"Stand and Fight!", Do your PCs ever run from a fight? Options

[The Question Man]

Hoi Chummers, I had a lot of fun GMing a running gun battle between the PCs and LoneStar Police and SWAT. With plenty of support from Drones, Matrix, and Magical assets. It was a blast. When the game was finished I realized that if I had ever tried to run that scene with any of my old Shadowrun groups they would have "Stood and Fought!" until either they were victorious, dead, or the GM interfeared.

Do your Players "Stand and Fight!"?

Or do they "Scoot and Shoot"?

Let me know

Cheers

QM

[Kagetenshi]

Standing and fighting against not-outmatched foes tends to leave dead players.

~J

[mfb]

i've been in all kinds of groups. my usual character and his usual partners are, quite often, tough enough to win against a surprising level of opposition. on the other hand, that same character and his partners have, on at least one occasion, looked at the current situation and bugged out. and when it was that character, a few other runners, and some college students against 5,000 shedim... actually, we stood and fought the first few hundred. after that, though, we ran.

[Cray74]

[UpSyndrome]

I agree with Cray, with the notable exception that they will often start to flee once it's far too late.

-Joe

[Kyuhan]

Didn't we have a thread similar to this a little while ago?

[nezumi]

My group runs even when the odds are on their side! I was running one of the jobs from First Run, where a group of Red Sams are ambushed. They had half the group dead and half wounded, and of course these guys are loaded down with top notch gear. But as soon as they get the chance, they grab the loot and high tail it. I was surprised.

[GrinderTheTroll]

In the words of Kenny Rogers, "You got to know when to hold'em, know when to fold'em, know when to walk away and know when to run."

My players generally know when it's time to get-out-of-Dodge.

[SpasticTeapot]

From my limited RPG experience, most of the characters I have known like to throw a grenade or two before running; if nothing else, it tends to dissuade people from coming after you.
And besides, nothing produces crispy & chunky salsa like a Delayed Blast Fireball in a room full of goblins. (AD&D)

[D.Generate]

Smart runners don't even get into gun fights but shit happens so any smart person is not gonna stick around and duke it out with the "law" whatever form that comes in.

Most of my players know that brute force will end thier life pretty fast. Some of the slower ones still haven't caught on that bullets kill no matter how much chrome/mojo you pack. Needless to say I always bring a couple extra character sheets with to my games just incase someone gets a bad case of Matrix-itis which is what i call it when bullets start flying for no reason and characters run into the fray no cover or anything. Now I'm not a cruel GM but if you do dumb stuff in my games I don't pull punches, bad dice rolling for smart plans are understandable, clocking out a receptionist because you can't come up with a better plan to get inside an office building always causes a bad day for everyone.

The New Big D

[Siege]

If your players can muster delayed blast fireballs and are fleeing goblins...

-Siege

[heliocentric]

The old group... well, the less said about them the better.

This new group has yet to get in a protracted fight. When the lead flys they bug out.

[DocMortand]

My group hasn't been together for too long - maybe 4 months, I think? So I haven't got a good read on their preference yet (of course my membership is shifting as well...) but so far they tend to stick to things to the end - good or bad. I think they've fled twice, and they usually left someone behind.

*shrugs* Of course my group also tends to be paladins, and sometimes beserkers. :)

[Speedy]

In my group, a buddy and I both take turns playing and GMing. I tend to make sure that people have their characters do what they would really do. (would your character really try that?) also, I have my NPCs think like I would in their place. They don't hold back. You can't be afraid to kill a PC if they get stupid. Fear makes for excitement.
The first time I killed of a PC I was thanked for it. We all loved the character and how the player played him, but it would have been stupid to let him get away with turning his back on a street sam with a pair of Ruger thinderbolts in the middle of a fire fight. "I forgot she was there" just can't save you, in fact it should kill you. (mind you, he almost survived the shot to the head, the tough little bastard)

[Necro Tech]

Our group tries really hard to avoid the "gunfight at the OK corral" unless we are getting paid a lot of money. When we have to do it we like to start with grenades and rockets if we got them and escalate from there. Fights with johhny law are the one big no-no. If its fight or get arrested we fight, but we use non-lethal and retreat while we do it.

[iPad]

My sig sum my current character up.

Sybiotics so eats.

Shoots to beet immediate enemy.

Leaves when the times right.

Also similier to what a Kowala does

I ran the First Run mission, the red samuri fight was great, they spotted the copter at the last second and manage to shoot out some of the rappeling ropes. The red sams put in a fair old amount of damage but went down in the street. The truck with the mages and cyber zombie lead to a rapid bugging out. Was hilarious when the invisible combat decker with the cyber zombie phobia fled the wrong way, and was even more terrified when it still followed him. After a run around an entire city block had to leap into a moving van to escape.

[mfb]

see, people always say stuff like "smart runners don't get into gunfights if they can avoid it". but that's not always true. there are some runners whose speciality is firefights--whose job in the shadows is to meet bad guys and make them die. for instance, the mercenary archtype. he doesn't have that LMG because he's secretly a ninja.

[iPad]

But he does WANT to be a ninja

http://www.realultimatepower.net/index3.htm

[BitBasher]

Most of my teams get in the fights they have to or need to and as a genral rule have no problem bugging out. Of course, as a GM if the PC's never get into a fight they have to run from then I think the GM is pretty damn unrealistic. Shit happens.

[RedmondLarry]

I told my players, early on, that they would have to learn when to run from a fight and when to turn down a job. I was not going to make all opposition be weaker than the characters. I was not going to make all jobs be good ones.

Then I gave them opportunities to learn these things, over the course of many adventures.

[BitBasher]

[draco aardvark]

I think the "stand and fight" mentality comes from D&D, where the only one who can flee is the mage, and he's in the back anyhow.


You'd think they'd turn down the stupid jobs - but they don't!

Now admittedly, my group did a really wonderful bang-up job of "get the researcher from this Ares magic research base, he's not awakened, just surrounded by mages using ritual sorcery to throw his projects into orbit." They actually managed to time things just right so as to not have to deal with any mojo-slingers and only killed one guard.

On the other hand, they really should have turned down a mission where they were asked to destroy as much LoneStar property as possible. The two who agreed to that one are wanted by LoneStar, DocWaggon, and a girl who summoned a force 8 fire elemental for them who they subsequently didn't pay. One of the two *lost* money on that run.

[toturi]

[The White Dwarf]

A lot depends on your groups "givens". To use tortui's example, most of his jobs arent rushed enough so a look day works (in this context anyhow). The last several runs I played in, the Johnson/Fixer gave out rush jobs that were take or leave.

We also tend to presume that theres only 1 run planned in RL, so if we want to game that night we take it. Its the GMs job to make sure he gauges the power levels of the run accordingly; some should be a bit easy, some a bit hard, and if the plot warrents it some should be darn near impossible. Rather than make the players guess, they trust the GM to just space it out.

That said, *I* tend to stand and fight when I play. But overall the players in our group run if they think they have to. I just like to see exactly how beefy I am when the lead starts flying, when Im playing a sam-type with that kind of personality, and that tends to be the majority of the time. But far more often than not, we are the initiators of said fights and tend to pick battles we can win.

Its when you get flat out surprised by Bug Spirits in a muesum carrying only a hold out and 4 bullets that you try to run, only to fail and join the collective... not that such an event happened to anyone I know...

[Crusher Bob]

Part of the problem is that the players may not know how to run away, 'technically' a retreat under fire is very hard to pull off, for a small force facing a much larger force (ie SR team vs a lot of cops) it can be near impossible. The action movies that most SR players get their tactical ideas from almost never show the mechanics of a breakout or retreat under fire.

Since most GMs don't know how to do a retreat underfire, they tend to have guys get away by fiat, rather than good tactics. This can make it very 'hard' for the players to run away, as they have never 'seen' a successful retreat, except with heavy handed intervention.

also, the I go/ you go nature of initiative in SR can make it very hard to supress some guys and fallback...

The other problem iwth running away can come from published adventures. In general, in a published adventure, when overwhelming force shows up, the PCs are supposed to get captured. So they will tend to get caputred via GM fiat, even if they do a reasonable attempt to break contact.