Suicidal enemies

In CRPGs, enemies have a strange tendency to attach no value whatsoever to their own lives. Once the fight has started, wandering creatures merely looking for food, petty thieves and monsters attacking people out of general aggressiveness somehow turn into fanatics and will refuse to flee or surrender even if you're obviously trouncing them. Not only is this very unrealistic, it also puts you at a disadvantage, since you have to worry about your PCs staying alive.

Some games are exceptions :

- In Betrayal in Antara (and very likely Betrayal at Krondor, but it's been too long since I last played BaK to be sure), enemies do attach a lot of values to their own lives. They will flee if they are severely wounded or if several of their allies have been killed. It is actually possible to win a battle without killing a single enemy.

- In the Gold Box games I've played, once the numerous enemies you usually had to face in a battle had been whittled down to four or three, the remaining few would usually try to flee (and sometimes surrender).

- In PS:T, outmatched enemies (especially the bullies found in the Hive) would sometimes try to flee.

- In BG2, your own characters sometimes had panic attacks when their HP went too low. They would run around at random, most likely getting themselves killed more quickly than they would have otherwise.

 

I, for one, wouldn't mind killing some emos in a cRPG.

Jokes aside, ++.

 

That is true, it would really do RPGs good if there weremore enemies that actually like their own lives.

On the other hand, if I had a certain budget and would have to make a game, such things would not be amongst the highest priorities. Depending on the kind of combat and the general gameplay, such mechanics wouldn't be that easy to implement.
On other kinds, it would be very easy. In NWN2, for example, it wouldn't be that hard to implement a check of the own HP (then the somewhat random decision to run or not) and then an order to run to an exit point on the map, vanishing on arrival.

It just shouldn't be too strong. I'd be very annoyed if all human(oid) NPCs I fight just ran away when at low health. That might result in a rediculous looking chase after each enemy.

 

Few monsters in Diablo I and II are running away from you if one of their dungeon mates is dead. They are trying to prepair a trap by running into bigger groups of monsters, or they're just attacking you again.

 

Yeah more RPG's should have a morale system of some kind for the cookie cutter cannon fodder. NPC's cowering in fear, dropping their weapons and running away ("Fuck this!"), going berserk ("Fuck this but I'm taking you with me!"), or begging for their miserable digital lives.

High level types (seasoned veterans of bloodshed) would be more immune to this, of course. It's a good technique to reinforce relationships between characters such as seeing Minsc go berserk when his replacement wych he swore to protect falls.

 

Add Teudogar to the list. Some enemies (like bandits) run away if they suffer too many losses and even drop their stuff along the way.

And while I haven't played much of them before 7, I recall at least one of the older Ultimas having enemies flee and it being unvirtuous to shoot them in the back.

I also recall some humanoid enemies in the Fallouts running away if your level was too high compared to theirs. Or was it when they were too damaged?

 

Oh, there is Ultima 4 (maybe other Ultimas too), where enemies are fleeing after taking few hits, or when they are going to lose.

 

I still remember the frustration in the Exile games when fighting mages in random encounters. After tearing through a bunch of grunts and weathering spells, the mage (the only guy with decent loot) would usually try to flee combat. Then you'd have to kill the bastard before he made it to the edge of the combat area.

Good stuff.

 

Yes

Well, that's regular D&D morale system.

yes

 

I'm tired of NPCs running away or fighting fanatically. No one would try to run in a straight line away from a person who has a gun he just pistol whipped the teeth out of your mouth with pointing at you. You would get down on your knees, beg for your life, cry with your palms open. Or even try to get close to the gun and start fighting hand to hand.

If NPCs were surrendering then you would have to make a moral choice whether to let them live or not. Let them go with their gear, let them go without it. Tell them to throw down their weapons, remove armour, dance the funky chicken dance, cripple them, take their gold or turn them in to the law etc. Lots of possibilities.

And what if even you could surrender? Then you wouldn't necessarily get killed every time. Could make for some interesting situations and gameplay. Running around butt naked with a crippled left arm trying to make it back to a safe place with nothing but hope and a Swiss army knife. This would make you think more about what equipment you carry around and could call for some serious strategical thinking in travelling, combat and finding safe places for you and your items. And imagine the satisfaction you'll feel when you later encounter one of those who left you to die in the wilderness and thrust a knife in their eye.. or forgive them.

If some run, some fight fanatically, some surrender and some lay there holding their own guts crying for help, and each of these possibilities affect the ally and enemy morale. Combat may be more or less different each time and not a fucking chore like in Arcanum or Oblivion.

 

One of Morrowind's popular mods is one that makes sentient NPC's surrender, though it had its faults (The PC couldn't surrender and the surrendering dialog was generic)

 

This usually creates slight balancing issues*, but it is a game design philosophy that unfortunately has not been applied to many RPGs as of yet. With some tweaking and good ideas this would make combat far more believable.


* For instance, how to decide how much XP one earns for combat against a foe who ran away rather than died. This could make some enemies much easier than they should be, since you only have to get them to low HP rather than outright kill them. Also, you might run into problems (like in Wizardry 8...) where you have to spend 20 minutes chasing down foes who run away.

 

In rolemaster you got experience for defeating enemies, not neccesarely killing them.

 

Why would you absolutely have to chase them down? Why to RPG developers expect/force the player to physically slaughter every enemy they come across?

Give the player the XP (or most of it) for winning. In real life getting your enemies to run away is usually good enough. Leave it to special situations such as guards sounding the alert, or a major villain who will keep turning up, for it to become a problem.

You're right.

 

Well, assuming you don't need to slaughter them just to get XP, there's still the matter of the loot they just ran away with. Intelligent enemies tend to have valuable things to steal.

 

I think it would help if all this begging for mercy were tied with some sort of a meaningful reputation system. Leaving the good/bad axis aside, something based on chivalry and set in medieval (fantasy or not) land would do the trick.
Add in some classess which require a code of conduct (even if it's just a d&d dilemma - can't kill the guy in cold blood, or I lose my 1337 paladin poers) and we're getting somewhere.

Other things - make it so that a captured enemy is more valuable than a dead one, like selling for slavery holding for ransom, bounty hunts (with a significant price difference for 'alive' and 'dead') are all possibilities.

That's an interesting problem.
A partial solution would be to have enemies drop some of their stuff while they flee - logical for shields and weapons.

Another way - enemies' personal belongings might not be the most valuable ones - perhaps you're after the wagon they were guarding, or after their horses, or you can simply loot their camp.

 

I think the main problem is that people would still kill enemies for the loot, regardless of whether they fled or not. One solution to this would be having the game track how you treated fleeing opponents. More moral members of your party could turn against you if you killed them, and doing so could be treated the same as an unprovoked attack by the in game authorities.

 

Have it tied to a karma/reputation system would be best IMO. In most cases giving you a bad rep that hurt relations or even close down quest-lines. Good thing being that you will be great at intimidation.

 

Or make it like reality. People who go around systematically looting every corpse they find, overburdening themselves so they can methodically haul their murdered victims possessions back to a shop every few days (or hours, sometimes) for money them should be treated as sociopaths they are. There should be a severe penalty to how people view you, similar to child killers or slavers in Fallout.

Then you don't have a problem with allowing NPCs to behave realistically in combat.

What you guys are saying is that NPCs should not behave realistically in combat because it would be inconsistent with the ludicrously unrealistic way the PC is allowed/expected to behave in general. That's the D&D approach where RPGs become increasingly stupid because everything has to be consistent and therefore consistent in stupidity, people accept it and nobody challenges the stupid axioms that are the cause.

 

Loot dont have to be quite as common as it is in most games, and magical stuff is only carried by key characters. If they flee, there might be a second encounter further in to the game. Making the game less linear.
Magical armours wouldnt just fall of from a fleeing enemy though. But even if you killed him, wouldnt the armour be damaged? Otherwise, how did you manage to kill him? I donk think armour should be one-size-fits-all in the first place. Id rather se magical tokens that can be transplanted in to differents slots in your own armour, or weapon. For exampel,a strand of hair from a vampire could be tied around your sword hilt for extra damage but could also be used as string for a necklace, coupled with different talismans for various effects.