HarveyV said:
They literally and factually said they added the health pool system because idiots might end up going into encounters unprepared.
That is what casuals do. They are stupid and don't take their time or learn the mechanics, and die. Duh.
I think you may be misinterpreting what I said.
The intent was not to "dumb down" the game for "casuals". It was primarily to allow us to balance combat better. Numenera is a system built for the tabletop and while it has some great elements, our goal is still ultimately to do a Torment CRPG and not a 1:1 tabletop simulation.
Without a human GM tuning each situation, stat pools doubling as health introduced a ton of variance in character builds and capability levels that made it extremely difficult to balance encounters, DTs, items, etc. across the entire game. With health we have a more consistent reference point for balancing encounters, and resource management is still an extremely important part of exploration/conversation gameplay as well as for combat abilities.
You are welcome to extrapolate what that means for the game, or discuss how that relates to the spirit of Numenera if you wish. But I just want to get it out there that accessibility to some nebulous idiotic mass audience was not a factor.