... There for the Cons & Pros: Cypher System

 

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The Cypher System is the brainchild of Monte Cook, a relatively famous modern TTRPG Designer. He was the editor of the Hero system, worked on D&D through 3rd edition at both TSR and Wizards of the Coast, helped create a d20 version of one of the other major TTRPG properties, World of Darkness, and returned to D&D for 5th Edition as lead designer for a time, until he left due to differences with WotC (which, you know, fair).

Cypher is really interesting because it does a really good job at re-imagining the modern D20 roll-over system. The normal d20 roll-over formula goes like this:

1. Roll d20
2. Add applicable Trait Modifiers, Innate Modifiers, or other modifiers to that roll
3. Generate Total
4. Speak Total to GM
5. GM compares Total to Secret Target Number
6. GM Declares Success/Failure.

Each turn, each check, follows that same formula, over and over. In a game like D&D with static Target Numbers in time (like in Combat), players will eventually discover what the Target Number is, and that will speed up the back and forth slightly. Cypher takes that formula and flips it on it's head:

1. GM states Target Number
2. Player consults Traits and skills to reduce (or increase!) that Target Number to create final TN
3. Roll a d20. At or over final TN is success, under is failure. 

This "Reverse d20" system does a number of different things to streamline everything. Instead of creating a subtotal ahead of one's turn and then adding it to the d20 later, all of the math is done ahead of time. This also gives a benefit that, on occasion, a player could a Target Number to 0, which would remove the need for rolling altogether.

Other Pros of the system:

The Replacement of Static Stats with Stat Pools is amazing for emulating a "realistic" scenario where attrition of some variety is present. In other systems, you run into that feeling that the player characters can go at 100% until they lose their last hit point. In Cypher, you trying to aim your bow or gun is drawing from the same source as Dodging - the Speed pool. Swinging your hammer and getting hit by a hammer both impact your Might pool. It's an amazing system for emulating any type of drain, be it fatigue, becoming unfocused, and so on.

Cypher streamlines all bonuses and penalties to the same value - Three. A Creature's TN is 3 x their level. If you are trained at something, the TN is eased (goes down) by 3. If you have an item that makes the thing easier, it goes down by 3. If you're bad at something, the TN is hindered (increases) by 3.

The XP system is simple and intuitive, but also breaks up the "levelling" process into disparate parts. XP can also be used to purchase instant benefits - rerolling dice, refusing GM intrusions, and short-term or highly niche benefits ("I don't know much about living in the woods, but my grandparents took me camping in these woods for multiple summers in my youth") - as well as long-term advancement. Maybe you're training a skill, or increasing your pools, gaining a profession, purchasing an Artifact (any type of reusable game-altering item), or picking up abilities from your focus or archetype. Instead of rigid leveling requirements where each player gets prescribed benefits at roughly the same time, each PC gains abilities and skills at the pace of their choice.

There is no prescribed skill list. This allows the system to be really solidly genre-neutral - The skills you'd need in Old Gods of Appalachia (set in the late 1800s through early 1900s) are going to be very different than the skills of Numenera (set a billion years in the future).

The Cons of Cypher:

The promise of the game is often at odds with the execution of the game. Since the first release (Numenera), the promise of the Cypher system is that the game is focused on exploration and discovery. You are supposed to be gaining XP not for fighting monsters, but rather unearthing secrets. That sounds absolutely awesome... and then you read the abilities. While some are relatively nodding in that direction (trained in polite conversation!), reading through the archetypes is, more often than not, a list of combat-oriented abilities.

While the skill system is completely blank in theory, that isn't necessarily true in practice - being trained in weapons, dodging, armor, and certain types of attacks are all relatively the same across the systems. Those things can also only be increased or otherwise impacted when referenced by the archetype or other part of the character concept. When choosing skills, those skills are prescribed by the setting you're in - your archetype might have a list of interesting skills, but have one missing for no apparent reason (Skilled Exploring allows me to be skilled in Navigation or tracking, but not cartography). Also, there's a very fine line between "Trained" in something (which eases the check) and "Practiced" in something (that is, you're allowed to use that thing without a penalty).

The character creation seems interesting at first - it gives a 3-part mad-libs-style selection of Descriptor, Type and Focus, using the phrase "I am a _____ _____ Who ______": a Hardy Explorer who Explores Dark Places, a Driven Speaker who Moves like a Cat, and so on. However, what it means instead of choosing 1 class, like you'd see in other games, you're always choosing 3. The Types are the simplest, as there are only 4 - Warrior, Explorer, Adept and Speaker. They're sometimes called other things in other setting books (like the Glaive instead of Warrior in Numenera), but they're just reskinned versions. The Descriptor is some sort of adjective, from Appealing or Brash through the alphabet to Virtuous or Weird, each giving some stat bonuses and a small ability. The most confusing is the Focus, the "Verb" of the sentence. Many of them are really straightforward (Murders, Leads, Fights Dirty, Slays Monsters, Crafts Powerful Objects) but have a tendency to make not a ton of sense: Fuses Mind & Machine (i.e. is a cyborg), Howls at the moon (is a werewolf), Focuses Mind over Matter (is telekinetic), Abides in Stone (is a golem), and the silliest, in my opinion, is Carries A Quiver (because archery is clearly more than just a weapon). In practice, it's a whole bunch of different places to look to build and/or level up a player character. It's incredibly frustrating, because the thing I dislike the most from TTRPGs is having to look multiple locations for basic abilities.

Lastly, Why is it called the "Cypher System"? Well, because there are Cyphers, of course! In the system, these are single-use magical items or abilities that PCs can only have a limited number of (typically 2, but up to 4 for certain types). They are a sort of blend of Inspiration/hero points and spell scrolls, ranging in power from subtle Cyphers (like Dumb Luck and Remembering) to manifest Cyphers (like Gas bomb and Interstellar Teleporter). The idea behind them is that because they are single-use things that are supposed to be received with regularity, it will encourage the players to use them, and also that balance isn't a concern. In practice, they are easily the weakest bit of the system - they aren't necessarily always applicable, and players don't really want to let go of unused ones to pick up new ones. The fact that they can range in power from "a reroll" to weapons of mass destruction doesn't help this. 

Choose Your Own Adventure: Resolution Mechanics

 

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There are a whole collection of different ways people resolve things in TTRPGs. Dice, cards, tarot, jenga blocks, dominos, points, candles... it's absurdly diverse. Since we're trying to make RPGs, it would make sense to take a look at some options before making our decisions. Me, personally? I love dice. I'm a dice goblin, my wife is a dice goblin, all our friends are dice goblins... it's going to be dice.

Originally, war games used d6s only - they've been around for thousands of years, and even now, when most people think "dice", they think of d6s. When we entered into the era of what is now considered TTRPGs, those were stepped away from relatively quickly. The first era was that of linear dice - these are dice resolution systems that emulate some amount of easily-computable percentage statistics. Dungeons & Dragons, rather famously, used the d20, where each face has a 5% chance of being rolled, and other systems such as Palladium followed suit. The other early games, such as Basic Role Playing (BRP), it's spinoffs (Call of Cthulu, Runequest, and so on) and Warhammer, used a d100 - a pair of d10s, one representing the 10s place, and the other in the 1s place, where each digit is 1%. Other dice were still being used for any number of other things

Relatively quickly, that started getting spread around. Tunnels & Trolls replaced the linear resolution method with one that contains a "bell curve" - 2d6. This got spread around even more with systems like the General Universal Role Playing System (GURPS), with their 3d6 system handling more and more nuanced systems.

These types of systems are all about comparing numbers, and fall into 3 categories: 

• Roll-Over - the rolled number is compared against a Target Number (the difficulty level) provided by the Game Master, and if it's above that number, it's a success.
• Roll-Under - Instead of receiving a number by the GM, Roll-under systems have the Target Number there on the Sheet (If my sheet says 10, for example, I need to roll and the total needs to be at or under 10). There are two of these executions - first, the modifiers effect the dice rolled, like the above, but are in a state where negative numbers are better (TN 10, I roll a 12 but have a -3 in the trait, for a total of 9); alternatively, the modifiers effect the Target Number, and thus math is done first and the dice rolled second (TN 10, I have a +3 in the trait, so the actual target number is 13) 
• Contested - One of the above systems, but instead of a static difficulty, the player's dice and total are compared to the dice and total rolled by the GM

The next innovation was that of a 'dice pool' system - where dice are rolled, certain numbers are labelled as success, others as failure, and then a number of successes are counted. First with Ghostbusters (1986), which used a d6 pool system, the largest game that used such a system was the gothic monster games in the World of Darkness storyteller system (using d10 dice pools) and the Fudge d6 system, with their custom d6 dice that contain two "+" , two blanks, and two "-" signs (which are abbreviated as "dF"). Star Wars Roleplaying 2012, later released as Genesys in 2017, took that a step further, uses "narrative dice", a custom set of polyhedral dice that are used.

Dice pools are interesting because you have multiple "levers" to twist - not only is there a number of successes that can be generated, but what defines a success can be leveraged. In some Shadowrun editions, a d6 pool system, 5s & 6s are successes, but since the number of dice can get really large, there's an alternate rule that you can just automatically gain 1 success for every 4 dice that would be rolled (outside of combat, that is). In some of the World of Darkness editions (d10 pools), typically 6-10 are successes, 2-5 are null, and 1s are failures... but in some cases that number that defines success could get higher (7-10 or 8-10, for example). 

The next innovation was the fixed Target Number, introduced through the games that would become Savage Worlds in 2003. That system used a linear resolution (a single die and modifiers), and a fixed target number (4), but also added the concept of "exploding" dice - that is, if you roll the highest number on the die (a 4on a d4, an 8 on a d8, etc), that die is noted and then rolled again. Because of this, otherwise impossible resolution calculations, such as 1d4-2 vs a TN of 4, could be accomplished. While this solved many issues that linear resolutions had, the desire for low numbers to trigger additional "explosions" often meant resolutions make take quite a while - roll, and then roll again, and then roll again.

In 2010, Apocalypse World  took the RPG space by storm, eventually spawning hundreds of "Powered By The Apocalypse" games in its wake. They main innovation of the PbtA-style systems is that they took that fixed difficulty model, and used it to mirror both sides of the interaction - using a 2d6+ roll-over system (originally), the player would roll their dice, add a modifier and compare it against a chart:

• 1-6: Failure, and the GM makes a move
• 7-9: Partial Success (or Success, with complications), with the GM having a relatively fixed number of options for that complication
• 10+: Total Success

This shifted the balance away to an entire liminal setup - the GM doesn't roll at all, just presents a threat, the players act, and the GM reacts. There are also variants of this with other dice sizes (such as Monsterhearts & Kult which use 2d10). In 2013, this concept was ported over to d20 systems with Numenera, which eventually became the Cypher System, attempting to be a combination of both worlds.

An off-shoot of the PbtA craze was the game Blades in the Dark, which uses a combination of dice pools and the above system - Referred to as "Roll and Keep". With this setup, there is no (or very little) math involved. In this setup, you create a pool of d6s, and use only the highest result. 1-3 is a failure, 4-5 is a partial success, and a 6 is a total success (multiple 6s is considered a critical success). In TechNoir, a d6 pool system, 4-6 is a success and 1-3 is a null, but "Hurt Dice" can be added which remove the numbers rolled from the pool (so if you have 3 successes with a 5, 5, and 4, but one of your Hurt dice rolls a 5, those are negated, and you're down to a single success). The various Cortex systems are similar, where you roll a number of dice (but of various sizes), and you "keep" two of the dice for your total. In 2022, the concept was iterated on again, with the Breathless system - No modifiers, only dice sizes, and each time you roll a die, you keep the next smallest die. 1-2 is a failure, 3-4 is a partial success, and 5+ is a full success. This combination allows for the Stakes to constantly stay high, as each time a check is needed, whatever die that check is using will step down the die - It's really easy to roll over a 5 with a d12, but then it's a d10, then a d8. The lowest die that can be used is a d4, which means the checks can still succeed, but always at a cost. 

So, with all that out on the table, what do I want to actually use?

One of my largest gripes about RPGs in general is that difficulty is abstract, and the system revolves around having a Target Number. In some cases it's really straightforward - if you're fighting a creature, that creature typically has some sort of stats, and then the Target Number is derived from that. In D&D, it's numbers like the Armor Class (AC) or Saving Throws. In Cypher, it's the difficulty level multiplied by 3 (A level 4 creature has a TN 12). But outside of those predefined things, that abstraction is even more made-up - If you're falling and want to grab a ledge, how hard is that? If you have peak human strength, and want to lift a car up, how difficult is that for you? If you're trying to jump between moving carriages, what is the Target Number?

For that, the Roll-Over systems are largely devoid of value. There's always a table of some variety, some collection of "easy" to "hard" to "nearly impossible" with some numbers, but they're always devoid of context, and have no background information on how to make that work. The only Roll-Over system that works well is the PbtA model of game, where there is a constant Target Number. Roll-Under System seem to be the way to go for that specific complaint.

As a game master, I tend to be tracking a lot of things - while each player has a lone character, maybe a second one, the GM is tracking everything and everyone else. I like mass conflicts, I like things that are complicated and interesting. Because of that, I want enough of an abstraction where I'm not constantly having to track every little thing. That being said, I also don't want to go too deep into the realm of PbtA, BitD and Cypher - I still want to be rolling dice, and playing the game, just on a more reduced scale.

Instructions Unclear, Roll-Under seems hard

Roll-under seems like the way to go - having the bulk of the difficulties right there on the page would make things run really fast for the most part. Definitely the version where all of the math is done on the front end, though, manipulating the target number instead of the roll itself. That being said, many of the roll-under systems are linear instead of bell-curve, so that's a problem. Ironsworn (a solo-focused 2d10 system) and the Modiphius 2d20 systems (for games like Mothership, Conan, Fallout or Dune) are the only ones I know of. More research will be required.

I particularly like the degrees of success that is used in Hollows, a d20 roll-under, as the presence of enemies is represented as adding a second, lower Target Number, and the ideal roll is going to be at or under your TN but above the enemies'  TN. Gotta thread that needle really smoothly. That being said, I also enjoy that lower-equals-better from Modiphius, though - where rolling double 1s is an amazing roll. 

However, if there's a particularly asymmetrical version of contested rolls out there, that might also be interesting. Ironsworn, mentioned above, has a somewhat-contested roll, in that the Target number is determined by the Stat on the sheet added to a 6d. The Cortex dice-pool system, such as in Tales of Xadia, has difficulty levels are based first on dice pairs, but the contested pools are augmented by things like location distinctions and the character's own complications. For example, Recovery is against the base difficulty of 2d8 - so if you're bleeding d10, you would roll against the combined two highest numbers from 2d8+1d10. That also some serious potential.