Building encounters & difficulty

[Joel Sanda]

Thanks, TC. I was looking for a general rule, and it seemed matching OB  
and DB seemed a good place to start, as 'level' is a little more  
indefinite when your party is swinging swords somewhere :-)

One of my favorite campaigns was a friend who played a super-low  
intelligent fighter. It was a hoot. He role-played it to the hilt, and did  
a great job when spells would charm him or similar.

On Sun, 11 Jul 2010 12:50:33 -0600, TC <tc at zip.com.au> wrote:

> As a general rule, yes. But to some extent it depends on the individuals
> characters in your group. In a campaign I used to run had created a hick
> farm-boy fighter - no social skills, but could bench-press a cow or two.
> A combat encounter that was a challenge for him could very easily wipe
> out the rest of the group. He was fairly easily overcome by spells that
> affected the mind however, but not all monsters have that capability.
> And if you start building every monster with those abilities, your
> players will get a bit suss pretty quickly.
>
> That said, open-ended rolls and critical hits can change a combat
> dramatically. My advice would be to go a bit easy in encounters early,
> while you build a feel for the rules and for your group. And don't be
> afraid to wing it and change things on the fly, if you find that you
> have misjudged the strength of an encounter.
>
> Also, go to the ICE website, and sign up to the forums - they're a
> helpful bunch, and a kind to newcomers :)
>
> TC
>
> On 12/07/2010 12:46 AM, Joel Sanda wrote:
>> I'm coming to HARP via D&D, where I most recently played Fourth
>> Edition for a while.
>>
>> In the HARP Manual, Chapter 15 has a discussion on goal difficulty,
>> and starts with the formula of relatively close OB and DB being a Hard
>> Difficulty Rating.
>>
>> My question is this: as a general starting place a Hard encounter is
>> one in which the opponents number is roughly equal to the number of
>> Characters in the party and the OB and DB are roughly equivalent?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Joel
>>
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