The Player Psychology of Fleeing Villains

[FireLance]

Have they ever dealt with a fleeing enemy before?

Foreshadow you villain so when it bails, the players can say "I knew it the #$%@ was going to run" or even plan ahead for it.

These two posts touch on the two questions that I wanted to ask:

1. Was this the first time that any enemy fled from a fight?

2. If it was the first time that an enemy fled, how much indication did you give to the players that the dragon was about to run away?

If it was the first time that any enemy fled, and the dragon simply ran away without warning, you may simply have stumbled across one of the hidden assumptions that your players had about your game.

As for your question, I wouldn't generalize whether players will like it in the long run when enemies flee: there are those who do and there are those who don't. The first, most important question is whether you want the enemies to flee or not. If it isn't important to you whether your monsters flee or not, then give the players what they want. If you do want the monsters to flee, then find players who can live with that.

Frankly, I think this would be a good opportunity to find out from your players why they reacted the way they did and what are their expectations of your game. Hopefully, if your game styles are not too divergent, you can find a happy medium and keep playing.

 

[Guest 85555]

I've honesty never seen this come up in my own games. It would never occur to me to get angry over a monster or villain fleeing to survive (especially something as intelligent as a dragon).

 

[Virel]

The dragon should be MORE dangerous next time around and at full hit points. If the dragon has an intelligence above moron, it won't engage a party that beat it on their terms like it did last time.

As other poster said, who cares if they don't like the fact the dragon plays for keeps.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I remember, back when 3e was still kind of new and slightly shiny, really pissing my players off at an old red dragon.

The campaign centered around retaking a dwarfen mine, and every time they camped the bastiche would attempt a Spot check, and if it spotted them it would flame the camp once, maybe grab a horse (dead or alive) then fly off.

It never hung around, it never gave them a stand up fight, never mocked them, but it would do this every single time.

The equivalent of taking a potshot. It just wanted them to leave. If it killed one of them (and it happened a couple of times, early on) then oh well. If the horses scattered, then so much the better.

Gods they hated that dragon....

They eventually tracked it to its lair, did battle... then it fled, and they discovered that it had already moved its hoard... it had pretty much just stayed around to be a jerk.

Still, they got the reward for retaking the mine, they got the XP for defeating the dragon, the treasure balanced at the end of the day, but gods, they hated that dragon....

Sad thing is that they could have just bribed it to leave, or even to leave the dwarfs alone, if they had ever tried talking to it.

The Auld Grump

 

[Havrik Stoneskimmer]

So... an update:

One of my players (the one with the most furrowed brow and narrowed eyes) quit the game today. I think this was a long time coming, and the way this dragon encounter played out was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

This player is more of an "old school" type of player (he runs an old school megadungeon campaign that I am a player in) and the length of combat in 4e was just not working for him. I think that is a valid personal perspective although I really enjoy the tactical nature of 4e combat and find "old school" combat pretty boring most of the time, especially if you're not a fighter or cleric. So I think we just have irreconcilable differences on this one. We are friends and I don't take this too personally; I don't want him to waste his time on a game that isn't giving him enough enjoyment.

Specifically, his feeling about "losing the kill" was that if a fight was going to take two hours to play, it is completely unsatisfying to have the enemy get away at the end (S'mon alluded to this a few posts up). And he said, if the dragon was just going to flee anyway, why couldn't it have just done it an hour earlier?

There were some other things bothering him like perceived railroading (which is all in the eye of the beholder, but that's the only place it matters) and discomfort with the, uh, glee that I apparently take when the monsters roll well. Of course, I also cheer when the players pull off a nice move, too. But like I said, I think these all come to differences in preferred playing style.

I'm hoping my other players are interested in continuing the campaign without him (they were pretty unhappy about losing the kill, but don't think any of them were as disgruntled as the one who quit). Assuming we do continue, I'll definitely incorporate some of the advice in this thread when the rematch with the dragon inevitably comes.

As with just everything in life, the trickiest parts of D&D are the interpersonal relationships!

 

[S'mon]

Specifically, his feeling about "losing the kill" was that if a fight was going to take two hours to play, it is completely unsatisfying to have the enemy get away at the end (S'mon alluded to this a few posts up). And he said, if the dragon was just going to flee anyway, why couldn't it have just done it an hour earlier?

Yeah, I tend to sympathise with your lost player - I played in a terribly grindy battle with a dragon a week or so ago, by the end I was desperate for it to be over. As DM I find halving all the monster hp seems to solve this problem very well, I use more or higher level monsters to keep the threat level up; battles can still take a long time but never feel grindy IME. And like I said, I often have foes flee but I keep an eye on stuff like flight rules if they seem to make escape implausibly easy. That said, I love 4e, I reckon it's now my favourite system ever.

 

[S'mon]

There were some other things bothering him like perceived railroading (which is all in the eye of the beholder, but that's the only place it matters) and discomfort with the, uh, glee that I apparently take when the monsters roll well. Of course, I also cheer when the players pull off a nice move, too. But like I said, I think these all come to differences in preferred playing style.

I'm exactly the same as you - I tend to cheer both monster crits & PC crits. I haven't generally had any problem with resentful players though, even when I TPK them.

 

[MarkB]

I think there's a difference between just "bad guys getting away" and "bad guys getting away with it". If you know the villain has long-term plans, then when he gets away, it means he's going to be able to keep on putting those plans into motion - and since you failed to stop him, you share responsibility for the effects of those plans.

There's also a matter of degree. I recall one DM in a high-level 3.5e game tended to let his villains get away so frequently that we ended up in something of an arms race. By the end of it, we were loaded up on Forcecages and Dimensional Anchors to counter the enemies' last-gasp Gaseous Form potions and Plane Shift scrolls. I think we had more escape-prevention spells memorised than normal combat spells.

I recall once storming out of a game because he'd had his vampire villain pre-emptively activate an anti-magic amulet to counter my Cleric's 1/day Greater Turning, then had him fly right past my character under the effect of a regular Turn Undead when I'd positioned him so that it should have forced him out into sunlight.

I was a lot younger back then, and definitely less mature, but I still don't like to let the bad guy get away.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

I remember, back when 3e was still kind of new and slightly shiny, really pissing my players off at an old red dragon.

The campaign centered around retaking a dwarfen mine, and every time they camped the bastiche would attempt a Spot check, and if it spotted them it would flame the camp once, maybe grab a horse (dead or alive) then fly off.

It never hung around, it never gave them a stand up fight, never mocked them, but it would do this every single time.

The equivalent of taking a potshot. It just wanted them to leave. If it killed one of them (and it happened a couple of times, early on) then oh well. If the horses scattered, then so much the better.

Gods they hated that dragon....

They eventually tracked it to its lair, did battle... then it fled, and they discovered that it had already moved its hoard... it had pretty much just stayed around to be a jerk.

Awesome. I'm going to do that to my players the first chance I get.

 

[The Shaman]

The campaign centered around retaking a dwarfen mine, and every time they camped the bastiche would attempt a Spot check, and if it spotted them it would flame the camp once, maybe grab a horse (dead or alive) then fly off.

I did something similar with a 1e AD&D dungeon back in the day, only it was a purple worm - they eventually discovered its cavern lair and killed it, recovering the treasure they lost on the mules it grabbed.