Worlds of Design: The Lost Art of Running Away

How often does an adventuring party avoid an encounter, even run away from one? This used to be common in earlier versions of the game, but less so now. What changed?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.
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“Run away, run away!” King Arthur, fleeing the carnivorous rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Do you ever have your character run away in video games? In most video games, because there's the "save game" mode, there's no incentive to run away. Try to beat the enemy, and if that doesn't work, respawn and either try again or wait until you're stronger. You can't do that as easily in tabletop role-playing games, where if you die, you die. (Well, most of the time . . .)

On the other hand, players from my campaign have been struck by how seldom other gaming groups actually gather intelligence, or run away. They'd learned not to fight every fight, not to jump on every random encounter, not to push beyond their limits while relying on the GM to bail them out. Fighting every encounter becomes habit with some players, to the point that they may characterize a too-tough encounter a GM failure, not their failure to recognize when they should bail out (or not even start a fight).

This is exacerbated by GMs who, if players won't take on an encounter NOW, will not let them take it on later when they're better prepared. In my opinion, this encourages foolish choices in a tactical-style game. It's OK when you play a storytelling game, where characters aren't really in danger unless the story requires it.

Perhaps another reason why running away is uncommon, is that there's work involved. Avoiding a too-tough encounter requires good scouting as well as good intelligence-gathering (such as interrogating prisoners). But poor scouting is not confined to RPGs; it was a characteristic of many ancient and medieval armies. Entire armies could be ambushed because of poor scouting (as Romans at Lake Trasimene by Hannibal). Roman and Macedonian armies at the Battle of Cynoscephalae marched along with a ridge in between, unaware of their immediate proximity despite earlier skirmishes near Pherae, until someone went atop the ridge and spotted the enemy.

I think part of succeeding, in military terms especially, should be knowing when NOT to fight. Think about combat odds from "Always tell me the Odds." If you recognize how dangerous combat can be, and avoid the most dangerous when you can ("run away"), you're actually helping out your GM, who has the difficult task of making combat feel dangerous without making it too dangerous!

Of course, in earlier editions of the game, one of the most exciting adventures was where you got lost. Then it's extra smart to avoid fighting. Perhaps if parties got lost more often, they’d be less in the habit of fighting everything. So what can a GM do to encourage players to avoid fighting what they should not?

• Emphasize the mission. A random encounter along the way may be worth avoiding simply because it doesn't move the mission forward. Which brings us to...
• Give mission-based XP rather than XP for "monsters" killed. If you give XP for every encounter regardless of relevance to the mission, many players are going to fight every encounter just for the XP.
• Let interrogation yield useful information. Not every time, of course, but often enough that players will take prisoners, and even organize cutting-out expeditions to capture someone, in order to gather information. If interrogation never works, who's going to bother with prisoners?
• Don't let adventure publisher control how you GM the adventure. Modules tend to assume the party will fight whatever it encounters. You don't need to do it that way.
• Or at worst, let the party get their butts well and truly kicked a few times, and they might decide to pick and choose their battles.

My question to readers: how often does the party run away in your campaign?

 

[Sir Brennen]

Also, NPCs running away is a valuable GM tool in forcing PC decisions on tactics. There’s been instances in PotA where an NPC getting away will quickly bring another fight down on the PCs. If they just had a difficult encounter, or are low on resources, they have to decide to risk giving chase, or bug out before re-enforcements arrive.

 

[R_Chance]

I always have to laugh when people try to pretend that this is something new or something that came in in 3e. It's not. No one ever ran away. There are MULTIPLE Dragon articles, go all the way back to the Strategic Review talking about this. No, CR wasn't invented in 3e. When I look at the covers of every single AD&D module, it states, For X characters Levels Y to Z. How could they possibly guess those levels and PC numbers? They were just magic.

Glad to know you knew how we played... except you don't. On the first level of a dungeon (the easiest of course) you could run into enemies from the 3rd level encounter table (this is in 1E, it could be the 4th level table in the original game, but it was pretty similar). If a rather squishy group of low level characters weren't ready to run away from an Ogre or three, well tpk. If you descended into the second level you could encounter monsters up to the 5th level table. Including young adult or adult dragons. Why the he** wouldn't you run? When DMing I would leave clues about encounters (charred corpses, bodies with their heads / helmets crushed flat, etc.), but players had to be bright enough to pick up on the clues. Most were. And, if it was a random encounter, good luck. You had to size up the situation and react appropriately.

The modules gave a level range, but it was pretty lose. I never DM'd any (I did my own then and now), but I played in a number of them. The encounters in those required the same type of calculations; fight, sneak, parley, or flight.

Someone mentioned Morale rules. Morale rules only applied to NPC's. Never to PC's. So, that meant if you managed to smack a group down about half it's numbers, there was a very good chance that the rest would flee. Regardless of what you faced, you generally only needed to deal with about half of it, barring certain nasties like zombies that didn't flee.

Yes, the morale rules only applied to NPCs. Including any you had with you. PCs were assumed to be bright enough to know when to run. If the NPCs were played well their running away could come back to bite you in the rear too.

It always cracks me up to see people paint their early D&D experience in such rosy colors. Oh, of course you ran away all the time... except, well, you almost never needed to. Sure, the random encounter tables in the DMG weren't level based, but the random tables in every single module certainly were.

It wasn't that it was "rosy", just that it was different. It could be brutally "unfair", and often really exciting. As for modules, as I said, I didn't run the modules, but given how often we got our rear handed to us I doubt they were as "balanced" as you think.

Did people just completely ignore the DMG and advice when they made adventures back then?

Nope, we read everything omnivorously. Just look over the random encounter tables for dungeons in the DMG and get back to me on how balanced they were by modern standards. They were "balanced" for players then because they knew they could die pretty easily and had to be ready to act tactically. We had all seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Run away!" was a thing. So was stealth, parley, and combat. It depended on the situation. By the way, in a lot of ways the scariest monsters were NPC parties, you had to try and figure out their level...

 

[Sir Brennen]

Nope, we read everything omnivorously.

You mean, whether it was meat or vegetable?

 

[Lord Rasputin]

If you, the GM are not skilled at using it for such, to the players... it is just a downer. It is just losing.

Well, yeah, but it is a roleplaying game, after all. To be a game, there has to be a chance of losing. It can't be too often, of course, since part of the lure is continuity, but it has to happen sometime or else there's no sense of risk, and hence no pride in beating a tough foe. And losing is part of the fun, too; I still fondly remember being on the receiving end of total party kills.

Many monsters are faster than PCs, so that makes it hard too.

This is a more practical concern. As it happens, this has always been true. Of the 49 monsters listed on the Monster Table on pp. 3-4 of Monsters & Treasure, 20 have speeds greater than 12", which is what an unencumbered PC would move. (An encumbered PC moved 9" or 6", depending on how much stuff s/he was carrying.) How did folks get away? There were options:

If the adventurers choose to flee, the monster will continue to pursue in a straight line as long as there is not more than 90 feet between the two. When a corner is turned or a door passed through or stairs up or down taken the monster will only continue to follow if a 1 or a 2 is rolled on a 6-sided die. If a secret door is passed through the monster will follow only on a roll of 1. Distance will open or close dependent upon the relative speeds of the two parties, men according to their encumbrance and monsters according to the speed given on the Monster Table in Book II. In order to move faster characters may elect to discard items such as treasure, weapons, shields, etc. in order to lighten encumbrance.

[…]

Burning oil will deter many monsters from continuing pursuit.

Edible items will have a small likelihood (10%) of distracting intelligent monsters from pursuit. Semi-intelligent monsters will be distracted 50% of the time. Non-intelligent monsters will be distracted 90% of the time by food.

Treasure will have the opposite reaction as food, being more likely to stop intelligent monsters.

So, in effect, your way of getting away from a fast monster was:

• Don't run in a straight line, and, if possible, duck through a secret door.
• Carry some things like extra food or oil and drop them, taking spending extra loot and taking an encumbrance hit until you use them.
• Drop some treasure, which means sacrificing XP.
• Drop something else to move faster.

 

[Aaron L]

I think a huge reason for this lack of running away by PCs anymore is because of 3rd Edition, which put the idea in players' heads that every "encounter" was supposed to be perfectly mathematically tailored to their character levels... with the corollary reason for this phenomenon, being that 3E introduced the horrible rule that the only way to gain experience points was from combat, thus creating a situation where the players started to consider every encounter to be a combat encounter, and one which was supposed to be tailored for them to win after a fairly moderate fight, to give them XP.

This totally removed the idea from earlier editions that good play was to run if the situation looked like you weren't going to win. Because, while combat was a source of experience it was a minor one, and the main source of experience was from gaining treasure, so if you could get the treasure without combat that was actually preferred as a smart, superior play style. It actually drastically altered the nature of the game into something where PCs became nothing but constant combat machines in order to gain levels.

As an example, about 3 years ago my brother and I started playing D&D again with the person who was our first ever Dungeon Master nearly 30 years ago, but now with my brother DMing (he started DMing about 4 years ago and has turned out to be amazing at it. And we were actually appalled at how his play style had changed over the years since we'd last known him, as a result of his playing nothing but 3E in the years since we had last gamed with him (rather than the 2E we used to play with him.) He used to be a very diplomatic player, preferring to talk rather than fight, and he would only enter combat as a last resort. Now he entered combat first and didn't even bother talking at all later. He considered everything we met outside of a city to be an automatic target for combat... and this wasn't just one character, this was all five of the PCs he played once we started gaming together again. As soon as we would see a creature of any sort in the wilderness he would assume it was a valid target and start rolling initiative and attack. Because his years playing 3E had incentivized him to assume that every encounter was another combat to give him more XP. And on the multiple occasions where this attitude got him badly maimed and nearly killed he was actually upset and blamed the DM for "not balancing the encounter for us appropriately." The idea that he should have run away if the fight was too hard, which once was something he would have assumed from the start, or that he should never have fought in the first place, now never even crossed his mind.

When our normal group plays we always plan a possible retreat for if the fight goes against us and we have to run. We never just assume that we are going to win and always know we may have to retreat... but unfortunately it seems that too many players these days automatically assume they will be able to win every fight they enter because "there are rules to calculate that stuff." This idea of "balanced encounters" is kind of a bane of the game, and there should be a totally different way to calculate experience points. I personally think that XP should be decoupled from combat as it was in 1E and 2E, with XP primarily calculated from treasure gained with combat XP relegated once more to just a minor percentage.

My idea is to multiple the XP tables by 10, and reintroduce XP per GP gained, but I haven't had an opportunity to playtest that idea. That also has the benefit of allowing the DM to raise the PCs levels by dumping treasure on them when he wants a level increase (as our DMs always did back in 1st Edition) instead of the current cycle of endless combat leading to ever increasing levels, leading to even more combat ad nauseam, with PCs ridiculously gaining 10 levels in less than a year of constant hard combat (I think it should take YEARS of hard adventuring to gain so many levels, and there should be mandatpry training imtervals between level gains.)

 

[Lord Rasputin]

Sure, the random encounter tables in the DMG weren't level based, but the random tables in every single module certainly were.

Let me look through my sundry OD&D/AD&D adventures:
A1: These did not have level as a component for random encounters at all, neither for which table to use, nor for how many encountered.
A2: Likewise.
A3: Likewise.
A4: As best I can tell, there were no random encounters in this adventure.
B1: There is no level component for wandering monsters at all; there's only one table, which makes sense since there's only one level. The adventure is a little odd as it's a training adventure, and there are lists of possible monsters and treasure for stocking. The advice on p. 2 actually mentions fleeing:

The monsters encountered will generally be commensurate with the adventurers' ability to defeat them. For the few that are too formidable, the adventurers will have to learn the necessary art of fleeing or else employ more powerful means against them.

B2: Mostly, there are no wandering monsters in this adventure, with the Goblin Lair (D, p. 16) being an exception. There, there is one option, which is a goblin patrol, always of 6.
B3: I'm working from the original version which Wizards had on its a few years ago; I don't have the other version. Regardless, wandering monsters are keyed to dungeon level, not character level.
Caverns of Thracia: The greatest of them all, this also had random encounters keyed to level of the dungeon, not to level of the characters.
D1: This not only did not have random encounters not keyed to level, they were keyed to size of the passage and side of the caverns.
D2: See above, except the shrine had only one table.
D3: Same as the last two. The vault has different random encounters for each terrain type, more like a wilderness adventure, but without the chance of stumbling on a lair, which makes sense in a published adventure. The stronghold has different random encounters on the main thoroughfare than the side streets.
Dark Tower: Again, random encounters are by level of the tower, not level of the adventurers.
G1: Random encounters are by location, not by character level.
G2: Random encounters are by location, in this case dungeon level, not by character level. Like the two Jennell Jaquays adventures above, this is exactly as the DMG has it, without the chance of encountering a monster from a different level's chart.
G3: Exactly as G2.
Q1: Wandering monsters are by level of the web, so like the DMG, with web level substituting for dungeon level. Beyond the gate, they are by location, like a wilderness table, without a lair chance.
S1: No wandering monsters, by design. There's almost no monsters, actually. You can die without them.
S2: Only one wandering monster table for the whole adventure, which does not scale by level.
S3: Wandering monsters are by level and do not scale for number or level of characters. For such an unorthodox adventure, this one hems very near to DMG norms.
S4: Outside the caverns, the monsters conform to standard wilderness adventures, with no lair chance. Inside the caverns, there are no wandering monsters.
T1: Like the DMG: level of the ruins, number encountered does not scale by level or number of characters.
T2-4: Outside Nulb are wilderness encounters (again, no lair chance). Otherwise, by dungeon level.
X1: As this is a wilderness adventure, the wandering monster tables are by location. Unlike most of the other wilderness adventures, this one has some advice about lairs, which it needs since B/X has no lair chance.
X2: Like many other dungeon adventures, this one is by location in the castle; level isn't important. Averoigne has a wandering monster table specific to the plane.

I looked at 24 adventures, and not not obscure ones, either. The A-series and S-series got published as hardcovers a few years ago, and GDQ and T1-4 got super adventure books at the time. One of B1 or B2 came with the Basic Set; X1 came with the Expert Set. Not a single adventure's wandering monster table conforms to being character level-based. You're 0-for-24; you'd be sent down to the minors for that.

 

[Tsuga C]

My question to readers: how often does the party run away in your campaign?

Many of us went 'round and 'round on this subject on the BioWare forums back in the early 2000s. It seems that video gamers expect to be able to beat every single encounter by using the right tactics. Even when there are obvious hints provided, they keep on trying to do the impossible because their character and/or party is just so "speshul". This idiocy has infected tabletop sessions as most pen 'n' paper RPG people also enjoy the occasional video game.

Back when I DM'd, the players knew to pay attention to hints in the scenery, from written sources, and from NPCs because I had no problem with letting oblivious play result in the bloody end of a character or two.

 

[Hussar]

/snip

I looked at 24 adventures, and not not obscure ones, either. The A-series and S-series got published as hardcovers a few years ago, and GDQ and T1-4 got super adventure books at the time. One of B1 or B2 came with the Basic Set; X1 came with the Expert Set. Not a single adventure's wandering monster table conforms to being character level-based. You're 0-for-24; you'd be sent down to the minors for that.

Huh, those "location based random encounters" are locations in the modules no? And the modules are set for specific level ranges no? So, right there, those random encounters are level based.

In the other modules, the random encounters are based on the levels of the characters in that module. It's right there.

But, hey, yeah, methinks that folks are going to pretend that this is true no matter what. I've had this argument too many times and I know exactly how it's going to go.

So, I'll just end with, in my experience, players in any edition almost never ran away. In earlier editions, no one ran away because the PC's are so much more powerful than the monsters that there's virtually no point to running away. But, hey, whatever makes you happy.

/edit by the way, @Lord Rasputin, I don't know what versions of those modules you were looking at, but, reading through those random encounter tables, you might want to actually LOOK at what's on those tables. They are 100% keyed to the level of the PC's. There's a reason that you don't see random encounters that are too easy or too hard on those tables. Yes, they don't specifically say that. But, that's exactly what they are.

You might want to go back and reread your modules. Every table conforms to the PC expected levels for that module.

 

[Li Shenron]

Awesome thread!

IMXP I have also seen few instances of running away from a combat encounter. Here's my spare thoughts on the subject.

- I've seen many beginners/newcomers whose starting idea is to avoid any fight before it starts. Some might be simply cautious or skeptic about their ability to handle it pretty much because they are new to the game. It always ends as they try to avoid the second encounter, and invariably another player jumps up and put them into place saying "come on stop it this is supposed to be a fighting game!".

- I have little doubts that 3e and 4e progressively shifted the focus of the game towards combat, and specifically towards "balanced" combat. A lot of players blame the DMs who don't comply with offering only winnable encounters.

- Most of those players who do try avoidance tactics (diplomacy, stealth, etc.) still do so believing that if it goes wrong who cares we just kill them.

- Running away after a fight has started almost never happens. It is too common assumption that every combat encounter is winnable, so the players stubbornly continue because even when a fight is going poorly they still believe that either (1) we are in fact close to winning but the DM isn't telling us, (2) there's a trick to win we only need to figure out, (3) we're just unlucky with dice but next rolls will go better. Also, it is much easier for a player to blame the DM or the dice or the adventure designer than to accept they had a limited view of the game possibilities.

- Sometimes it is objectively difficult for a player to guess how difficult a combat will be. A lycanthrope or a vampire is not a deadly foe in every single RPG system or movie/series, and character "level" is an abstraction that beginners have no clue how to compare with reality. So a DM throwing a vampire against 1st level PCs and assuming the players MUST know it's an impossible encounter is not really understanding that it's not that simple. And "clues" don't always work the way the DM thinks they do. But still most DMs are against doing the safest thing to do which is telling the players when a foe is too strong for them, because they want to keep the mystery. This is even much worse when the monster is something the players have absolutely no folklore reference about, like the slubberglubbershuck the DM has made up for the adventure... how the hell are they supposed to know if it's just a glass cannot or an unbeatable foe?

- Very few game systems features combats long enough to let the PCs figure out they made a mistake jumping into a fight they cannot win. Another thing a DM can do to help them is roll monsters dice in the open: when players see that a monster hits on a low roll, or rolls many damage dice, they have a much stronger clue than when trying to figure out from frequency of hits/miss. But again, too meta and the myth of "no mystery" is what makes many DMs not even considering this.

- Actual combat rules make escaping from a fight notoriously difficult. Most importantly, the books do not teach the players how to use the rules to run away from battle. I have mixed feelings about where the rules should represent running away be in the easy/hard spectrum, because fortunately I have never been in a RL fight myself so I can't speak from experience. I do think the initiative rules are at least a bit too advantageous for the pursuer, it doesn't sound realistic to me that someone who only runs would be constantly hit by someone who runs AFTER her AND swings a weapon, but that's what the combat actions and OA rules imply. So I think the key here is knowing when/how to properly switch from combat rules to chase rules, but again, the books do not teach how to do this properly.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I think a huge reason for this lack of running away by PCs anymore is because of 3rd Edition...

This totally removed the idea from earlier editions that good play was to run if the situation looked like you weren't going to win. Because, while combat was a source of experience it was a minor one, and the main source of experience was from gaining treasure, so if you could get the treasure without combat that was actually preferred as a smart, superior play style.

XP for gold was mostly removed in 2e AD&D, except as part of the optional rule Individual Experience Awards. If this rule was used then only rogues got XP for gold.

2e's standard experience awards are similar to those in 3e - in both editions XP are awarded for overcoming monsters, achieving the mission, and coming up with good ideas. 2e also suggests awarding XP for active participation, making the game fun for everyone, and not being disruptive. 3e suggests awarding XP for playing in character.

In 3.5 a player's new PC starts off a level lower. 3.5 DMG: "Under most circumstances, a new character should begin play at the beginning of the level lower than the player’s previous PC."

If the recommendations for tailored encounters are followed then 15% of encounters are Very Difficult and 5% are Overpowering (emphasis mine):

Very Difficult: One PC might very well die. The Encounter Level is higher than the party level. This sort of encounter may be more dangerous than an overpowering one, because it’s not immediately obvious to the players that the PCs should flee.​

Overpowering: The PCs should run. If they don’t, they will almost certainly lose. The Encounter Level is five or more levels higher than the party level.​