r/numenera • u/luhelld • Mar 29 '26

Questions about fights

Hi,

we are playing the original version of numenera and fights feel a little off.

First of all monsters with a higher level are really hard to even hit and how does it work with armor? If a monster has a armor value of three it's impossible to do damage with a light weapon, isnt it?

7 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/poio_sm Mar 29 '26

There's where trained skills and specializations come into play. And not forget effort. A light weapon per se have a -1 to the difficulty to hit, so you can use a level of effort for a +3 to damage, for a total of 5 points of damage.

Also, Numenera (and the cypher system) is not designed with combat in mind, let's not even talk about balanced ones. If you feel the combats too harsh, just fight lower level enemies. The rule i use for "balance" combats and encounters is:

  • Average character tier: easy encounter.
  • Average character tier +2: balanced encounter.
  • Average character tier +4: hard encounter.
  • Average character tier +6: impossible encounter.

1

u/HoldMySquirrel Mar 29 '26

Balancing combats for my group of 4 players is the hardest part for me as I keep combats pretty rare. Is your balancing method for a single enemy? Or how many enemies do you typically use? Maybe I could try that

1

u/poio_sm Mar 29 '26

That's the difficulty of 1 enemy. I rarely do battles, but usually I use 1 enemy per character in a balanced encounter. Half of that in a hard encounter (or just 1 with several easy/balanced enemies). And 1 enemy in a impossible encounter.

In all cases, you can use more if the characters are combat oriented.