[GM] Individual Melee Combat Balance

[Kromm]

Multiple combatants are indeed a place where things get sticky, fast. Both your skill and your attacker's are mostly irrelevant if you get surrounded and he's behind you, because he can do a Telegraphic Attack for +4 to hit something vital, while you can't defend at all. Your damage doesn't matter much once it's big enough to take out weak fodder opponents in one shot; at that stage, you don't want bigger damage so much as additional attacks in order to take out more mooks per second. And of course one good defense isn't so cool when you have to defend against three orcs at once, or six zombies in a horde, or 12 evil pixies buzzing around your head.

Moreover, the answers change depending on whether the PCs decide to gang up on one foe, or one PC gets ganged up upon. I've seen very competent fighters destroyed in detail by inferior foes this way. I've seen the same fighters annihilate legions of identical foes coming at them one at a time. This has little to do with points or abilities, but much to do with player and GM decisions. These always matter, of course – GURPS offers tons of combat options, and bad choices tend to neutralize one's abilities – but they matter a great deal more in many-on-many fights.

Also, the nature of multiple-combatants fights tends to lead people to use area-effect and explosive weaponry. Your defenses won't matter very much if you can't leave the danger zone, even if you're a god of war and the attacker is using a merely so-so weapon with mediocre skill. And against one-shot-kill area effects, like modern explosives and incendiaries, this is even more pronounced, with any sensible amount of DR and HP going on the "largely irrelevant" list, and Luck and HT deciding the battle.

This is why I tend to think that a dry run is best for such battles. Put the character sheets in front of you, set everything up on a map, and think about what would happen if everybody gangs up on one guy, if one side's best warrior gets taken out by a critical hit, if one side bunches up and gets hit by the other side's area weapon, etc.