I've been GMing for about 15 years now and one of the hardest part for me is finding a good balance of difficulty for players that are in their 3rd + career.

By this time elf's are getting close to 70 80% chance to hit on WS. In some games I've had players break the 100% mark and couldn't possibly miss unless they rolled a critical fail of 99 (house rule)

The problem I find is those that go the academic route don't get plus 20 or plus 30 to WS or BS; for the most part they stay a little on the squishy side.

Some players are running around with plate armor and reaching AC+T of 10+ while our not so strong players are running around with mail shirts and other AC boosting items; still not matching that of a fighter oriented player.

To keep things challenging I have bring in enemies that hit a lot harder and more often increasing the chance of a squishy getting one shot by a critical.

I normally combat this with giving them a puzzle during a epic battle that needs to be figured out or more and more enemies will descend onto the party; but sometimes the dice come after them and soon all hell breaks loose.

I'm just curious to see how other GM's handle this. Most of my games are combat focus but every now and then I have a group that rather RP there way through a story rather than engage everyone and there mothers.

First I'd suggest that you ask this at www.strike-to-stun.net instead, this forum is dedicated to 3 edition, so most people here won't be able to help with 1 edition specific questions. So I think StS could generate better responses.

But here are some general thoughts from me:

• You could cap skills at 90% (or any other amount that feels good) as a houserule.
• You could have enemies that decrease skills (i.e. this Blood Dragon vampire is good enough that you get -20% WS).
• Armour is hard to handle in many games, if the party has very different amounts of AC/soak/etc. In general the squishy players should have ranged weapons and try to keep out of combat.
• Are there any rules in 1ed for a fighter oriented character to "tank"? So attacks are focused there rather than on the squishy ones?

Thank you very much for your response k7e9.

Those are some really good ideas; I really like the idea about having more skill dissolving effects.

The whole Tank / Range / Caster class system doesn't really quite work. Academics don't necessarily get Ballistic skill upgrade or Weapon skill upgrade, and magic is super rare you have a 1% chance of getting a starting job that leads into a magic casting career. It won't be until your 3rd career ext that you might be moving into something that has battle magic.; so these guys really fall behind compare to a more combat oriented job; as you go up in experience you can exit into another job and most players start moving towards more combat oriented jobs because they are tired of being left behind unable to really preform. But they that time they are so far behind that by the time they do catch up, the other players are maxed out.

I guess one solution when starting a campaign could be to modify the starting job table (I'm guessing that there's a table where you randomize starting job?). If you change the table so that most, or all, starting jobs have at least some combat application all your players will have characters that are good in a fight. So that if your campaign focuses on combats the characters do as well.