Think back over all the roleplaying games you’ve played and run.
Why do NPCs always fight to the death?
If you take a moment to really think about it, this is odd behavior. Even in actual warfare, the outcome of a conflict is rarely for one side to fanatically fight to the last man. Animals don’t do this, either. When the tide of battle has clearly turned, armies rout and people run away or surrender rather than being slaughtered.
Yet in most RPGs, every fight ends only when every last person on one side has been laid in the grave.
First, there used to be morale rules. But GMs (and the industry in general) moved away from morale rules because of the “roll vs. role” mentality which, in part, maintained that mechanics shouldn’t govern character interactions. Thus, the NPCs’ decision of whether to run away or stay and fight became solely the GM’s purview.
(The other reason GMs abandoned morale rules is because they mechanically prompt all of the following stuff.)
Second, most GMs start by running dungeons. Dungeons are an appealing scenario structure, particularly for new GMs, because each room is firewalled from other rooms, making them easy to prep and easy to run. You don’t have to worry about the whole scenario, just the current room.
NPCs who run away break the firewall.
Where are they running to? What are they going to do there? If they’re looking for help or trying to summon reinforcements, where are the other enemies located? If they reach those enemies, what do those enemies do?
To handle willy-nilly monsters cascading through your dungeon like free radicals, you need advanced techniques like adversary rosters, and most GMs don’t have those techniques.
(Conversely, if you’re using the My Perfect Encounter™ school of adventure design where every encounter is hard-coded to a specific location and fine-tuned to a razor’s edge of challenge, the whole adventure actually falls apart if monsters from one encounter start running around the place. This becomes even more true in a game like 4th Edition D&D, where this is hard-coded into the system.)
Third, taking monsters prisoner ALSO breaks the firewall, because the PCs are going to want to question them about the dungeon. This, again, requires the GM to break out of the current room and think about the entire dungeon as a whole. (Which, again, is more difficult for a new GM.)
Prisoners also create a logistical challenge which is perhaps interesting once or twice, but then quickly becomes boring.
Fourth, the desire to avoid boring logistics will prompt players to solve the problem by murdering their prisoners. This is morally repugnant and, therefore, often undesirable. Similar calculations will also motivate the PCs to shoot anyone running away in the back (which may also be aesthetically/ethically undesirable).
For a non-RPG example of the difficulty in taking prisoners, check out The Raid (2011). The main characters try to take prisoners, but the logistics overwhelm them and a lot of people get killed.
Once you move away from raid-type scenarios (which a typical dungeoncrawl is closely related to), bad guys running away are usually easier to handle. (If nothing else, they can just run off into the night and exit the scenario.) And the prisoner logistics, along with the tough choices accompanying them, usually become more interesting to explore.
But by that point, most GMs have already developed “fight to the death” as a habitual practice, so it tends to just kind of stick around.
Fifth, there’s also the influence of video games. The designers of video games face similar challenges in implementing bad guys who run away and so they also don’t do that, creating a cultural perception of what game-ified violence looks like which GMs carry into their tabletop games.
TO THE DEATH!
On the flip-side, very few systems provide a viable system by which PCs can reliably flee combat. (Ironically, the original 1974 edition of D&D is one of the rare exceptions.)
Mechanically, this strongly incentivizes the PCs to also fight to the bitter end, because the alternative systemically boils down to begging the GM not to kill you: Players like to feel as if they’re in control of their own destiny, and staying within the clear structure of the combat system lets them do that.
(An effective mechanical structure for retreat must (a) be known to the players; (b) have a concrete resolution method which clearly sets stakes and provides an unambiguous and definitive outcome; (c) allow players to make meaningful choices which have a substantive impact on the success or failure of their retreat (and are, ideally, shaped by the specific of their current situation and/or resources); and (d) resolve success or failure for the group as a whole (players don’t want to risk leaving one of their own behind, and such systems generally suffer from a rolling to failure problems in any case). But I digress.)
This whole meme-sphere – in which both PCs and NPCs fight to the death – then feed back into game design and scenario design, which, for example, balances combat encounters around the assumption that the bad guys are going to fight to the bitter end.
GMs who try to break away from that assumption will find that the result is systemically unsatisfying: The PCs don’t really feel challenged when the bad guys logically run for it, which leads to everything feeling like a cake-walk in which the last few rounds are just mopping up bad guys who aren’t even fighting back.
No challenge? No satisfying conclusion?
That’s a bad encounter.
Which, of course, encourages the GM to abandon the whole “running away” thing, leaving the bad guys engaged until the bitter (yet mechanically satisfying) end.
SO WHAT?
If having the PCs and NPCs fight to the bitter end is so much easier, what’s the problem? Why not just keep doing that?
Well, as you’ve probably already noticed in our discussion so far, it takes a lot of interesting situations off the table. The Matrix probably wouldn’t be improved with Neo needing to figure out how to manage a captured Agent, for example, but Pitch Black demonstrates the unique challenges and amazing roleplaying that can emerge from shepherding even a single prisoner.
Another prominent example are the Principles of RPG Villainy: Running away to fight another day isn’t just something bad guys logically do, it’s the process by which truly memorable, campaign-defining villains are created.
I’ve already mentioned adversary rosters as a tool for running strategically active environments, but if every encounter mindlessly defaults to the NPCs fighting to the death, this tends to stunt the development of these more complex styles of play.
And, of course, none of this is to say that NPCs should never fight to the death. But variety is the spice of life. (Or, I guess, the spice of death, in this case.)
So what’s the alternative?
Well, obviously, you can just start making different choices.
But, as we’ve noted, there are systemic factors that affect these choices. We’ve already talked about how you might implement a mechanical structure for retreating, but there are other options to explore.
First, revisit how you design and think about encounters. My opinion is that the My Perfect Encounter™ method of adventure design is a hyper-developed dead end. It takes the training wheels that are useful for first time GMs and quadruples down on them, trying to make them the best goddamned training wheels you’ve ever seen. But you don’t get better at riding a bike by strapping on a fourth set of training wheels; you get better at riding a bike by taking the training wheels off.
Second, consider implementing a morale system. A good morale system won’t just mechanically prompt you to break your existing habits, it can also provide a structure for players to pursue combat tactics other than “stab them to death.” In other words, finding ways to rout your opponents is a viable way of achieving your tactical goals.
Third, speaking of tactical goals other than crushing your enemies (for example, you might also drive them before you and hear the lamentations of their women), another option is to define 0 hit points to mean something other than death. And I don’t just mean unconsciousness. I mentioned how “balanced encounters” in an RPG are designed around enemies fighting to the death. But it would be more accurate to say that they’re designed around enemies fighting until they run out of hit points. If we define that as death, then they fight to the death.
But if we broaden that definition so that your foe(s) being reduced to zero hit points simply means “the fight is over,” then we open up the possibility for fights to end in other ways. Depending on genre and circumstance, for example, this could be explicitly framed as anything from “they run away” to “they agree to join you in your quest” to “they surrender the golden phoenix of Shar-Halad.”
Whole heartedly agree.
Inspired by your website I started my own megadungeon and having foes retreat, call for parley, call for backup, circle back makes decisions on who, where, and when to fight that much more interesting.
The converse way of looking at the idea you express of some people not finding the emergent gameplay that came out of foes running away or surrendering is the way I often heard it expressed — that some groups at the time were only particularly interested in the fighting. An immature sentiment to be sure (I seem to recall it being particularly common among teenagers, in fact), but not an uncommon one in the 90s. Of course, now we have video games that do fighting to the death much better, and many of us expect a different experience out of our tabletop RP…
Another thing to consider when it comes to enemies running away is that some people regard one side running away as not merely a narratively unsatisfying conclusion, but as *losing*. This holds whether it’s the players running (we didn’t win the fight!) or the NPCs running (they’re getting away! they’re not letting us win!). Video games feed into this further, as in every game I’ve seen that experimented with the idea, foes who run away vanish into the aether and bring their experience points with them. Thinking of enemies in tabletop RP running away in the same way could be called the Metal Slime fallacy.
I’ve run headlong into the “running = losing” problem myself. A player in one of my games seemed to consider the idea of a recurring adversary to be completely unacceptable and thus would not let a scenario finish until the NPC I had intended to be a recurring adversary was dead. She also seemed to regard the need to run away from a foe in a later scenario to indicate that it was wrong to face that foe at all because they’d just lose again, not that they needed to gain allies and rethink their tactics (indeed, the point of that fight was to try to prompt the players to start thinking more cooperatively by showing a group of enemies doing the same).
**Slight spoilers ahead for BG:DiA**
This is excellent thank you. I’m currently running your Remix on BG:DiA and found myself utilizing some of the concepts you present here. In the Dungeon of the Dead 3, the players were running low on resources and decided to bunker up and long rest. They had eliminated about 2/3 of the opponents. I decided that the implications of this rest meant that one of the Cult leaders and a small group would escape via the secret passages while distracting the party with lesser enemies. Vaaz, being the one who escaped, would becomes a recurring villain. He would later ambush the party and once again try to flee but the players were able to use abilities to restrain him and thus end his life (not before losing one of their own).
Other implications of enemies fleeing means that if you have pre-triggered events these could be potentially impacted. In this very scenario, because they rested one of the NPCs died because they did not arrive in time to rescue him. A chain of events followed soon after that would alter the future. Whether good or bad is not the point, but rather a result of PC decisions that leads to very interesting scenarios.
As you mention, considering factors and implications of fleeing enemies is difficult to do but it helps if you’re able to buy yourself some time after the session is ended. Thinking about what the enemies would do between sessions let me flesh this out and integrate it into the story. Not always plausible I know but could be used as a strategy. In other words, find ways to buy yourself time.
I’d be curious to see a survey put some numbers to the prevalence of fleeing enemies and taking prisoners in 5e and other RPGs. I certainly have both happen, but I try for verisimilitude in enemy psychology and also started by running published campaigns rather than dungeons.
As someone who’s introduced multiple, different groups to 13th Age, I can report that even the availability of a straightforward, effective, and safe mechanism for retreat in combat doesn’t mean the players will use it. I often have to remind the group that it’s available when the chips are down. I find that most players haven’t forgotten it, but are extremely reluctant to use it. There have even been a couple of PC deaths that could have been avoided if they’d just pulled the trigger on retreating a round earlier.
Agreed on all points. I will say, however, that in 5E, rules as written, when a player reduces an enemy to 0 hp, they have the choice, in that moment, to decide by fiat if the blow kills or renders the enemy unconscious. When I actually remembered to remind my players of this, it led to more prisoner taking and interrogations, and less outright bloodbaths. They did still murder a bound prisoner, but I also happen to be running the Avernus remix, so they’re definitely getting taunted about that by a devil later.
The other place where retreat makes a big difference is with wandering monsters. I’m running a campaign in which the party explores a megadungeon on a mysterious island full of dinosaurs, and random encounters were kicking their butts until they started realizing that just because you’re *attacked* by eight velociraptors doesn’t mean you have to *kill* eight velociraptors; take one or two of them down and watch the rest flee.
(They’re not dumb players, but they’ve lived so long on railroads and My Precious Encounters that they spend too much time thinking about the rulebook instead of “what happens if we throw some raw meat into the bushes over there to distract the velociraptors while we flee?” “What happens if we use a firebolt to ignite the underbrush where that giant toad is waiting to ambush us?”)
In fact, I’m gonna make one of those sweeping statements that will probably get me schooled: I don’t think you can effectively use wandering monsters *without* also using some flavor of morale rules.
I think one pf the reasons why D&D has basically devolved into my perfect encounter is I think the Fighting Map, and the fighting map is there because the rules do want you to be thinking in granular 5ft squares.
If you don’t prep the encounter the fighting devolves into i attack rolls for both sides, so to make combat interesting you have to think tactically, which means you have to start drawing maps, which means you need to draw those maps, which means you need to firewall that section so everything is tactically sound and is interesting.
Thus the Perfect encounter is born. I’ve tried to move away from this from d&d but tbh without it combat does become a bit…dull. I’ve tried using other things other than 5ft squares but for some reason the races have all got different speeds and for obvious reasons the players wants those speeds to be consequential…
@Pteryx said: “She also seemed to regard the need to run away from a foe in a later scenario to indicate that it was wrong to face that foe at all because they’d just lose again, not that they needed to gain allies and rethink their tactics.”
Did you talk to her about this? It sounds like a clear case of a player misunderstanding something intended by the DM. Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to break the fourth wall and explain that they’ve got hold of the wrong end of a stick you tried to toss on the table. The classic case is “Do you understand that if you try to stand and fight there, the falling ceiling is going to crush you to goo?” “Oh! I thought we had more time.” But this kind of thing is in there too — though you may be able to wait to explain, “You know, I think with better preparation you guys could beat Count Obnoxio. I didn’t mean to give you the idea he was invincible.”
> “foes who run away vanish into the aether and bring their experience points with them”
Maybe you know this, but Justin didn’t mention it in the article so I’ll throw it out there. One of the common insights kicking around in the OSR is that OD&D mostly gave xp for treasure rather than for killing monsters, because if you got the treasure that means you won. Doesn’t matter *how* you got it, you still got it.
@croald If the situation had been as easily solved as a conversation, it wouldn’t have stuck in my mind and haunted me for over a decade now. As it was, a later aspect of that disaster session dominated the conversation, and ultimately led to my kicking her out over irreconcilable expectations and goals.
As for XP as treasure, yeah, I know about that. But I was referring to expectations set by video games, which don’t work that way. How D&D itself used to work isn’t particularly relevant to what expectations people bring to the table about whether running away by either side is a victory condition or a loss condition — apparently, even if you actively give people XP for running away from a fight they were losing, which I did in this case, and doesn’t happen in video games.
> NPCs who run away break the firewall. If they’re looking for help or trying to summon reinforcements, where are the other enemies located? If they reach those enemies, what do those enemies do? To handle willy-nilly monsters cascading through your dungeon like free radicals, you need advanced techniques like adversary rosters, and most GMs don’t have those techniques.
> very few systems provide a viable system by which PCs can reliably flee combat.
The one rather plays into the other, doesn’t it?
If the PCs have scattered amongst their enemies in a pell-mell melee, then honestly they probably can’t retreat simply because it’s hard to describe what they’re actually physically doing to get away. Heavy infantry can retreat in good order by maintaining formation, but PCs don’t have a formation, so it’s hard to describe what they are actually doing that’s different from “flee in a disorganized rout”. And “flee in a disorganized rout” tends to end very badly (most casualties in ancient and medieval battles were of fleeing soldiers), so to make it succeed, you need a magical handwave. (And, uh, in D&D, the system is kind of piled high and deep with spells to teleport, block corridors with spiderwebs, cast illusions and so forth, so if the party does have access to magical handwaving you can just use it. So we’re really talking about if the PCs don’t have access to that.)
A much more obvious time to retreat is during a lull when the enemy is fleeing to fetch reinforcements.
Suppose three goblin sentries fight a successful delaying action while the fourth escapes. (That is, after all, what sentries are for.) Once the PCs have failed to stop the messenger escaping, they can choose to retreat before the other fifty goblins arrive.
At that point, you don’t really need a system for retreat, since success is automatic if you decide to retreat.
Morale Rules – when it is time to flee/beg for mercy
Reaction Rolls – when the NPC’s attitude is not apparent to me the GM.
And moving toward XP for Gold/Goals have help break the fight to the death cycle (or the fight in the first place cycle).
@Xercies wrote: “which means you need to firewall that section so everything is tactically sound and is interesting”
I dispute this consequence. Obviously you can always break a firewall by having new enemies enter the map, but the flip side is valuable too. You want to also be able to rapidly extend the map while running the combat.
This is possible if you learn to play with scribbled sketch maps. Get players used to the idea that distances are approximate and that you can and will do movement by eyeball. It honestly doesn’t matter if a character moves exactly 60′ in a round or whatever. Let the faster characters be faster when it matters, and the rest of the time just let characters move some distance that seems reasonable.
If you have trouble making combat tactically interesting without detailed maps, try stealing the “arenas” concept from Kirin Robinson’s Old School Hack (p.17). It’s free (or pay-what-you-want):
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/96527/Old-School-Hack
Solving this problem seems to require 3 complementary systems: NPC morale, PC withdrawal, and rewards that take both into account.
I’ve had a lot of luck with TheAngryGM’s morale system grafted onto Pathfinder 1e. I also use his XP rewards system that basically asks, “did the party definitively thwart the obstacle blocking their goal?” If yes, full experience. If no, half experience.
For example, in my game last week there was a room with animated harpoons and another room with a rampaging elemental. The harpoons were a fight to the death mob, defending the room. If the party had been tricksy with cover and gotten through the room without destroying the harpoons, that would’ve been half experience (because they may have to go through that room again, later). They don’t get the other half until and unless they definitively remove the harpoons as an obstacle.
The elemental was desperate to escape, and a little crazed from imprisonment, so was a flee-when-half-hp mob. The party figured out (based on story cues) what the elemental needed and managed to talk it down and help it escape to its plane. That was full XP, even though there was never a weapon raised.
What I don’t have is a PC withdrawal mechanic. Instinct says to establish what the NPC wants to determine whether they will want to pursue, and then give the party the chance to make pursuit too much trouble. This almost makes it like social interaction, trying to “convince” the NPC not to pursue.
Maybe there needs to be a Chase Framework? Something that can handle throwing rocks and looking big while you back away, ordered retreat under covering fire, and running down an alley, upturning garbage cans and Cafe tables as you pass, looking for shortcuts and hiding places.
One important problem with running away being a viable combat option is that usually, the combat rules make it unviable. If you start a turn with somebody in melee range and decide to run away, you are getting hit first by the attack of opportunity, then don’t get to do anything to your opponent because you’re out of melee range, then you get hit again when the opponent on their turn moves back into melee range and attacks, for no net improvement to your position but two free attacks for your opponent.
I added morale rules to Savage Worlds on my table, although they haven’t seen much use, because the current campaign is full of non-combat characters who are very keen on avoiding any violence.
@Colubris: Obviously you can do a retreat as a full chase if it seems fun. You don’t have to, though — you can just pick a few quick tests different characters have to check, and then frame ahead with a description of where the PCs end up when they have gotten away. “Fighter, give me a strength check to see if you can pull down that statue. Rogue, dex check to see how fast you can pull out your caltrops. Wizard, con check to see how fast you can run.” Failure doesn’t mean they don’t get away; you just use it as a guide to decide how cruel to be when you describe where they end up after running for their lives.
If there’s ever a time when you as DM can justify a jump-cut framing the characters into a problem, it’s when they’re running for their lives.
This one turned up in a previous session of our open table game. My son (age 13) and I have put together an open table game for friends of ours. We get enough response to split into two tables and play.
My table consisted of all kids, between the ages of 9 and 15. Good mix of adventurers. They end up encountering a goblin lair, and decide to raid it. They’re fairly good about hitting the enemy quick and using good tactics.
They rolled into a goblin barracks unopposed and proceeded to light the place on fire. (Side note: What is it with adventuring parties and fire?) Lots of the goblins escaped to warn their king. So a few minutes later when the group moved to the king’s location they were met by a fortified position and a goblin king telling them to go away.
They responded by negotiating with the goblin king. They started with asking for treasure to leave the goblins alone, and then escalated to asking the goblins to work for them. “You’re proposing vassalge, then?” I asked, and then had to explain how vassalage works. Of course, it’s a two-sided proposition. Yes, the goblins will fight for you, but you’re also obligated to come to their defense.
This opened up a whole new avenue of plots and opportunities because *some of the goblins ran away*. I always use morale checks (a DC 10 WIS check in D&D 5) because it gets interesting responses. It increases verisimilitude, and that’s what we’re after, right?
“We’ve already talked about how you might implement a mechanical structure for retreating”
Did we though? You listed the characteristics that such a structure ought to have, but you didn’t actually present one. I for one would be very interested to see your solution to the problem. (I remember you mentioning in a previous article that OD&D had explicit rules for the chance of pursuit if PCs flee, but I’ve had no luck finding that article, and in any case IIRC those rules were specifically designed for dungeons and would be inapplicable in other scenarios.)
It seems to me that rules for retreat would be closely linked to rules for running chase scenes. Because either side (PCs or enemies) might retreat, and the other side might or might not decide to pursue.
@Alien@System: Technically, that’s true in 3e/PF, but not quite true in 5e. In 5e you can either disengage and move, which doesn’t provoke an attack of opportunity, or dash and move, which does. However, if you dash, then your opponent would have to dash to get back in melee range with you, and wouldn’t be able to attack you again at the end of their move. Either way, they’d only be able to attack you once, not twice.
Your larger point still stands, of course, but I think the real problem isn’t the attacks of opportunity, it’s the fact that everyone has fixed movement rates. If your movement rate is equal to or less than your opponent’s it’s basically impossible to run away from the fight unless they let you (or unless you have something that lets you tip the scales such as a slow spell or a rogue’s Cunning Action).
Something that occurs to me is that once you’ve established that enemies will regularly flee battles when they are losing, you can use their *not* fleeing for effect. For example, if you have established that wild animals and wandering predators usually flee when even lightly injured, the fact that a wild animal attacks the party and fights to the death becomes a hint that it’s being magically controlled. Or you can make zombies and other undead feel relentless and difficult to kill without actually giving them more hp, because unlike living opponents they never retreat and you have to knock off every last hitpoint.
Agreed that a key part of allowing either PCs or NPCs to flee battles is having a workable system for fleeing, and that the current system doesn’t do it.
Like others have already mentioned, this is an excellent post! I agree with the points being made, and I’m a big proponent of morale mechanics (but, then again, I run B/X or OD&D). I’m also all about gameplay that promotes reoccurring villains and/or adversaries. I almost always build homebrew encounter tables with potential villains in mind. Additionally, anytime monsters/NPCs get away from the PCs after an encounter, I like to start thinking right away about how and why those monsters/NPCs might show up again. I find that this kind of play keeps a game running without much work and produces new content and narrative (I guess what you would call procedural play or procedural content generation). Good stuff!
Worth noting that morale per se only matters when determining whether enemies flee in a disorganized rout and get cut down like wheat. If the question is whether the NPCs will decide on a fighting retreat, or a defense-in-depth yielding ground…well, that’s just kind of a tactical decision the GM has to make for the NPCs as the GM makes all other tactical decisions, including the decision to engage the PCs in the first place.
(If Denethor orders a defense-in-depth and the unit retreats in good order while drawing their pursuers into the claws of reinforcements, that’s not the same thing as fleeing in a disorganized rout…looking at you, Peter Jackson. A tactical retreat is done for tactical reasons, not because anyone has low morale.)
> A good morale system won’t just mechanically prompt you to break your existing habits, it can also provide a structure for players to pursue combat tactics other than “stab them to death.” In other words, finding ways to rout your opponents is a viable way of achieving your tactical goals.
I liked the 3e system where a creature had to make a morale check every time they lost half their unit, for every level of “unit”, so morale gets worse as the command structure disintegrates.
Initially, NPCs only make a single morale check, when their squad takes 50% casualties (and thus, can only slip one rung down the morale ladder), because however scary the PCs are, the bad-guy leaders are scarier. “Panic makers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot. Not one step backward without orders from higher headquarters!”
(Technically, they’d also make a second morale check, when losing half their own hit points, and therefore theoretically could slip all the way down to “frightened” and run away. Of course, being half-dead is a pretty good reason to run away.)
But later, someone might have made multiple morale checks before ever laying eyes on the PCs, from losing half their platoon, half their company, half their battalion, half their regiment, half their brigade. People are terrified of the PCs for good reason.
Of course, you might not want to figure out a full hierarchy for the bad guys, but you can figure e.g. if the PCs wiped out the previous shift of guards for this post, that counts.
If the enemies are already shaken like that, PCs could also choose to spend a round concentrating on trying to overawe an opponent, driving them back rather than actually trying to box them in and kill them. If the Intimidate check succeeds, the target slips from shaken to frightened, and flees. Per the rules, they only have to flee for one round…but, also per the rules, if that means the squad has now taken 50% casualties, everyone else immediately has to make a morale check, so it can start a rout.
Strictly speaking, it’s not “realistic” to not start making morale checks until losing half the unit, you could make a case for 30% or 10% or whatever. But “half” is a rule that’s easy for the players and GM to remember and apply, so when they’re one casualty away from a morale check, the GM can narrate them wavering, and even if the GM forgets, the players might remember to recognize this as (what the game arbitrarily identifies as) the morale-critical turning point of the battle and try to take someone out of the fight, even temporarily, to start a rout. The PCs can also tilt the odds by appearing more numerous. Mercs are cheap. Mercs and unreliable, and probably won’t wade into a serious melee, even if there were space for them, but the mere presence of a mob has psychological effects.
(Of course, the 3e system was just a flat roll, so morale performs very differently at low levels versus high levels. That never bothered me. High-level characters are literally awesome, after all.)
> define 0 hit points to mean something other than death.
…couldn’t you just have the NPCs react to some hit-point number other than 0? The angry bull might attack, but if it loses one-third of its hit points, it decides “screw this” and withdraws.
HP thresholds can represent situations where the PCs just need to run off a belligerent monster to get it out of their way. If you try to violate the bull’s territory, it’ll attack, but if you wound it, it will back off and won’t bother you again.
I particularly like to match HP thresholds to XP awards. If a monster exists but isn’t fully committed to the fight, then a full XP award might not be appropriate. Saying that if it fights to one-third HP then it’s one-third XP is extremely crude, but it works.
> If you start a turn with somebody in melee range and decide to run away, you are getting hit first by the attack of opportunity, then don’t get to do anything to your opponent because you’re out of melee range, then you get hit again when the opponent on their turn moves back into melee range and attacks, for no net improvement to your position but two free attacks for your opponent.
> Technically, that’s true in 3e/PF
Yeah, that’s…not even remotely true. In 3e/PF, a withdrawal does not provoke an attack of opportunity, and your opponent does not get to attack you (in melee) on their turn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_(military)
Unless you’re withdrawing in a perfectly straight line on a perfectly flat, featureless plain, in which case your opponent could “charge” to move double speed and attack in the same round. But that’s not going to happen often.
(Of course, Alien@System was probably talking about Savage Worlds, anyway.)
> the real problem isn’t the attacks of opportunity, it’s the fact that everyone has fixed movement rates. If your movement rate is equal to or less than your opponent’s it’s basically impossible to run away from the fight unless they let you
Most systems don’t have good rules to support chases or escapes. Some systems support a withdrawal just fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_(military)
Of course, with a withdrawal, there’s no real question of whether the opponent can physically keep up with you, they obviously can. The question is whether they want to follow you to what you’re leading them into. (Read: goblins retreat deeper into the goblin warren. The PCs can follow them deeper and deeper, but that risks getting surrounded by reinforcements in unfamiliar territory.)
For chases and escapes, yeah, the entire concept of fixed movement rates makes the very idea dead on arrival. (Unless you have a teleport spell, or a block-corridor-with-spiderwebs spell, or a…)
@Bull’s Strength: You have creatures respond to a different hp total than 0 by using a morale system.
You can reprogram the meaning of 0 hp to potentially address the issue of game systems with highly tuned balance that produce unsatisfying encounters if bad guys flee “early.” (There often other ways to address this problem, too.)
@Rout: “For chases and escapes, yeah, the entire concept of fixed movement rates makes the very idea dead on arrival. (Unless you have a teleport spell, or a block-corridor-with-spiderwebs spell, or a…)”
Or a door.
In general, I think it’s also a mistake to treat the useful abstraction of a consistent movement rate in combat as some sort of ultimate truth where all bodies in the game world move at steady state velocities.
It’s interesting because while I love this and normally implement it, my current campaign is creating some issues. And it seemingly shouldn’t. The majority of enemies are regular humans, and the players often explicitly try to take prisoners. Yet the biggest hurdle is the genre: I’m running Legend of the Five Rings and a lot of the setting’s assumptions play into the classic samurai trope of fighting to the death and never surrendering.
Now this is easier to work with when you’re dealing with random bandits or ronin. They’re not expected to have honor and can thus act like reasonable people, but it gets tricky when you’re dealing with other samurai. I had a recent encounter end with the clearly defeated opponents *ask* to be killed and it was only through some good role-playing by the players that they were able to keep their foes from killing themselves and instead bring them over to their side.
It’s also a good way to organically adjust the difficulty of an encounter in the middle of things. It obviously won’t work if the PCs are clearly losing, but having minions flee is an effective way to reduce the number of foes, akin to having reinforcements arrive. And who knows exactly *what* is going to cause that. Maybe it’s “I’m not getting paid enough to tangle with a mage” or seeing a friend get one-shotted by a sniper. Even if they would theoretically be winning before, plenty of things can shock enemies enough to break.
@Rout: “Yeah, that’s…not even remotely true.”
You’re right, I forgot about the withdrawal rule. (It’s been a while since I played 3e.) I was going to point out that Savage Worlds doesn’t *have* “attacks of opportunity”, but I checked and it *does* say that opponents get a free attack against you when you withdraw from combat, and apparently there’s no way to avoid it. OTOH, Savage Worlds also has rules for variable movement rates when running, though they’re pretty underwhelming.
“The question is whether they want to follow you to what you’re leading them into.”
Hence why I said “unless they let you”.
@Justin: “In general, I think it’s also a mistake to treat the useful abstraction of a consistent movement rate in combat as some sort of ultimate truth where all bodies in the game world move at steady state velocities.”
Yeah, I think an opposed Athletics check to determine whether someone can catch you is a perfectly reasonable house rule. (You could vary the ability score used depending on the circumstances — Strength for a flat-out sprint over open ground, Dex for weaving through crowded streets or parkouring over rooftops, Con for a long-distance pursuit.)
I love the idea of using massive Damage Thresholds, not as You Die, but to force morale checks (in 3.5 speak, for example, a Will save similar to the expected Fortitude save?). It further treats HP as more than a bag of meat. Similarly, using 0 HP (versus negative hit points) as a morale marker is a fairly simple way of limiting character death if constructed correctly (maybe even allies might need to roll some lower check at that point to continue without penalty?).
Boy, how did I miss this? Great analysis and insights.
For what it’s worth, AD&D (1e) had full rules for this as well. Morale was DMG pg. 67, Pursuit Underground pp. 67-68, Pursuit Outdoors pg. 69, as well as Loyalty pp. 36-37. Standard modifier heavy approach of the time, but the mods can be streamlined.
Ultimately, though, I do think this style of play is sadly out of fashion today, for all the reasons mentioned above, but also because they ARE advanced techniques, and require more advanced encounter design to accommodate them. That’s just not going to be everyone’s bag, baby.
In my experiences, being cognizant of your NPCs not fighting to the death definitely forces you to be smarter and more aware during combat. It changes the way you think about balance, since the PCs aren’t going to have to fight every single person in the room, just enough to cause them to rout.
Also leads to some pretty funny scenarios. Sometimes i’m not taking stock of the battlefield, send in reinforcements a turn too late, and what happens is they walk in, analyze the battlefield, and run straight out the way they came. Some PCs might see that as a cop out, but luckily mine usually enjoys the power trip it gives them.