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Originally Posted by TippetsTX
I second that motion, although I have to wonder if stat totals alone are sufficient to defining a creature's 'challenge quotient'. I don't want to over-complicate this, but many creatures have special abilities that should somehow be factored into their difficulty rating, shouldn't they?
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(Fortunately, TFT doesn't really reduce to a "challenge quotient", or it'd be much less interesting.)
In the detailed combat experience rules a TFT friend and I designed back circa 1985, for fighters we ended up with ST + adjDX + armor + other offsets, such as off-ST-scale damage. Various abilities, combat spells, unusual MA, flying, etc are kinds of apples & oranges cases.
However, while that system seemed vastly better than just adding ST + DX, it's clear that it's not nearly enough to estimate even just combat threat value accurately - relative armor to damage is a massive factor, especially when someone has more armor than a foe is likely to do damage. Look at the damage amount they do and compare it to the armor of what they're fighting, and vice versa. Compare adjDX. Compare number of attacks. Notice MA, hex size, ST and other features. Still, the relative numbers and situation in a combat tend to be more important than one-on-one stat comparisons. Also, how deadly you consider a monster also has to do with how much of a defeat it is to lose one or more of your comrades defeating it.
Rather than trying to come up with a number, perhaps type categories would be more appropriate. Some monsters are sort of like fighting a human, or close enough. Others have peculiar abilities to sort out. Others are large beasts of varying challenge. Others are especially deadly mainly only if they get you in HTH. Others are deadly for unarmored people but have a hard time hurting people with enough armor. Many/most can be challenging one-on-one but will be wiped out by a coordinated group in a situation where they can all attack it at once.