Scaling the Threat of Monsters and NPCs
Posted: Tue May 11, 2021 11:44 am
One aspect of RPGs I've been pondering lately has to do with how a GM can tailor the difficulty and toughness of enemies to be a reasonable challenge to player characters. Most GMs I know just wing it and come up with a guess based on their intuition and experience. My NPC generators (linked in my signature) offer a level-based sliding scale to make these NPCs tougher; this helps, but I'm not sure if it's an ideal way to handle this, because level scaling is multi-dimensional and somewhat uneven. It can be very tricky to adjust the combat effectiveness of an NPC or monster.
Example: Let's say you have a monster that, in a typical fight, will take down about half of your player characters' armor/health/hit points/ISP/P.P.E./ammunition, and you want to make that opponent an even match for the players. You want this monster to be more of an even match for the party, so you double the damage of its strikes, double its strike/parry/dodge bonuses, and double its MDC. The monster now hits twice as often, gets hit half as much, hits twice as hard when it does hit, and can absorb twice as many successful hits. Rather than making this monster twice as tough, you just made it 2^4 times as much, or 16 times as effective against your player characters!
This is an extreme case, and I'm admittedly simplifying things a lot. The effects of strike/parry/dodge bonuses and penalties are too complicated to quantify this way. That said, I think it illustrates that it's a lot easier to adjust combat stats one at a time to achieve a specific threat level than to adjust all of them at once. But which one is best to adjust, and how will altering these traits can affect the experience of playing the game?
Doubling the M.D.C. of a monster is probably the simplest and easiest way to tailor its effectiveness in combat by a predictable degree. The longer a monster lasts, the more damage it will do, and the more dice rolls you have, the easier the outcome is to predict, thanks to the Law of Large Numbers. Doubling the monster's defensive bonuses will have a similar effect. On the downside, requiring more dice rolls to resolve combat can turn it into a grind. Fights where the damage is low but the damage capacity is high get very tedious.
On the flipside, doubling the damage of the monster's strikes is also likely to make the monster twice as effective, and it makes fights less predictable and more tense, as single hits become far more consequential. On the downside, this also means that the player characters will be at an elevated risk of losing and/or dying from a few hits, as little as one. Doubling a monster's chances to hit instead of doubling damage mitigates this risk somewhat and provides characters more opportunities to react to damage/withdraw/surrender/play dead.
Another method is to increase the number of limited-use attacks available to an enemy. For instance, increasing the number of missiles an enemy has available to use in a single volley can provide more opportunities to bring the M.D.C. of the player characters' vehicle/armor to a level where they are concerned without putting them at risk of dying in a single hit. Increasing available P.P.E. for a spellcaster could allow them to throw a few high-P.P.E., high-damage attacks with a similar effect.
I've seen Rifts books that emphasize many of these adjustments. CJ Carella's South America books are famous for offering high-damage weapons that make combat more dangerous. Content with deity-related creatures like Patheons of the Megaverse and the Four Horsemen in Africa are good examples of high-M.D.C. adversaries that make stand-up fights more predictable, but longer. Triax offers some missile-heavy power armor and robots that are good at delivering a massive initial strike that brings enemies down to more manageable M.D.C. totals.
What do you think? What approach do you like to take in your Rifts games to dial threats up and down? My general preference is strike bonuses; increasing them shortens combat without stepping the risk of player character death up too high.
On the flipside, as a player, which combat traits of your character do you most like to maximize? My general preference is damage; increasing it both shortens combat and makes the result of any hit rolls that much more consequential.
Example: Let's say you have a monster that, in a typical fight, will take down about half of your player characters' armor/health/hit points/ISP/P.P.E./ammunition, and you want to make that opponent an even match for the players. You want this monster to be more of an even match for the party, so you double the damage of its strikes, double its strike/parry/dodge bonuses, and double its MDC. The monster now hits twice as often, gets hit half as much, hits twice as hard when it does hit, and can absorb twice as many successful hits. Rather than making this monster twice as tough, you just made it 2^4 times as much, or 16 times as effective against your player characters!
This is an extreme case, and I'm admittedly simplifying things a lot. The effects of strike/parry/dodge bonuses and penalties are too complicated to quantify this way. That said, I think it illustrates that it's a lot easier to adjust combat stats one at a time to achieve a specific threat level than to adjust all of them at once. But which one is best to adjust, and how will altering these traits can affect the experience of playing the game?
Doubling the M.D.C. of a monster is probably the simplest and easiest way to tailor its effectiveness in combat by a predictable degree. The longer a monster lasts, the more damage it will do, and the more dice rolls you have, the easier the outcome is to predict, thanks to the Law of Large Numbers. Doubling the monster's defensive bonuses will have a similar effect. On the downside, requiring more dice rolls to resolve combat can turn it into a grind. Fights where the damage is low but the damage capacity is high get very tedious.
On the flipside, doubling the damage of the monster's strikes is also likely to make the monster twice as effective, and it makes fights less predictable and more tense, as single hits become far more consequential. On the downside, this also means that the player characters will be at an elevated risk of losing and/or dying from a few hits, as little as one. Doubling a monster's chances to hit instead of doubling damage mitigates this risk somewhat and provides characters more opportunities to react to damage/withdraw/surrender/play dead.
Another method is to increase the number of limited-use attacks available to an enemy. For instance, increasing the number of missiles an enemy has available to use in a single volley can provide more opportunities to bring the M.D.C. of the player characters' vehicle/armor to a level where they are concerned without putting them at risk of dying in a single hit. Increasing available P.P.E. for a spellcaster could allow them to throw a few high-P.P.E., high-damage attacks with a similar effect.
I've seen Rifts books that emphasize many of these adjustments. CJ Carella's South America books are famous for offering high-damage weapons that make combat more dangerous. Content with deity-related creatures like Patheons of the Megaverse and the Four Horsemen in Africa are good examples of high-M.D.C. adversaries that make stand-up fights more predictable, but longer. Triax offers some missile-heavy power armor and robots that are good at delivering a massive initial strike that brings enemies down to more manageable M.D.C. totals.
What do you think? What approach do you like to take in your Rifts games to dial threats up and down? My general preference is strike bonuses; increasing them shortens combat without stepping the risk of player character death up too high.
On the flipside, as a player, which combat traits of your character do you most like to maximize? My general preference is damage; increasing it both shortens combat and makes the result of any hit rolls that much more consequential.
