The Player Psychology of Fleeing Villains

[S'mon]

In my experience, players hate enemies fleeing. When an enemy starts to flee, they concentrate fire on that guy. I hear a lot of "it's vermisilitude to have smart enemies flee" but that always translates to the enemies getting shot in the back.

It seems their thinking is that a fleeing enemy means reinforcements or revenge.

Hmm, personally I find PCs rarely pursue fleeing minor enemies, though they'll hunt down an enemy leader type. Likewise most of my monsters won't chase fleeing PCs for very long unless they're much faster & on clear terrain.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I don't know Havrik, maybe I just come from a different generation but I never once gave a crap about everyone's enjoyment. And I never fought the bad guy/enemy/opponent based upon what I thought the players wanted, but based upon how I thought the bad guy/enemy/opponent would really react. (Which would be in their own best interests, not in the best interest of the PCs.)[

I agree with this about halfway. I also play the NPCs as "realistically" (for lack of a better word) as possible. Yes, they act in their own best interest as they see it rather than the players'. They might or might not make smart decisions depending on how smart and/or well informed they are.

On the other hand, I do care about my players having fun. But I make sure to have players at my table who enjoy fighting an enemy who is doing their best to win. If they enjoy being let win, then they need to find another DM. I don't do that. If they enjoy a challenge and want to feel that they earned their victory rather than having it handed to them, then they're in the right place.

 

[S'mon]

*Pure style preference here, but I've found the more "real" it is, the less I enjoy it.

I'm the opposite, I'm always looking for reasons for things in the game-world to make sense, and if they don't my enjoyment saps away very quickly.

 

[Rechan]

I'm the opposite, I'm always looking for reasons for things in the game-world to make sense, and if they don't my enjoyment saps away very quickly.

I don't want to threadjack into a style/preference thread. But to explain my comment, it was more related to system and tone, not necessarily complexity and in-world consequences. I love monster ecology and things that interconnect, continuity and the like. My suspension of disbelief is strong.

I only see Realism, when used in relation to RPGs, refers to "Gritty" systems, resource accounting, players as relatively insignificant in the world, and efforts to Simulate real world physics, economics and so forth. For four hours a week I want to not deal with the nitty gritty stark reality of Real Life, and instead tell a grand story involving things Larger than Life.

"Realism" invokes the GNS issue.

 

[Ultimatecalibur]

After rereading the OP, I don't think it was the fact that the dragon fled, but their condition when the dragon fled that upset them.

If I understood things correctly, when the dragon fled, 3 characters were unconscious with near-death levels of negative hp and the remaining character in the bloodied condition. If this was true, then when the dragon fled it was closer to "DM didn't want a TPK" than "we barely won."

 

[The Shaman]

Basically, don't script anything that takes away from the players' sense of achievement if you can help it. There's nothing necessarily wrong with having a bad guy escape in a way that makes your players angry, but it's not a fun experience. Having the dragon just quit and fly off needs to be a damn rare experience, or the players can start to feel like the game is stacked against them. Having the dragon taunt your PCs for failing to kill it is, in my opinion, a big part of their reaction. It makes sense in the context, but remember that the taunting is coming at them from the same side of the table that controls the whole world. It tends to create an adversarial attitude between players and Dm.

All this right here?

Yeah, not at my table.

If a someone or something knows it's about to be bested and has the means and opportunity to flee, then of course it's going to get out of there, and if the chance presents itself, it may even toss off a few choice insults on the way out the door. I don't play intelligent or instinctive opponents as stupid without a damn good reason, and to be perfectly blunt, if the players can't handle both smart gameplay and verisimilitude in the setting, then by all means they should go find another referee more interested in their 'collaborative fiction'; in fact, they'd be doing me a King Kong-sized favor if they do.

If that sounds adversarial, it's because there are times when my role at the table is to play the adversaries.

 

[Jhaelen]

So what do you all think? Is it the duty of every DM to let a tough villain taunt the PCs and escape to hound them another day? Deep down inside, is this a delicious sort of agony for the players? Or did I just destroy everyone's enjoyment of tonight's game?

Actually, I think it's the DMs duty to try to portrait every enemy, not just major villains, in a believable way. Especially for intelligent foes that means you have to think about their motives and their evaluation of the current situation which should guide how they're acting.

This can mean that enemies flee early, late, or never. It can also mean that they aren't interested to engage in combat at all and try to bargain.

Having enemies flee when it makes sense for them to do so also happens to be a convenient way to shorten combat encounters with a foreseeable ending. I'd actually hope for every DM to consider this preferable to grinding it out!

 

[Keeper of Secrets]

This is a delicate topic.

Before I get into the 'fleeing' part, let me bring up a similar issue I have seen players grumble over: use of healing potions.

Since we're tying in the idea of villains acting intelligently, why would they not use every item at their disposal to fight, win, survive, etc? I recall being a player in a game where the GM had a bad guy drink a healing potion and one player went nuts. It was surreal. My own was response was kind of a growl but it was because it made it tougher on us. I had no real problems with the villain doing it because it seemed intelligent and it showed the GM was clearly giving us a challenging issue. But the player who went nuts, slammed his fists, yelled and just acted like a true ass. I mean, the guy was shaking in anger.

My own experience as the GM involves supers games. I run supers more than anything else and I feel it is a common theme for villains in comics to slip away. That is kind of a thing they do. Further, ones that have illusion powers use them to their advantage and so on. A few weeks ago a team of villains really were quite bright and kept their powerful illusionist in hiding. Once things went poorly for the villains, the illusionist used her illusion abilities to create an illusion of police showing up to arrest the bad guys, allowing them to slip away with a phantom escort. I gave chances to detect the illusion, showed some strange actions with the police, etc. Some of these players got really angry at the end of the session and stormed out, leaving a bad taste in my mouth for a few weeks.

Half the players thought it was clever and the other half thought I was playing dirty pool. We never really had a discussion to resolve it but things calmed down. But based upon that, I am sure hesitant to try anything like that again due to backlash, which is unfortunate since I felt it was within their scheming, a reasonable tactic and one which was 'fair' as they got several chances to detect it. (Added was the fact that a week or two later the characters would get another shot at them as the final arc of the story involved the characters tracking them down.)

I guess what really bothered me was the fact that we have been gaming together a long time, and I have always shown a propensity for fairness and equality. The accusations of unfairness by a few of them really bothered me and left me upset for about a week over the whole thing.

So to bring it full circle, I can certainly understand why the green dragon slipped away and feel your pain for having players who felt you 'stole their kill.'

 

[Barastrondo]

There's a line between "The villain would realistically do whatever it takes to survive" and "I as GM will do whatever it takes to keep my villain alive." Even if you've never crossed that line before in your lives, odds still are that unless all your players are people you personally recruited to gaming, somebody at the table has experienced the latter. And then even if you have a villain work to survive via the noblest of intentions, it can still remind the PCs of a villain that survived because of GM protection. And flashbacks to moments of being powerless aren't enjoyable. And maybe you don't care if the players enjoy themselves, but if you do, it's something to keep in mind.

I favor the tactic described in "The Villain's Fault". Yes, villains will flee, or try to protect themselves, or work to take chances. That does not mean, however, that they take the optimal choice in every situation. Sometimes they might put themselves at risk from stupid pride even if I as GM say "If he were wiser he wouldn't do that". Sometimes they may try to flee immediately, leaving their subordinates behind and perhaps engendering some betrayal. For one, I think it's more realistic if the players can identify flaws in their villains; for two, if they see them, they're much less prone to think "this villain is an extension of the GM's will." Instead they think of the villain as an entity unto himself, a personality in the world. That's pretty valuable.

 

[Rechan]

At this talk of "use tactics to win at any cost that seems realistic".

The villain poisons the PCs with a strong sleeping drug. He then kills them in their sleep. Or casts a sleep spell on the guard on duty and then murders everyone in their sleep.

Sure it's realistic, effective, and if it works why wouldn't he do that? But I would never think of doing that because the players would feed me my dice.