Yes. Every time you have to defend after the first you get a -3 penalty. This means that the last person attacking gets a good shot on the defender - a reason why you send in the trollkin first, *then* hit him with your great troll.
> This also means that the results change depending on how the GM splits the
> groups up, which seems unfair.
Unfair to whom? The players? The narrator should be working with his players to have a good time, not trying his best to scrag their characters. Every DM/GM/Narrator/Lore Master/whatever you want to call it has had the ability to drop a moon on a group of characters, in every system ever published starting with the brown-box D&D set. Most games have passed beyond the adversarial relationship (or at least, *I* have).
My personal philosophy for breaking up NPC groups is to have one "adversary" for each player character. That way everyone gets to play, instead of watching the 15th-level Fighter/MagicUser fry everyone in sight with a super-fireball while my 5th level warrior just hangs out (yep, I've played in games like that. Didn't like 'em).
So if I'm the narrator faced with four players - Harrek, Gunda and the two best guys in Harrek's warband, say 10w2-level, then I'd divide up my 250 stickpickers so that half of em face Harrek, a quarter face Gunda, and the rest are split between the other two players.
> The more I think about it, the more I think I will go with my idea. To
> wit, we can treat them all seperately, or you can all go enmasse, and
> there's a -3 for each extra one of you. Means loan heroes CAN'T stomp
> through legions of normal guys, thus encouraging them to have their mates
> along. This does break down for large battles, 'cos sheer weight of
> numbers means far more than skill, but I don't see that being a problem in
> my games, since I'm not hugely interested in roleplaying such battles.
That's your perogative, of course, but in Glorantha lone heroes *can* stomp through masses of troops (hell, in stories from the real world they do, too - look at the Song of Roland or Lancelot's rescue of Guenever for examples).
Roderick
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