[ol][li]Avoid Fight[]Avoid fight[]Avoid fight[]If you can’t avoid fight[ul][]make certain your maximum NPC/Monster S damage is below the lowest PC Mortal Wound threshold.[]Don’t coup de grace[]Don’t use the +1 IMS option of Great Strike (use the increased WVA, instead)[]Don’t use extra successes to increase NPC hits if you can move the hit location instead.[]Don’t roll enough dice to shift to S damage if it’s higher than the target’s Mo Threshold[]Give the bad-guys poor quality weapons with increased Add and/or reduced power to reduce the chances of huge hits.[]Apply the Arrgh! My Arm! optional rule (BWG 489) to NPCs[*]Give the bad guys a stat at 2 - the go out of action on two light or a midi [/ul][/ol]
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But, if defeated, either by surrender, failed steel, or unconsciousness, take something ELSE away. Give them scars or take their favorite toy away.
Oh, and a high skill guys with a knife that has a Superior damage in the Midi wound is a great way to quickly KO PC’s. And to cause Steel tests.
Guest playering for a friend, I demonstrated that a knife is a very powerful weapon, at least with the steel rules.
The question on balance in terms of sending opposition against characters falls under the same sort of umbrella (thanks for the patience as we all explain in various ways!); just as character vs. character balance is nothing like the “linear fighter quadratic wizard” problem in D&D, character vs. non-player character balance is the same. The only exception is when you throw in monsters, but the majority of players’ opposition should be non-monster characters. I’m running a game where it’s only been humans vs. humans, for various reasons. Well, and a magically-enhanced wolf, I forgot about that. But never a monster unless I really had a reason to.
You could have monsters more frequently, and I think you have a good handle on the idea that throwing a dragon or troll at them is not a good idea unless you want to maybe kill them. But that’s because they have scary big stats. Still, don’t shy away from it; remember that they can always burn a Persona point to survive.
A question I constantly asked is, “How do I NOT kill my party?”
The answer I got was, “That’s really hard to do.”
I think your approaching this wrong and it has everything to do with you thinking about math vs story. I don’t mean it in a disrespectful way mind you and you are certainly free to disregard this advice. I do think that if the only choices your giving your players are certain death/ victory then you do run the chance of killing them all a lot. Of course theres no reason to just offer a stark live/die scenario.
While you cannot control your players intent (although you should at least try to challenge it) , you can most certainly control the NPC’s intent. What I mean is that while your characters goal in a fight may be to kill the big bad Orc Captain, the Orc Captains goals do not have to be so simple. Perhaps his boss a certain White Wizard ordered him to capture prisoners for a later interrogation. Maybe the Captain is trying to fight to escape from the kings guard who are sure to arrive in a few minutes and player death isn’t that important. Maybe the Orc captain likes raw food, and wants to take some meat back to the caverns for later, or maybe he’s looking for some strong human backs to shovel coal and do some slave work. In your world orcs now keep slaves and only kill the old, weak and infirm which is cool storytelling. As for players, why are they fighting this Orc Captain fairly? Why aren’t they ganging up? He’s clearly pretty powerful and skilled at skewering players and by looking at the stats you’ve chosen (which are higher than either of his opponents one on one) of course he’s going to win mathematically. So why aren’t your players ambushing him, teaming up or in the case of your fool with throwing knives killing him outside of Melee combat. All of this ignores Artha too, the magical substance that transforms misses into hits and turn rolls into open ended murder fests where your squire aims for the orcs unarmored head and turns him into dead meat. Your math is also only about standing in one place and swinging which ignores positioning, (also armor it seems because that mail is going to be tough for Orkey to crack) and other types of attack that could turn the tide in your favor. Why aren’t your players trying to tackle this guy, or assessing to study this guys style? If they just swing and hit or swing and miss your not using the system right.
But in the end the answer to “how do you keep the party alive in this situation?” is pretty simple. You as the GM need to be making it about something other than murdering the players (unless you want to murder them). The life or death part is your choice. Give the characters a couple of fights to get knocked around in and they will earn enough tests to raise poor skills and easily make mincemeat of their earlier opposition.
My suspicion, totally spitballing here, is that you want some guidelines on how to calibrate any given encounter’s threat level. Like…“I want it so that really the worst that’ll happen is say a Midi wound” or “Maybe they’ll get taken prisoner but nobody gets ganked” or maybe even something along the lines of “Let’s set up a little fight so folks can earn some juicy tests and feel good about being badasses.”
If that’s the case, I have a couple thoughts on that:
This is like…the perfect application of the versus test system, Task/Intent and explicit consequences. Want a fight where the worst that’ll happen is a midi wound? Make that the consequences of a versus test. Want a fight where the worst that happens is that everyone gets taken prisoner? That’s the consequence. Say it out loud, roll it off, get on with it.
Do not use Fight! if you want to maintain some kind of GM-level “control.” The secret sauce of Fight! is that it is by design pretty chaotic. It introduces the possibility of really shitty, unexpected outcomes. It’s meant to feel dangerous for everyone involved: the players and the GM alike. It’s why you only really use Fight! when there’s a Belief in play. Because fighting for your Belief means the possibility of really shitty, unexpected outcomes.
Third bonus thought: The game design and designer actively hates, and will in every way seek to undermine, the desire for “mook fights.” That’s not a BW thing. The game will prompt you to either skip through it by reducing it to a simple versus test roll-off (and man…the dice-grubbing is pretty intense even if it’s all down to a single roll), or pushing you into this chaotic, oh-shit-we-really-might-fuck-this-up Fight!. That’s a feature, not a bug.
So in terms of balance? Just remember that whatever the dice probabilities say, you can always, always set the upper limit of awfulness. Just not when you use Fight! It’s perfectly self-balancing.
yarnperson, you might be better served by more targeted threads about each concern you have. Omni-purpose threads like this can get out of hand with all the quoting and such. Everyone wants to help, even if it comes across as shouting.
My old eyes would also appreciate a blank line between your paragraphs, but that has nothing to do with the content of your posts.
