Fria Ligans forum

I know that there are no chiseled-in-stone Difficulty Rating rules in the book. I think I'm looking for best practice examples of how other GMs go about putting together opposition in Action Scenes. Other than gut feeling, any good ideas or guidelines how you make sure you design a challenging, interesting, but not excessively difficult scene?
Any good rule of thumbs when looking at a given statblock, how to gauge it's power level against your PCs? (Considering, of course, that a cosmic champion PC will also need very different powered enemies than a teen upstart).
Any special experience with extras, regular NPCs, huge monsters? Fewer tough enemies or more, less powerful ones? Use of environmental factors, traps, hazards in your action scene?
Really, would welcome any experience about design good action scenes and gauging power levels right. What's your process?

I know that there are no chiseled-in-stone Difficulty Rating rules in the book. I think I'm looking for best practice examples of how other GMs go about putting together opposition in Action Scenes. Other than gut feeling, any good ideas or guidelines how you make sure you design a challenging, interesting, but not excessively difficult scene?
Any good rule of thumbs when looking at a given statblock, how to gauge it's power level against your PCs? (Considering, of course, that a cosmic champion PC will also need very different powered enemies than a teen upstart).
Any special experience with extras, regular NPCs, huge monsters? Fewer tough enemies or more, less powerful ones? Use of environmental factors, traps, hazards in your action scene?
Really, would welcome any experience about design good action scenes and gauging power levels right. What's your process?

Thanks for posting!

The published adventures best demonstrate how to craft encounters for action scenes. Right now that's Metro Mayhem from the starter set, but several others are en route.

A general guideline would be to think in comic panels, that the game is set up around scenes where characters typically get plenty of recovery time (not dungeon crawling) between them, so encounters can go all out, and with the Invincible setting, it's okay if they go too far. There are multiple ways to rally or recover during action scenes, and doing so afterwards is intentionally trivial.

Pitting the heroes against a like number of enemies that have about the same number of attribute points - where they can go one-on-one against each other - is a standard encounter. If you use less foes but want the same standard difficulty, you make the foes have more attribute points, or give them powers like QUICKNESS and SUMMONING. You can make encounters more difficult by adding Challenges into the mix during battle, and less difficult by using minions.

If you've seen a similar encounter in the comics, then you should feel free to try it, as the rules are designed to capture that feel.