D&D 5E Bravely running away

[MarkB]

This is completely alien to my experience. IME the players of the fallen PCs are usually the ones yelling at the others to flee!

Because they're putting those players' characters above their own - which is exactly what the players who choose not to have their characters flee are doing.

In one memorable example, I saw a retreat fall apart completely because three separate players, in turn on their initiative, declared their character to be the one staying behind to hold off the enemy while the others fled.

 

[el-remmen]

Because they're putting those players' characters above their own - which is exactly what the players who choose not to have their characters flee are doing.

In one memorable example, I saw a retreat fall apart completely because three separate players, in turn on their initiative, declared their character to be the one staying behind to hold off the enemy while the others fled.

I've seen that happen a few times too. But I've never considered coming up with specific escape/retreat rules because of it.

 

[Kinematics]

Human beings all have the same speed as each other, on average, and people have been successfully retreating for as long as there's been conflict. I am very confused by why this keeps being described as almost impossibly difficult in D&D. It's not; we do it all the time.

You're conflating the mechanical in-game movement speed (which is mostly the same between characters) and real-life movement speed (which is highly variable, and quite unlikely to be the same).

I was just watching a review of a basketball game today, and in one play where the team got a turnover, players started running down the court. The big, tall, slow player barely got 3 steps in while the short fast player traveled 3-4 times the distance in those couple of seconds, going from well behind to well ahead. The speed wasn't really even close. And both players are professional athletes.

I've also seen a YouTube video where a guy was talking with a professional sprinter, and wanted to see how well he'd do in comparison. The guy was healthy and fit, but the difference in speed was just ludicrous.

Some people are just faster, and some are better trained (training for how to successfully retreat is a big thing in the military), and that's most of how people successfully retreat (or chase down a fleeing person, from the other side). And if speeds are actually similar, then it's a matter of endurance.

But the game abstraction of speed strips all of that away, and it becomes that largely unwinnable mess that several people have already described.

 

[TiQuinn]

I think some DMs here have far too ingrained an opinion about how realistic it is to have a chance at fleeing in small group combat.

Realism isn’t the top priority for me.

 

[Nefermandias]

It's a simulationist thing. If a rule produces incentives and results that cut against the vision of how things work in the game setting, then so much the worse for the rule.

So if the GM and the players want a world where comrades are frequently left behind to die, because attempting to drag them along is a high-risk move that is likely to get the rescuer killed too, then they want a rule giving the result that attempting to drag along a fallen comrade is a high-risk move. But if the GM and the players want a world where retreating with a fallen comrade is common and commonly successful, at least for heroic types with superior abilities, then they'll want to change the rule to one where retreating with a fallen comrade is low-risk and easy, at least for those aforementioned heroic types.

As I see it, the DM has at his disposal a difficulty slider he can adjust accordingly to the tone he wants for his game.

If you as the DM insist on using the combat rules and movement for everything, you are just making things harder for yourself.

This is also why I have a problem with the new way Actions are presented in the 2024 PHB. Trying to frame every (lower case) action in the game as an (upper case) Action leads to weird results. If you read the new entries for tools, you're going to find some absurdities like a cobbler being able to modify footwear or a cartographer to draw a whole map within six seconds with a single Utilize Action.

I'm just saying that Actions and tactical movement makes very little sense outside of straight combat scenes.

 

[Vaalingrade]

And if the players put themselves into a situation where fleeing is a requirement, what then?

Making it possible is still on the DM.

 

[FrogReaver]

Realism isn’t the top priority for me.

Then I wasn’t talking about you?

 

[TiQuinn]

Then I wasn’t talking about you?

Who can tell? You covered everyone who thought fleeing was an option in combat.

 

[FrogReaver]

Who can tell? You covered everyone who thought fleeing was an option in combat.

given what I said and your response I think it was fairly obvious. If you couldn’t tell you could have asked.

And I explicitly did not cover anyone who thought fleeing was an option in combat. I explicitly said some.

 

[TiQuinn]

given what I said and your response I think it was fairly obvious. If you couldn’t tell you could have asked.

And I explicitly did not cover anyone who thought fleeing was an option in combat. I explicitly said some.

No, it’s not clear to me what you’re thinking at all based on your statement. And since it’s also not clear who you were directing it to, because some can mean anyone, then it’s not clear why you said anything at all.