules for certain situations, such as weapon length and dual wielding. Some of these "big box" games get so deep into rules entire sections get exploited, and you can see the rules bloat in every update and edition.

I like Cypher/Numenera the best since the game realizes the "5E dream" of multiclass builds without needing multiclass builds. All of the best 5E powers are in there, a step simplified, and you get to mix and match different character types and power sources, along with your "base party role." Your character is this fantastic combination of powers, background, attitude, and ability that feels like a unique combo-build 5E character designed with a few hundred dollars of add-on supplements and over a thousand pages of reading and rules synthesis.

And Cypher lets you play any combination. Do you want a magic-using fighter? You got it. A mechanic who crafts robots? A thief-druid? A barbarian bard? Anything you can imagine, you can build - and you can also create the building blocks yourself. If the game is missing something, you can quickly create the framework of the power system you want to see in the game, and it is there.

In fact, any of my 4-page Starfinder builds could be more manageable in the Cypher game than in Starfinder. Starfinder is still in that Pathfinder 1e framework, and the classes and rules are incredibly involved and detailed. While Starfinder is a fun game, how I play it does not match how it is designed.

I do broad, sweeping swaths of narrative action and story, and the individual combat stats, AC, and hit points of one space goblin do not matter to me. I don't care; this one has AC 13, and that one has AC 14 and 5 versus 7 hit points. None of that fine detail matters to me. I love the characters and story, and what ends up happening is I will play a section of the story with my nose stuck in a book or flip through PDFs for half the session.

That play experience for a creative story-based person - especially in solo play - sucks.

You repeat it enough times and eventually end up not playing the game.

And I have a stack of character printouts an inch thick that feel like a waste, and I am probably shredding them all.

Statistically, there isn't a big difference between one point of AC and two hit points. Yet, here I am, spending 5 minutes every time looking up stats and making notes before every combat. for something where the variance in the rolls of a d20 and the weapon damage dice make a 1-point difference in AC and a few hit points meaningless.

Especially when compared to the story.

I like OSR games because I know the parts stuck in my head from playing them growing up, and I do not need book references during play. But still, even though I know it all, very little of it matters, and I do not care. I end up being stuck in the same old rigid classes, buying the same old set of chainmail, and swinging a longsword at an orc. I have lost interest in the classical d20 mechanics, which no longer mean much to me. They are just a means to a combat's end and do not interest me in gaming.

Numbers and math mean very little to me compared to stories.

Games that put story and narrative over mechanics excite me. But they can't be too abstract, such as FATE, because I lose interest. There is this sweet spot of structured character builds and that point where the game says, "make the rest up yourself," and that structure draws me in. The character sheets sit on a table, the promise of immediate fun draws me in, and the game is so easy to play no book reference is needed.

Do you wonder why mobile gaming outshines consoles when compared to revenue? It is all about accessibility. Cypher and Index Card are infinitely more accessible and easy to play. I love my console games, but they have a time and a place. Cypher gives me that "big box" game feeling in a pick-up-and-play package.