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Message: <blockquote data-quote="!DWolf" data-source="post: 8421449" data-attributes="member: 7026314">This is getting a bit off topic but:The problem people are having in the other thread are that they are playing a system heavily slanted towards Combat as War and are having their characters try to accomplish something difficult without giving any thought on how they can do it effectively or investing any resources in accomplishing it. Of course they are going to have a bad time.But as soon as you remove those conditions then things like retreating across wilderness becomes a lot easier. Let's take an example:[spoiler=Example 1]Oops there were two trolls in that cave and a party of adventurers only brought enough alchemist fire for one. Now they are being chased by a troll out of the cave and through the forest back to town. The party, expecting the worst, brought mounts and made sure everybody (well the illusionist wizard, everyone else was already trained in nature with decent wisdom scores) had the ability to ride them. So they perform a fighting retreat out of the cave slowing the troll down with spells (such as warped terrain and illusionary object), yell at their hirelings (someone had to watch the mounts while they were in the cave so they spent a couple of gold piece for some hirelings) to prepare to GTFO and finish mounting up and ride off before it can catch them. A galloping horse moves at 140 feet/round (and is incredibly motivated to get away from the troll). An angry troll moves at 90 feet. The party will quickly break contact with the troll. If the troll wants to continue (horses can't gallop endlessly) and try to out endurance the horses, then it becomes a chase.[/spoiler]When you look at the system in light of that example then feats like Hireling Manager and Ride and spells like Warped Terrain and Lock start to make a lot more sense as options for players. Why would anyone memorize Lock for instance? Well consider another example:[spoiler=Example 2]The party, level 3, snuck into an evil temple and disrupted a ceremony conducted by a bunch of cultists. Ritual disrupted, they are now fighting the cultists, but they didn’t realize there were quite so many of them and decide to retreat. Coordinating their actions: the rogue (in back) moves through the door and readies an action to close it. The fighter and cleric (in the front 30 feet away from the door) strike and spend two of their actions to move through the door. Then the wizard (closest to the door) moves through, the rogue closes the door, and the wizard casts lock. The cultists now have to move up 35 feet to the door (2 actions) and attempt to break it down (using the Force Open action) to get to the PCs. The DC is 19 and the cultists athletics skill is +4-2 (not having a pry bar). That gives the cultist pretty bad odds of breaking the door down in one turn. They will probably get the door down the second turn as there is a lot of them, but the by then the party has regrouped or retreated.[/spoiler]And once you understand that tactic (which also works with barring the door so NPCs can use it to), you see why a barbarian might take feats like Adrenaline Surge or Bashing Charge. And if you keep thinking about tactics and refining them and figuring out how your character can do things, eventually you will realize that the game is Combat as War and things like the monk feat “Sleeper Hold” that nobody can figure out from a Combat as Sport perspective make incredible amount of sense (it's a sentry removal tool, it has incapacitate because it's meant to be use to one shot level-3 or -4 sentries, the victims don't fall prone or drop their weapons because that would make noise and it lets the monk hide the body with less actions).So the problem (for me at least) with the retreat system isn’t: there is no retreat system, but how can I get players to think about tactics ahead of time and invest resources in things other than frontliners move towards the enemy and everyone attacks until its dead. And that’s a tricky thing that I think about a lot. I do have some thoughts on how to do it (if you are a very tactical and roleplay minded person like me), but teaching tactics is a topic for another thread.All that being said, I do have a couple on topic ideas:1) A set of tactics cards such as (these are preliminary and bad names) “capture location”, “defend location”, “withdraw to location”, “retreat”, “panicked flight”, etc. Each card could give you mechanical benefits such as increased movement speeds for “panicked flight” (you would have to do a lot of playtesting to balance these). Then each turn you decide (or have a player spend an action?) which tactic your going to use. You could also do a tutorial adventure where you have a Jack the NPC style character choosing the tactics for the party so they can get used to the system and thinking tactically.2) You could run it as a chase with the first obstacle being “Escape the X” (X being the monster or situtation) and make a custom hazard to represent what your fleeing from. The hazard deals damage to players each turn they fail their check until they overcome the first obstacle.</blockquote>

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