I’ve talked about Numenera and the Cypher System it spawned quite a bit in the past, both here on the Alexandrian and elsewhere. Often what I’m talking about are the GM intrusions, which are one of the best and most innovative elements of the system.
When saying that intrusions are innovative, however, I’m not infrequently confronted by people demanding stuff like, “Have you ever read any Fate game at all?” It’s an ironic comment because it’s an accusation of ignorance which is, in fact, born from ignorance. But it’s happened often enough that I feel a need to just write up a definitive explanation that I can reference in the future.
First: Yes, I’m familiar with and have played (and run) Fate.
Second: Yes, both games feature a mechanic in which the GM offers a point of meta-currency to a player to achieve an effect which the player can cancel by spending their own meta-currency. But the similarity is superficial, in much the same way that saying “in Magic: The Gathering you play cards from your hand and in Dominion you also play cards from your hand” is a superficial comparison of those games.
Let’s break this down.
GM INTRUSIONS
I discuss the GM intrusions of the Cypher System in much more detail in The Art of GM Intrusions, but the short version is that the function of a GM intrusion is for the GM to say, “I’m going to do something that the rules don’t normally allow me to do.”
GMs will, of course, do this from time to time in any system. But there’s generally a limit. For example, if a GM’s response to a successful attack in a typical RPG was to say, “Yeah! And you hit the mammoth-saur so hard that your axe actually gets stuck in its side! And then it rears back and rips the axe right out of hands!” the players would generally say (or at least think), “This is bullshit.” Because punishing people for making a successful attack is bullshit; it’s a violation of the rules we’ve all agreed to abide by.
But hitting something so hard that your weapon gets stuck in it is actually pretty fucking badass. And what the GM intrusion mechanics basically let the GM say is, “Wouldn’t this be cool?” (by offering XP) and for the players to say, “Fuck yeah!” (by accepting the XP) or “No, I don’t think so,” (by spending an XP to cancel the intrusion) within the rules we’ve all agreed to abide by.
We could, of course, just chat this out without the mechanic, but (a) you can really say that about any mechanic in an RPG and (b) in practice, making it an explicit mechanic lubricates the interaction so that play doesn’t bog down on these points.
This simultaneously lets Monte Cook, the designer, keep the system streamlined by binning all the special case rules. The example he gives in the book basically boils down to, “The reason other games have attack of opportunity rules is to eliminate weird edge cases where turn-based combat creates odd and undesirable outcomes like being unable to stop someone from running past you because it’s not your turn. Instead of having a whole heap of special case rules trying to weed out those corner cases, the GM should just use the intrusion mechanic to deal with them when and if they’re important.”
Basically, any time the rules would discourage something awesome from happening or result in one of these weird edge cases due to their streamlined abstraction, the GM instrusion provides a mechanism for resolving it.
FATE COMPELS
Let’s compare this to Fate in which the GM can identify a specific Aspect belonging to a character and compel it by paying a Fate Point to the player. (And the player, in turn, can cancel the compel by instead spending a Fate Point of their own.)
As we’ve noted, the form of the mechanic is superficially similar. But the function of the mechanic has a completely different feature set.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Dresden Files RPG lately, so we’ll use that as our primary example. It includes two types of compels: Limitations and Complications. Limitations are the GM forcing the player to take a specific type of action (which, you’ll note, is not something that GM intrusions do at all). Complications are similar to one variety of GM intrusion (by introducing elements that are disadvantageous to the PCs during play), but note how the actual execution of the mechanic is almost completely inverted: Compelling an Aspect isn’t providing mechanical support for unanticipated edge cases; they’re explicitly the core rule by which Aspects (which are one of the primary ways of describing your character mechanically) are mechanically implemented.
Here’s one way to clearly perceive the distinction: If you took GM intrusions out of the Cypher System, nothing on your character sheet would change. If you took compels out of Fate, you’d have a whole bunch of negative-leaning Aspects on your character sheet without any mechanical hook for using them.
WHY DOES THIS MATTER?
Because the misapprehension that GM intrusions are supposed to be used like compels in Fate appears to be causing a lot of Fate players to misuse and dismiss one of the most useful innovations in RPG design in the last decade.
If you believe that GM intrusions are just “watered down compels from Fate” (as one Fate player told me), it means that you’re not only limiting your use of GM intrusions to one very tiny part of what they’re capable of, you’re also saddling the GM intrusion mechanic with an entire ethos (being the primary mechanism for leveraging character traits into play) which GM intrusions are not mechanically capable of robustly supporting (because, again, that’s not what they’re designed to do).
The opposite, of course, would also be true: If you tried to use Fate compels as if they were GM intrusions, the result would almost certainly be a very sub-optimal use of the Fate system. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in actual play or online discussions, which is why my discussion here is primarily focused in the opposite direction.
It’s interesting to note that Invisible Sun, the latest Monte Cook Games RPG removes the ability for players to stop these GM Intrusions.
I don’t really understand the reason to be honest, as we have only done 3 sessions. The players however don’t seem to mind – the awarded XP (split into Joy for fortuitous Intrusions and Despair for negative ones) and narrative validity seems enough for my players, so far.
I’m not familiar with the Cpher system, but it sounds like what you’re describing is very similar to complications in Cortex Prime – a way for the GM to introduce a complication that can work against the player in exchange for metacurrency, but it’s external and derives from the situation (they’re also driven by for results, which is neither here nor there). Another way the people that are comparing that to a compel in Fate are going wrong, is that in Fate a compel is less about making some exception or introducing some mechanical element that might not be beneficial to the players, but still may be interesting, and more about what weight the existence of the aspect gives in the fiction. Basically the existence of the aspect is giving the GM permission to compel it – with first refusal right going to the player, as you noted – in a way that’s consistent with how the table as a whole understands what the aspect stands for. It falls under narrative permission, which is as you likely already know a different beast than GM intrusion.
I’ve quite often used GM intrusions for character evolution; for instance a character that had an eye infection while in a different time stream was a brief sub-plot and the infection was caused by direct character actions.
That returned later as a source of a GM intrusion where a sudden sharp pain in that eye resolved into seeing the same scene 10 minutes in the future through their infected eye while their regular eye saw it as it was currently. Suddenly the character had a new ability that they could not call on themselves but was periodically a fun plot device if not overused.
So much that has been commented on about GM intrusions implies that they are complications for the characters, but they need not be negative.
Hi. I really like your blog. It comes up in discussions with rpg dorks I know; people are always impressed with your thinking.
I also really appreciate that you’re one of the supporters of Cypher. I feel like the system isn’t (over all) good. It has good ideas but the system and Numenera struggle against the basic resolution mechanic (it feels bad), the weirdness-as-primary-driver-of-interest exists outside of the game world, locking characters at 1st level, it was so bad it killed an otherwise great video game, etc etc.
It’s nice to see an alternative point of view.
Fate compels feel good because it’s well thought out and integrated into the mechanics. It’s clear to the player how their character is going to interact with the world and it resolves the “need for tension” (characters need to have bad things happen to them) with the players desire that they (=their character) feels competent and has a good time (the escapist fantasy). By putting it in a mechanic Fate gamifies a tricky part of dramatic story telling in a way that helps players feel empowered and safe.
From a Fate players standpoint Cypher (and most other games) feel a bit neutered.
But that’s not your point, right? Your point is that Numenera isn’t trying to solve or empower players. The idea of “gm intrusion” is a rules adjacent thing (i.e. it doesn’t connect to any rules because it’s a kind of ur-rule – a codification of Rule 0). Most games would benefit from “I’m gonna hose your characters but you get a hero point; or you can skip the hero point and avoid the hosing” type mechanism for negotiating awkward situations.
I think Monte Cook never intended it to work this way though? He’s not like… “grappling rules and critical fails suck; they’re interesting 1 time in 10. Lets just do the 1 cool time and skip all the fiddly rules that gum up the game the rest of the time”.
Yeah… things like this (https://www.montecookgames.com/player-intrusions/) are why people don’t see it.
MC’s *presents* as an amazing innovation that… sounds a lot like a Fate compel…. and doesn’t fulfill that.
I’m an art-exists-independent-of-the-artist person; so I don’t think MC’s intent is particularly important but your framing is basically… completely new?
That makes your article more impressive in my book, btw.
Graf says: I think Monte Cook never intended it to work this way though? He’s not like… “grappling rules and critical fails suck; they’re interesting 1 time in 10. Lets just do the 1 cool time and skip all the fiddly rules that gum up the game the rest of the time”.
I mention this in the article, actually. I’m pretty certain it’s how Cook intended the mechanic to be used. The example of play from the first edition, for example, includes a character doing something that would provoke an attack of opportunity in D&D and the GM uses an intrusion to model the attack of opportunity.
Player intrusions I haven’t actually had a chance to use in play yet or really even look at in more than a cursory way, so I can’t really comment on those as of yet. (They were added to the game’s second edition.) They seem like a far more traditional “reality edit” mechanic of the sort that dates back to the old James Bond RPG.
I particularly like these articles (this one and the following 2 on Momentum) on specific mechanics in particular RPGs. I’ll never be able to try out every single one of the games you mention here, but understanding what makes them distinctive at the table might nudge me to try one, or to extract a mechanic and carry it over to another game at my own table.
Thanks for responding!
So why doesn’t he say that other places? E.g. in the example I cited: (https://www.montecookgames.com/player-intrusions/). If you need to figure this out by careful reading of the combat examples from 1st edition book… that’s the definition of obscure.
99% of the audience is going to take the author at their word. MC’s *presents* as an amazing innovation that… sounds a lot like a Fate compel… but doesn’t actually deliver anything like the experience.
I’m not saying you’re wrong about how the mechanic could actually work out in play. But he clearly doesn’t know, or has forgotten.
I would have added a subtitle or something that says “The best innovation Monte Cook forgot he made” and been more direct about the fact that you’ve identified a positive feature of the system that the author forgot about / etc.
You’re citing a web article about a different (albeit related) mechanic and wondering why it’s not providing a specific piece of advice about GM intrusions.
Meanwhile, if you look up “GM Intrusion” in the 2nd Edition rulebook, the example I cite in the article is right there. Then you can go to the section “Using the Rules”, flip to the section giving advice on the many ways the GM can use GM intrusions, and find the example you describe as the “definition of obscure.” It’s repeated again in the example of play also found in the 2nd Edition rulebook.
It just doesn’t seem that obscure to me.
It occurs to me that another part of the difference between these two systems is what is being spent/given. In Numenera, GM intrusions are paid for and bought off with XP, which (though you can spend it for temporary effects) is the currency used to purchase permanent advancements. In FATE (or at least the DFRPG), Fate points have nothing to do with character advancement, you can only spend them for temporary bonuses and effects or to buy off compels. Which means that accepting a GM intrusion for XP feels very different than accepting a compel for a Fate point.
Only recently discovered your amazing website.
Since you mentioned spending a lot of time with the Dresden Files RPG, is it possible that we see a full article about it in the future? It is one of my favorite RPGs !