Monday, August 6, 2018

Numenera Character Generator being updated

Iadace! I have the Numenera 2 books (Destiny and Discovery) now and am currently in the process of updating the character generator to be able to make second-edition Numenera characters. I have added the new types (Arkus, Delve, and Wright), but have NOT yet fixed the descriptors and foci. That should be done pretty soon though.

It was said by somebody official somewhere-- though I don't know where to find this quote now-- that obsolete options from Character Options and Character Options 2 ARE compatible with second edition, but that you "probably" would prefer to use new stuff instead of anything from CO1 and CO2. This makes some sense because one of the big changes is that all foci in the new books now have a choice of two specials to take at Tier Three and Tier Six, giving the updated core foci powerful new options. However, I think most of the "obsolete" foci like Reforges Completely or Fights Dirty or whatever are still perfectly playable. (And in any event, many of the foci from CO1 and CO2 were already not as "strong" as the foci from the core book, so this is not as big of a deal as it may appear at first glance.)

For this reason, I am keeping all the foci from CO1 and CO2 in this character generator. (Obviously, if your GM decides not to allow obsolete foci, that is within their purview.) Any foci that appear in both the old and new books will be changed here to reflect the new books (although for the majority of these there is no change at Tier One.) For cases where the NAME of a focus has changed-- of which I have found only one instance so far, "Hunts With Great Skill" being changed to simply "Hunts"-- both names will appear in the generator, but selecting either will do the same thing (i.e., both foci are tied to the exact same code).

On the other hand, I decided to remove the obsolete types (i.e., Seeker and Glint) from the generator altogether, because these are straightforwardly replaced by new, indisputably better types that fill the same or similar roleplay niche (namely Delve and Arkus, respectively). I may change my mind on this in the future and put Seeker and Glint back in, but for now, I think it would be too confusing to keep them. I want to keep the process of rolling up a new Numenera character as non-confusing as possible. Plus, I feel the old Seeker and Glint types were pretty under-powered compared to the base classes anyway, so I doubt anyone will miss them much.

Obsolete descriptors I will be keeping, unless there is some specific reason to remove some of them. (I have not yet gone through all of the descriptors, but from what I have seen so far, I don't see any issues with keeping all the descriptors. I know not everyone is a fan of the racial and location-based descriptors, but I think they are fine.)

Lastly, a few of the Esoteries, Fighting Moves, etc, you get from your types that were in CO1, CO2, or the old core book have been removed from the character generator also. I kinda had to use my judgment to decide which specials were intended to be no longer compatible with the new system, or replaced by something else, etc. (For example, I feel reasonably sure that Pierce and Thrust are intended to be replaced with "Combat Prowess", an ability which second-edition Glaives get for free.) Most of the old abilities are still in there though, but are marked with asterisks in case you want to avoid them and roll up a "pure" second-edition character. Also, I am too lazy to expand the space for Esotery choices beyond fifteen slots, so a few had to be deleted solely for that reason haha. (Sorry, Jacks... Rope Use wasn't that great anyway.)

Enough of my blathering. Do check out my handy-dandy Numenera 2 Character Generator for yourself. So far as I know, it is the only free, online N2 character generator out there.

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