Scare

Scaring monsters, causing them to flee can be useful in many cirumstances. Scaring a monster will prevent it from using melee attacks, and will typically cause it to move away from your position. It will not prevent the use of ranged attacks however, including offensive wands and breath attacks.

Methods
Note this table does not describe every nuance of each method; see the pages of the individual methods for full details.

Effect
A fleeing monster will usually try to get further away from you unless it is trapped or eating.

The following monsters have special code to handle their movements, and will not always move away from you while scared:


 * pets
 * shopkeepers
 * s
 * covetous monsters
 * s

A fleeing monster may attack you in melee if it blunders into you when you are invisible or displaced, or it is confused, stunned, blinded or cornered. Monsters will never melee when adjacent to a square they think is protected by sanctuary, Elbereth or a scroll of scare monster (or an altar if a vampire).

Monsters will still use ranged attacks while fleeing.

A monster will stop fleeing when any time has expired. If the scaring is untimed, it will stop fleeing 4% of the time on each move it makes, if its hit points are at maximum.

Strategy
There is no single perfect method of scaring enemies; all methods either allow monsters to resist or have significant exceptions. Thus it pays to keep multiple methods available. For example, Sanctuary, Elbereth or a tooled horn will not scare a ki-rin, but because this angelic being is not humanoid, applying a mirror will scare it 4/5ths of the time. A high level player might scare it with a spell of cause fear, but this will be successful less frequently than the humble mirror.

Typically, in the early game, you can rely upon Elbereth, until you start meeting hostile humans or elves. Lower difficulty monsters in this group typically have little or no magic resistance and can be scared by an instrument, spell or wand. Later in the game, higher difficulty angelic beings and  humans or elves have higher resistance and are thus harder to scare.

The utility of scaring a monster depends on its behaviour. If you want to avoid a monster's melee attack, scaring is is very useful. This makes it ideal for creatures such as s and s. Once you have magic resistance and cold resistance however, scaring an is of dubious benefit.

Because monsters with an untimed flee will flee until their hit points recover, it is worth considering attacking an enemy briefly in these cases to ensure it leaves you alone for as long as possible.