I'm about to start GMing a new campaign tonight (Beyond the Rim) and was wondering what the general GM consensus is regarding NPC stats.

One thing I noticed in our last campaign is that the players were very much aware of the current HP/Strain of opposing NPCs, and would adjust their strategy accordingly. I can't really even claim meta-gaming, as it's such an obvious outcome of knowing the remaining health of an opponent. For example, they'd leave even a Big Bad Guy to the non-combat Toydarian, as they knew it would only take one more hit to knock him down, and start to take on the next mob.

Should I play without making the stats of the NPC public knowledge? Just try to indicate via descriptions how dangerous an opponent it is?

Generally, I frown upon players tracking opponents' HP. There's a world of difference between "He looks so beaten down that one more hit should put him out of the fight" and "He has 3 WT left."

The first is somewhat vague while the second allows maths to come into play. Maths are cool for analysis away from the table, but people pulling out calculators, doing probabilities and using slide-rules to determine the optimal combat actions in a round just breaks immersion for me.

I never explicitly tell them the stats if I can avoid it.

I just go "ok, he takes X damage and he's down" or "he takes X damage, and he's still standing" to make them guess.

Of course, if they're fighting minion groups, they'll figure out the ballpark of HP pretty quickly.

My players can see a bar, but not a number. I don't mind that, as it's an easy way for them to tell the overall health of an enemy without asking multiple times each round how damaged a foe a looks. For a while, I hid the bars so the party couldn't distinguish rivals from nemeses, but I've gamed with them long enough to know they won't metagame that info.

The actual numbers aren't revealed until after the game, and sometimes not even then .

I track this on my laptop or my own notepad and do not have that in plain view on the table. Only one of my players really cares very much and does more than his share of GMing on other game systems. He tracks them and has a list of opponents and health values (most of them with narrow ranges of options). He is exceptional at keeping the meta game away from his character and never describes it as numbers, he just likes knowing his targets and is willing to do the legwork to figure them out.

Thanks for the quick replies - I'm going live in a couple of hours

Sounds like it's fine for me to take the numbers out of their world - it seemed a bit immersion-breaking anyway.

On the plus-side, it gives me an opportunity to let the NPC run away or die if that's required to further the story. Sometimes it's far too easy for a combat PC to pile on a massive amount of damage without much warning.

My long time players know if they ever see NPC stats, I'm probably lying, because those stats are based off of their observations and assumptions either they made or I ... encouraged them to make.

"Hey Scoundrel, can we see what the pilot's stats look like?"

"Sure, let me just up load his sheet to our cloud storage...."

Minutes pass (as I hurriedly build a new sheet) and everyone now sees NPC-Pilot-Observed.pdf is now in the shared cloud storage for the game. Now the stats were in the ball park, except for the talents... and the career... and his non-gunnery combat skills... and he may have had some gear that they'd never seen. The beautiful part (to me) then becomes watching my more paranoid players blow their own minds trying to figure out what they can't see. To be fair to my players, they had a lot of reason to be suspicious of the Pilot NPC, whom they found with a large caliber energy weapon wound through one eye and into his head that it took a medical miracle to save but left him suffering from retrograde amnesia and just before order 66, he freaked out and lead the PCs to a modified YT-1300 as the precursor to the campaign. Nothing suspicious there.

The exception to this rule is in the case of "companion" type NPCs. One of my players has a padawan and as she was basically minion token that existed to get him into trouble, her sheet was totally visible to the players from the jump, and her master even had a say in how she developed over the course of play. Now, despite this fact that her sheet was totally transparent to the players, this didn't remove her from the paranoid theorizing that usually happens after the bad guys show up conveniently for about the third time.

"Is it the pilot or the padawan that's screwing us?"

"I dunno, what if it's a tracking device?"

"When would they have put it in the ship?" etc.

But I do love keeping my players guessing, and I love hearing their guesses about things that are going on. And absolutely under no circumstance has one of them ever had an idea that was better than mine which I then stole, clearly they just guessed correctly.

Haha, that sounds awesome. Truly gentlemanly scoundreling

The book indirectly tells you you're not supposed to reveal stats. The vehicle action "Scan the enemy" allows the players to learn about things like the HT and ST status of a vehicle, which would be meaningless if the players already had access to that.

I don't give #s. They can make decisions on real world information like how someone is looking and acting of course. Of course that also leave me the option of playing possum as well.....