[GM]Monster Attack/Defense Notation

[Lupo]

Originally Posted by thulben

Why the negativity about combat balance?

I am all in favor of combat balance; I am highly skeptical of "magic formulas" intended to automate the process of balancing encounters.
I think combat balance is too difficult to evaluate and to unpredictable, to allow for such formulas to be reliable.

Moreover, a little unpredictability adds to the fun; the risk of being incapacitated, or failing to save the Queen from her attackers makes the game more compelling. And if sometimes the PCs win too easily, they'll think that's because they are AWESOME before blaming it on poor gamemastering ;)

I think this lowers the bar for those new to GURPS so that the GM appropriately challenges their party.

I somehow feel that lines like this
"Shortsword(17 DA 15):[2D+1]Cut- 30% 2 dmg add 1 per 3 HP over 13 avg HP."
Do not really "lower the bar" for new players.
And I think that good ol' "GM cheating" can be way more effective to challenge the party... if the fight looks too easy, declare that one of the NPCs has Luck and allow him to reroll that one failed attack/defense. Or say that 2 more orks were hiding behind the corner.

If the fight looks too HARD, the GM can easily make it just right with a couple tactical mistakes...

Combat is very different in GURPS than it is in other systems, so I think this is useful.

I played my good share of different RPGs, many are similar to GURPS in combat rules (of course GURPS tend to be more detailed and often more 'exact').
I don't think GURPS fights are that difficult to balance when compared to other games.
If you play out 3-4 fights with the same PCs, you (as the GM) will soon realize what hurts and what doesn't, so even if you can't exactly predict how challenging will be a given fight, you rarely end up inadvertently killing (or boring to death) your players...

Even if you don't use Nymdok's system straight up, you can see what factors he's using and use them to inform your decisions. When I get a couple more roundtuits, I'm going to try this with my group and see what happens!

Praise to Nymdok for his work! This "research" can indeed prove useful to better understand how probabilities work in GURPS' fights.

I maintain that GURPS fights are unpredictable and *very* varied, so it is not easy to find some 'formula' that, for setting combat balance, is better than simple GM guess.