Balancing Scenarios

Mr. Atkinson makes an interesting point. I ran a Scud Hunt scenario in
which one side was SF looking to smoke a Scud-like system gaurded by
locale militia. The SF had FAVs, good troops, and they had to get in and
lay a smackdown upon the SCUD (they had off-board support too) before
the SCUD could fire and get away. 

Played it one way and the Defender held the SCUD Launcher long enough to
get off three Scuds. This meant the attacker lost. 

The attackers complained about balance. The day was young. We fired it
up and switched sides. This time the attackers destroyed the Scud
launcher before it got off a single rocket. 

The problem wasn't the scenario..... it was the one team of players
excercising poor judgement in the placement of their defence (when they
were defending) and in the aggressiveness of their attack (when they
were attacking). 

I think this is a good test of a scenario. Run it again the other way.
It doesn't gaurantee to demonstrate balance (dice and how events turn up
tends to play some havoc in analysis) but a fairly balanced scenario
should give some either fairly even results both times or at least
illustrate that one team is _clearly_ the better team of players. 

This is the principal behind Duplicate Bridge. I think it is a good one.