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The reality is; sometimes the PCs should turn tail and run. It’s not heroic, but it can be dramatic and let’s face it; overwhelmingly the PCs will triumph in every encounter. Our job as GM is to make the players feel like John McClane; gets his ass kicked at every turn, and wins all the way through. But retreat can be not only tactically critical, but narratively rich. There is maybe no better way to set up a recurring villain.

I don’t believe in the No Win Scenario. I think any encounter designed to force a retreat or a surrender is Bad Design. Rather retreat/surrender should be looked upon as an unexpected opportunity. Hey! I get a chance to set up a Recurring Villain! Awesome! Therefore the following rules serve two purposes; to arm the players with data to enable good decision-making, and handle edge cases like battles that are too long, or too tough.

Earlier editions of D&D were not as resource-focused. Fighting types could perform almost any action available to them from the beginning of the battle through to the end, just as effective at 1 hp as they were at 100. Expendable resources were mostly potions and scrolls. But now every encounter for every player is a steady whittling down of options. And there’s no good signal to let the players know which kind of encounter they’re in. But I think that making good decisions, like stay and fight, or run, requires good data.

Therefore I propose breaking the encounter into three Acts. Furthermore, I think we need a way to communicate these acts to the players to make it clear what their situation is. Many encounters don’t need any structure. But some encounters are dangerous and I think 4E makes it harder for PCs to judge how something is going to go.

I think all good design communicates to the player a Beginning, Middle, and End. So let’s create one for Encounters.

Act 1: What Are We Up Against?

Act 2: We Have An Idea How This Will Go.

Act 3: It’s Now Obvious How This Will Go.

The critical issue lies between Acts Two and Three. There should be a moment, though there is often not, when the players realize “We’re going to win!” Or “We need to retreat!” D&D has its roots in tactical wargaming where Retreat is often built into the rules. The players knew that if they made Retreat Checks, they could preserve more of their expensive army even in defeat than if they slogged it out. D&D has no such mechanic. But we’re still left with that tradition. Of leaving to the players the job of recognizing when its time to retreat, and then acting on it.

But this is Bad Design. It’s based purely on tradition and ignores the basic fact of inertia. Most players, left to their own devices, will always want to press on, even when it’s obviously not to their advantage. They usually feel like they have no other choice!

Therefore we, as designers, need to make these decisions clear. We don’t want to force a retreat, but we want an elegant way to communicate to the players “now is the time to decide what to do.”

Lastly, the players need to feel like, if they retreat, something besides their lives are saved. In other words, they need some incentive to make the right decision. Remember this is for situations where they are otherwise going to die. Otherwise retreat feels really negative. In real life, if may be, and maybe their characters would feel that way, but we want to give the players an “At least…!” A little bit of optimism.

At the beginning of Act Three, the players need to recognize which of the following endings they’re about to experience;

3.a “It’s all over but the shouting.” At this point, you recognize “it’s a forgone conclusion the PCs will win, and everyone knows it. We’re just clocking time until the dice are done rolling.” It’s unfortunately common in 4E for one bad guy to be standing at the end, especially an Elite or Solo, with all his powers used up, plenty of hit points left, and nothing really to do. This is usually a result, I think, of either bad encounter design or unforeseen circumstances.

Spending rounds with nothing dramatic happening and nothing to look forward to except the inevitable death or surrender of the bad guy is boring. The best thing to do in a situation like this is “just get it over with.” Resolution is important, you don’t want to delay it once its time has come. Your players should never feel like they are just ‘enduring.’ Players will cheer when bad guys die even if its because they took so damned long to kill. That’s bad. Even though they’re cheering, they’re doing so for the wrong reason. They should be cheering triumph over adversity, not their own ability to stay awake while rolling dice.

3.b “We are all going to die.

“At this point the players should be aware they’re outmatched and need to make some tough decisions. This doesn’t mean they ARE going to die if they don’t retreat or surrender, they could come up with something inventive, and this is all to the good.  The best system would be the one that transmitted to the players the nature of the encounter (“too tough” or “we can handle it”) without forcing the end one way or another. The worst scenarios are when the players don’t realize they’re all going to die, or slowly realize it without ever addressing it. Often someone says “TPK” but no one DOES anything about it and this is because you, the GM, have not put the question to them.

So how do we deal with these things? Here’s what I propose.

End Of Act One Mechanic

The purpose of Act One in our Encounter Model is to empower the players to make good decisions later.  The way we do this is by exposing data to them that they might otherwise miss, or misinterpret.

Critically what the PCs need to know is; how hard to kill are these things, and how easy is it for them to kill us. To this end I propose exposing two pieces of data. Lowest Defense and Attack Bonus.

Using a Knowledge check, as per the rules, the players can, with a result of 25 or higher in the Heroic Tier, learn the monsters “resistances and vulnerabilities.” But I propose amending that to include “Attack Bonus and lowest Defense.” Defenses, as you may know, they can figure out on their own. The players can always just keep track of hits and misses until they deduce the AC, Fort, Will, and Reflex defense of each monster.

But this is tedious, and not fun, so I propose you don’t make the players do that. Rather, at any point the players can make appropriate Knowledge checks and, if successful, learn the vulnerabilities, resistances, lowest defense and attack bonus of the enemy. I don’t recommending revealing all the defenses, as I think this goes too far and overloads the players with information. Just the lowest value will be sufficient to give them good data to make decisions on. And will also let them know which characters and which attacks will be critical. Something very important in 4E when some characters can attack several different defenses.

This will seem distasteful to some people. Exposing the mechanics behind the fantasy. As originally conceived, the GM made ALL rolls, even all the players’ rolls, specifically to preserve suspension of disbelief. But as I say, with Resistances at least, the players can find that out anyway, you’re just saving them the trouble. Also, the characters could reason this out themselves. The guy in heavy armor is going to be hard to hit. The big dumb monster probably has low Reflexes. I often think that the characters would know more than the players anyway, just by watching the bad guys move and act.

And though this is not true of the bad guy’s attack bonus, it is a CRITICAL element in communicating encounter difficulty to the players. Combined with resistances, there is no surer way of telling the players how hard this encounter is going to be. Armed with this knowledge, they can immediately look down at their sheet and tell how often they’re going to hit, and how often they are going to be hit.

Ignorance can, as you know, be a powerful shield in defending suspension of disbelief. But it can also fuel bad decisions. Players who don’t know what these stats are can talk themselves into thinking that so far it’s just been bad luck or dice rolls to rationalize their inertial tendency to press on in the face of Certain Doom.

Lastly, I propose that at the end of the first round of combat, you let the players know that if they haven’t already made Knowledge checks about the monsters, doing so from this point forward nets a +2 to the roll. Why? This is what’s called Push Design. Pull Design depends on the players deciding to do things on their own with no help. Only reasoned self-interest. Push Design prompts them to do it, reminding them that the option is there, communicating it to them. This can be enormously important in good design. You don’t want to tell the players “Ok, now make Knowledge checks,” the decision should be theirs. But you want to remind them of the option, and in a non-patriarchal fashion. “Remember! You can always make Knowledge checks!” Is condescending. And it implies that they’re not doing something they should be doing, but don’t realize it. And no one likes to be nagged.

Whereas pushing the option to them by merely granting them a bonus to further checks after the end of Act One makes them feel like its their decision, without nagging them. And encourages them to do so. Why? Because we want them to have this info anyway. We want them to make good decisions and to do this they need good data.

We narrativize this neatly by saying “Ok, now you’ve had some time to observe your enemy, any Knowledge checks you make from this point forward get a circumstance bonus because you’ve seen them in action.”

End of Act Two Mechanic

There is no End of Act Three Mechanic because the end of Act Three is “combat’s over.

“So all we need is an mechanic that prompts the players to make a decision based on what they’ve learned so far. If they want to retreat after the End of Act One, then probably your encounter was too tough. Or they’re cowards. Players will naturally think they can win and, after all, even if they perceive the encounter as really difficult, they have a lot of options they can pull out to try and swing things in their favor.

Really, we want two mechanics. One to let them know they’re in the 3a “We’re going to win” branch, one to let them know they’re all going to die horribly, 3b.

For the first situation, the goal here is simply to get things over faster so the players don’t feel like they’re just enduring, clocking time, waiting for the bad guys to run out of HP. The easiest way to do this, is give them a bonus to hit.

When you, the GM, feel like its all over but the shouting, announce “It’s now clear to you guys that you’re going to win, and your improved morale grants you a +2 circumstance bonus to hit.

“The easiest way to tell when this point has arrived is when you see the bad guys have spent all their resources, and the players have not. In other words, the bad guys have no more shots in their locker, and the good guys haven’t’ even gotten started yet.

A bonus to hit should mean the team hits more often, which means more damage, which means the bad guy goes down faster. A bonus to damage might not go amiss as well.

The “We’re All Going To Die” mechanic should reward good decision-making. Whatever it is, the mere fact of its deployment should give the players pause. It should not change their opinion of the encounter! It should simply frame what they already know, but haven’t acted on. As a GM, you will know when this happens because your players become morose. They burn through their Daily Powers, have no options, and the bad guys still have plenty left.

Like retreating in wargames, the players need to feel like something precious is preserved by retreat. To this end, I submit we first introduce a new action called Retreat.

Retreat: Standard Action

• Move and Move: Move your speed twice, away from the enemy, taking only defensive actions, such as helping prone or unconscious teammates.
•  +1 speed: Your adrenaline gives you a bonus to your speed.
•  Movement Requirements: You must move away from the enemy. Though this movement can take you nearer to other enemies, you may not attack them this turn.
•  Provoke Opportunity Attacks: If you leave a square adjacent to an enemy, that enemy can make an opportunity attack against you.
•  No Further Actions: After you resolve a Retreat, you can’t take any further actions this turn, unless you spend an action point to take an extraaction.

This action, on its own, might be enough to prompt good decision-making. But leaving the choice to the players with no signal as to when it should be used, is Pull Design and I prefer Push Design. To that end, when you judge the PCs are doomed, grant them healing equivalent to their surge value, without spending their Second Wind or a Healing Surge.

“The enemy seems confident of their victory and your morale is failing. The next Retreat action you take grants healing equal to your Surge Value, without spending a Healing Surge.

“This lets the players know “It’s time to make tough decisions” without forcing them to run. Knowing this is an option, players may well fight for another round or two, which is to the good. The tide of battle MAY change and if it does, they will feel all the more heroic for having done it when all odds seemed against them. But taking the Retreat not only costs them nothing, they gain something from it. So they won’t feel completely demoralized.

To avoid exploitation, you may want to let the players know that the enemy gains a +2 morale bonus to hit for the next round, just to discourage players from trying to retreat into a fight.

At the end of the day, D&D4 is all about managing resources and the process by which the players try to figure out if this is a good use of their Daily Powers and Action Points, since everything else refreshes quickly enough. It is in everyone’s best interest to make this process easier. Forget how frustrating it is to be without your Daily power when you fight the Boss, because you mistook which encounter was the Boss Encounter. We want to use our Dailies when it’s dramatically most appropriate. Which is to say, at the right time.

I don’t talk about Acts or Mechanics when GMing, I just use these techniques and rules and when successful, the encounters feel like they have a beginning, middle, and end without me calling it out.

Finally, there is another situation. One that’s hopefully common. “No one knows how this will end!” Not all battles HAVE an Act Three, many will be tense standoffs all the way through and its important to remember this. Remember that the End Of Act Two mechanic is there purely to handle Edge Cases. Situations where the battle would otherwise get boring, or fatal. Only you can judge this!

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