How can I make my PCs flee?

Question

My players never run away or avoid conflict. Ever. I throw them ridiculous encounters, they will stay and fight. If I tell them, "You know you're not gonna make it, just run," they stay and fight and blame me, the GM, for the casualties. They complain my encounter was too hard etc. When I tell them they should simply flee if they get into something too powerful, they accuse me of railroading them. They once went to attack a dragon even though I told them that it's common knowledge that dragons are way above their level. They expect me to adjust the environment to their level. I don't. I think if you go in hell to attack a Balrog, he shouldn't be a level 1 encounter.

So how do you make the PCs run?

Answer 1

Give them options, or a hiding place perhaps. Trying to tell them out of game to run is (unfortunately) well into the realm of railroading. On that note, there is one option: Show them in-game that running is their best option. This can be accomplished by having a known-powerful NPC friend defeated by said baddie, or an appropriate knowledge check about them lacking the proper tools, or even displaying it's strength against buildings or other foes clearly more powerful than the PCs.

Blaming the GM for stupid casualties isn't a roleplay problem, that's a game dynamic problem. They need to learn, just like my players had to learn, that their characters (while special) are not unique, and not gods. Another option to this is consequences. If they face impossible odds and someone dies, that's part of the story. Also related to this part of the problem is an out-of-game discussion. Tell them that sometimes you just need to put in big encounters like that which are currently insurmountable but won't be for the whole campaign. Things like "you know that dragon that destroyed the town you all ran from? Now you're strong enough to take him down." Seems they want to play through combat to combat with little room for flexible plot on your end, and this is the problem you should address out-of-game.

By trying to get you to conform to their unrealistic standards on combat difficulty, they are in essence railroading you.

Answer 2

I agree strongly with LitheOhm, but to add a couple of things on:

Make sure they understand fleeing is actually an option. If you are facing an opponent that really wants to kill you and is faster than you or has good ranged attacks, you might be best off staying and fighting even if they are much more powerful. Then you have a (slim) chance and at least you'll die on your feet with a weapon in your hand. So, if you want them to flee they need to know that either:

1. The enemy doesn't actually care about them and will leave them alone if they retreat (or distracted, etc)
2. The enemy is much slower and has limited ranged options.
3. The players have some effective deception techniques (illusion spells, smoke bombs, etc.) that will actually work on this enemy.

You can also reward appropriate retreating beyond survival. Appropriate retreating is a correct role playing choice and could be rewarded with XP and other adventurers agreeing they did the right thing.

They could also see more conventional gaurdsmen and militaries being praised for proper strategic retreat that enabled a later major victory.

Answer 3

Simplest:

Apply the morale rules to player characters, too.

For example, the old D&D 2d6 morale check. Use the morale listed in the racial entries. (Dwarf, Elf, Halfling=10 if leader alive, 8 otherwise; man 6-11). In the case of human PC's, let them pick in that 6 to 11 range.

And then just apply the rules to PC's as well as NPCs.

Not so Simple

Convince them that head-on fight-to-the-death leads to dead PC's. start with just simply outnumbering them, and/or giving them a few fights that they simply can't win. After a few TPK's, they'll start to learn.

Or they'll get peeved and quit.

It helps to give a full XP award when they decide to flee an encounter. Also, if it was the right choice, a good RP award.

Answer 4

The "how can I convince my PCs to run" part of the question has been well answered, so I'll turn to the last bit: "How can I create a chase encounter?"

• The big problem I've had with chase scenes is that in miniature-heavy games there's not enough room on the map. My solution is to draw/print and cut out buildings/trees/etc and move THEM rather than moving the creatures; this is especially easy in vehicle chases. The PCs and NPCs move only relative to each other and the environment moves past them.

• Whether or not you're miniature-heavy, chase encounters need terrain. In a Featureless Plain the fastest guy wins. In a city advantage goes to the ones who can push through crowds without slowing down, who know the streets like the back of their hand, or who can dodge safely across a busy street. Many systems allow you to turn this into what D&D 4e would call a skill challenge.

• You have to keep a chase from turning into kiting. This means your PCs need to spend enough of their action resources on movement to prevent them from getting off a shot every round as well. This is a delicate balance that's really too dependent on your system and group for a system-agnostic post like this to deal with.

On a more general note: while you work on wearing down your party's insistance that the GM should make every encounter winnable, you might also try changing up win conditions for the party. When killing things is the answer to everything, your players will start expecting to be able to kill anything in front of them. So do an escort mission, or a timed event, or anything else where they can lose even if they kill all the bad guys.

(I know escort missions are universally despised, but I've run a couple that my party enjoyed. The key is to make the escort tough and interactive rather than a stubbornly forward-moving one-hit wonder--and you might have fun with an escort who is just as bloodthirsty and impulsive as the party, so they have to drag him away.)

Answer 5

Okay so here's your problems:

1. Most games are terrible at presenting threat levels. Absent direct GM comment, most games have absolutely no mechanics at all for judging how tough a foe is! Think of how amazingly dumb that is in a game where a bearded old man in a robe runs the gamut of possibilities from harmless old coot to literal god.
2. Most RPG mechanics don't make running at all viable. In a game with monsters/aliens/whatevers, most of what you fight will be faster than you and outnumber you, so retreat doesn't really work. Honestly this makes some sense from a game balance perspective, since if the PCs were faster than the bad guys, they could kite anything without a ranged weapon in complete safety. If you've got a setting-appropriate way of effectively fleeing (Get to the car/wizard/transporter room), then you can play that up as an available option.
3. In many games, a downed PC can be revived or recovered after being defeated. So even if a PC falls, there's a good case (and a fair amount of social pressure around the table) to 'leave no man behind'.

So #1 means that if you fight at all, you'll end up in fights with things that outclass you unless your system tailors encounters to PC capacity. #2 means that if you suddenly find out you're outclassed, you can't actually get away. #3 means that if one guy goes down, the whole group has every incentive to buckle down and try and fight harder (hey maybe it was just an unlucky break that downed their buddy) to stay in the battle and win the encounter. Put them all together and everybody's fighting to the death all the time.

I think if you go in hell to attack a Balrog, he shouldn't be a level 1 encounter.

So if they're level 1, why are they in hell? People playing a game want to well... play the game, and if your game's mechanics are almost entirely combat-oriented, they're going to try to fight things wherever they go, especially if there's monsters there.

There's another side to this that's important to consider. In real life, people get horrifically injured in fights, so aside from the profoundly stupid, people avoid fights. The people who can't avoid fights, like the military, try to mitigate danger through intelligence gathering, planning, training, and trying to get temporary numerical/positional advantages over their enemies at critical times.

All of those things take a lot of time and actual work. If you build your game around the kind of encounter environment where that kind of work is necessary to succeed, then you're going to have a lot more sessions spent evaluating the hypothetical ways people might do X than sessions spent actually doing X. If that floats everybody's boat, then more power to you, but from what your described, that kind of play is going to leave your group's boat at the bottom of the ocean. This is why for example Shadowrun is a game with a fantastic and interesting setting that almost nobody plays because ops planning boring but necessary.

Answer 6

Allowing them to make a choice between running away and dying isn't railroading. In a well-run game, all actions have consequences and sometimes that consequence is death. If they aren't prepared to accept that one of the possibilities of fighting a battle is getting killed then they shouldn't be fighting.

You should also talk with your group and see if you are playing with the same genre expectations. If you're playing a fantasy game, people can have different approaches to what that means with regards to fights. Ask them if they expect to win every fight. When they say "yes", ask them where the challenge in that is. If they still argue for winning every fight, then you could make every fight for two sessions simple and easy to beat without them breaking a sweat. Then ask them if this is how they wanted it and if they're bored. If the answer is "no" and they are enjoying it, maybe you've got different expectations about the game and should talk to the group about how that play style bores you as a DM. The style should be halfway and they aren't listening to you. As a player, if a DM said to me, "You can run away," I would read this as "I'm going to throw stuff at you that you can't beat and the consequences will be grim." I'd pick my fights carefully and watch what I said around powerful NPCs.

If my players pick a fight with someone way more powerful than them, I give them a "meta-slap" (for example, one player is hit once, down and bleeding). If they don't change their approach when presented by evidence, that's the same as saying, "I decide not to move out of the path of the oncoming train." They've made the choice. Now they have to live with it.

Answer 7

The methods I recommend using are the following:

1. Ticking Clock
   • Informant is only able to talk for one specific hour in a day
   • Baron Von Good needs an antidote
   • At high tide the road is flooded
2. Escort / Courier
   • Baron Von Evil wants to kidnap the Baron Von Good's youngest son on his trip between cities and doesn't care about the players
   • Baron Von Good's battle strategies need to get to the front line before the enemy attack
3. Both
   • Duchess Benevolent is a werewolf trying to get to her sanctuary before she changes; Baron Von Evil tries to assassinate her en route
   • Keep the possessed sword away from Henchman Rude until it is disenchanted/exorcised

Using one or both of these should hopefully wake your players up. The objective has nothing to do with killing to get the rewards and thus the "retreat XP" suggestions above can apply. The party gets no reward if they bumble it up and it could even make matters worse.

Answer 8

One means, in addition to some of the excellent ideas already mentioned, is to separate XP from combat all together. Grant XP in blocks, by your descretion, for the characters succeeding in their adventures. This removes any concern they might have that they are losing out on XP if they run. ie, remove any game mechanics that are in the way.

This of course assumes one is open to house rules. I know some groups will only play by the book.

Answer 9

My old DM used these methods when he wanted to show that a power was overwhelming:

1. Have the enemy appear in overwhelming numbers, e.g. hundreds of anhkegs, a dragon with eleven more dragons circling in the sky above, an entire army approaching from the distance. Or, use a single enemy who is clearly unstoppable, like a great wyrm or epic level creature.
2. Ask for a skill check to reveal the enemy's strength—Sense Motive, Knowledge (arcana) or whatever is relevant. Success reveals that the enemy is way out of your league.
3. If the PCs still refuse to flee, have the enemy defeat them, but captured alive. They may have to escape, or be forced into some quest. This will teach them that they can't win every fight without a TPK they weren't expecting. The second time they make the same mistake, they've had their warning, so don't be so merciful.

Some other advice:

• From The Strategemata: "Scipio Africanus used to say that a road not only ought to be afforded the enemy for flight, but that it ought even to be paved." Give your PCs a clear opportunity to flee unharmed and continue the adventure by another path.
• Make fleeing the encounter a challenge in its own right. The encounter is now about flight, not combat. The PCs may have only to reach some safe house (think Left 4 Dead):
  • Undead can't enter a consecrated place.
  • Vampires can't cross running water.
  • Huge creatures like dragons can't fit through a small dungeon entrance.
  • An army may be unable to cross a national border or enter a city.
  • The PCs only need to hold out or hide for a fixed time, e.g. until reinforcements arrive, or until sunlight forces the undead to retreat.

Answer 10

I have the exact same problem. One idea is to throw an under-powered encounter at the PC-s. The enemy flees, effectively, as they may be weak, but not stupid and reckless and have left themselves a backdoor.

Answer 11

In theory, fleeing should be something they do naturally. But if your players are seasoned veterans, they may have been conditioned to assume that any combat is balanced according to the rules. Even if they're willing to flee, they might consider it a loss.

To deal with this, I flat out tell them to flee. Before one of my campaigns I told the players that there were two types of encounters. There were combats and escape scenes. The win condition for a combat was defeating your foes. The win condition for escape was getting off the map.

The players accepted this and had a grand ole time getting chased across the city. I told them when they were in chase scenes at first, then I let them figure it out for themselves. Eventually they decided their cause was important enough that they went after a foe that had previously been part of an escape scene. It was actually a powerful moment from my POV to see them deliberately risk their lives at this point, something that's lost in a standard game, and everything that followed was pretty much the grand finale of the campaign.

Answer 12

If your players are completely unable to recognize and respond to subtlety, then you might need to find new players. Otherwise, a fun way to show them that it's time to flee is by showing them other things fleeing. Say the party is trekking through the mountains to find the dragon's lair. Villagers on the way can tell the party that they're headed for certain death. They might encounter orcs on the road that don't stop to fight- they just shoulder past the party & keep running away. Then bigger & more powerful monsters, all headed AWAY from wherever the party is going. Then show them the remains of past victims: munched and burned bodies, mangled, shredded pieces of armor, broken weapons, ghosts of former heroes, etc. If the party is headed towards their own deaths, make it explicitly clear that death is the only thing they can expect.

Answer 13

First, inhabit your gaming universe by other heroes and adventuring groups. Give your PCs new of these groups and heroes and sometimes let them meet each other and eventually fight in friendly contests. State that barehand wrestling contests have a big tradition in your game world, or let them fight in any other way where death is not at stake. Since most of these other heroes are stronger (some a lot stronger) than PCs in the beginning, the players will find out that they are not invincible. This is also a good ingame measure of development of PC's system stats - NPCs don't get levels so fast, so they will eventually beat someone who was too strong few levels before, but still it should be clear that some enemies are just too strong. If you really don't want players to fight someone (e.g. a dragon), let the monster wipe out a party led by Conan the Invincible who have recently beatten whole party by himself.

Still, some players wouldn't believe you will kill the PCs in real fight. This was my problem for some time - the PCs were regularly winning for too long. Fortunatelly, there were many friendly NPCs, with whom players had some relationships through year or two of gaming. Killing half of PC's favourite badass henchmen (heavily injuring most PCs was a detail) was excellent start of the best "hunted prey" scene in my campaign. Of course, you can't make this regularly, but it's the best way to make players slow down if they get too overconfident through long campaign.

This is apparently not your case, so you will need to hurt the PCs in other weak points. Still, life of a PC is not the best price of failure. An orcish warband might capture overconfident PCs and take their stuff. Give them opportunity to escape, and to retake their equipment, but let them know (in metagame level too) that sneaking and not brute force leads to success. If they will prefer killing as many orcs as possible, fine, but they will be cought again. Next opportunity to escape will be after the PCs will be sold as slaves to slavers' caravan. Then they will work in mines or on galleys, and if they won't manage to escape for the third time, you are free to kill them.

GrandmasterB's answer is good too - if system doesn't grant most XPs for dead enemies, it's OK, otherwise you should somehow explicitely state that running away is worth as many XP as a heroic battle would.

Answer 14

You should give them a reason to run besides their own safety. They clearly don't respond well to the classic "that monster's too big, you can't fight it" situation.

For instance: They've got a time limit to reach some other important objective. Example: They're trying to defuse a bomb or stop a magic ritual.

Or present them with reasons to run that can't be fought directly or quantified as a monster, at least not easily. Forest fire, tidal wave, a swarm of a trillion army ants, volcano, meteor falling, lava flowing, earthquake opening a chasm, etc. If you want monsters involved, well, put monsters there too, and then you've got your chase scene!

Answer 15

It's possible that they don't want to miss out on the metagame rewards, like XPs. Ask them if that's the case, and if so, make sure such rewards are available for surviving their foes as well as defeating them. Make the encounter not about "slaying the Balrog" but about "not encountering the Balrog at all", and hint at all kinds of in-character and metagame rewards if they succeed. It is already clear that failure is a quick fiery death.