[DF] Solving for N

[Purple Haze]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I am not talking about PC tactics, I am talking about NPC tactics, which are usually predicated on a certain level of personal cowardice.

There is nothing more cowardly than a PC. And so it should be, NPC's in general face only one combat in their existence, PC's countless ones. A brave PC is a dead PC.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Purple Haze

There is nothing more cowardly than a PC.

There is also nothing more suicidally brave (or sometimes just mindlessly aggressive) than a PC. It really depends on the players attitude towards his character and towards the current fight.

[Stripe]

Originally Posted by Bruno

There is also nothing more suicidally brave (or sometimes just mindlessly aggressive) than a PC. It really depends on the players attitude towards his character and towards the current fight.

Agreed. I've yet to encounter a player behaving cowardly except when playing a character with that disadvantage -- and that's only happened once, and he wasn't very cowardly at all! XD

[Bruno]

To do more than just bomb the thread with an "I disagree!" and then fly off into the sunset, I'm both kinds of player, which is why I can say with full confidence that you can't generalize about this :D

I've played the character that charged the dragon screaming war cries (and died horribly). I was mildly disappointed by dying, but not terribly surprised.

I'm currently playing a character that doesn't technically have cowardice, but has established a reputation for running shrieking from fights. In my defense, the running is to get enough space for his ranged attacks to be more sensibly used, and the shrieking is to alert the party[1].

With my other characters, who aren't quite so black-and-white about how fights should be handled, I can be stubbornly homicidal if the Bad Guys have captured the Helpless Villagers and are in the middle of sacrificing them to Complete Their Evil Plan. Failure is not an option, and the timeline is so short that retreat is failure, so it's win or die. But if we're just doing your traditional "roving band of adventurers is pillaging the unsuspecting goblinoids tunnels" thing, discretion can definitely be the better part of valour.


[1] (and for comedy value).

[Anthony]

PC cowardice is heavily influenced by the in-game costs of being reckless. If it's "create a new character with zero experience", you're going to be pretty paranoid about high experience characters. If it's "create a new character with experience at the party average", probably not so much. If the GM routinely fudges so death is very unlikely, even less so.

NPC cowardice, by comparison, is mostly about GMing style, because for throwaway monsters it doesn't cost the GM anything to lose them. I typically try for some sort of fast resolution once a fight has become boring and predictable, and running away fits the bill.