COGs and Gears - Balancing combat encounters in Hackmaster

COGs and Gears - Balancing combat encounters in HackMaster 

This is I think the most difficult part of the art of GM'ing the Hack and to be perfectly honest I am not sure I have quite got the hang of it yet.

Why do I find it quite so difficult? you might ask after all the old fart has been doing this for more years than many of you have been alive in all manner of systems many of them several degrees if not orders of magnitude  more brain burning to use than HackMaster.

Well I think a couple of examples might help

In episode IV three first level characters encountered a Rattle bone mummy

This was intended to scare the players and make them run away it was in a circle of protection against undead so it wasn't going to be able to give chase  and besides it was under the delusion that it was still alive and would therefore attempt to cast spells It however could no longer do this and all that would happen would be a scary waving of dead arms.

It scared the players all right, even more when Aeltred managed to make his roll against arcane lore and realized the spell was something powerful and not what you wanted to be on the receiving end of even if his knowledge of things arcane was not up to working out exactly what.

However Aeltred hit him with his spear, actually a Spetum but  very similar weapon,, this should have bounced off even if ir was a fairly certain hit given the mummy was not actively defending itself being occupied in spell casting. Dr12 is quite high especially given Aeltred's players feeble dice rolling he hit he crited it penetrated at least once on the damage dice and the rolled critical did an additional load of damage. all together enough to knock the mummy right back out of the circle which it could not cross but across which it could be pushed. I had brief thoughts of a party kill, the thing would soon realize that it couldn't cast spells and resort to unarmed combat until I realized the damage from the hit had killed the mummy outright.

I was a bit relieved not wanting the party wiped out quite so soon and it was a bit of a fluke surely

In episode 

I will add further examples from my game but will proceed to the conclusions I have drawn from my gaming experience so far..

What all this means 

This all comes down to a question of how much control do I need of the game generally and specifically at critical points like combat. 

In general I like to give my players a lot of freedom and fall into the role of storyteller and don't need to exert a high level of control or micromanage events. Neither do I prepare very detailed scenarios every thing is generally based on a rather lose game plan in  my mind which is itself subject to a lot of change on the fly due to this plan interacting with the players in game actions.

Coming down to the question of combat, I find HackMaster combat rather unpredictable as I have suggested with the examples above a single roll good or bad can change who has the advantage in a fight. This is a lot like real life where the best that skill and tactics can do is mitigating this a bit. 

I have concluded that there is no real point trying to design combats in a balanced and controlled way as you might in other games with similar themes. I think the best that can be done is to set up the encounter according the needs of the situation and the story and allow it to run as it will making sure that you bear in mind not to grossly overload the capacities of the players.  

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