Numenera: Third Time Wasn't the Charm

Aldarc said:

But let's run a hypothetical scenario with a Tier 1 glaive and a Tier 1 nano where you were facing a creature with AR 4-5, so around 10-11 percent collectively from creatures surveyed.

Glaive: You get Combat Prowess, which provides +1 damage to your choice of ranged or melee weapons. You have access to all weapons, which would include Medium (4 dmg) or Heavy (6 dmg). This is 5-7 damage default per hit, not including any special abilities that you may have as part of your focus, which should get past most 4-5 AR. This does not include the possibility for critical hits either.

Nano: You can only use Light Weapons (2 dmg), but you can pick a Tier 1 ability called Onslaught that does 4 dmg. It costs 1 Int to use, but as a Nano you have Intellect Edge 1, so the ability cost is effectively 0. If you get a critical hit on a 19, that's +3 dmg; or on a 20, that's +4 dmg. So that would still provide you 7-8 dmg to bypass 4-5 AR. Sure that requires a critical, but you had mentioned "even on a critical" you didn't do damage.

Now if we are talking about bypassing any AR above 5, then we are talking about 1.8 percent of all creatures in the books that I looked through above: the 2 core books, the setting book, and 3 bestiaries.

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I appreciate all the work you put into this post.

I just want to say that in 2 out of the 3 situations, I was using pregenerated characters at a Con game (run by Monte Cook games). I had no access to selecting powers, abilities, or equipment.

So the issue is ... Even if I took a Nano with Onslaught, all I can do is spam that one ability in virtually every combat encounter. I can't do anything else. I would have like a 10% chance to damage it with weapons. I have no other abilities that can have any impact on the game.

Who thinks this is good design? Even 1st level D&D characters have more options.

mopakarim8900 said:

The design bears some of the blame in not providing enough GM support for this. There aren't enough sample Numenera. This crops up again with the NPC design; things that hurt your Speed and Intellect should not be nearly as rare as things that hurt your Might.

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Agreed - it took a good year for more sample Numenera to come out in an 'official' capacity, but right after its launch, there were a couple of massive fan-contribution sites that helped. As far as the Speed/Intellect damage, I can't remember if it is something we homebrewed, or a part of the playtests somewhere, but there was an option to take physical damage to either Might -or- Speed as you saw fit. Don't know if it ever made it into any of the other rules, in that I only own the Numenera core kickstarter material.

Beyond that, we also made some homebrew innovation so that Might/Speed/Intellect never took damage, and was instead purely an offensive resource for the players. Alternatively, we just gave each character Hit Points equal to each stat, and then moved the health chart to function off that instead of the 'attributes.' So like every single system we ever play, we had to have our own rule adjustments to enjoy it for any prolonged period of time. In fact, our big upset (and the reason we eventually moved on) was the limited character advancement. Six tiers with only 24 XP to advance made our typical campaign cap out very fast.

@Retreater Sounds like the premades weren't very interesting. I do recall people saying the new Numenera material really cut down on the 'chosen abilities' at first level, because the original material usually had something like 3 abilities at first level, if not more. However, none of it really mattered, because in the end, Onslaught was the only thing a caster got that was really worth combat-beans.

Retreater said:

So the issue is ... Even if I took a Nano with Onslaught, all I can do is spam that one ability in virtually every combat encounter. I can't do anything else. I would have like a 10% chance to damage it with weapons. I have no other abilities that can have any impact on the game.

Who thinks this is good design?

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I agree that spamming Onslaught can seem tedious from the perspective of a player who may expect their mage to have more D&D levels of spell choice and its corresponding round-per-round tactical decision-making; however, Onslaught is a flexible attack ability that is the equivalent of a Jack or Glaive fighting with a Medium weapon (4 dmg). You can also use Onslaught to bypass armor (2 dmg) if that had been an issue for you. And at character creation, you will have a second Tier 1 Nano ability to choose from. And when you begin working on leveling,* you will get another Tier 1 Nano ability of your choice. Though Numenera 2 has reshuffled things (though this most affects the Glaive and the Jack), you can still look through the Character Options 1 supplement if the core book does not provide you with enough ability options to your liking. And you will have Cyphers.

* You need to purchase the four steps for the next tier (4 XP each): a new Effort level, a new Type ability (your tier or lower), a new Skill training, and additional Edge.

I also disagree that you "have no other abilities that can have any impact on the game." Non-combat abilities exist. It seems that you are viewing this almost exclusively from a D&D combat perspective and not a Numenera perspective. Regardless of how those GMs ran your Numenera game, I don't think that combat should ever be the driving focus of Numenera gameplay. You get XP from solving mysteries and making discoveries. If you are more worried about the combat pillar, your type thankfully does not exist in isolation; you will also get an ability or two at each tier from the Focus that you choose. AND ALSO FROM YOUR CYPHERS!

Even 1st level D&D characters have more options.

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Sure, but D&D focuses a lot more on tactical combat across its 20 levels. Numenera provides PCs with a smaller set of powers and abilities and emphasizes the exploration pillar more. Numenera is less about having a spell for every occasion and more about possibly having a cypher for the occasion.

Xaelvaen said:

@Retreater Sounds like the premades weren't very interesting. I do recall people saying the new Numenera material really cut down on the 'chosen abilities' at first level, because the original material usually had something like 3 abilities at first level, if not more. However, none of it really mattered, because in the end, Onslaught was the only thing a caster got that was really worth combat-beans.

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Somewhat. Every Glaive picked one of the three Tier 1 options that gave them bonus +1 damage, so MCG gave them a flat +1 dmg bonus to them for free at character creation (range or melee) and provided more interesting active options for Glaives to choose from. The Nano is mostly the same, though it's skill training in Numenera was changed to Understanding Numenera, since the former made it into an omni-skill. The Jack was remodeled so it is less of a hybrid jack-of-all-trades without an identity, and more of a skill-monkey rogue jack-of-all-trades. Also to save time on things, the game now gives you a premade set of starting cyphers per type.

In Numenéra, fighting is not the 50%-of-the-session activity it tends to be in D&D. Echoing Aldarc, the system isn’t designed to do that. I’ve run a campaign for a few years now, and I found that players would come to me asking to swap combat abilities for non-combatant ones. It’s not that combat doesn’t happen, but it tends to be much less mechanical than D&D, as well as rarer. I’ve had a nano place an enemy in stasis, another attach a null-gravity cypher to them and the third launch them into orbit. Players lure enemies into traps and hazards — the environment is much more a part of the game. In some ways combat has an AD&D feel — you get your one attack power, but if that’s what you’re using, you probably aren’t doing the best thing — look for the non-swing-sword maneuver.

in D&D the big climax is typically a fight. I think I can say that it has never been so in the game I’ve run, across maybe ten or so arcs. Players have, as a cap to the arc

- persuaded enough people to own their own house
- activated the numenéra in the cellar and launched their house onto a distant water planet
- escaped the water planet through a gate to the moon
- temporarily fixed the moon’s time travel issues well enough to get the space port working
- ejected the rogue intelligence from their ship into the sun
- lured the big bad nasty thing into a trap
- persuaded an immortal that the immortal was just depressed and needed a change of lifestyle
- understood the giant creatures’ house/school/spaceship well enough to switch off their power source and free their ship.

Combats were generally a minor feature, more of a set-up than a finale. They could be very nasty, and take entire sessions occasionally (a big brawl in a society ball with numenéra running amok) but there was always something going on in addition to combat. All the way to end-tier, I have characters being played who still only really use one combat attack power, but they feel like a fallback; something to do if you haven’t a better idea, or if you’re a bit tired or on a bathroom break.

Oh wait; there was one big bad that was eliminated at the end of an arc; I forgot because the fight was a bit of anti-climax; one player managed to apply a cypher to him that adapted him to life deep underwater, and he failed to realize what had happened (no water on his planet deeper than a few meters) and teleported himself into space as a last-ditch effort to live, believing it might be a space adaptation cypher. Dead if he stayed anyway, so not a terrible guess. People did do some standard attacks against his minions, but I don’t think against him.