Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5208054" data-attributes="member: 3820">By the way, thedearhunter, many kudos on differentiating between player and character frustration. Being able to judge the acceptable levels of both, and figure out how to feed one while not feeding the other, is a critical skill for running games. It's the distance between dramatic tension and players wondering why they bother to show up.An additional thing to consider, perhaps, is that killing the bad guys is another form of progression, like leveling up or finding magic items. This is another reason that many of us tend to place minions, then lieutenants, before you actually confront the main villain; you're essentially progressing your way up the chain. Whereas a villain that consistently escapes may feel to the players like being stuck at a certain level; they don't feel like they're progressing on to bigger and better things. This may depend on the players, of course, but it's a good reason to look at fights where you may like your villain to escape and consider how, if they do well but not quite good enough to prevent his escape, the fight can be considered a good victory that gives the players a sense of advancement. It's sort of like "drama XP" -- do the players feel that they're achieving more dramatic things even as more dramatic challenges loom before them?It's tricky to pull off, but one final option is to give the players positive incentives to let the villain escape. For instance, if the villain knows where the Big Interesting Thing is and the players decide to track him there, or if they know he'll flee back to an interesting lair to regroup. Or maybe the villain can bribe the PCs outright in some fashion. In that sense, they can weigh alternate rewards: do they want the rewards gained by the surviving villain, or is the satisfaction of killing him superior? You can do this with negative incentives, too, but at that point you're basically asking the players to choose between punishments instead of rewards. "The bad guy goes free or the hostage dies" -- picking the lesser of two evils, really. Now, that works great for some groups, but some players really like to soak up adversity, even angst. If you suspect your players aren't that sort of people, negative incentives might not be the way to go.</blockquote>

Verification