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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 6545196" data-attributes="member: 57112">I was giving that more as an example. Obviously without knowing the underlying math I wouldn't know the actual value of a specific equipment bonus or natural SOAK score.I was thinking that you could compare the bonus from equipment to equivalent bonus gained from skill or attribute bonuses, but IIRC that's not a strictly linear scale, so bonuses from equipment mean more for lower ranked critters than for higher ranked ones.It's also very dependent on what kind of information you want to communicate with NPC rank. Is it an overall measure of skill and ability as compared to the PCs? Is it a combat challenge rating? Is it something else entirely? What you want to communicate will be a huge factor in determining how you want to weigh certain elements.A lowly rank 4 goblin is an easy combat encounter compared to a massive dragon. But give that same goblin access to spiffy high quality scanner and it's suddenly a much bigger problem during a stealth encounter.It's fairly easy to compare opposed rolls when designing skill challenges. It's quite a bit harder to tell an even combat encounter at a glance. If that's the primary goal of ranking NPCs than I might even recommend creating an entirely different system of creating and ranking combat NPCs, one that doesn't take into account non-combat attributes and skills (which I gather is what's holding your T-rex back from being barely a rank above a starting character.)If combat ranking isn't your primary concern then I'd say it's probably not worth over thinking. If you've got a universal exploit around that gives natural SOAK use that as your baseline (or design a hypothetical one if you don't have one), then use the eyeball test for equipment bonuses. You might weigh bonuses to defense or attack differently from incidental skill bonus equipment (such as the aforementioned scanner) or you might not. Then you can probably call it a day. I'd gather the bonuses from SOAK will give your assorted dinosaurs an appropriate enough bump.</blockquote>

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