TTB "balanced" Drama Time

[Nikshe]

I understood the idea of the book that "there is no balance in the firefight" but I surelly need some instrument for making party's enemies when I want to create weak/moderate/severe problem.
Is there some official or approved method of creating encounters? Some sort of formula for calculating the summ of enemies' ranks or something?

[ezramantis]

That would be great. So far the only response to this I've seen amounts to "adjust the numbers and figure it out". You'd think a $60 core book written by a skirmish game company with years of experience creating game balance would give you a bit more material and guidance.

[Qualvanda]

Since the groups of players can vary so much, it's really difficult to do a "Balance list".

If you have a group of 4 players, a Henchman can be a balanced encounter, if you have 3 players, and one of them thought that the Academic Pursuit would be amazingly fun to roleplay, that Henchman would probably TPK the group in 4 rounds.

It all depends on your groups setup... If you don't have any AoE damage, large group of minion characters could ruin your day, but if 2 or more have some AoE that same group of minions could be dead before they even reach the players. If you don't have anyone with the doctoring skill, a peon with the ability to give you "Bleeding Out +1" can outright kill a PC.

Anything with Black Blood can ruin a group with melee focus, but if everyone is an expert marksman, those Nephilim will be dead before they reach you, however, THAT group will get brutally murdered by a swarm of rats, since they probably won't be able to defend themselves in melee.

See where I'm going with this?

You have to get a feel for your group, where are their strengths/weaknesses, try to start small, and ramp up the difficulty if they start to steamroll. Have encounters with hidden reinforcements that can barge in from the back door after 5 rounds if the fight is too easy, or if you notice that the fight is balanced, or even too hard, maybe the reinforcements don't show up, or they are a separate fight after the PCs have had a chance to catch their breaths.