We have a group that, at max, has 7 people. Often some can’t make it on a particular week but sometimes (50%?) we get everyone. I know the section on p 437 talks about 5 players + GM, so I was wondering about 6 + GM and possible changes. Given the troupe structure of the game we can obviously swap around PCs and roles each week if necessary.
Would it be feasible to run with 6 PCs, or would we be better only doing so on weeks with fewer players?
Also, somewhat related, are there guidelines for opposition to include? I know that one of the starting missions mentions opposition i.e. Horned One (Elite, Infamous and 2+ squads). The Mission chapter (p 214) doesn’t really mention scaling of opposition though. Is this merely a hand wave/story based consideration or is there some useful rule of thumb? I’ve been GMing long enough to hand wave these things but sometimes a framework is useful.
The description of the “Undead Armies” for each Broken includes some kind of “battle order”. Example: “Breaker’s troops are mixes of Burned and Hexed (12 to 18), guarding and supporting a single Shadow Witch.”
Also, when you randomly roll missions, there is a “scale of opposition” for the Assault missions (on a 5-6 for the subtype, the opponent is a “powerful undead”, at least an Infamous). That should mean that if you don’t roll those numbers, you should not put more than Elites in the opposition.
Ok - I didn’t find that obvious from the generator TBH, but I see that p 316 clarifies it. Recon has Danger which includes Infamous+.
Religous and Supply missions don’t have Powerful Undead/Danger in the Type table, so unless I specifically want to put one in they are not going to appear in those missions?
Incidentally, for opposition casualties, since Threat 1 take 1 damage each to destroy (as per NPC Rookies/Soldiers), and I see that the example is for a Threat 2 to be an 8-clock, and a Threat 3 to be a 10-clock (p 20), it looks like the rough calculation is (2 x Threat) + 4 (although this is only roughly true).
Given that, an undead squad Threat 1 of approx 5 members would give a 5 or 6-clock, i.e. that works quite well for knowing how many are eliminated as the result of PC/Squad attack effectiveness…
I guess so. But those missions could include other kinds of non-combat challenges, or non-undead adversaries…
Your Threat calculation formula is a bit off. If you used this formula, then a single T1 undead would be a 5 or 6 clock. In fact, in RAW there is just a big gap in power between T1 and T2. Also, the 8-clock ot T2/10-clock for T3 does not properly reflect the difference in power/survivability because the fact that difference in scale/threat gets added or subtracted to the damage upends the linearity: for a T2 Specialist, a 10-clock undead is not just 1.25 times more “difficult” to kill than an 8-clock one, it is 2.5 more.
However I agree with you that for T1 undead, a clock with the same number of segments as the number of undeads is a good approximation. You do not necessarily have to use a clock in this case though. See the example of combat against Rotters on page 238.
I think you can definitely work with more players than 5+GM. It might mean that one player doesn’t have a specific role in the leadership, but they could help other players do their roles, probably. There’s a lot of book keeping, so it might lighten the load.
But the system scales just fine to more players than the recommended, as there are plenty of extra characters to go around. You’ll just have to try harder to make sure everyone gets their fair share of focus, and that nobody is left waiting for “their turn” for too long.