Scaling the Threat of Monsters and NPCs

[Hotrod]

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.

[ITWastrel]

When I want to scale up an encounter, I generally add complications rather than just making the bad guy tougher.

If, for instance, the party is in a fight and it appears the baddies are going to die quicker than intended, I'll have a "stray shot" rupture a cooling tank or fire hydrant, or similar. Suddenly, the area is filled with steam/smoke/spraying water! Every attack now has a 50% miss chance, and my players are now half as effective. They don't see a tougher baddie, they don't see me fudging the rules, and nobody asks how, exactly, that grunt got a +13 to hit.

I'll also do swarms of bees (Hey, Juicer! The bees are INSIDE your armor, what do you do?) or sudden flooding, or weakened building/collapse, or even wandering orphans* if it makes the encounter work. I don't do complications for normal fights, just blast some mooks, but for boss fights, heck yes.

My goal isn't to strengthen bad guys, or weaken heroes, but to waste as many of the heroes' APM as possible. Your PC may be able to one-hit kill these goons, sure, but if you're saving Ruby Rudolph, intrepid girl reporter, you're not one-shotting anybody.



*Wandering orphans: any innocent bystanders that the DM decides to put in danger so our heroes can be distracted saving them. Also known as "a bus full of nuns" or "little Peggy's class trip", these squishy, pop-able, splat-able innocents are always fun to have haplessly wander into a firefight.

[Kraynic]

When I want to scale up an encounter, I generally add complications rather than just making the bad guy tougher.

I don't run Rifts, but this is how I handle things in my Fantasy games as well. Poor or changing environmental conditions, hidden (most likely weak) henchmen or unexpected reinforcements, unstable magic, diversions (used against the PCs), etc.

[ITWastrel]

When I want to scale up an encounter, I generally add complications rather than just making the bad guy tougher.

I don't run Rifts, but this is how I handle things in my Fantasy games as well. Poor or changing environmental conditions, hidden (most likely weak) henchmen or unexpected reinforcements, unstable magic, diversions (used against the PCs), etc.

You've disturbed a nest of large scorpions... and their mother.

The cave drips with foul smelling water. If you are injured here, you will need to make a save vs the poison as well.

The zombies are full of hungry carnivorous worms, and when they die the corpse bursts. All over you. The worms bite, and they're venomous. They pop when they die, and their blood is acid.
And now here come more zombies.

[Hotrod]

When I want to scale up an encounter, I generally add complications rather than just making the bad guy tougher.

If, for instance, the party is in a fight and it appears the baddies are going to die quicker than intended, I'll have a "stray shot" rupture a cooling tank or fire hydrant, or similar. Suddenly, the area is filled with steam/smoke/spraying water! Every attack now has a 50% miss chance, and my players are now half as effective. They don't see a tougher baddie, they don't see me fudging the rules, and nobody asks how, exactly, that grunt got a +13 to hit.

I'll also do swarms of bees (Hey, Juicer! The bees are INSIDE your armor, what do you do?) or sudden flooding, or weakened building/collapse, or even wandering orphans* if it makes the encounter work. I don't do complications for normal fights, just blast some mooks, but for boss fights, heck yes.

My goal isn't to strengthen bad guys, or weaken heroes, but to waste as many of the heroes' APM as possible. Your PC may be able to one-hit kill these goons, sure, but if you're saving Ruby Rudolph, intrepid girl reporter, you're not one-shotting anybody.



*Wandering orphans: any innocent bystanders that the DM decides to put in danger so our heroes can be distracted saving them. Also known as "a bus full of nuns" or "little Peggy's class trip", these squishy, pop-able, splat-able innocents are always fun to have haplessly wander into a firefight.

I think this is a very viable approach. The downside to throwing in situational changes is that, if it's not handled carefully, it can come across as hokey deus ex machina or taking away the players' agency. If it's obvious to the players that the GM is throwing in situational changes in response to them doing well or doing poorly, that can detract from the game and the feeling of accomplishment that comes with defeating a difficult foe.

As an example: One of the weakest moments in The Force Awakens is when a giant fissure in the ground opens up just when Rey has defeated Kylo Ren. While this happens because Starkiller Base is in the process of going kaboom, the way it happens is implausible. No other fissures open up or affect anyone or anything else. It's painfully obvious that this giant crack in the ground opened up because the plot needed this to happen. The writers wanted Kylo to lose, but get away so he could be in the next movie.

Now, if Kylo Ren caused the fissure to open up so he could get away, that could be cool; a sort of "you think you've beaten me? You think you're strong because you can beat me with a lightsaber when I'm already wounded? Think again!" This would help Kylo retain some awesomeness in the eyes of the audience. Alternately, maybe Snoke intercedes and opens up the fissure, establishing the big bad for Rey.

[Library Ogre]

I used to have a method that compared MDC to character damage per round, but I cannot recall it.

[Killer Cyborg]

(Hey, Juicer! The bees are INSIDE your armor, what do you do?)

Well, a JUICER could safely ignore the bees until he was down to less than 5 HP, I believe.

[ITWastrel]

(Hey, Juicer! The bees are INSIDE your armor, what do you do?)

Well, a JUICER could safely ignore the bees until he was down to less than 5 HP, I believe.

The juicer could ignore the bees... but wouldn't want to.

Now a Crazy would start screaming "I AM LORD OF BEES!" and immediately ask how much damage his new bee armor does to his enemies, then asks for a circumstance combat bonus for the intimidation factor.

[Library Ogre]

I used to have a method that compared MDC to character damage per round, but I cannot recall it.

Ok, here's the idea, as I redeveloped it.

Take the average damage of the party per round; not per attack, but per round. You can ratio this for likelihood of landing an attack, but we're looking for the ballpark, not the base.

Take the average damage of the opposing party per round.

Compare this to the MDC of their opponent. Which team will kill the other first, just based on these numbers? What's the ratio of rounds?

If the party will kill the opposition in one round, but the NPC will take 6, the encounter is ludicrously easy. If the party will kill the opposition in 3 rounds, but the bad guys will take 2, then it's going to be a close and hard fight.

It's rough, it's dirty, but it will put you in the ballpark for "Is this encounter a cakewalk or a death march?"

[Incriptus]

Reinforcements and lying

Ideally you send in the Pawns first. They will tell you what mechanics you need to upgrade for the Bishops, Rooks and Knights. If your pawns were hitting alright but not doing enough damage; you're next guys will do more damage. Plus narratively it'll let the players know their characters are special; and when the time comes for a hard fight they'll feel like they earned it.

And the art of Lying says that if even your pawns are too strong then you just spontaneously make them weaker. If he was doing too much damage I guess he ran out of ammo of that weapon. If his bonuses are too high then his "buff" must have just worn off. If the fight is taking too long ... well I didn't tell you how much MDC he had in the first place.