Hello!
I have looked over the rules forums and cannot find this; sorry if it has been previously answered...

What, exactly , do the skulls mean after each enemies' listing?

I realize that they are an indicator as to how powerful said creature is...but on what chart? What level?

Does 1 skull mean that that is an effective enemy to 1 PC?

Does 3 skulls mean that that's appropriate for a party of 3 PCs?

What of those with 5 skulls then?

It seems a tad difficult to balance out without a refernce point , especially for new GMs and players in this system.

Any ideas?

I posted over at BGG, too. Any help is apprecited!

I take it as a highly subjective rating mainly used to give you an idea of the danger level - but it all depends on what kind of characters you have and how many.

42! said:

Agree. It must be like that since there is a very very big difference in the combat ability of different careers. Some careers have skills that are primarily for social encounters (like a Student for example), while others are very very adapt in combat (like the Soldier). It very much depends on the party composition.

If you need some guidelines, look at the combat encounters of the scenario that comes with the game books, and see how many skulls those are made up of. Then toggle the opposition up/down depending on how combat viable the party is. Start on the easy side and then just scale it up 'til you hit the "sweet spot". It's not that hard to add another couple of monsters to upcoming encounters if you notice it is too easy. You'll soon figure out how many skulls is a good opposition for the party your group has created. I found p 44 in Tome of Adventure very helpful when trying to adjust encounters (and it's very easy to apply several of them mid-game to adjust upcoming encounters).

Hi,

in the ToA is a passage about enemy threat level. There the skull system is mentioned:

"It is important to note that this threat level rating compares mon-
sters to other monsters, not to player characters."

So in my opinion, there is no help in comparing the monsters to the pcs, you just have to be cautious not to kill your group... or your group has to run when its time to... ;-)

Greetings,

Sky

Thanks for the replies all!

I was thinking it was purely subjective; just wanted clarification.

Guess I need to get other systems out of my mind, lol! Thanks for the head's up.

Personnally I do not dig the D&D 4E convention of modelling encounters to be balanced. I am happy with a fairly subjective approach to assist any encounters I put together, Then again I will probably only ever play published adventures due to time constraints so...