I have played a couple of games and close combat seems to be an issue...

I take it that the stats for the NPC enemies include SB - eg shard spider - 1d10+4 pen 4

The GM was running it as 1d10+4 + SB (pen 4) which lead to some of the weaker PCs getting hurt relatively quickly once the shard spiders got into CC...

so what rules apply to NPC stats and where are they?

Thanks

Generally NPCs in the various books include the SB in the damage already.

Thanks, do you have a reference for that?

The NPC sections somewhere state that SB is included in the damage

However : I have found through my observations (crossreferencing the listed damage with the weapon's base stats+SB+talents when relevant) that, in DH at least, most of the time if someone has Crushing Blow (haven't seen anyone with Mighty Shot yet) it seems to be left out of the damage listing, so you might wantto double check that for any applicable NPCs.

Found the reference in DH (page 336), still can't find any mention of it in RT