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Originally Posted by Pragmatic
Is it a measure of attack skills, defense skills, and levels of hit points? How does one know that, barring a series of critical failures, the party will win? D&D gives reasonable estimates as to when an encounter will use 25% of the party's resources (magic, hit points, and so on), and when an ecounter will be barely survivable. The difference between fighting some mooks and fighting the boss.
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As Pudding mentioned, there are always the Mook rules. However, that's cinematic trappings. If you're trying to be more realistic, these may well not be appropriate. In GURPS (and there are those who understand the dynamics much better than I) skill is important, but I would argue not as important as defenses. A foe with a skill of 12-14 won't be risking much on his to-hit for Deceptive Attacks to lower the opponent's defense, but if his dodge (for instance) is 12 somehow, he'll take a while to bring down, barring bad luck.
HP are probably pretty important, but what strikes me as potentially a greater issue is the opponent's HT score. That's what determines if they can stay up after receiving X damage, and even if some little Dire Rat has 2 HP, if its HT is 16+, it's quite simply not likely to fall, even after big hunks of its flesh start to go MIA. If you want to give PCs a really rough and potentially unnerving battle, pit them against some monstrosity that has a lot of HP AND a good HT score. It'll take forever to land a decisive blow even assuming that they can penetrate its defenses.
Naturally, supernatural advantages (how's that for a mouthful?) skew the balance here. A creature that can heal itself or that absorbs certain attacks or has the ability to turn invisible and so forth will be exponentially more difficult to fight. An invisible foe, particularly a CLEVER invisible foe will be a severe threat to a party that can't see it, even if it can only do a token 1 point of damage per attack. You can't stop what you can't see, unless you're a cinematic warrior in which case you can as well as see it anyway.
Another very important thing to consider is that GURPS does not generally favor the underwhelming odds. If you have a group of adventurers fighting a group of roughly even threat enemies, the fight will be a toss up. Whichever side outsmarts the other will most likely win. If you have a group of adventurers fight a single powerful enemy, the single enemy isn't particularly likely to win, unless he is SIGNIFICANTLY more powerful, or has supernatural advantages that allow him to deal with attacks from all sides and groups of opponents all at once. If a group of adventurers faces a horde of monsters, the little ankle-biters will likely come out victorious through sheer numbers. Not without heavy losses, but the simple fact is that without advantages and/or cinematic skills (spells fall into this category) to counter attacks from all sides, the enemies will overwhelm the heros' defenses by slipping in behind, getting lucky hits, grappling the PCs en masse (one little goblin grappling a berserker may not do much. Twenty of them dogpiling the brute probably will, though), and so forth.
The final (not really, but it's the last I'll mention) thing in GURPS to consider is that while HP tends to be low, and damage tends to be fairly high in comparison to it, HT plays an INCREDIBLE role in prolonging battles, by keeping fighters alive and awake even after they're badly beaten and bruised. If you play combat as an endurance match, you'll be fighting a long time, mostly, and it turns into luck of the draw to see who fails their HT roll first. GURPS reminds the savvy GM of this, and I absolutely support it, it's important to remember that most creatures, humans included, will flee if a fight isn't going their way, regardless of the other danger. Those who fight and run away live to fight another day. That isn't cowardice, it's SMART. PCs would be well-advised to remember that victory doesn't mean death to the enemy automatically. It helps that in GURPS, CP isn't rewarded based on monsters slain or enemies downed. Those two things combined will go a long way to keeping fights shorter in length and less stained in blood.
As I said before, there are others on the forum that have a better grasp on this than I do. Consider this a stand-in til more knowledgable members can weigh in on the issue.