How often do you hide from creatures that are too strong for you/your party in your games?

We have a rather stupid tendency to wade in and hope for the best.

If shit really starts to look like an imminent TPK the DM brings out the DMPC to swoop in and save us. It's more fun than it sounds because he doesn't hang around. By this point the DMPC is more of a much beloved mascot of the party than anything, a bit like the Mysterious Stranger from fallout but more retarded and nude.

When he shows up we know we fucked up too far and tried to take on something too strong. Only one player has any real problem with it because he's an autistic stick in the mud who insists that all things are srs bsns with not room for magical retard gnomes with wands of wishes.

In one of our L5R campaigns, we have been doing it for, like, the last couple of sessions. And it's not even monsters: it's just samurai that are stronger than us and swathes of bandits.

>Retarded and nude
What did he do to you, user? WHAT DID TEEHEE DO TO MAKE YOU LIKE HIM?

As a GM, the players are relentless even in the face of overwhelming opposition.

As a player, the GM never leaves any opening for us to escape with.

Particularly in nWoD, there's very rarely anything to directly gain from a combat encounter. I had a 3 year long campaign where there was literally 2 combat encounters that not only I, but the entire party would not have immediately fled if given the slightest fucking option to do so.

Despite our overwhelming preference for fleeing, we only *once* had it as an actual option, and it literally just led to an 8 hour long chase scene over open desert terrain because it was exactly as fast and had similar stamina to us. We eventually had the slowest party member suicide into it to distract it long enough for us to get some distance.

Wait is that fucking Teehee

This, except that it's actually impossible as a DM to make it clear without destroying immersion. Until you start saying stuff like "yeah he's like 10 lvls above you" they will think it's all fluff to make the upcoming battle more epic.

Shamefur dispray

Hide, plenty, flee, less often. If you hide properly and don't mess up, you don't need to flee.

As a GM, though, my players often forget that fleeing is an option. This cost them a few characters already.

It's pretty easy on very low levels
At that point people are usually unable to battle adult dragons or things whose steps reverberate through whole dungeon and sends all locals fleeing
It's even easier if someone rolls for knowledge or something

This is exactly why I stopped hiding combat stats. I give quantitative answers if asked, either if the character can make a perception + weapon skill check (sizing them up, etc) or with no check if they can see the enemy attacking.
The challenge isn't in "might" or "maybe" it's in showing the PCs the enemy and letting them sort it out or shit their beeches.

Not often. You need to start from the beginning of the campaign, or the players will assume that the encounter is balanced and that there is a winning solution.

Or use an already established setting: When Darth Vader comes out in a Star Wars game, even the worst player knows that it's time to run.

Not often. Most of times if a thing can beat you, it's better at find and chasing than you are at hiding and running, this happens in most systems out there. Usually we fight to the death or use a distraction.

I had to tell the players of one of my campaigns to not fight the all powerful wizard (using that very name) by pointing out his 5 house sized steel constructs and the very obvious wind elementals floating about.

Then they decided to just talk to him, amazing.

There’s something to it.
Honor and a nickel will get you five cents, so obviously it’s worth something. Well, as long as it’s paired with something else of actual value that is.

We are already ronin so..

Never. My party is retarded murderhobos.

Mine would attack and try to kill it, although maybe they devise a plan instead of charging it. We don't play a game like D&D where they can just read the monster-book and say "Dragons are level X and we're Y", though.

This automatically destroys any immersion, though.

My group often starts doing that when one dies or is severely injured. And this is when they don't enter the "must avenge friend" mode.

We avoid combat as often as we can. A stray bullet can kill you know.

>This automatically destroys any immersion, though.
Not really. Well, not any more than the mechanical side of combat does. Generally my players don't ask these questions until combat is imminent at least. Plus, the speed increase to combat from players knowing the target number of their rolls and such makes up for it.

I think a big problem is if its just a dude, big monsters people expect to be party killers but nobody would think that the big guy would be too much for you.

Its amazing how willing they are with fighting them, even when they don't get to bring friends.

>Not hiding from everything including responsibilities, employment and social interaction
Do you even Veeky Forums?
I bet you're one of those casuals who aren't NEET and actually meets people to play ttrpg's instead of just shitposting like me

>We don't play a game like D&D where they can just read the monster-book and say "Dragons are level X and we're Y", though.
I think this is just a group-dependent thing, because I can say from personal experience that my players have played a variety of systems and ran from everything from a single ogre to a band of sideshow hooligans with knives to the local thieves' guild when it looked like they were outmatched. Some groups are naturally just more cautious than others. By the same token, I've played in a couple of campaigns where knowledge of the monster book just made us that much more determined to try and kill the thing we weren't supposed to kill, much to the GM's chagrin (he was kind of asking for it, though).

>Bad GMing the post

Perhaps they were hoping to cut his throat before throwing him out of the dragon.

The problem is that the only way to know how strong something is, is to witness it.
>the lair is riddled with bones of heroes!
May hold true for both a gaggle of skeletons, or a dangerous dragon. And when the party gets to a level where they can face powerful enemies (such as huge monsters), how are they supposed to know that this random monster is stronger than another?

When we know it's best to hide, we hide. Sometimes we learn of a creature before we face it, and we can judge its power. Sometimes we get into a fight with something and escape, only to hide from it again later.

But usually we fight. And the thing with big monsters is that they're often hard to escape.

Practically every session. If it weren't for the anime-protagonist-paladins, the nuclear blaster mages, and the superhumanly dickish noble, you would think the game was survival horror.
The party is decently powerful and we CAN fight a lot of stuff, we just end up waking up ancient horrors that we're not prepared for near-constantly

What game is that?

And to answer the question: all the time for me, not often enough as a party.

Never. In one campaign we were on a planet to get stronger since we defected upon realizing that our leader was corrupt. The leader found out and sent his left and right hand man along with a couple grunts. The left hand man remained hidden but the order was to destroy the whole planet.
The rest of the party talked with the leader of the planet and got some fancy stuff in return for protecting the planet. They immediately talked to each other about fleeing the planet because they had the option to. It was near unanimous that the party wanted to escape.
I said no. I told every single one of them that they can run away but I'm going to stand and fight. A man keeps his word, a man protects those in need, and I wanted to show them that I'm not some coward who runs away.
The party came to the agreement of getting the ship working again while I fight everyone and inevitably die since we know I was badly outmatched and outnumbered.
The invaders landed and I was put into combat with them. A couple other party members took on the grunts since they weren't too strong while I was pitted against the leader's right hand man.
The grunts died quickly and the party members fled while I fought the strong one. I was doing surprisingly well despite being outmatched just from being extremely lucky with my rolls and the opposite for the DM. Then he got a couple good hits off and I was practically dead. I blasted him one last time before getting blown up and dying.
The rest of the party got away safely.
It was fun.

Fuck you Macaroni

I ran away from a timberwolf once as I met it alone, unarmed and unarmored, but other than that I've never needed to.

When I'm DMing, my players never, ever run from anything. I believe this is because they're all more familiar with computer games where killing things is the main way of getting XP, so if there is something to fight, they will try to fight it no matter how useless or suicidal it is. If they were in my situation above, every single one of them would have simply tried beating the carnivorous wood beast barehanded and died.

often enough.
the truely insurmountable are usually hidden away guarding some great treasure or just in time out because something more powerful said so.
others are kind of roaming raid bosses in certain biomes, there to show the "bigger fish" principle in a very palpable way. i usually intend them as set pieces but i've had players engage them against NPC warnings before, nearly always resulted in shit getting wrecked and a hearty sense of caution in future encounters from the survivors. that dumbass sniper archer just HAD to shoot the thunderbird because it was technically in his range. they nearly died in the desert after it destroyed their sand skiff miles and miles away from anything but dunes. but hey i got to use that oasis scene they kept avoiding because they were sure it was a trap or a mirage. it wasn't, just a magical oasis that moved every time the sun set and no moonlight touched it. sure there were poisonous snakes in abundance but that hardly qualifies as a trap.

Exanima. Incomplete at the moment, hasn't been updated in a while, however the devs promise big things and have shown snippets of further development. The lead dev allegedly became a professional programmer so that he could one day build his ideal RPG. He refused to work with publishers because they thought his idea wouldn't work in the mainstream (which is definitely true after seeing the moaning about fucking Cuphead). They say he works 14 hours (along with other devs) a day to complete it.

In the screenshot, I've been knocked under the table by the beast and I'm desperately trying to crawl away.

Sounds like it could be fun, thanks

I think we've only fled from an enemy once.

It was a DM created daemon that willed you into nonexistence. Basically if it touched you, you had to make a near impossible save to keep existing. I say keep existing because if you actually failed the save your character died, their body was dumped in some other dimension, and everyone forgot they existed.

So melee characters couldn't get close without risking instant death, and the dumb thing had some effect on it that made it impossible to be hit by ranged attacks or spells.

One of our friends was touched right off the bat and was gone. We couldn't realize the danger without metagaming, but we knew something was wrong. We noticed that we had significantly less people than we started so we fell back.

eventually we begged a DMPC to find some way to assist us, and he basically instakilled it