Building Encounters

[jade von delioch]

I am looking at running Palladium Fantasy down the road again and was wondering how to improve how I run the game so that the game remains fun but challenging. Which brings me to my Question:


How Do you, as a GM, Build your Encounters.

Palladium doesn't have anything like what any edition of D&D have, where you have clear guide lines for designing encounters using CRs and such. Now generally, in the past the way I would design an encounter was either to look at the general bonuses that each of the part members had; so for instance if they had as an average +3 to strike, parry, dodge, an AR15 and hp/SDC at about 80 total then Easy encounters would be +2 SPD, AR 13, hp/SDC 55 (or something like that) Medium would be equal to what they had, and hard would be +6 spd, AR 16, HP/SDC 120+, and deadly would be higher. etc. I would also look at average damage output of the party too and adjust accordingly. (this is a rough example by the by)

Or I would say that easy was a level or two lower than them, medium was equal level to the party, hard was a level or two above them, and deadly was several levels above them.


But I am curious how other people handle this?

[Aaryq]

Every other year or so I'll create a random encounter table. I'll take some of the more common monsters, demons, deevils, and non-monstrous combatants and assign them generic HP, SDC, kit, and abilities.
I break it down into 3 levels of difficulty: easy, average, and tough. Difficulty could be determined by HP/SDC, lethality of weapons, morale, etc.
If the encounter roll doesn't fit the setting then I reroll. For example if the players are in a major metropolitan area, there probably won't be too many bears lurking in the shadows.
I'd like to also add that my combat is usually not fatal because my bad guys are usually not fearless. For example, if the party is attacked by a dozen goblins and 10 of them are killed in the first melee round, the last two will need some SERIOUS motivation to continue fighting. More than likely, theyre going to either flee or surrender.