Off the Shelf: Cypher System

I bounced off this game at least six times. For the past year, I lost faith in it, feeling that the newly revised edition wasn't for me. I had the books in my garage and took down the blog I'd started for it. But this is me, and the same thing happened to Dungeon Crawl Classics, a game I love and adore.

But Cypher System is one of those one-book "desert island games" people bring up all the time, and they are right to choose it. I had some of my best solo adventures with this system. I lost faith for a while and needed some distance to get perspective.

This is what happens when I feel a game is near-perfect, and it gets changed. While I agree the new edition is the best for new players, it loses touch with the original design, where you came into the system picking a "player type" for your character - combat, social, environment, or powers. This was very close to the old d20 Modern "strong hero" or "smart hero" class system, but instead of ability scores, the "classes" (called types) felt more like player types than character types.

If you loved combat, picking a combat-type character meant you'd have fun and get all the powers and abilities that would make your table time a success.

The new game flips this on its head: you create a generic character before you pick a type, and I feel something was lost. I don't want a traditional game where I sort through a skill list and pray those skills fit my play style. Just give me the social character archetype and let me talk to the NPCs, and I can do the rest.

The new wounding system, I felt, was unneeded and meant to appease those who expect hit points and tracked wounds, or could not tell the difference between getting stabbed and spending the same 2 points to avoid the blow. To me, the difference was clear; even though the rules did not, I could make a call, and my table agreed. If you drop to zero in all pools without taking a wound or light damage, you are not dead but dropping from exhaustion. Take most or all of those losses in wounds? You are dead.

The player can choose to avoid those wounds with pool expenditures. There is a difference.

Also, GM Intrusions can be triggered off wounds taken, and they should. Playing a Jaws game? That's blood in the water. No wounds? No reason to pull that card as a GM. It is a narrative system; wounds work differently here, and are one-level abstracted.

I know the old game was dense, and even I bounced off it a half-dozen times, but once I figured it out, the rest was easy.

But I loved my old books.

And my old books came out.

The new version? I will give it a chance, but I have a full library of three Cypher System games, and I intend to keep them on the table. The old game still works great, and it is still one of my desert-island games. The new and old games are more side-grade games, in any case; all the books are still compatible, and even the sister games work the same way.

Still a great game.