Running away :) [Archive] - Wizards Community

Running away :) [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
Rerednaw
02-01-07, 01:23 PM This came up in another thread and rather than hijack it I thought I pose the question here.

When do you run away in LG?

Here are the instances when our party considered running away:

1) Final fight. Party had overcome all the challenges leading to this. Combat begins (cannot negotiate, bad guys get drop on us as usual). Half the party was down because of poor dice rolls on our part and excellent ones on the DM's part.

2) Final fight. Half of party caught in trap and helpless. Rest of party trying to help them when ambush starts. Party cannot fly or teleport. Monsters move at Fly 50'. Fleeing would have meant on difficult terrain (half speed, Balance check all the way or fall down). Half of party has base move of 20'. And of course those left behind would have died.

3) Final fight. BBEG is a flying summoning nuking spellcaster. Party gave flight potion to best tank, who is promptly polymorphed. No cover.

The results:

1) We tried to act like heroes (stupid in a heroic fantasy) and fought. Party TPK (perma-death) at APL 2. For 2 of the players it was their first experience with LG.

2) Despite being at a massive disadvantage, party chose to stay and fight. Party wins and loses no one.

3) Despite being at a massive disadvantage, party chose to stay and fight. Party wins and lost one guy who dropped in the second round of combat. Given the cause of death, if he had fled, he still would have died. By staying he tied up the caster for a round.

I have yet to play or run a mod where the mod specifically states that the party should flee or automatically be killed, etc.
UMiskatonic
02-01-07, 02:24 PM I have yet to play or run a mod where the mod specifically states that the party should flee or automatically be killed, etc.

That's because that is never needed. All the writer has to do is include an encounter that is so CR-bendingly awful that it -will- kill you.

The reply will always be "You didn't have to fight it, you chose to"...

As an example, I've run into three epic level NPCs, and a few creatures that were 10 levels higher than I was, any one of which I could have attacked. Did I attack them? No.
UMiskatonic
02-01-07, 02:30 PM As far as running away, there's a good article on the wizards' site on TPKs and how they happen. Go read it.

....
Now that you are back, I generally run from creatures that I can't affect, or circumstances that are too dangerous to allow a reasonable chance of success. I'm more likely to run when the situation is not time-sensitive. If I can whip these guys tomorrow when I'm ready, then why fight today? If tomorrow means the princess is dead, then I'll reach for the steel.

Remember that you CANT run from things that are faster/ more mobile than yourself. There are two ways to adjust to this situation.

a) Have items that increase your mobility, like potions of fly, gaseous form, invisibility, or a scroll of dimension door.

b) Fight to the death.

And remember, if everyone hangs back to cover the retreat, then there's no retreat. It's worth coming up with the escape plan ahead of time.
solbergb
02-01-07, 03:05 PM I watch how a fight is going, and if it looks like the incoming smack is coming in too fast for us to handle it AND we can't seem to kill or disable or block off any of the enemy to cut down the incoming hurt, I start looking for escape routes. Disengaging is hard, you need to plan ahead

I've only actually fled three times in LG that I can remember.

#1 - advanced chaos beast hits our best fort-save tank and he starts mutating. The bard makes a high knowledge check and immediately cast xp retreat and flees. My monk picks up the tank and runs off with him, outdistancing the chaos beast only via superior balance/jump skill to get through rough terrain faster (as I was no longer light load). That guy had to suicide - as we could raise him eventually, but if he mutated all the way to chaos beast we'd have no way of recovering him.

#2 - four elder elementals get the drop on us (partly because we didn't use divinatory abilities we have to avoid such ambushes in a suspicious situation) and have our tank surrounded and most of the rest of us in harms way. Most of the party can't use most advantageous element against them because of a prior module's curse effects. One party member is 100% useless, a sneak attack rogue without UMD. After several rounds of harrowing combat, only one elemental is dropped, two wounded, one unwounded. I started directing traffic to set up an escape, got most of the party memebers gone and then went from full to single digit hitpoints getting to the tank (well into negatives with delay death) into ottiluke's sphere with me. After waking her up, we dimension doored out, but by being there to distract the elementals, the others also had an easier time escaping.

#3 - circumstances suckered us into an overwhelming encounter (although at least we had omen of peril warning so we had an idea it might be coming). Holy word banishes some foes and temporarily incapacitates others, but reinforcements are coming, about a minute away. We used the few rounds to do a quick loot of the area (mostly for information) and then bailed. Luckily for plot reasons, they didn't pursue...we could have teleported most of the party out, but not all and it would have been my monk trying to hoof it away from pretty scary critters on his own, plus they would have eaten a bunch of innocents we'd just rescued that were slowly walking home. At the very least I'd have had to make several telekenesis will saves to avoid being yanked back before I got out of range unless the critters got distracted by the commoners.

I've also had a few encounters where the party chose not to fight, but to instead give in, and quite a few where we talked our way or stealthed our way around the encounter.

The first two encounters were only difficult due to party mix and not being good enough at scouting type skills and not (in case #2) using spell resources we had available. The third was supposed to go like that, if anything we did better than expected. A party that went in without any divinations, augurys, omen peril or similar though might get sucked in, and if they get into a rescue loop you could easily lose everybody. Overwhelming encounters are always a touch dangerous in LG to write. As a player, you have to use sense and sometimes you DO have to leave somebody behind.
Istaran
02-01-07, 03:22 PM I fled when half the party succumbed to templated bronze dragon's Repulsion breath. Or rather, I tried to flee and died. Amazingly my 16 hp character tied up the dragon for 3-4 rounds, giving two people time to hide in a rope trick and two time to get out of sight and bury themselves in a sand dune. So the dragon coup de gras'd my unconcious body, and left me to be reincarnated a few hours later when the cost was clear.
Net results:
1) I died and came back with more hitpoints. (Gray elf -> human)
2) Everyone else survived.
3) We promptly quit the mission, realizing we were not, in fact, up to taking on a dragon.

Only other time the party fled with me in it, I perma-died due to insufficient cowardice. I cast swift expeditious retreat and only single moved (eating an AoO from a spiked chain wielding raging ogre barbarian) to regroup with the others and cast a spell rather than double moving 60 ft past them and letting them catch up. Half the party died that battle, the other half managing to run far, far away.
jstorrie
02-01-07, 03:47 PM I've had my PC need to flee once, and didn't give it a moment's doubt: three party members had been abducted, three were investigating in order to rescue. Blundered into an obvious trap. Spiked-chain ogres drop the tank and arcanist; CL2 paladin playing up to APL6 beats a hasty retreat at 2hp. I did regroup for a rescue, though, and managed to rejoin the party just as they broke out and rematched the captors, and we were fine.

But even paladins know it's time to regroup sometimes.
solbergb
02-01-07, 04:33 PM Actually there was one more thing....this was about adventure #8 for me, at my very first RPGA convention.

APL2, party is is waiting in ambush in the woods around a clearing. Two yeth hounds appear in AND all of the plants in the area go into "entangle" mode. Everyone in the party except my monk is promptly feared and entangled, except one guy who is just feared because he was not in the woods hiding (somehow I made all 3 saves).

I was polling other party members on whether I should just run and they're going "yeah, run away. It happens, we're gonna die. Go!"

Having fought a yeth hound at APL2 earlier in the con, just one, and it taking pretty much everything the party had to beat it I piped up "are you sure this is APL2"

Dm: "Oops. You guys are APL2?" Removes one Yeth hound. That left only one party member both feared and entangled, and me and the main tank (the guy not hiding) kept it busy long enough for the party to get together and kill it.

We'd earlier fought the APL4 centipede battle and the APL4 brown bear battle and were thinking "man what a tough module". Things got easier after we started actually playing at our level.
Bob_the_Theurge
02-01-07, 05:15 PM This came up in another thread and rather than hijack it I thought I pose the question here.

When do you run away in LG?

When facing something obviously over-CR'ed.
When facing something that your triad wrote that is clearly on crack.
When your tank goes down and only one member of the party has otherwise been able to do much more than delay the actions of other enemies.

Oh, and by the way: Dimension Door is Your Friend.
Japangirl
02-01-07, 05:28 PM When three people are dead and the bad guy is willing to bargain their permanent death for a non-recoverable TPK for everyone.
Akhamshyy
02-01-07, 05:54 PM When to run...hmmm.
How about when the halfling theif tries to steal one too many shinny baubles from the oversized lord of the dungeon. In the process waking it, raising an alarm, and causing one of the most stooge-like episodes of D&D I've ever seen.
Halflings (there where a couple) running with booty out of room. Dwarf trucking down coridoor after coridoor into encounters that have prematurely activated. The bard, his animal friends and cohort following. Other PCs breaking for it. The dwarf running back out of what is now a hall-o-doom of combined encounters, passing the bard along the way. Theif running into hall-o-doom, turning on his heel and screaming back down the coridoor.
I wanted so bad to just run away. But the hallways turned out to be circles!:eek:
I wish I had run about a minute before that.
Reska
02-01-07, 07:19 PM I run from Mobs. No...really..Mob Templates are the suq!
Swiftbrook
02-01-07, 08:36 PM I "ran" from a mod this past weekend. It was a hack-and-slash and we had a table of 5 at APL 6. I played my usual Ranger 8 archer. Before we saw the BBG or even knew he was there a trap hit the party fighter and me. I failed a Reflex save and was knocked prone, haven't done that is a loooonnnnngggg time. BBG was Huge, reached out of the room and grabbed the fighter. I stood up on my action. Before I could do anything else, the fighter was dead. Party now down to 4, and our APL also dropped to 5. We left the place, carrying out downed comrad.

Bad dice rolls got us into the situation and knowing when to quit got us out.

-Swiftbrook
_m_
02-01-07, 09:24 PM I run from Mobs. No...really..Mob Templates are the suq!

lol, i missread that for a second. I read it as World of Warcraft 'mobs' (as in, in wow terminology, mob is simply an npc / monster / enemy of some sort).

and i was like 'what, you run from everything?!'.

i've run once in an apl 2, because everyone in the party was either having their first d&d experience (3 10ish year old kids), dead already (half orc barbarian), or playing a 'curves up to be good later but has colour spray and charm person atm, neither of which can hurt this encounters monsters' (me).

once in a 6, against and advanced elite displacer beast (150 hp), and a VERY advanced elite displacer beast (200 hp).

i WOULD have run only one other time... but dimensional anchor saw to it that i couldn't.
ShinAkuma2
02-01-07, 10:24 PM I'm usually the one that's running headlong INTO bad situations...As a Monk, I've got all kinds of mobility, so I may as well use it to get myself into kooky messes.

DM: "You're going to hang from the side of the boat?"

Me: "And I punch it." :D
Drezden
02-02-07, 12:40 PM It can be tough to make the decision to run in LG, since the "norm" is to win all the encounters. You go into most mods assuming you are going to win.

One situation is when you are with a mismatched/poor/weak party and you don't think you are going to win the combat. I recently played a mod at APL6, where my 7th level archer was the only person capable of doing (virtually) any damage. The bad guys were summoning help faster than I could kill them. I was dropped into negatives, but then revived and the situation was just getting worse. 2 characters were surrounded (due to very poor tactical choices on their part), but it was either take 2 deaths or have a very real risk of a TPK. The 4 of us fled - but then had to come back the next day to retrieve the bodies and start the fight over. We managed to win this time, knowing what was coming.

Another situation to consider fleeing from are overwhelming encounters - which you will see more frequently in Interactives or Core Specials. I played an Interactive at APL12 last year - in the surprise round we got hit with 3 Horrid Wiltings, followed up by 2 Unholy Blights in Round 1. We made all 30 saves (they were low DCs), but still took a minimum of 100+ hps each. 2 of us had to use favors to avoid death. Sitting there with our 2 spellcasters and Rogue all with 10 hps or less and our 3 frontliners with under 50 hps - and with the bad guys unhurt (and with other nasty abilities we knew they had), we decided to Dim Door away. This was harder to do because the party I was with (and the players) were all tactical power-gamed players who aren't used to running away.

The only thing that made running away easier was that the encounter was an "open road" encounter that was incidental to our mission. So there was no point in trying to fight very, very long odds to accomplish virtually nothing. We Dim Doored past these tough creatures and still fully succeeded in the interactive. I have seen many encounters like this, where the encounter is one that can be run from without jeapordizing the overall mission of the mod. In those situations, a party should be more willing to run, since you can do this with little real consequences.

Daren
solbergb
02-02-07, 08:17 PM Yeah.

Of the cases where I ran

the Elemental fight was the least important encounter in the module, from a "goals" standpoint although I left a cart with irreplacible size large weapons on it that motivated me to beat up the BBEG in the upcoming interactive (he stole them, they were his elementals). We didn't recover the stuff the elementals were guarding, but the fact that it was there at all, and guarded was actually more important and we got out with that info. Plus we succeeded at all the other stuff.

The Chaos Beast encounter cost us only the xp for the encounter. It had zero bearing on the success of the module, and we alerted people sufficiently powerful to hunt it down and kill it so we didn't feel TOO bad about running away.

And the third encounter we were EXPECTED to run away.

So yeah. If the fate of the world or whatever hinged on the outcome, we would have tried to tough it out, and probably got stomped.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Rerednaw 02-01-07, 01:23 PM	This came up in another thread and rather than hijack it I thought I pose the question here. When do you run away in LG? Here are the instances when our party considered running away: 1) Final fight. Party had overcome all the challenges leading to this. Combat begins (cannot negotiate, bad guys get drop on us as usual). Half the party was down because of poor dice rolls on our part and excellent ones on the DM's part. 2) Final fight. Half of party caught in trap and helpless. Rest of party trying to help them when ambush starts. Party cannot fly or teleport. Monsters move at Fly 50'. Fleeing would have meant on difficult terrain (half speed, Balance check all the way or fall down). Half of party has base move of 20'. And of course those left behind would have died. 3) Final fight. BBEG is a flying summoning nuking spellcaster. Party gave flight potion to best tank, who is promptly polymorphed. No cover. The results: 1) We tried to act like heroes (stupid in a heroic fantasy) and fought. Party TPK (perma-death) at APL 2. For 2 of the players it was their first experience with LG. 2) Despite being at a massive disadvantage, party chose to stay and fight. Party wins and loses no one. 3) Despite being at a massive disadvantage, party chose to stay and fight. Party wins and lost one guy who dropped in the second round of combat. Given the cause of death, if he had fled, he still would have died. By staying he tied up the caster for a round. I have yet to play or run a mod where the mod specifically states that the party should flee or automatically be killed, etc.
UMiskatonic 02-01-07, 02:24 PM	I have yet to play or run a mod where the mod specifically states that the party should flee or automatically be killed, etc. That's because that is never needed. All the writer has to do is include an encounter that is so CR-bendingly awful that it -will- kill you. The reply will always be "You didn't have to fight it, you chose to"... As an example, I've run into three epic level NPCs, and a few creatures that were 10 levels higher than I was, any one of which I could have attacked. Did I attack them? No.
UMiskatonic 02-01-07, 02:30 PM	As far as running away, there's a good article on the wizards' site on TPKs and how they happen. Go read it. .... Now that you are back, I generally run from creatures that I can't affect, or circumstances that are too dangerous to allow a reasonable chance of success. I'm more likely to run when the situation is not time-sensitive. If I can whip these guys tomorrow when I'm ready, then why fight today? If tomorrow means the princess is dead, then I'll reach for the steel. Remember that you CANT run from things that are faster/ more mobile than yourself. There are two ways to adjust to this situation. a) Have items that increase your mobility, like potions of fly, gaseous form, invisibility, or a scroll of dimension door. b) Fight to the death. And remember, if everyone hangs back to cover the retreat, then there's no retreat. It's worth coming up with the escape plan ahead of time.
solbergb 02-01-07, 03:05 PM	I watch how a fight is going, and if it looks like the incoming smack is coming in too fast for us to handle it AND we can't seem to kill or disable or block off any of the enemy to cut down the incoming hurt, I start looking for escape routes. Disengaging is hard, you need to plan ahead I've only actually fled three times in LG that I can remember. #1 - advanced chaos beast hits our best fort-save tank and he starts mutating. The bard makes a high knowledge check and immediately cast xp retreat and flees. My monk picks up the tank and runs off with him, outdistancing the chaos beast only via superior balance/jump skill to get through rough terrain faster (as I was no longer light load). That guy had to suicide - as we could raise him eventually, but if he mutated all the way to chaos beast we'd have no way of recovering him. #2 - four elder elementals get the drop on us (partly because we didn't use divinatory abilities we have to avoid such ambushes in a suspicious situation) and have our tank surrounded and most of the rest of us in harms way. Most of the party can't use most advantageous element against them because of a prior module's curse effects. One party member is 100% useless, a sneak attack rogue without UMD. After several rounds of harrowing combat, only one elemental is dropped, two wounded, one unwounded. I started directing traffic to set up an escape, got most of the party memebers gone and then went from full to single digit hitpoints getting to the tank (well into negatives with delay death) into ottiluke's sphere with me. After waking her up, we dimension doored out, but by being there to distract the elementals, the others also had an easier time escaping. #3 - circumstances suckered us into an overwhelming encounter (although at least we had omen of peril warning so we had an idea it might be coming). Holy word banishes some foes and temporarily incapacitates others, but reinforcements are coming, about a minute away. We used the few rounds to do a quick loot of the area (mostly for information) and then bailed. Luckily for plot reasons, they didn't pursue...we could have teleported most of the party out, but not all and it would have been my monk trying to hoof it away from pretty scary critters on his own, plus they would have eaten a bunch of innocents we'd just rescued that were slowly walking home. At the very least I'd have had to make several telekenesis will saves to avoid being yanked back before I got out of range unless the critters got distracted by the commoners. I've also had a few encounters where the party chose not to fight, but to instead give in, and quite a few where we talked our way or stealthed our way around the encounter. The first two encounters were only difficult due to party mix and not being good enough at scouting type skills and not (in case #2) using spell resources we had available. The third was supposed to go like that, if anything we did better than expected. A party that went in without any divinations, augurys, omen peril or similar though might get sucked in, and if they get into a rescue loop you could easily lose everybody. Overwhelming encounters are always a touch dangerous in LG to write. As a player, you have to use sense and sometimes you DO have to leave somebody behind.
Istaran 02-01-07, 03:22 PM	I fled when half the party succumbed to templated bronze dragon's Repulsion breath. Or rather, I tried to flee and died. Amazingly my 16 hp character tied up the dragon for 3-4 rounds, giving two people time to hide in a rope trick and two time to get out of sight and bury themselves in a sand dune. So the dragon coup de gras'd my unconcious body, and left me to be reincarnated a few hours later when the cost was clear. Net results: 1) I died and came back with more hitpoints. (Gray elf -> human) 2) Everyone else survived. 3) We promptly quit the mission, realizing we were not, in fact, up to taking on a dragon. Only other time the party fled with me in it, I perma-died due to insufficient cowardice. I cast swift expeditious retreat and only single moved (eating an AoO from a spiked chain wielding raging ogre barbarian) to regroup with the others and cast a spell rather than double moving 60 ft past them and letting them catch up. Half the party died that battle, the other half managing to run far, far away.
jstorrie 02-01-07, 03:47 PM	I've had my PC need to flee once, and didn't give it a moment's doubt: three party members had been abducted, three were investigating in order to rescue. Blundered into an obvious trap. Spiked-chain ogres drop the tank and arcanist; CL2 paladin playing up to APL6 beats a hasty retreat at 2hp. I did regroup for a rescue, though, and managed to rejoin the party just as they broke out and rematched the captors, and we were fine. But even paladins know it's time to regroup sometimes.
solbergb 02-01-07, 04:33 PM	Actually there was one more thing....this was about adventure #8 for me, at my very first RPGA convention. APL2, party is is waiting in ambush in the woods around a clearing. Two yeth hounds appear in AND all of the plants in the area go into "entangle" mode. Everyone in the party except my monk is promptly feared and entangled, except one guy who is just feared because he was not in the woods hiding (somehow I made all 3 saves). I was polling other party members on whether I should just run and they're going "yeah, run away. It happens, we're gonna die. Go!" Having fought a yeth hound at APL2 earlier in the con, just one, and it taking pretty much everything the party had to beat it I piped up "are you sure this is APL2" Dm: "Oops. You guys are APL2?" Removes one Yeth hound. That left only one party member both feared and entangled, and me and the main tank (the guy not hiding) kept it busy long enough for the party to get together and kill it. We'd earlier fought the APL4 centipede battle and the APL4 brown bear battle and were thinking "man what a tough module". Things got easier after we started actually playing at our level.
Bob_the_Theurge 02-01-07, 05:15 PM	This came up in another thread and rather than hijack it I thought I pose the question here. When do you run away in LG? When facing something obviously over-CR'ed. When facing something that your triad wrote that is clearly on crack. When your tank goes down and only one member of the party has otherwise been able to do much more than delay the actions of other enemies. Oh, and by the way: Dimension Door is Your Friend.
Japangirl 02-01-07, 05:28 PM	When three people are dead and the bad guy is willing to bargain their permanent death for a non-recoverable TPK for everyone.
Akhamshyy 02-01-07, 05:54 PM	When to run...hmmm. How about when the halfling theif tries to steal one too many shinny baubles from the oversized lord of the dungeon. In the process waking it, raising an alarm, and causing one of the most stooge-like episodes of D&D I've ever seen. Halflings (there where a couple) running with booty out of room. Dwarf trucking down coridoor after coridoor into encounters that have prematurely activated. The bard, his animal friends and cohort following. Other PCs breaking for it. The dwarf running back out of what is now a hall-o-doom of combined encounters, passing the bard along the way. Theif running into hall-o-doom, turning on his heel and screaming back down the coridoor. I wanted so bad to just run away. But the hallways turned out to be circles!:eek: I wish I had run about a minute before that.
Reska 02-01-07, 07:19 PM	I run from Mobs. No...really..Mob Templates are the suq!
Swiftbrook 02-01-07, 08:36 PM	I "ran" from a mod this past weekend. It was a hack-and-slash and we had a table of 5 at APL 6. I played my usual Ranger 8 archer. Before we saw the BBG or even knew he was there a trap hit the party fighter and me. I failed a Reflex save and was knocked prone, haven't done that is a loooonnnnngggg time. BBG was Huge, reached out of the room and grabbed the fighter. I stood up on my action. Before I could do anything else, the fighter was dead. Party now down to 4, and our APL also dropped to 5. We left the place, carrying out downed comrad. Bad dice rolls got us into the situation and knowing when to quit got us out. -Swiftbrook
_m_ 02-01-07, 09:24 PM	I run from Mobs. No...really..Mob Templates are the suq! lol, i missread that for a second. I read it as World of Warcraft 'mobs' (as in, in wow terminology, mob is simply an npc / monster / enemy of some sort). and i was like 'what, you run from everything?!'. i've run once in an apl 2, because everyone in the party was either having their first d&d experience (3 10ish year old kids), dead already (half orc barbarian), or playing a 'curves up to be good later but has colour spray and charm person atm, neither of which can hurt this encounters monsters' (me). once in a 6, against and advanced elite displacer beast (150 hp), and a VERY advanced elite displacer beast (200 hp). i WOULD have run only one other time... but dimensional anchor saw to it that i couldn't.
ShinAkuma2 02-01-07, 10:24 PM	I'm usually the one that's running headlong INTO bad situations...As a Monk, I've got all kinds of mobility, so I may as well use it to get myself into kooky messes. DM: "You're going to hang from the side of the boat?" Me: "And I punch it." :D
Drezden 02-02-07, 12:40 PM	It can be tough to make the decision to run in LG, since the "norm" is to win all the encounters. You go into most mods assuming you are going to win. One situation is when you are with a mismatched/poor/weak party and you don't think you are going to win the combat. I recently played a mod at APL6, where my 7th level archer was the only person capable of doing (virtually) any damage. The bad guys were summoning help faster than I could kill them. I was dropped into negatives, but then revived and the situation was just getting worse. 2 characters were surrounded (due to very poor tactical choices on their part), but it was either take 2 deaths or have a very real risk of a TPK. The 4 of us fled - but then had to come back the next day to retrieve the bodies and start the fight over. We managed to win this time, knowing what was coming. Another situation to consider fleeing from are overwhelming encounters - which you will see more frequently in Interactives or Core Specials. I played an Interactive at APL12 last year - in the surprise round we got hit with 3 Horrid Wiltings, followed up by 2 Unholy Blights in Round 1. We made all 30 saves (they were low DCs), but still took a minimum of 100+ hps each. 2 of us had to use favors to avoid death. Sitting there with our 2 spellcasters and Rogue all with 10 hps or less and our 3 frontliners with under 50 hps - and with the bad guys unhurt (and with other nasty abilities we knew they had), we decided to Dim Door away. This was harder to do because the party I was with (and the players) were all tactical power-gamed players who aren't used to running away. The only thing that made running away easier was that the encounter was an "open road" encounter that was incidental to our mission. So there was no point in trying to fight very, very long odds to accomplish virtually nothing. We Dim Doored past these tough creatures and still fully succeeded in the interactive. I have seen many encounters like this, where the encounter is one that can be run from without jeapordizing the overall mission of the mod. In those situations, a party should be more willing to run, since you can do this with little real consequences. Daren
solbergb 02-02-07, 08:17 PM	Yeah. Of the cases where I ran the Elemental fight was the least important encounter in the module, from a "goals" standpoint although I left a cart with irreplacible size large weapons on it that motivated me to beat up the BBEG in the upcoming interactive (he stole them, they were his elementals). We didn't recover the stuff the elementals were guarding, but the fact that it was there at all, and guarded was actually more important and we got out with that info. Plus we succeeded at all the other stuff. The Chaos Beast encounter cost us only the xp for the encounter. It had zero bearing on the success of the module, and we alerted people sufficiently powerful to hunt it down and kill it so we didn't feel TOO bad about running away. And the third encounter we were EXPECTED to run away. So yeah. If the fate of the world or whatever hinged on the outcome, we would have tried to tough it out, and probably got stomped.