My group tried out Numenera for the first time last night and it didn’t take long for me, as the GM, to fall in love with its system for determining the difficulty of the skill checks the adventurers face.
It’s based on the core mechanic that powers the entire game: every creature, object and task has a level assigned to it ranging from 0 to 10. That number is multiplied by three to determine its target number – how hard a monster is to hit and how much health it has; how strong the door is that you want to break down; how easy it is to sweet talk your way into a discount with the local merchant. These rolls use a d20.
For example, a level 3 steel spider has 9 hit points, requires an attack roll of 9 to hit it and a defense roll of 9 to avoid its mechanical mandibles. The damage it does, 3, is based on its level. (This creature has other nasty abilities, but the basic statistics for all monsters follow this formula with minor variations.) A level 1 merchant is going be easy to deal with, requiring a persuasion roll of just 3. But a level 5 CEO? That target number of 15 is going to much farther out of reach.
But what about skill checks that aren’t in direct opposition to another creature? What if the PCs encounter a man who is bleeding out after being mauled by a ravage bear, as happened to my group? Well, I just had to consult the guidance in the following table:
| Difficulty | Description | Target Number | Guidance |
| 0 | Routine | 0 | Anyone can do this basically every time. |
| 1 | Simple | 3 | Most people can do this most of the time. |
| 2 | Standard | 6 | Typical task requiring focus, but most people can usually do this. |
| 3 | Demanding | 9 | Requires full attention; most people have a 50/50 chance to succeed. |
| 4 | Difficult | 12 | Trained people have a 50/50 chance to succeed. |
| 5 | Challenging | 15 | Even trained people often fail. |
| 6 | Intimidating | 18 | Normal people almost never succeed. |
| 7 | Formidable | 21 | Impossible without skills or great effort. |
| 8 | Heroic | 24 | A task worthy of tales told for years afterward. |
| 9 | Immortal | 27 | A task worthy of legends that last lifetimes. |
| 10 | Impossible | 30 | A task that normal humans couldn’t consider (but one that doesn’t break the laws of physics) |
I reckoned that this qualified as “even trained people often fail” and set the difficulty at 5. As it turned out, the PCs were able to use a healing kit to temporarily stabilize the man, but didn’t roll high enough to stabilize him.
(If my players are reading this: I didn’t explain this well, but yes, the village probably did have first aid kits. But since it’s a level 1 village, the first aid kits would only be level 1, and thus ineffective against a level 5 task.)
This sequence played itself out over and over again throughout the game. It was so easy. The PCs want to find a safe path through the woods to avoid being ambushed by the ravage bear? Sounds like a typical task requiring focus, so that’ll be a target number 6, please. They want to keep an eye out for anybody following them? I know that those creatures aren’t nearby at the moment, but I suppose they may have left a footprint or two in the past few days, so that falls under “normal people almost never succeed” and a target number of 18.
You may have noticed that rolling a number in the high teens on a d20 is unlikely. I don’t want to get too deep in the weeds here, but the characters have pools of Might, Speed and Intellect they can spend to reduce the difficulty of tasks, along with skills that do the same. Even a Tier 1 character can turn a target number of 15 into a 9 reasonably easily.
The only real difficulty we ran into was an encounter with a creature known as a disassembler – an intelligent but erratic type of robot capable of taking apart inorganic material at the molecular level. Numenera is not built with a Dungeons & Dragons style difficulty calculator. Instead, it offers some general guidance about what beginning characters can handle. A level 5 disassembler, for example, “might be an interesting challenge.”
Interesting is one word for it, I suppose. I did not realize a disassembler has 4 points of armor, which meant two of the three PCs did not have weapons capable of doing any damage to it, and the third could only do 2 damage if he was lucky enough to hit. With the disassembler dealing 5 points of damage per round, there was no way they could win. They had also failed in their checks to reason with it. I got myself out of this jam by having the disassembler try to repair the reactor it was maintaining after the PCs started smashing it, then having it run away when they damaged the reactor so much that an explosion was imminent. (The PCs got out in time.)
I think that was all pretty fair. And though unexpected, that massive explosion gives me a ton of ideas for future plot hooks. My advice for anyone else thinking of running the game: be prepared to be flexible. The PCs will have lots of interesting ways to tackle problems, but in Numenera hard things are truly hard.
There’s a lot more to the game that we haven’t really explored, in both the Discovery and Destiny rule books, so I can’t write a full Numenera review yet. There’s crafting, and researching ancient artifacts, and gathering materials to build up the local village. Given how busy the summer is and our ongoing Dungeons & Dragons campaign, I don’t know when we’ll play it again. But I can’t wait.
Into the Fray 