Hi all,

A quick question: is there an easy way to ensure an enemy (or group of enemies) that are level appropriate for your party?

How do you best choose enemies for encounters to ensure they aren't too overpowered or too weak?

Any help greatly appreciated.

There is no objective 'challenge rating' that you can use to scale encounters- you just have to take your best guess. If you are new to the WH40KRP system, I recommend that you start out with a few small encounters (say, with poorly-armed gangers) and add re-enforcements if it goes too easily for the PCs. It's always better to err on the side of safety when learning a new system and 'scale up' as needed, rather than try a heavy encounter right out of the gate and risk a Total party Kill on Day 1.

There's numerous posts about this issue on the thread- and its often a problem encountered by new DMs- I myself have ran into it a couple of times.

You can really only counter it by experience- on the other hand, you don't have to tailor every fight to match the players. Sometimes a fight IS suicide and the bad guys ARE better equipped.

Fate-points are there so that you can balance out the fight, you can always be a bit more generous with handing them out at the beginning if you find that your players are burning trough them a bit too quickly. (You killed this boss, you get a fate point- you saved these hand-full of innocents, you get a fate point... and as the game moves along, as the stakes get higher, it becomes harder to get fate points. Saving a hand-full means nothing when thousands could die at the end of the day, that guy you thought was a boss was just an underling, the real boss is still out there, etc etc...)

I run a DH game on maptool using the DH framework and if I'm not too sure on balance for an encounter I'll play it through using the framework a couple of times testing out anything I'm not sure about. Of course you'll never properly simulate what your players will end up pulling on you but it does give a good general idea of how that combat might play out and lets you fix any blatant stuff.

Only started DMing for the first time for this group in October 11 and found that running through like that on maptool did alot of good with quickly figuring out the general potential of the players and the enemies they faced.

Personally I just cheat.

The players wading through the enemies like a hot knife in butter? Give 'em more wounds and up their stats on the fly. Or have some reinforcements arrive.

Players about to die horribly, and need a break? Let them have one. Guns Jam, enemies die in spectacularly fatal ways even though they actually had wounds left, etc.

The point is to challenge your players, and to have fun. Not to do a lot of maths to simulate some sort of sci-fantasy "reality" after all.

I still count as a startup GM, and I have to say, I have a MASSIVE problem with this.

Due to previous bad occurances, I either under or Over estimate. I'm never on the money. Smeg's idea of Fudging it sounds like my only option. But of what I've learned and people I've spoken to, either simulate it (I'm going to take a look at this maptool, I've never heard of it!) or get the dice and pen/paper and get dots to laser each other.

Darth Smeg said:

This is how I do it, I 'cheat' too.

You need to remember what Darth Smeg has said about fun, it isn't about accounting, no one will give you a hard time for being unfaithful to the system because the system SUPPORTS the game, it is not THE GAME. GM's judgement is as old as RPGs and so don't get too caught up in the 'rules'.

My bad guys run away, die easily, and miss a lot as need be to maximise fun. The players only need to think they could all die, and if the encounter you have prepared is too tough, then those six double hard thugs aren't really as hard as they appear now are they.

Enemies should be selected for narrative fit, The numbers are there to support that and therefore are secondary. Finally, don't forget you have to have fun too.

Caveat to the above: Unless I'm GMing Paranoia of course. Then I'm just plain mean and swing things the other way, where my bad guys tend to 'roll' really really well if the outcome will be funny even if they are complete mooks.

"Just as you do that, Imiss-R-LOT is so surprised she drops her gun, which unfortunately goes off... (pretends to roll, looks around the group as if counting) ...sadly hitting the experiemental cleaning robot entrusted to your care."

So over-estimation is fine as long as if you realise you've done so, and you then fudge it something firm to 'help' the players survive.