Hello everyone!

How do you handle running away from combat. Let's say the evil villain decides she's had enough, and decides to flee. She'd have to disengage, and then she's out of movement, unless she wants to spend fatigue i.e. get damage. Next player's turn comes up, he spends a maneuver, and they're engaged again. Other players swarm in and that's it for the villain.

So the villain has two options: a) run herself to death, or b) be swarmed. And that makes me sad.

Maybe Perform a Stunt could be used to run away? If so, then what? How to tell if she's gotten away?

Thanks!

End encounter mode, story mode begins, bad guy runs away. Or invent some other plot change (change of weather, darkness, allies appearing, ...) that allows her to escape. There's no need to make it more complicated than that. If the NPC needs to escape for the story you shouldn't feel bad about using some GM fiat.

Or if you really want to complicate things you could invent actions for the NPC's that help her escape. If you want it to be an open-ended situation I guess you could let the encounter change into a pursuit-encounter with opposed athletics checks and a progress tracker.

I think you have to largely base it on the situation. If the villain is being swarmed by the PC's I don't think she should get a hand wave to be able to run away. That cheats the PC's. If on the other hand she's at the fringe of combat or not even really involved yet then it's easy enough to set a story event where the PC's lose track of her and she buggers off in the mix.

Mechanically if she's in combat she would need to outrun the PC's. But since she's just running away she can burn as much fatigue as she wants on movement actions. Once she's out of range of the PC's she's off the grid and you don't have to worry about her at that point.

The fact that NPCs take wounds instead of fatigue is both a blessing and a curse. If they're just taking a couple little extra moves, wounds are much nastier than fatigue. But, if the NPC hasn't been hurt too bad yet, they could run far enough and fast enough a PC can't catch them without being KO'd (or at least severely handicapped) by fatigue. The NPC has to go for broke. If they underestimate the fatigue levels of the PC, someone will catch them, and they probably won't have the extra wounds available to try it again.

Or, depending on your group and situation, you may be able to just be candid about it. "Since this is the first fight of this adventure, the bad guy escapes behind a screen of mooks, and dissapears into the night. You'll be seeing him again later." Some players dig that, because it makes for a good story. Others feel cheated, because you bent the rules. As with all things RPG, you'll have the best results if you get to know your players really well.

Depends on the NPC. The NPC's take wounds rule is more for the nameless unimportant NPC's. You may optionally use fatigue and stress for more important NPCs, which I would think the big bad villain would qualify as.

Just thinking another way to handle this could be using the trackers.

If the Goal of the NPC is to get away you could setup a tracker with say 10 pieces on it. If the PC's haven't gotten to her in 10 rounds she gets away, if they have, well, you may need to create a new villain. While this doesn't really answer your original question and may not give you the results you want. It would certainly be dramatic and tension building.

If you want to run away, it's useful to have somebody cover your retreat. A villain would need a bunch of flunkies to engage the PCs. Then the villain is free to disengage. Any PC who wants to engage him, has to disengage from the flunkies first, and then burn fatigue.

Kryyst said:

Not that it matters, but per the main boxed set it's actually all NPCs. "Enemies do not suffer stress or fatigue the way player characters do. An effect that would force an enemy to suffer stress or fatigue inflicts an equal number of wounds instead." Page 46 of the Tome of Adventure.

There's a specific exception made for Nemesis NPCs in the GM's toolkit, but nowhere does it say that all named characters must be Nemesis-level. Nor do I know if the OP has the GM's toolkit.

That said, I certainly wouldn't ever fault a GM for deciding a particular NPC was important enough or nuanced enough to use fatigue and stress just like a PC or a Nemesis.

I can also see situations where an NPC might start out as just the "miniboss" of a particular encounter or adventure (say, just a "bigger skaven" with a few bonus dice or A/C/E points) and then grow into a full-fledged Nemesis after they escape and plot revenge. That'd be cool.

Even before the GMTK came out, I gave my named NPCs fatigue and stress instead of wounds. If he's got a 'name', he's typically important enough be be a GM-run PC (in essence), and therefore a Nemesis NPC. It's one of the differences between "Harold the Cultist" and "Cultist #3".

Regardless, if the Villain has a reasonable ability to disengage and attempt to flee I would stop the combat encounter (assuming no other combatants left), and enter into a chase social encounter. I'd set up a track for the chase, and roleplay (and roll-play) the chase to see if the PCs can re-engage the Villain.

What I do to stick with the RAW is queue a Rally Step when I want the villains to flee.

This allows both parties a breather in the combat and refreshes the A/C/E pool for the NPC, if necessary I'll re-roll initiative for the NPC. Then I just spend all of the remaining Aggresion and the free maneuver into moving away. Then I use the Perform a Stunt card to have the NPC run away, on extra successes or boons they get extra maneuvers.

That will usually get the villain far enough to drive the point that the villain is intent on fleeing. The player's are then free to try and shoot at it and give chase, spending fatigue as the case may be. In some cases they cease the chase, in other cases they give chase and murder the NPC. But that's as it should be.

Lexicanum said:

Good points. Solid way to handle it.

i like kryst's idea of involving a progress tracker, and i think it can be combined with what lexicanum said. plan the villain's escape (if he/she is important to your story) ahead of time instead of trying to improvise. but personally, i feel like the players should be able to kill him if they roll well and try clever things. mechanically, when you start a chase i think you should move away from trying to make combat movement into story movement. if i were going to just do a race between two copies of the same character the simplest way is just to make a competitve athletic checks based on agility where you just add count up who has more succeses and if they tie give it tot he guy deeepest int he reckless stance. want to make it more complicated, make more checks: a discipline check, more athletics checks, add obstacles, turn the race into an episode and use a progress tracker.

what i might try in your situation: i would plan that if the combat has reached the first event marker on a ten-piece progress tracker and the villain is still alive, call your rally step roll in reinforcements and if they aren't crushed before the progress tracker reaches its end then the big bad gets away. you move the progress tracker forward for every round and every chaos star the players roll (come up with some bad luck stuff than can ruin their day) and maybe backward for clever things players do to try to block the villains escape. you could even split the tracker if part of the party tries to abandon the fight just to chase the villain. but make it impossible for the whole party to give chase.

To expand on my answer, in my games the tracker generally gets incorporated if the characters start the pursuit. The Rally Step signifies the end of the encounter per se, which allows you to move into other mechanics, like competitive rolls to determine if the NPC manages to run away. And you can keep track of successes using a tracker.

How the chase is modeled was of secondary concern in my answer, since the main problem seems to be one of the players saying "What do you mean he's running away? He's right next to me, he's in close range!". Once the NPC has started fleeing (by creating a large enough range gap between himself and the PC's) you can use various things from just one roll, competitive rolls to continuing in encounter mode depending on what suits the story. For example, I wouldn't want to dedicate an encounter to chasing an injured goblin. If the players want to chase him, that's the kind of thing I'd say yes to.

Chasing someone like Adolphus Kostus (from TEW) through the streets of Weissbruck might be served better with a Competitive Check and a tracker. A group of NPC's trying to retreat to a hideout in the midst of a battle would probably work best within encounter, as the players might want to shoot and move and do other combat actions as they gave chase.

That's a tough one. The manœuvre system can do weird things...

It's unfortunate that there exists no official rule for running and competing that uses the same Fatigue system than the RAW.

Maybe use the Perform a Stunt card as a Sprint or Marathon card, where boons can recover fatigue ? So someone with good athletics could push more and longer because some fatigue would disappear as he runs.

So take a To 4 runner running full out: as per RAW he could use 7 or 8 manœuvres in one go. Just one short of falling unconscious. Of course, the round after, he would have to dramatically slow down. If he could use Perform a Stunt as mentioned, he might regain a Fatigue or two, and be able to keep a better speed the following round.

If the same guy was planning on running a long time, he would jog at 2 manœuvres per round and attempt to regain as much by rolling well on Perform a Stunt (or maybe the card gives free manœuvres ?). So if equilibrium is reached, he could run for hours... (the Athletics would get harder and harder as time goes by).

Other kind of situation, where the chase happens in a very broken terrain. Maybe ask for a mandatory Coordination test to see HOW MANY manœuvres you can spend each round ? (Successes = manœuvres, boons and bane = fatigue and CS you fall over ?)

Back on topic, if the enemy is engaged and turns and flees, I think the PCs that are close and aware can react and engage pursuit. Use one of the techniques above to resolve pursuit each round. The enemy has 1 manœuvre's worth of distance as a lead. Use a tracker to manage the evolution of relative positions using 1 manœuvre increments (makes a long tracker, I know... Has to be long enough to cater from engaged to over extreme.)

Unless the NPC is an athlete, he will have a very hard time getting away. As in RL, he will need to either:

1- Shake off pursuit by hiding/dodging in alleys, bushes, behind any useful obstacle.

2- Run faster.

3- Throw away gear to get lighter and thus lower the difficulty of the Athletics check (this check should be modified by terrain, visibility and armour/gear ! Not plate mail soldier catching up with a naked amazon !

Using these rules, things will look a lot like real life. The first rounds of pursuit are key. That's when you accelerate. A Tougher, more Athletic PC will almost always accelerate faster and re-engage the round after. In this instance, I would use 2XTo as the limit number of manœuvres for Critters also, no matter how many wounds they have left.

Too easy...

I had a goblin disengage from the players. He started to run away with a second manuoveur moving to close range and gaining fatigue. The players wanted to pursue. I had an opposed die check using Agility to see if they caught him. His AGI was twice the pursuer so it was 4 difficulty dice plus an misfortune because of the wooded terrain and another misfortune die from the Goblin's ACE pool. One success and they stayed up with him. More than one success they were able to engage him again. If they stayed with him, I would have forced another fatigue on each side and retested. He got away.

I would use the Nemesis character rules in the GMTK for an npc I cared that much about keeping alive.

(1) Invoke a rally step (as above)

(2) use the optional rule that NPC's can spend A from A/C/E budget for fatigue.

and

(3) Skip it all, after a foe manages to disengage make it a skill matter - competitive Athletics checks or such to see if escape works or foe cornered. The stronger and more agile foe should be able to escape weaker and clumsier PC's is the essence of matter. This also makes skills matter more.

It depends on how intricate you want the escape to be. You can:

• Just end it and story it up.
• Make a small track and make a few tests (such as my player were running away through a swamp, so I used a series of tracking tests).
• ...Or, you could look in the GM Toolkit and check out episode called 'The Chase'.

Depends on circumstances, time, and how big of an element you want it to be in your plot.

Dhobbry said:

End combat and make a progress tracker for the fleeing and and chasing pcs.