Invisible Sun Design Diary 2: Acquiring Different Abilities with Different Experience Points

Depending on your point of view, it’s either enlightening or disheartening to look behind the curtain of a game’s design. Enlightening perhaps, because you see why things work the way they do. Disheartening, on the other hand, maybe, because it takes some of the magic out of it. Case in point, in a game like Numenera, we want to think of things like the Glaive’s ability to pierce foes with a sharp weapon to be entirely different than a Nano’s ability to scan, because one is skill and the oth...