Cypher: The Better 5E

If 5E existed for a million years, I am betting Cypher System is what it would end up as.

This is a game I never thought I would understand since the layers of abstraction felt so utterly alien to me that I would not figure out how to create a character. I packed the book away and felt like the purchase was a waste of money. Then, I pulled it out and made an honest effort to determine what was happening.

People hyping this game up as a game they could not live without was what made me put the work in. Best thing since sliced bread! I never understood what they were talking about. Character creation was a mystery. The system seemed far too abstract to have meaning at the table. Everything from monsters, weapons, and powers seemed overly abstract.

And then it clicked.

Cypher simulates the 5E table-play loop perfectly. People sit around the table, managing resource pools, improving characters at milestones, trying to keep their player characters alive, finding treasures, solving puzzles, dealing with challenges, and rolling a d20.

Everything superfluous or distracts from that loop was tossed out. All the d20 scaffolding and cruft are gone, and many of the 'fake invented terms' were tossed out to keep the core gameplay loop streamlined and focused on the fun parts only.

Challenge Rating? Hit dice? Hit points? Difficulty Class? Saving throws? Proficiency bonus? Advantage? Modifiers? Lists of dozens of chained conditions? Action economies? The d4, d8, and d12? Multiclassing? One-level dips? Spell level? Inspiration? Bastions? Average party level? Flat-footed? Attack of opportunity?

Blah. Blah. Blah.

Fake, invented lingo meant to distract you. Most of it is worthless transitory values meant for exposed system math. It is like you asking me what the price of a cereal box is and me answering, "X equals 5.99!" Many of these terms were invented for 10% edge cases and then enshrined as the game's language - and then, they decided to load more rules onto the term. By default, games should be written in natural language, and special terms should be saved for things without easy replacement.

Forget the false lingo of D&D and Pathfinder and free your mind. Of course, you are replacing that lingo with Cypher's lingo, but the lingo on this side is more logically consistent and less rooted in a wargame-y, arbitrary past. You are also not dealing with 50 years of cruft and trying to keep things familiar yet modern.

You want to sit around a table and roll a d20 with friends.

Cypher gets you there in a single book with a core mechanic. The character creation and customization are on par or better than 5E. With one of the genre books supplying focused options and a few more customizations, you have a better and more complete game than a shelf full of 5E books draining your wallet dry. And Cypher is a generic game, so it really does everything.

Challenges are generic, as monsters can be just a level challenge, and that's it. The deeper you go here, the better it gets. Altering individual values for deviations from the norm is how you make monsters unique. A goblin may be a "level 1" challenge but does 2 points of damage. They may deal more surprise damage and set traps like a level 5 creature. Using the 'team up' (swarm) rules from Numenera/Strange, you can put them in four-goblin groups and have them attack as two levels higher (with a +2 damage bonus). With ingenuity and customization, monsters become deadly fast.

The resource pools are amazing. If you want depth, use a realistic wounds module and track that damage separately from the effort spent. When playing solo, watching those resource pools run dry and knowing what will happen when you lose one or two makes the tension rise. Finding a safe resting spot becomes critical for survival, and I am not talking about some closet in a dungeon somewhere.

You start cherishing and burning those XP to survive with player intrusions and rerolls.

And those start running low, and you get really worried.

Oh, and the players and referee share in narrative control. When those pools of resources run low, your characters are in danger of failing or dying. You are burning XP to shift the narrative in your favor, and you will feel the tension and excitement rising far more than listening to the door of room K23 and spending an hour fighting six goblins (and short-resting the consequences off). The more the referee awards XP, the more fluid the narrative becomes, and all sorts of amazing things can happen.

Cyphers themselves toss monkey wrenches in every situation. They are flat-out unique toys that encourage emergent behavior and roleplaying, often offering alternate solutions to problems other than 'blast them with a spell' or 'kill them all with weapons.' 5E is so limited in emergent gameplay, and the characters are almost internally focused on personal power that they become blind to alternate solutions to problems. We have murder hobos in 5E because that is what the game encourages and rewards.

Want a more fantasy-focused experience? Play the sister game Numenera; you have a world far better than anything 5E can dream of. Numenera does a science fantasy and extra-planar setting far better than the tired 5E 'great wheel' setting, and it does it with a sense of mystery and wonder - and is entirely unpredictable in terms of opponents and challenges. This setting is on par with Dungeon Crawl Classics in terms of 'I do not know what I am looking at' in terms of monsters and threats. Numenera beats the tar out of 5E's 'happy planes' and 'fantasy multiverse' offerings, where you must buy the earlier edition books to run the setting.

Numenera can be played on a wide range of flavors and feelings. You could play this as straight fantasy and have an almost Forgotten Realms feeling to the world, with ancient science making infrequent and mysterious appearances. You can play this as a better Gamma World than Gamma World. You can play this as a Heavy Metal science fantasy experience. You could play this as a sci-fi game and world. This can be played more like Rifts. This could be a horror world. A world with mechs. Thundarr the Barbarian works nicely here. A cyberpunk setting. There is a little bit of Minecraft in here. There is a space game hidden in here.

The range of flavors and ways this can be played boggles my mind. What GURPS is to universal rule sets, Numenera is to science fantasy settings - it does it all.

Combine this with The Strange? You can have characters from TV, movies, and fiction running around in your universe causing trouble - and those universes bleeding into others and taking them over to an infinite degree. These can be rebooted to be used again fresh. You can use the system to play characters inside one of those realities and have it break free from the limitations of that recursion.

You can even play characters from fiction, TV, anime, and movies. They can escape their world like something out of Last Action Hero and find themselves fighting for their lives in another movie or fictional universe. Want to have the characters from One Piece fighting Jason Vorhees at Camp Crystal Lake? Want to be a Mulder and Scully X Files agent stuck in the middle of that fight? The Strange does that.

I feel bad for the 5E players stuck in dungeons, railroad adventures, and those planes that reinforce stereotypes and Western religious paradigms. What would a place of ultimate evil look like if you were banned from using Hell, demons, and the Abyss? Who would live there? These players will never know how fantastic, frightening, unique, and alien the universe can be. They will be forever stuck worshipping the Keep on the Borderlands and thinking the Tomb of Horrors is the ultimate deathtrap dungeon.

I love those adventures but give them a rest.

Do something new.

Try something else.

If I sell all my 5E books, I would not miss them with this trio of games replacing that core gameplay experience. The character builds are better, the gameplay loop is better, the resource management is a revolution of thinking, and the shared control of the narrative allows the players to help shape the story.

Cypher is the ultimate sitting around a table and rolling a d20 with friends game.