Combats -- Good til the last (corpses) drop?

[Evilhalfling]

Yeah Fast forward is a common option, even enemies trying to escape gets yada, yadaed. (monk moves at 60, bar/sor frequently casts exp retreat) many enemies realized running gets nowhere, and some try and surrender (but rarely live afterward.

 

[Fenes]

I often use fast forward. "You mop up the remaining enemies" "The rest surrenders ro tries to flee - do you let them flee?" "No." "Ok, you kill a few, the rest gives up". Often the PCs are not alone anyway, so I can have the guards and such mop up the mooks.

I don't see a point in playing out a fight blow by blow if the outcome is clear.

 

[Wombat]

Like many others, I go with the "Odds are against you, run away or surrender" school. I find it ridiculous to assume every combat is going to be a case of 100% bodycount theatre. Not only does it not feel "realistic" (please note quotes), but my group finds long and excessive combats boring and often pointless. Besides, you can interrogate a living captive

 

[scourger]

In game yesterday, I took a few of these kinds of shortcuts. I let the PC's allies automatically continue to pin foes that were successfully grappled by two or more allies. Some of the foes fled, seeing that the battle was lost. And the last couple of foes were just put to the sword. It worked to keep the story heroic without getting mired in a marathon dice-rolling session, but I think I would do it differently in the future. The real issue was that there were too many combatants for individual contests and almost too few for using a mass combat system. For d20 mass combat, I have used the system presented in the Judge Dredd Rookie's Guide to Block Wars to good effect; and I think I would use a version of it again if the PCs had many low-level allies fighting many low-level foes. Essentially, the battle rages in the background as the PCs square off against the leaders of the bad guys. It works and feels very cinematic.

 

[fafhrd]

Usually a cornered opponent will still have the chance to roll that 20 and make a good accounting of itself. While it may not be decisive in that particular battle, those lost HPs, that sundered item etc. could be crucial later on down the road. I play it out. Yielding opponents have the added fun of burdening the PCs with tough choices. It gives you more options in the future as well. You know that supposed reputation PCs are expected to attain? A foe that is let loose can be a great way for a party's reputation to spread and give you more believable leeway in future encounters. "You...you were the ones who destroyed Jorkags band in the Vale of Highwold. I would not cross blades with such as you." Let it play out. It gives you more tools to work with.

 

[Chimera]

I recently had this discussion with a new game group I joined, asking (rhetorically) "why do the last two Orcs stand and fight to the death when all their buddies have been slaughtered like flies?" I pointed out that IRL combat, 20% losses would be considered severe, 50% losses would be considered catastrophic, with entire units disbanding and the battle turning into a rout.

IMO, it's one of the problems of gaming, and not just RPGs. This "every battle must go to the bitter end" mentality. The old adage is "paper soldiers never die".

As far as individuals running off to chase down those who flee, that's another issue that's distorted by the mechanics of gaming. Would you seriously run off into the trees to track down a retreating foe? (Sure, you might move faster, but can you catch me in the trees?) What happens when, 300 yards away and out of sight, you are ambushed by more of his friends, or by something completely different? "I dunno, Bob ran off and never came back. We never found him..." It also makes me think of the Mongol tactics, where they would deliberately retreat, simply to lure the overconfident enemy into an ambush.

And that's besides the entire issue of earning a reputation for doing such things (and how that can be used against you).

 

[res]

The one thing that I didn't like about 3.0/3.5 is that they didn't have any kind of moral rolls in the core books. We found them in the miniatures handbook but 2nd Ed had a good, if not confusing moral system.

People should run away unless there are some sort of extenuating circumstances.

 

[Feathercircle]

The one thing that I didn't like about 3.0/3.5 is that they didn't have any kind of moral rolls in the core books. We found them in the miniatures handbook but 2nd Ed had a good, if not confusing moral system.

People should run away unless there are some sort of extenuating circumstances.

Sorry to be anal-retentive, but you meant "morale", right?
Anyway, I've addressed this issue in my own game once or twice... sometimes I'll have enemies fight to the bitter end, others they'll run away (or attempt to do so) when things start to go sour for them- it's highly based on context, though. The same enemy might flee in one circumstance but stick around in another (ie, if mommy dragon is getting thwacked, she's likely to just fly away and live to fight another day, but if her babies are in danger, she'll do everything in her power to take the adventurers down, even if it means her own death.) Intelligent and non-intelligent foes alike both will flee under most circumstances, if they can. The next encounter in my campaign is probably the first I've had where the enemies won't flee- they've been driven too insane to care.

Other than circumstances, as mentioned above, if there's a blatant "leader" type in the combat, like a gnoll alpha female or a paladin commander or a pack leader of some sort, I'll allow them to make some form of a Charisma check to prevent their group from routing if odds are against them- though this sort of thing can be exploited by canny characters as well. A group of baddies who's just seen their leader, the strongest or smartest or otherwise best of them cut down is far less likely to stick around, even if they have fair odds of winning otherwise.

In many cases, causing enemies to flee gives pretty much the same results for the party as killing them, so I normally don't dock them experience for not running after fleeing foes when it isn't imperative to kill all of them. Fled or dead, if the threat is eliminated, they get XP. I NEVER fast-forward because the resources used up (on both sides) in the tail end of combat can make all the difference- not always, but it's always a possibility. Who knows when Joe Average Goblin might roll a lucky crit?

 

[Seonaid]

I am not a GM. That being said, you can now ignore or read this post as you see fit.

My first response was to say, "When combat is boring, you should fast-forward. If the players are getting glazed eyes and a fight has been going on for too long in the real world, definitely fast-forward."

But then I read some of the other posts and started thinking about it, and every time it actually happened in a game, I did feel cheated. However, I think that mostly it came from me feeling as though something else wasn't going right. That is, it's not the end of the combat that leaves me feeling cheated, but the overall tone of that part of the session (or, sadly, the whole session).