Responding to the set of "end fights early" posts here, and not just yours.

Quote Originally Posted by Eldan View Post
The roleplay opportunities too, of course, but mainly, I have enemies run away or surrender once the fight gets boring. I.e. you've killed half the goblins and survived their ambush and the traps. The rest of them scurry back in their holes, so we don't need to play another five rounds of everyone using their most expendable abilities to mop up.
I do this as well, mostly when the end of the combat is unambigous. I do have one minor caveat though: The actual result needs to be unambigous, not just "who wins". Having enemies surrender works well (very well, in fact, for the reasons mentioned previously). I'm always a bit concerned over the "have the NPCs run away" bit, though. This makes sense from a realistic pov (would they just stay in a fight they are doomed to lose?). However, it still needs to be something the PCs can't prevent, if that's what they want to do, and I will continue to play out the encounter if the players want, for this exact reason.

Sometimes (quite often, in fact), the PCs don't want any of the NPCs to escape. Escape may mean they run off to warn the rest of their group, maybe. It can also be frustrating for players if the main leaders always escape every fight. So, as a minor modification, I'd caution about just handwaving the conclusion with regard to NPCs running away, unless it's actually the case that they can run away and the PCs can't stop them (ie: the conclusion is not in doubt). What you don't want to do is run a couple rounds of combat, then declare "Ok. You guys are easily defeating the NPCs, so I'll just say you win, but some of them get away". Sometimes, that's fine. But sometimes, the players want to do more, so you should let them play it out.


I suppose it's also a point to make if the objective of the fight itself is resource depletion. If the party is attacking an area with enemies, and this is one group of such enemies out of possibly many that need to be defeated, and it's a dynamic environment (so the NPCs become aware of the party and will response in kind), you really do want to play things out all the way to the point of "there are no more resources needed to reach the conclusion". This gives the PCs options like "do we use our default combat stuff, knowthing that half of this group of enemies will get away and warn their friends, but have more resources for the fights to come?" or "do we use some of our more powerful but limited resources, and make sure no one escapes to tell the tale?". Sometimes, ending a fight early may remove those choices from the players, and IMO, those are valid and significant choices for them to make.