CER Combat Effectiveness Rating

[rerednaw]

Hey folks!

I was playing around with a dungeon generator and came across CER. A little digging and I learned it stood for Combat Effectiveness Rating.

How would this be used? Is it like CR (d20)?

Say 4 Dungeon Fantasy newbie characters go vs. CER 68. What is the expected outcome and resource consumption?

How does this work? Or do we also calculate CER for characters and then by comparing we get?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

It is, as you surmise, a method of coming up with a single-number rating of how dangerous something is. I'd recommend that you get Pyramid #3/77, the issue in which it appears, read the article, and go from there.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by rerednaw

How would this be used? Is it like CR (d20)?

Say 4 Dungeon Fantasy newbie characters go vs. CER 68. What is the expected outcome and resource consumption?

How does this work? Or do we also calculate CER for characters and then by comparing we get?

The characters CER is computed - a party of a thief, a bard, a wizard specialized in Communication and Empathy, and a cleric will function differently than a party of a barbarian, a holy warrior, a scout, and a knight, even if they're all shiny-new off the 250 point templates.

The article gets into the details in depth of course. It has a small sidebar on trap effectiveness rating, but we could really do with a full article on a social effectiveness rating (where that first group would really shine).

I set the default CER for the dungeon generator based on what I judged to be a very rough average for a party of 4 250 point characters, as a starting place (I assumed a knight, a thief, a cleric, and a wizard). Treasure that is associated with monsters is generated based on the monsters CER, and treasure that's found without a monster is based on the dungeon's CER

[Kromm]

Also bear player ability in mind.

Because GURPS admits so much choice of movement and actions, and has rules that are open to GM interpretation, it isn't a fully prescriptive, algorithmic system that lets you predict combat outcomes. Tactics can matter more than stats.

Back In The Day, a friend of mine who had played probably hundreds of hours of Man to Man took a 50-point warrior up against a couple of 100-point ones run by newbies. Told to fight with no holds barred, invoking every obscure rule he wanted, he won – repeatedly.

All of which is to say that if your players are newbies, you might want to make things a little easier, while if they're veterans, you can push a bit. All the cool abilities and gear in the game won't matter if the players forget to use them or don't know the optimal uses for them; even basic abilities and gear can be put to crushing effect by someone who calls every shot based on the best odds.