"Challenge Rating"?

[LivingTriskele]

Does anyone have suggestions for gauging the "Challenge Rating" (to use a D&D 3.5 term) of a monster or an encounter area? I'm working on a Monograph with disparate location-based wilderness encounters and I'd like a way of communicating how skilled or powerful a party should be to have decent chance of survival. I think RQ suggests certain skill levels. Thanks.

[pulpcitizen]

Ultimately I don't think that Challenge Ratings have ever worked as fully envisioned in D20, let alone transferring the idea across to BRP. The reason I say this is that a sense of optimal balance is inferred, and given all the variant feats, atatck ratings, wepon options etc, then any such rating becomes notional in my opinion.

Given the ranges of competency and ability that could be mustered by groups of characters in BRP, and the range of combat ability specifically they could potentially muster, then I am not really convinced such a system would achieve its aim if transferred. This is compounded by the relatively potential lethality of BRP combat versus the 'protected by mountains of hit points approach' of D&D.

Would not a better approach be to ensure that the players understand the world and many of its risks at the outset? That characters should live or die by their own informed choices? Often in RPG's there is little real sense of threat or risk: in D20 this is due to the model of encounter balancing (as seen through CR's, which I don't feel are entirely fit for purpose and devolve the game to the level of a video game; in many supers systems - Hero, MEGS and M&M especially - it is through mechanics that create a low-lethality environment unless optional rules are invoked; I am sure there are many other examples since many systems have mechanics that allow catastrophe to be avoided through fate points etc).

Rather than trying to emulate another game, why not use BRP for what it is or what it can do, which is arguably what D20 can't do.

Now, stepping off my soapbox for a moment ( ), what about having an Idea roll based approach and basically eye-balling it (every party is different, so threat is relative), then having a selection of indicative descriptors (ranging from minimal threat or equivalent to extremely dangerous or whatever is appropriate; with perhaps multiple descriptors for similar levels of danger) that can be expressed without resorting to numerical values, which can themselves break the stroytelling illusion.

Edited December 1, 2008 by leonmallett

[Shaira]

I think I've mentioned this before, but the D&D paradigm tends to expect PCs to stand toe-to-toe with foes and slug it out until one side keels over and dies. This is not traditionally how it works with BRP games - there are many more options available to characters, including the much respected "Run Away..." strategy .

Given the possibility of criticals and fumbles in combat, the option of ambush, stealth, ranged attack, and "strategic retreat" ("Run the Other Way...!" ), it's worth getting out of the D&D mindset with BRP combat. Thanks to the random element, combat is rarely "balanced".

AFAIK, CRs in D&D3 were a method of assessing relative challenge for the purpose of assigning experience points. Given BRP doesn't have XP, CRs aren't much use on that score.

Bear in mind that, when a BRP party begins combat, they should be doing several things before running in screaming and waving swords:

i.) Assess enemy capability (recon). Spot rolls and spells like Rat's Eye, etc, are great here, as are Idea rolls, Weapon rolls as Knowledge rolls (to possibly get an angle on how capable the foe looks), checking out any obvious "enhancements" (plate armor, glowing weapons, tons of weird-looking amulets, rings, crystals, etc).

ii.) Select strategy based on the above. It's generally sensible to either ambush from afar with ranged weapons if possible, or failing that to arrange to get terrain advantages in a melee ambush. Use magic to create darkness or light, enhance your weapons or armor, etc. If the enemy looks like a baddy plus a load of mooks, decide whether to concentrate on the baddy, or take out the mooks first, again based on apparent capabilities. Muddling a bunch of low power Mooks can swing things drastically in your favour.

iii.) If the foe appears *way* too powerful, maybe try to avoid combat, or, if it's too late for that, try and get past the enemy whilst saving your skins - Run Away! (Spells which increase your MOV or hamper the enemy are great here).

If you still feel you need to balance encounters after that, then keep the enemy's skills relatively limited in number. With a single melee weapon, ranged weapon, and dodge skill, you can assess whether a given foe is above or below or roughly equal to a PC in competence. Spells tend to be enhancements (Sorcery) or replace a weapon skill as a principle attack (Magic).

Finally, if you find you've got it all wrong and the PCs are getting creamed and are unable to escape, you can use the Fate Point rules as a last resort. If you want it to be a huge rarity to do this, make them burn permanent POW rather than PP to upgrade the quality of their rolls.

Just a few thoughts. D&D3 CRs were, IMHO, a pretty flawed device in the first place (I much preferred the D&D1 XP calcs, and eyeballing it for encounter "balance"), and trying to hammer them into BRP will probably generate a lot more heat than light!

Cheers,

Sarah

[DirkD]

CR is useful in level-based rpg's, but I wouldn't reduce it to a number in brp. I would probably use 4 or 5 descriptive categories to rate the encounters. From "Easy" for newly created characters to "God-like" for overpowered superheroes.

The exact numbers aren't helping in brp, since you can't rate the player-characters as easily. For example, if you make up a formula to rate stuff and calculate an encounter level of 9, what does that help if the readers don't know the rating of their own characters? Something like "Advanced" or "Expert" is guideline enough in my opinion.

[sladethesniper]

excerpt:

Ability Levels

Because BRP has no level system, it is somewhat challenging for a novice GM to set the appropriate amount of challenge for a group of characters. This is easily remedied by use of Ability Levels. There are 10 Ability Levels, and they are appropriate for characters as well as NPC's. A beginning character is usually considered Average or Above Average. The Ability Level is determined by adding together all of the percentages of a beings skills, abilities, and statistic checks. That number is the Ability Level for that being.

Ability Level / Rank / Rating

0% - 1000% / Novice / 1

1000% - 1200% / Rookie / 2

1201% - 1400% / Green / 3

1401% - 1600% / Trained / 4

1601% - 2000% / Average / 5

2001% - 2500% / Above Average/ 6

2501% - 3000% / Experienced/ 7

3001% - 3500% / Elite / 8

3501% - 4000% / Expert / 9

4501% - 5000% / Awesome / 10

5001%+ / World Class/ --

By using this you can see how a world class character is at least 5 times as powerful as a novice or a rookie, but remember that this is only as an individual...a world class character will almost never be alone, they will usually have at least one Awesome cohort and several Experts or at the very least Elites in tow. They also have huge amounts of resources which allow them access to all sorts of ability boosting goodies. This is important to remember, since many RPG's have the idea that a “major character” must have freakish ability scores and ridiculous amounts of "power" in order to be important.

That theory is utterly ridiculous. If an enemy warlord has a high leadership skill and actually delivers on his promises to his subordinates, there is no reason why a very “low level” NPC can not command the undying loyalty of some very high level cohorts. This is essential to understand when creating NPC’s for you characters to interact with. A major foil does not need to be an insanely old, ridiculously powerful warlord or wizard, but it could simply be their neighbor who knows somebody that owes them a favor or two.

And no, I still can't do tables ;-(

-STS

[frogspawner]

Give the OP a break! I believe "balance" is a bad thing and de-skills adventuring - but I don't think that's what he's after. There are good reasons why a GM would want a quick "Monster Rating": how much treasure it should have; knowing how ambitious PCs would be to take it on; and knowing whether to buy the Monograph or not!

RQ2 had "Treasure Factor", calculated as 1 point for each of the following:

1. Each 5 HPs or part thereof;

2. Each 25% attack or part thereof;

3. Each extra die of damage;

4. Each AP over the whole body;

5. Each combat spell;

6. Each special power;

7. Each 5 POT of poison;

8. Each extra attack.

I have my own variation, but that's the original. I'm sure you could tweak it to suit your own tastes.

(Alternatively, I always liked the old MonsterMark system from the early days of White Dwarf...)

[TRose]

As pointed out , one big difference in my opinion between D&D type games and BRP type is that intelligent monsters can be way harder to beat then a larger and so called more powerful dumb monster. A group of trollkin , led by a cunning and combat experience superior trollkin can be a pain that no group of kobolds would be in your average D&D game. And can be more of a challenge then a Cave Bear .

[LivingTriskele]

Hey everyone, I really appreciate all of your responses!

Just to clarify, I'm not really interested in balance and I have no qualms with killing off entire parties of much-loved characters if they make rash decisions. I appreciate verisimilitude and the fact the wild holds dangers that are bound to be beyond anyone's capabilities. It's one of the reasons why I appreciate BRP.

I'm just trying to come up with a quick tool for the GM to use to assess an encounter's danger level and the party's ability to confront it. I believe even Call of Cthulhu describes some adventures as being for 'experienced investigators' with certain SAN scores and spell-casting capabilities.

There are some great ideas here and I think I'll be able to use them to come up with something on my own. Thanks again!

Edited December 1, 2008 by LivingTriskele
I don't know how to spell

[fmitchell]

IIRC, the section on Creatures has an appendix that rates creatures based on their challenge to Standard, Heroic, Epic, etc. characters. (Giant Robot and Giant were the only challenges at the highest tier.)

The Warhammer Fantasy supplement Old World Bestiary rates creatures based on how much of a challenge they were to a specific character, named Hans I believe, statted out at the beginning of the "crunch" section. Notably, dragons and ghosts were both "Impossible" challenges, although if Hans had magic at his disposal ghosts would come down to his level, more or less.

[LivingTriskele]

I thought there was something like that... just wasn't sure where. I'll take a look. As it turns out though, I think I'm going to cull out all of the extra location-based encounters. It's a lot of extra work and the campaign is long enough as it is...

[Atgxtg]

The hard part about trying to rate certain challenges is that it isn't so much a finite rating score, but more of a case by case judgment. D&D can use level as a loose guide to relative power of a foe, as well as his expected wealth and equipment, but as others have mentioned it isn't entirely accurate. For instance, in D&D, stats are not factored into the CR rating for most NPCs, so a group of CR 1 Orcs, with above average STR scores can be much nastier than their CR indicates.

Since BRP doesn't tie gear and magic in with relative combat ability like D20 does, it is harder to use an abstact rating. With BRP, the best gauge of relative power is probably the relative skill scores of the characters. You can probably use a character's skill in his primary weapon as a rough guide. A 10% edge is significant, but not telling, while a 30% difference or more is probably going to have a significant impact on the outcome of the encounter.

From that you would want to adjust for differences in stats, equipment/armor, and magic. And then adjust for situation and tactics. Even so this is a very rough guide. Something like, an Allosaurus, with 50% bite skill, and doing 12d6 on a bite, is obviously much more threatening that a typical bandit with 50% in sword or bow, unless the foe in on the other side of a ravine, in which case an archer with 50% in bow is more of a challenge that the 30 foot long pincushion.

[Turloigh]

RQ2 had "Treasure Factor", calculated as 1 point for each of the following:

1. Each 5 HPs or part thereof;

2. Each 25% attack or part thereof;

3. Each extra die of damage;

4. Each AP over the whole body;

5. Each combat spell;

6. Each special power;

7. Each 5 POT of poison;

8. Each extra attack.

That's pretty nifty. I've never known that.

I have my own variation, but that's the original. I'm sure you could tweak it to suit your own tastes.

Would you mind sharing? I'd pay money for such a system. (Well, not much. But a little.)

(Alternatively, I always liked the old MonsterMark system from the early days of White Dwarf...)

Again, care to spill the beans? I've never heard of that one either.

Edited December 4, 2008 by Turloigh
Clarification. About the money.

[frogspawner]

That's pretty nifty. I've never known that.

Find yourself a copy of RQ2 then, and enjoy! There's a lot of good stuff packed into those 120 pages.

Would you mind sharing?

Certainly. Mine's not very different (the original is pretty good, after all). Instead of just adding the points for each 25% attack in step 2, I multiply the total by it at the end. (That's it - I thought I'd made more changes, but they're mostly in the Treasure Tables).

Again, care to spill the beans? I've never heard of that one either.

The MonsterMark system was a highly maths-based method, derived for D&D in the Old Days, which calculated various values: D = the amount of damage the monster would do to an average opponent each round; A = the number of rounds it would last against an average (immortal!) opponent; and finally M (the "MonsterMark" rating) = D x A x Fiddle Factor (for special abilities etc).

Far too longwinded and complex but the principle's sound.

PS: I hope you appreciate this posting - now I've lost my "666" count...

Edited December 4, 2008 by frogspawner
PS & typo

[Atgxtg]

Find yourself a copy of RQ2 then, and enjoy! There's a lot of good stuff packed into those 120 pages.

Boy, you aren't kidding! Especially in the Appendix. For the benefit of those who haven't seen RQ2, I'll note that the back of the book had an appendix of a dozen pages or so, written in small (6 point?) type with all sorts of optional and alternative rules. It'S probably the best (if not the only) appendix even provided with a RPG. Lots of good stuff was tucked away in there.

The MonsterMark system was a highly maths-based method, derived for D&D in the Old Days, which calculated various values: D = the amount of damage the monster would do to an average opponent each round; A = the number of rounds it would last against an average (immortal!) opponent; and finally M (the "MonsterMark" rating) = D x A x Fiddle Factor (for special abilities etc).

Far too longwinded and complex but the principle's sound.

Of coruse it'S the fiddle factor that ruins the application. It's hard to reflect things like stoning or 20d6 fireball attacks accurately in such terms.

PS: I hope you appreciate this posting - now I've lost my "666" count...

You traded your "mark of the beast" for a Monstermark? :D

[Turloigh]

Find yourself a copy of RQ2 then, and enjoy! There's a lot of good stuff packed into those 120 pages.

I'm holding it in my hands right now... <flipping pages> Got it: page 92, right at the start of the Treasure Hoards chapter. Well, d'oh.

PS: I hope you appreciate this posting - now I've lost my "666" count...

Dude, much appreciated, totally worth it. Muchas gracias and everything. :thumb: