Editing Unwritten: System Reference Document/Running the Game (section)

===Playing the Opposition===

Remember, you want a balancing act between stonewalling the PCs and letting them walk all over your opposition (unless they are nameless NPCs, in which case that’s pretty much what they’re there for). It’s important to keep in mind not just the skill levels of the NPCs in your scenes, but their number and importance.

Right-sizing the opposition is more of an art than a science, but here are some strategies to help.

* Don’t outnumber the PCs unless your NPCs have comparatively lower skills.
* If they’re going to team up against one big opponent, make sure that opponent has a peak skill two levels higher than whatever the best PC can bring in that conflict.
* Limit yourself to one main NPC per scene, unless it’s a big climactic conflict at the end of an arc. Remember, supporting NPCs can have skills as high as you want.
* Most of the opposition the PCs encounter in a session should be nameless NPCs, with one or two supporting NPCs and main NPCs along the way.
* Nameless and supporting NPCs means shorter conflicts because they give up or lose sooner; main NPCs mean longer conflicts.

It’s easy to fall into the default mode of using the opposition as a direct means to get in the PCs’ way, drawing them into a series of conflict scenes until someone is defeated.

However, keep in mind that the NPCs can advantages just like the PCs can. Feel free to use opposition characters to scenes that aren’t necessarily about stopping the PCs from achieving a goal, but scouting out information about them and stacking up free invocations. Let your antagonists and the PCs have tea together and then bring out the Empathy rolls. Or instead of having that fight scene take place in the dark alley, let your NPCs show up, gauge the PCs’ abilities, and then flee.

Likewise, keep in mind that your NPCs have a home turf advantage in conflicts if the PCs go to them in order to resolve something. So, when you’re setting up situation aspects, you can pre-load the NPC with some free invocations if it’s reasonable that they’ve had time to place those aspects. Use this trick in good faith, though—two or three such aspects is probably pushing the limit.

Your opposition will be way more interesting if they try to get at the PCs in multiple venues of conflict, rather than just going for the most direct route. Remember that there are a lot of ways to get at someone, and that mental conflict is just as valid as physical conflict as a means of doing so. If the opposition has a vastly different skill set than one or more of your PCs, leverage their strengths and choose a conflict strategy that gives them the best advantage.