Monday, February 8, 2010

Gauging Enemies

So my son is starting to game master. Of course - he swears he doesn’t need to write anything down in order to GM. Actually tapped his temple to tell me it was “all in there”. Yeah, LOVE that in a GM!
OK - so one of his earlier mistakes involved giving the enemy wolves 12,000 LB - Yes, that would be 2,000 Endurance. But Wait! The players’ weapons did % die damage (1-100 or 2-150). He felt this was entirely reasonable. Truth be told, the players would have won. Of course, it would have taken them 200 hours, but hey - these kids had some time on their hands.
So I made a spreadsheet. It lists chance to hit, defense, damage and LB for both physical and magical. (One list for the good guy and one for the bad guy) It computes the % chance of success and uses that compared to the damage and LB to compute # of turns it would take to kill someone. That way you can compare how many turns it would take either character to kill the other. If there is a party, divide the turns by the number of guys per side.
Is this the world’s greatest gauge of threat level? Of course not. But it’s turning out to be a sweet little tool that makes you think. Once you spend the four minutes to create it, it only takes a couple of seconds to drop in the numbers.

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