New Glave Fighting Moves (Numenera)

Some Glaves take a much broader view of what constitutes a battlefield in the Ninth World. By thinking strategically rather than tactically they widen their view and impact far more lives than a simpler mind might. All Glaives are looked up to as bastions of strength in a strange and wild world, but these individuals seek to keep mind as sharp as their blade and often wield armies or entire communities as their chosen weapons.

Tier 1

Battlefield Medic; You are trained in healing skill rolls. If you have already treated a patient for the day you can apply a level of Effort to do so again rather than to gain a bonus for the roll. Enabler

Motivate; (2 Intellect points)  One creature you choose within short range may take an action. They can use it immediately, even if they have already taken a turn in the round. They may not use special abilities such as fighting moves, esoteries, or tricks of the trade on this action. Action.

Tier 2

Inspire; (3 Intellect points) One creature you choose within short range makes a recovery roll without having to spend the time to do so. Action.

Oration (3 Intellect points): If you succeed at an Intellect-based persuasion or intimidation task, you capture and hold the attention of everyone within 90 feet (27 m) for up to ten minutes. The GM sets the difficulty based on the audience’s disposition. Action to initiate. 

Tier 3

Opening Strike; (4 Intellect points)  When you make an attack on a target the attack throws them off balance or out of sync until the beginning of your next turn, and anyone attacking this target has the difficulty of their attack is reduced by one step. Enabler

Tier 4

Words of Insight; (6 Intellect points)  You restore points to a target’s Intellect Pool in one of two ways: either they regain up to 6 points or are restored to a total value of 12. You make this decision when you initiate this Move. Points are regenerated at a rate of 1 point each round. You must continue speaking with the target the whole time. In no case can this raise a Pool higher than its maximum. Action. 

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One of the interesting features about Numenera is the fact that stats are pools rather than directly checked against. How each pool is used varies from Might being mostly hit points to Intellect being mostly fuel for power and Speed falling between these extremes. Even at the extremes, Intellect is still the target of attacks and Might still fuels powers, but they clearly are used in this manner less. The clearest demonstration that this is by design is the way Armor works; protecting against damage to Might but specifically not the other pools. There are defenses for those pools, but they are extremely rare compared to Armor. Meanwhile, the only one of the three classes ("types") to rely heavily on Might for its powers starts with an Edge in both Might and Speed and has as many moves that either don't use points or rely on speed as it does Might.

Meanwhile, Numenera falls into a common trap for class-based systems- the "limited fighter." Where the Nano and the Jack both have non-combat functions the Glaive is almost purely built around combat- to the point that its special abilities don't even pretend at neutrality or universality like "Esoteries" or "Tricks of the Trade." They are, explicitly, Fighting Moves. This closes the class out of helping players find things to do in the range of non-combat settings and scenarios.

Unlike D&D, which is the poster child for this problem as the origin of "hard classes" (ie; most if not all abilities are class derived), Numenera allows thoughtful players to patch over it somewhat via Descriptors and Foci. However, even if this issue can be patched over, the core problem remains that these classes are determinative and often, especially for the physical classes, highly restrictive to roleplay or any interaction outside combat which, in turn, feeds back into the primacy of combat in the roleplay environment.

So, I started working on ways for fighters... err, Glaives, to express another thread of the type description; "In most cities and villages, people hold glaives in great esteem. ... They focus on their bodies, but that doesn’t mean they don’t value more cerebral pursuits as well. ... In a group of explorers, glaives typically take the lead." Again, this sounds like a discussion of the 4e Warlord and its roots in D&D and, as I've done before, I try to turn it back into space for a new generation of fighter types to find things to do aside from beat on stuff.