Hubris 4e

[ExploderWizard]

I don't see the logic of this at all. There are all sorts of events that your character can't control in the game that affect his fate. What about escaping (which is not avoiding AFAICT)? What about surrendering? Your choice about whether or not your character left a will, or what kind of race/class you want to create next, is certainly not rendered meaningless by your character's death. In fact, quite the opposite.

Then again, some folks don't want to make decisions about anything once they aren't having a good time according to their definition. I very well could find myself playing Monopoly and decide, once I'm no longer winning, that all my choices left are "meaningless". It's a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't think things have to be that way though.

The situations you described can certainly be part of an interesting game. The trick is not that these situations exist but how they came about. If PC's make decisions that bring about a surrender or die situation the so be it. If the DM just decides to plop the party in such situations at random then there could be a lack of caring what happens on the part of the players because nothing they do seems to matter. If the players dig thier own hole then they may be more likely to maintain interest when the chips are way down or even out.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

My party ran from a Manticore at 4th level.

The DM set up the encounter with the following:

1. A quest that lured us into the Manticore's territory with a guide
2. the gradual realization that this 'quest' and 'guide' were a set up to lure adventurers into nasty encounters and then loot their over-equipped bodies
3. Finding an adventurers' campsite riddled with manticore bolts

Oh how we ran.

All while the DM said that we should trust him, he wouldn't throw a horrible overpowered encounter at us.

Oh dear dear DM, we shouldn't and you would.

 

[scrubkai]

You don't need to just throw raw powerful creatures at them to take the pcs down a notch....
Here's a few suggestions that have worked in our group:

1) Give them a situation with a coupl elite creatures that does not act as they would expect.... For example in the past we ran into an inteligent, magic using troll that regenerated from Fire and Acid. So when we saw it was a troll we charged right in and blasted away with fire, however when it started dropping mini-fireballs on us we all scratched our heads. Then it started regenerating from the fire and we got concerned. By the point that it started turning invisible and taking pot shots at us while it flew from tree to tree we knew it was time to run and do some research into what the heck this thing was. (It ended up being about the same power level as us but it was affected only by cold, and that took us a long time to figure out.)

2) Give your players a goal that looks simple and is guarded by creatures that they can obviously beat, but put it in a situation that the terrain obviously heavily favors the monsters. Then actually play the monsters as if they were intelligent and did some basic pre-planning.
For example: The players figure out they need to reach a tower on a goblin infested island. Most of the shoreline of the island is steep cliffs that the players would have to climb up while the goblins drop rocks on them from above. The only obvious beach is well guarded with difficult terrain and goblins who can shoot down on the beach from a number of protected bunkers. Then add in some hidden traps and a few other surprises. (For example: a Dam that can be broken to wash the off the path up to the island and back to the beach).
Now run this a few times with sample characters and see how YOU would try to assault this. Pick your monsters tactics to counter what you would do. Make it hard enough that the PCs don't die immediately, but should realize they are in over their heads pretty quickly. You are defending so let them retreat and try this a few times. You the same basic tactics every time so that the characters start to know what to expect, but if they focus on taking out some of the defenses be reasonable in what you can repair while they are gone. Eventually they will wear the defenses down and get through, but a bit of planning and some inteligence can make even small monsters very scary.

3) Focused fire.... You will be amazed at how fast even 4E characters go down if the monsters all manage to go after a non-defender character.

4) Take the characters out of their comfort zone. If you have mostly ranged strikers put an area that is foggy so they can't shoot from a distance. Does your defender normally run ahead and pull all the monsters from the back rank? well lock down the defender (grapple with one creature) and then have a swarm of creatures go after the back rank. Do the characters normally shift around a lot, well fight on difficult terrain, or make the area unstable so that every square moved has a chance of something bad happening. (like a rotting wooden deck of an old ship, where every step has a % chance of falling into a crashing sea below.) If your players can't use the tactics they are used to, a standard fight can become a scary must run ball of nastiness.

 

[Rechan]

One possibility is to make the encounter less about the monster, and more about objectives.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Hi

My party is 5th level and they just killed their first dragon.
I want to throw one encounter at them in the near future that will teach them that not only is it ok to run away from a fight, but it might be necessary some times.

The current setting involves them sailing a small "borrowed" ship seeking clues to a mystery in a 500 mile long chain of tropical islands that runs parallel some 30 miles from the coast of a desert kingdom.

Has anyone had any success getting a hit-point heavy (4e!) party to run from a fight? I'm not talking about the 5th encounter of the day with all the characters down to zero dailies and 1 healing surge left. I would like to throw something at them that make them take notice, discuss it, and the decide to run.

There are a few ways to interpret this request.

Scenario 1: You just want them to run away.
This is easy. Just tell the players that they see a creature that has not noticed them. Call for a nature or dungenoeering check at DC 2. If they pass, tell them that the creature appears to be Demogorgon or Tiamat, and ask them what they do. If you give them a monster that they recognize in character, the players will run, unless they are very dedicated role players who wish to get slaughtered while fighting against overwhelming odds.

Scenario 2: You want them to consider fighting but to instead opt to back down unprompted.
This is very, very difficult to pull off. If it is not immediately obvious that the players need to run away, the players will almost always fight. This is not to say that the players kill everything that the DM describes as being something other than terrain. If the DM sets it up as a non combat encounter, they may talk. Also, if the players are presented with the setup for a combat encounter but are low on Healing Surges or otherwise think they need to find safety and rest, they may try to avoid the fight.

But in my experience as a DM, I have never seen any group of players back down when presented with the setup for a combat encounter when they think they can defeat what they are looking at.

The only way to make this work is to describe the monsters as looking like they will not be easily defeated and drop some hints that the players can expect to get killed if they try it anyway. Another thing that will work is to let the pc's fight one or two of a given monster, and see how tough they are, and then present them with 10 of them. If 2 was a close battle, they can do the math on 10.

This may end up not working though. Either the players kick off a battle and they are defeated, which may drive the less on home, or the players kick off a battle and they win. The latter may be worse if you want to create a sense of plausible danger in your game.

Scenario 3: You want the players to start a fight and then decide to run away after taking a severe beating.

This is a bit easier then Scenario 2. As I said, getting the players to start a fight is not at all difficult. However, as a DM I have never had my players run away; I always seem to get the TPK. On top of that, having all the PC's survive this scenario is likely. Players never seem to realize they need to run away (or surrender) until a few rounds too late. There are a few ways to do this though.

The easiest is to change the situation of the fight by adding re-enforcements. Do it gradually, but keep doing it until the players figure out they need to cut and run. Just give the reason to figure out that they really need to cut and run. This gets easier if they know the re-enforcements are coming a few rounds in advance. Also, try to make sure your players have a chance to get any dropped Pc's back on their feet so they can all run off.

Another way to do it is to use a creature with some form of Regeneration or Damage reduction. If you give the players a chance to realize that they are totally ineffective, they will run away on their own. As long as the creature does not have a massive damage output, this is a pretty safe way to go.

I advise against trying to pick 'typical' monsters that are just strong enough to make the players reconsider partway into the fight. This is the easiest way to end up with a TPK.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Lord Pendragon]

A foe that cannot be defeated is not a combat encounter. It's an RP encounter or plot device. Presenting a non-defeatable foe as a combat encounter only serves to frustrate the players.

I give the players an out-of-character heads up when they're facing a foe they cannot possibly defeat. "As you look at the fiery hellspawn, you know in your heart that it could kill you effortlessly." At this point, they know combat is not an option, so they switch gears. RP could include any number of things, from running away, to attempted bargaining, to one PC sacrificing himself so the others can escape, etc. etc.

Or I might then introduce a skill challenge to get away from the unkillable foe.

But the point I'm trying to make is that introducing unkillable foes as combat encounters is, IMO, a bad idea. It merely frustrates and punishes the players, to no effect.

This is not to say that running away can and must never happen. Dice are random. Sometimes an encounter intended to be difficult will turn very deadly. At that point, the surviving PC(s) can either stay and be TPKd, or run away to potentially regroup and retry.

You won't need to do anything special to teach them this. The first time they TPK, they'll get the idea.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

A foe that cannot be defeated is not a combat encounter. It's an RP encounter or plot device. Presenting a non-defeatable foe as a combat encounter only serves to frustrate the players.

I do not think the original poster is looking to hand his party an unescapable TPK. I do think he is aiming for the one thing that such a combat would be that you left out. Aside from an RP encounter or plot device, it can also be a Metagame device. Running an encounter that the players should, on paper at least, not be able to win can have a big effect on what the players will expect to see in future encounters in that campaign.

If you only ever hand the players encounters you know they can win, they will figure out pretty quickly that if they are in a fight, they can expect to win. But if you hand them fights that they are not guaranteed to win, they may end up being more careful in future encounters. They may even look for soutions aside from those presented.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Peskara]

Our DM recently made us retreat from a fight.

We were negotiating with some goblins to ally against some superior forces of orc cultists, when a large force of the orcs showed up.

We thought we could possibly take them, since we had a superior tactical position, but then our goblin allies chose to flee.

Without the goblin assistance, we realized we could maybe hold them for a few rounds, but then they'd find a way to surround us and we'd be toast.

The DM then gave us a skill challenge to flee and lose the orcs on our trail.

In another game the DM went straight to the skill challenge to have out PCs avoid getting pasted by a troll, while still leading it to where the higher level NPCs were fighting elsewhere on the battlefield. We failed the skill challenge after a few initial successes, but we managed to lure it close enough that we only had to engage it for a couple of rounds before reinforcements arrived.

I thought these scenarios worked out pretty well, but if you have the sort of players for whom retreat is never an option and would rather the PCs die than surrender, then it may be a very hard lesson to teach.

You might want to skip presenting it as combat entirely and just go straight to the skill challenge to escape.