House Rules

Nov 29, 2015 8:21 am
Customizing Descriptors
There are a lot of Descriptors available in the official materials. However, there may may not be the ‘perfect’ one for your character.If you just can’t find one that works for you use the guidelines presented below to design your own Descriptor. I retain final approval rights of course, but I am open to your ideas because I want you to have the character you want for this game. (The information provided below can be found on page 117 of the core Numenera book.)

Under the normal rules, each descriptor is based on some modification of the following:

Some descriptors offer +4 to one stat Pool and either two narrow skills or one broad skill.

Other descriptors offer +2 to one stat Pool and either three narrow skills or one narrow skill and one broad skill.

A broad skill covers many areas (such as all interactions). A narrow skill covers fewer actions (such as deceptive interactions). Combat-related skills, such as defense or initiative, are considered broad skills in this sense.

Regardless, you can add an additional skill if it is balanced by an inability that is essentially a "negative skill." You can add other nonskill abilities by eyeballing them and trying to equate them to the value of a skill, if possible. If the descriptor seems lacking, add about ten to fifteen shins of additional equipment to balance things out.

With this general information, you can customize a descriptor, but keep in mind that a heavily customized descriptor isn’t a descriptor if it no longer says one thing about a character. It’s better to use this information to create a new descriptor that fits exactly how the player wants to portray the character. Customizing a Location-Based Descriptors is an option,

Lasting or Permanent Damage as Death Replacement
Character Death is sometimes unavoidable, bad luck in rolling and overconfidence in character ability being the chief reasons. Sometimes Character Death comes just as you were really getting into your character and truly discovering their motivations. If your character dies and you are just not ready to let them go, I offer Lasting or Permanent Damage as an alternative. Using the table found on page 114 as my guideline I will select some effect related to the manner of death that will be applied to your character for a significant time. These effects may be bought off after a sufficient amount to time with in-story reasons, but you will need to make a compelling argument for their removal.

Choosing to Roll
Sometimes, if a player spends points on an action (for example, to apply Effort or to activate an ability), she might want to toss a die even if there is no chance for failure because a roll of 20 reduces the number of points that need to be spent. In addition, in some situations, particularly in combat, a roll of 17 or higher indicates more damage or a special effect.

In these cases, players are allowed to roll not to determine success but to determine whether they achieve an above-and-beyond success. However, there is risk involved because if they roll a 1, that results in a GM intrusion It does not necessarily mean failure, although that’s an obvious GM intrusion to use.

Rolling for Damage
So far these rules have been options presented in the core rule book. This one is all me as far as I can tell. I dislike the core concept of flat damage based on the size of the weapon used. So to give it the feel that I want I am giving the player a chance at increased damage through rolling. In order to keep the expenditure of Effort viable I didn't want to make the potential damage rolled any more dangerous, to that end I would like to try adding a 1d4-1 to all damage the players (PLAYERS ONLY) may do. This nets a 0-3 range, meaning it could be as effective as spending effort, but not a guarantee. This damage is in addition to the normal of a the weapon size. Alternately you may add the weapons normal damage to the d4 roll to get a single number. So a light weapon would be 1d4+1; a medium weapon would be 1d4+3 and a heavy weapon would be 1d4+5

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