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As has been established in this thread - 5e does not have functional rules for a party fleeing a combat where they are outmatched. A DM forcing the PCs into an unwinnable combat encounter is no different than them saying "rocks fall, everyone dies", in 5e.

Unless your classic dnd party has 8-10 human players, there should be plenty of hirelings around that the wizard's players can direct when they're in scenarios the wizard won't be useful.

It would be reasonable to say "your characters would know they likely cannot handle a dozen hostile foes, your action would draw all of their attention - do you still want to do that?" Much in the same way if a player wants their 1st level to jump off a 50ft cliff, you'd let them know they'd...

Then your GM shouldn't be putting you into a scenario where fleeing is a requirement.

5e had Multiclassing and Feats as optional rules - the DM would need to choose to opt-in to the added complexity/balance problems they create, and players would not expect them to always be available for them. 2024 makes both of these base rules. Now a DM has to BAN them if they want to play...

Chases end when the pursuer is close enough to Catch their target - a situation that is likely to occur during the very first round, assuming you a fleeing a monster from melee. This is true even with equal speeds - and many monsters will be faster than the PCs. The chase rules are best...

Running away is a completely unviable option, yes. Fleeing should be done in-between combats - once you've realized you're outmatched its too late to do anything about it.

Then sometimes the PCs will lose, and when PCs lose they tend to all die. If your players a cool with re-rolling frequently, that's not a problem. Agree. Then their characters should die. They will learn not to be overconfident next time.

The entire chapter 3 of the DMG, but specifically the encounter rules on pages 81 onwards. To turn that around to you - can you find me any rules for designing and running encounters specifically designed not to be winnable by the party?

Its what the game is designed for. As you stray from the game's assumptions for how it will be played, it has a tendency to break. In this case, if you stray from the assumption that the game will be composed of a large number of winnable combat encounters, it breaks in that there are no...

Yes that's what I said. That's working as intended. Deadly encounters are tuned to drain about 1/3 of a party's daily resources. They shouldn't kill a party unless they're extremely low on resources, especially if you're playing with experienced player or players that are min-maxing hard.

Page 81 of the DMG has clear guidelines on how to design encounters and how many of them to give your party. Nothing in the DMG addresses creating encounters which are too strong or unwinnable for your party. The hardest difficulty is Deadly - "A deadly encounter could be lethal for one or...

Part of the social contract of 5e is that the PCs will not flee from combat, and that the GM is designing all combats to be winnable. Even "Deadly" encounters should be easily within the capabilities of most parties. 5e is an attrition game. The choice of whether or not to flee is not made...

The best weapon for a magic user to wield is 2-3 hirelings. You're a skinny dude in robes. Buy some beefy boys and send them into danger for you!

The Deadly threshold is only 1/3 of the XP budget of an adventuring day. An encounter meant to be a sole encounter for a day ought to be triple the XP of the deadly threshold. For example, a single encounter for the day for four Level 5 PCs could be 6 CR 4 monsters, 4 CR 5s, a trio of CR 6s...

My dungeons and dragons adventures tend to involve Dungeons. Most have had 4-6+ encounters per long rest, easily. I don't think I've ever once run an adventuring day with only a single combat encounter. Even when I'm running other adventure styles than dungeon crawls. An example - I ran a...

I really like this as an implementation of the classic pf1 concepts into the new system! Additionally re: the name change - the inquisitor name evoked a more specific concept than Vindicator does, and excluded itself from some of the more popular and iconic deities, namely shelyn or desna.

And this is exactly what they're hoping people will do again with 5.5

Oh don't worry, tons of people edition war over the minor differences between those too

I haven't felt the need to significantly house-rule OSE. It works pretty well out-of-the-box.