Do your players hate it when...

[Bjarkmundur]

.... The enemy runs away?

I'm taking my current dungeon crawl and applying the Angry GMs 'Dramatic Question' and 'Source of Conflict'.

I have a simply encounter, a single mimic. I'm looking at my checklist and starting to think I should just skip this encounter.

1. What's the Dramatic Question?
a. What is the player's goal?
b. What happens if the players don't reach their goal?
c. Why is this scene important?
d. What do the players learn in this scene?
2. What's the conflict?
a. What does the opposing party want?
b. How is that hindering the players?
c. What is making the opposing party want to hinder the players?
3. When does the encounter end?
c. When the conflict is resolved.
d. When the dramatic question is answered.
c. When everyone knows how things are going to end.

Seeing how the mimic is a simple predator that will most likely flee and hide when outgunned, I don't see how this 5v1 fight is going to be interesting. Am I missing something? Should I cut this encounter? Is the mimic simply a boring gag that adds nothing? Is there ever a good place for a mimic in an adventure, outside the classic "it's not ACTUALLY a treasure chest", which isn't even a good gag.

1. What's behind the secret door?
a. To not get eaten
b. They die.
c. It isn't
d. Don't open secret doors.
2. The mimic wants to eat the players.
a. To feed.
b. The mimic grappling attack.
c. Hunger.
3. When the players run away or defeat the mimic.

I don't want to teach my players not to open doors.

This is the mimic in encounter 5 of mines of Madness.

Tl;DR Are mimics boring in a vacuum?

[MrStabby]

The thing that you are missing is that you are putting too much faith in what some guy on the internet says.

Some of it is kind of good advice, but a lot of it is crap. It all depends on the table.

Why are you fighting? There is the IC and the OOC answer. You are addressing only the IC answer not the OOC one. The OOC answer is that combat can be a fun part of the game and a chance to put to use all of those mechanical abilities you have got.

The issue is not to make a combat dramatic; it is to make the combat have a point in the game. Fun can be a point, just as drama can.

An easy encounter can showcase how powerful the party has become - especially if it is similar to one they found really hard a few levels earlier.

An easy encounter may not be about the encounter itself but to foreshadow something else. If I want to add a homebrew NPC "class" or monster to a game I will often showcase it in an easy encounter to spoiler some information about it's abilities before the more tactically demanding showdowns.

An easy encounter can tell a story about a place. How did the mimic get there? What is their life cycle like? Why have the other inhabitants not destroyed it? And "what does it's current form say about its most common prey?". If the mimic appears as a heap of scrap iron then maybe it tells players to be on the lookout for rust monsters. If it looks like a pile of corpses then maybe it preys on ghouls, and so on.

An easy encounter can be a challenge to conserve resources and as such it can give other players a chance to shine. If you skim over easy encounters then all you are left with are the most deadly where ability to spend massive resources is more important than endurance or efficiency. The only players that get to shine are those that excel in that remaining type of encounter. The stars of an encounter like this can be the fighters and rogues that can take it down whilst allowing others to conserve resources.

Basically run encounters that are fun. Thinking about "Drama" is fine but it is a means to an end not an end in itself. What type of encounter ensures that all players at your table have fun? Run that. What abilities do you want to give people a chance to use? Help them use them. End the encounter when it is no longer fun - when the concentration spells have run out, when no one has anything "cool" left to try. You can add drama back in - the sound of approaching footsteps; a mimic might not be much of a hazard but the mimic could make the upcoming hobgoblins MUCH harder to deal with if you are slow.

[MoiMagnus]

Mimics are useful:
1) If you want to instill paranoia into your group, have them check every door and stuff for traps. I've never seen it done in an interesting way in a D&D game. I've seen it done in interesting ways in non-D&D games using the "standard D&D universe".
2) If you need a treasor guardian (so the mimics are hiding in the treasure room to make a surprise attack, but there is still a true treasor in the room)

From experience, players don't hate when ennemies flees (unless you made them flee with a Deus Ex Machina), but they hate "useless fight" (so "the fight could have been cut in the scenario, nothing would have changed") and they hate when they have a feeling of "making the same fight again". So if you want a recurring ennemy make sure the fight feels fundamentally different each time.

[Unoriginal]

I feel like my players would hate it if the enemies always fought to the death.

Many enemies aren't self-sacrificing fanatics or controlled puppets. It means that they'll often try to book it when they can if they see they're in difficulty.

In the campaign I runs right now, I had a gang leader try to flee after nearly dying and two martial artists surrender as soon as the first one got hit by a Sneak Attack (although they both had more than half their HPs, they didn't want a fight to the death and getting skewered by a rapier was not a good moment for them).

[Pex]

Only when it's obvious the DM wants him to run away and nothing the players do can stop him for whatever excuses the DM can think of. It's fine if the players were given the fair chance but the bad guy succeeded in escaping. The DM should still give full XP for defeating the bad guy.

[CorporateSlave]

The DM should still give full XP for defeating the bad guy.

Yeah right? A DM who gives partial (or no!) XP for an enemy that escapes will quickly bring out the murder hobo in his players, as they desperately paste every potential enemy they can find.

An enemy who has fled has been defeated, as you say. Unless the retreat was a sort of planned plot point ("get them my minions, they must not stop me from claiming the treasure at the top of this mountain!") XP is in order unless you want your players to hate enemies fleeing (and start resenting the DM and rolling their eyes as they gain the upper hand in combats). In a case like this, they still ought to get the minions' XP obviously, but the main villain's worth can wait until the climatic mountaintop battle.

[Dr. Cliché]

Only when it's obvious the DM wants him to run away and nothing the players do can stop him for whatever excuses the DM can think of. It's fine if the players were given the fair chance but the bad guy succeeded in escaping. The DM should still give full XP for defeating the bad guy.

Basically this.

I think enemies running is fine. Hell, I think a lot of enemies (especially goblins, Kobolds etc.) would logically run when a given fight turns against them.

As Pex said, I think the only time it really becomes an issue is when the enemy escapes via DM fiat. Basically, whether because the DM likes them or because they're important to the plot, a specific NPC/villain will manage to escape regardless of what the players do.

It's frustrating for them because it removes all agency from their characters.

[MrStabby]

Yeah right? A DM who gives partial (or no!) XP for an enemy that escapes will quickly bring out the murder hobo in his players, as they desperately paste every potential enemy they can find.

An enemy who has fled has been defeated, as you say. Unless the retreat was a sort of planned plot point ("get them my minions, they must not stop me from claiming the treasure at the top of this mountain!") XP is in order unless you want your players to hate enemies fleeing (and start resenting the DM and rolling their eyes as they gain the upper hand in combats). In a case like this, they still ought to get the minions' XP obviously, but the main villain's worth can wait until the climatic mountaintop battle.

I think "defeat" does have to involve substantially inconveniencing them. Thwarting or seriously delaying their plans - yes. Forcing them to burn a spell slot for dimension door or triggering their contingency... no. Both sides used resources to keep the plot pretty much where it was. A no score draw.


Now if you "kill" a lich it could be either way in my eyes. They regrow under the city and you cost them a few days. So what? Or you kill them, they regrow on the other side of the world, they lost control over their army of animated dead, the siege on the town is lifted and supplies can come in... sure, the lich will be back but their defeat was genuine as it has had a significant impact on the game world.

[Bjarkmundur]

Thank you for all your answers.

I actually misread the encounter, and the mimic isn't just pretending to be a secret door, the mimic IS a secret door, and when defeated opens up the route to the next room. That gives the encounter purpose and far more interesting.

[beargryllz]

Of course they hate it

This is fine though, because hate is a good motivator

I tend to have the enemies abandon some treasure or clues when this happens, and I always award full experience points because they obviously won the encounter.

This gives you continuity in the storyline and grants opportunity for revenge or tales of the adventurers' prowess in battle. Dead men tell no such tales and generally will not avenge themselves

[Fat Rooster]

Yes; that's why we scouted out the outside of the ogre's lair for secret escape routes and blocked them before entering...

It was only on talking to the DM about 2 years later that they informed me that the ogre was intended to be recurring, and had a whole panic escape plan set up. He was moderately irked by our sudden isolated competence.

It is all about win conditions. If you are on an assassination mission, the enemy's win condition is staying alive. If you are guarding a caravan, your win condition is the caravan surviving. If you have been ambushed, your win condition is staying alive.

I'm not a big fan of how this encounter sounds, as it sounds like it wants to be an ambush, but is done badly. Bypassing it basically means killing the mimic, because the reward is on the other side of it. That changes it from an ambush (win condition is survival vs kill) to a battle royale (win condition is kill on both sides). The party's win condition is killing the mimic, because surviving is not good enough to get the loot. Ambushes in general are either trivial or extremely dangerous, meaning that they need to be used sparingly.

A better ambush would be the door behind you being a mimic, that withdraws if badly injured or the party manage to get un-cornered. Weak ambushes by stupid stuff like mimics can be dramatically useful for inducing paranoia, but that only works if the 'wander away' victory condition isn't available. It has to be a strategic ambush, rather than just relying on abilities for a surprise attack. A mimic in front of you is a jump scare (or a random PC death depending on power), where one behind you is a trap. At high levels it helps set the scene, even if it is quickly dispatched.

At first or second level it can be a legitimate 'boss' encounter to a treasure hunting dungeon. Retrieving something from an abandoned wizard's tower could consist of dealing with the local goblins to get access (sneak, kill, barter, or other), clear out the rats that infest the place, and then get trapped in the McGuffin room by a mimic. You might do something like "the door closes behind you", and the mimic grabs the first person to try to reopen it. It has to be the boss because it only makes sense as an encounter if the party is in legitimate danger, and the boss should be the most dangerous encounter.