D&D 5E Bravely running away

[S'mon]

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 have seen an occasional low skill player so this but usually the others yell at him to run and he gets the message.

 

[Clint_L]

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.

If you are going to insist on playing everything like a boardgame, then it becomes tougher, but even so it is not hard to engineer escapes. Players have tons and tons of options, and we do it in our games all the time. We see avoiding or escaping fights as the generally preferable outcome, if we can still achieve the ultimate objective.

I think a lot of it comes down to DM choices. For example, if a player hurls down a flask of burning oil and then runs off, I'm going to have most opponents go around that area rather than willingly run through fire. I'm not going to run them as if they are thinking "Well, I have 73 hit points left, and this will likely only do 5 or so, so I'm ignoring it." I'm going to run them as if they are thinking, "Crap, fire hurts! Go around!"