Standing and fighting

[Wolfwood2]

One reason that nobody has mentioned so far.

Fights are fun.

You get to lay out the grid mat and place your figures. There are clear cut decisons to be made and never any doubt as to whose turn it is and who should be taking up the DM's decision. You get to roll the dice and woo-hoo or groan with your results as it immediately affects your character. A good 90+ percentage of your character's special abilties are probably devoted to combat. Everybody can participate more or less equally.

Fights are fun. Granted most groups don't want only combat, but if there hasn't been any for a while then it's likely they'll jump at the opportunity to pull out their dice bags.

 

[FreeXenon]

I have had something similar happen. Players are used to being able to win pretty much all situations. There is not enough times when failure is most likely what will happen if they take direct action. PC's believe that they are invicible and think "Hey we get to kill critters for having the temerity of showing their face and then take their stuff.... Muahahahahahah!" If the DM has taken the time to include the encounter then we must need or want to interact with it...



Having PC's that flee or avoid confrontation is not normal..

 

[hexgrid]

Fights are fun.

Yep.

It varies by group, of course, but combat is such a huge part of D&D that if the characters avoid combat, the players are missing out on the game they specifically gathered together to play.

It makes for an interesting disconnect between the desires of players and the likely desires of the characters they control.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Two sessions ago, Pandemonium, a large cavern filled with bones that animated as soon as they drew near.

They ran the entire length of the cavern!

I also remember coming across a hydra as a Player when my PC was around 7th level, we had no cleric or healer except for a bard, there were only three of us, and we were beaten and weak. We ran like little boys from cooties. It was priceless.

PCs will only run if they know it is beneficial and possible. This means that the DM has to encourage it by 1) using encounters that they can't beat giving them a reason to run and 2) not always chasing after the PCs to kill them.

I think most monsters are played way too blood thirstily. Just because something can chase after the guys with weapons and armor doesn't mean they will. There are much easier targets.

 

[The_Gneech]

I have occasionally scared the players into fleeing without meaning to:

In one particular instance the characters were camped in the woods and a friendly pack of blink dogs wandered by. The wizard's familiar, also a blink dog, chatted them up and found out they were all off to attack "the ancient enemy" (i.e., a small pack of displacer beasts) that weren't too far away.

The characters immediately packed up camp and scampered. Granted, the party was only 4th-5th level, but I had merely thrown in the blink dog encounter for atmosphere (and to give the blink dog familiar some airtime) -- I didn't expect the players to assume the displacer beasts were coming after 'em.

-The Gneech

 

[Wil]

While not AD&D, last time group of players tried to stand and fight a pack of wolves (in Tribe 8) one PC was killed, one more severely wounded and most of the others injured enough to hinder them.

So, yes, I have seen players cut and run - when they understand that in the game that they are playing that even what might be considered a "minor threat" might hand them their behinds in a most unpleasant way.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Unless the monsters are extremely dangerous, we fight. (Wolves aren't that dangerous to even low level PCs, especially if they're picturing, in their minds, what a wolf can't do to someone wearing armor.) Fighting gives XP. Fighting clears opposition from your back, like when you're leaving the castle. Suppose the DM said that you get more XP for avoiding certain encounters than for fighting. Okay then, avoiding the wolves is so easy you don't expect XP for it, so we fight.

If the DM had described them with red eyes (or some other hint that they might be werewolves), the PCs might run. Or maybe scale a tower and loose some arrows and spells! (More dangerous? More XP!)

I've found low level PCs are, of course, more likely to run. They'll run from a pack of 1st-level characters they could easily defeat if outnumbered 2:1 - there's no way for them to know how dangerous humanoids are.

This means that the DM has to encourage it by 1) using encounters that they can't beat giving them a reason to run and 2) not always chasing after the PCs to kill them.

Unfortunately, #1 often ends in TPKs. It's not easy to make to make it obvious you should run, unless you use something scary like animated bones (wolves aren't scary to armored or spellcasting PCs). Furthermore, when should you use such encounters? Scattered randonmly 5% of the time? Only for the boss' lair, until it's time for the PCs to attack? The ancient evil's lair, which isn't part of the current adventure(s)? There are few cues for DMs and even fewer cues for PCs.

A lot of adventures should have you run and not even attempt to complete them. I'll give two examples:

Grasp of the Emerald Claw. Taking on the temple at the end required several days of campaigning (both in and out of game). It was obvious the DM was being nice to us - we were never attacked in our sleep (we set watches, etc, though), despite the presence of intelligent opponents who knew we were in the temple. Really, we should never have gone in there once it was obvious we couldn't get what we wanted in only one day, especially for the reward (gold). It's a 6th-level adventure, so no teleporting, and my character, the mage, refuses to use broken spells like rope trick - not that he had the slots to devote to it anyway. (I could say almost exactly the same thing about SotW or whatever it's called - the one where you go into the Mournland. There's no way we should have faced only one random encounter, which we did run away from, seeing how any monster in the Mournland is mysterious and you can't heal, either.)

Another example involved an adventure in Modern (a published one) - the PCs were storming an enemy camp. The number of opponents in the camp was very high, although most were of low quality. There's no good reason, other than player enjoyment, for the GM not to take half the NPCs and have them attack the PCs simultaneously. The PCs would simply die - have a fun adventure. Upon realizing this problem (compounded by a fairly poor map), I had to hand-hold them by making the NPCs deaf and dumb.

In most Modern adventures, I found it just a bit easier to get the PCs to avoid fights. You're not powerful enough to take on four encounters per day, which I'm thankful for. (Coming up with four plot-relevant encounters in a single game day is very difficult.)

I think players get used to hand-holding - if they weren't, they'd never complete a lot of adventures.

 

[Wolfwood2]

Unless the monsters are extremely dangerous, we fight. (Wolves aren't that dangerous to even low level PCs, especially if they're picturing, in their minds, what a wolf can't do to someone wearing armor.) Fighting gives XP. Fighting clears opposition from your back, like when you're leaving the castle. Suppose the DM said that you get more XP for avoiding certain encounters than for fighting. Okay then, avoiding the wolves is so easy you don't expect XP for it, so we fight.

If the DM had described them with red eyes (or some other hint that they might be werewolves), the PCs might run. Or maybe scale a tower and loose some arrows and spells! (More dangerous? More XP!)

Well actually, the OP described the encounter as being with "dire wolves".

Those things are the size of a horse and monstrously strong. (Strength score in the mid-twenties.) They're very fast and they get a free trip attack every time they hit, which they are likely to succeed on.

I think I'd rather fight your standard werewolf, on the whole.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Well actually, the OP described the encounter as being with "dire wolves".

Those things are the size of a horse and monstrously strong. (Strength score in the mid-twenties.) They're very fast and they get a free trip attack every time they hit, which they are likely to succeed on.

I think I'd rather fight your standard werewolf, on the whole.

If I were running, all werewolves would be dire ^^

They're nasty, which means they're even worse when you come crawling out of the castle with negative levels, few hit points, almost no spells, etc. Best to kill them now.

Were they in a hurry to get into the castle? Was there a deadline they knew of? Because if worst came to worst, you could kill them, get injured, and wait a day.

Heroes in books and movies often run from, hide from, and avoid unnecessary or dangerous fights. Why do RPG heroes always choose to fight?

They're alone* (and outnumbered), they often have obvious deadlines, the danger is often obvious to them, they can run to the authorities, etc. They have many cues and options not available to the players/PCs.

* It's rare for the author to make multiple main characters actually main characters. If there are multiple main characters, often only some know how to fight. Often they spend little time together - one's in Moscow, the other is in Paris. In other words, there's rarely an optimized combat party in novels, and of course little in the way of magic healing, either.

Even when there's a party (Band of Four, City of Towers) the magic is somehow nerfed so there's no awesome fireballs or insta-healing.

 

[buzz]

Heroes in books and movies often run from, hide from, and avoid unnecessary or dangerous fights. Why do RPG heroes always choose to fight?

You don't get XP for running away. Not in D&D, at least.

And, as others have said, fights are fun. In D&D, fights are the whole point. WHy would I have my character run away from any opportunity to, you know, play the game?

D&D != novel.

Have you ever seen PCs run from, hide from, surrender to, or avoid unnecessary and dangerous encounters?

I've been in plenty of parties that avoided encounters. Sometimes, they're obviously too powerful, and you need to come back a few levels later.