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<blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 4648279" data-attributes="member: 1139">Chances are your games don't feature, say, 10% of encounters being TPKs against the party.&nbsp; Under the simplifying assumption that an encounter will end in a TPK for one side if no one flees initially, then each monster is getting killed 90% or more of the time.&nbsp; So if the monsters had correct expectations about what was going to happen, and valued being killed more negatively than the positive of winning the fight (and didn't really value inflicting damage on the opposition while getting killed), in the vast majority of encounters they wouldn't want to fight if they had a decent chance to flee.While this can work, it requires almost every monster to be very overconfident.&nbsp; Boxing is sufficiently low stakes that overconfidence doesn't seem unreasonable; perhaps it's a good method to motivate yourself to work harder.&nbsp; A monster that actually has a 95% chance to get killed and 5% chance to win the fight (and wouldn't want to take the gamble of getting into a fight at 50/50 odds) would have to be overconfident by a huge factor to want to take the gamble.&nbsp; By comparison, if it has a good chance to get away and get lots of reinforcements by running, its chance of getting killed will go down dramatically.&nbsp; Unless the PCs are the first true threat that the monsters have ever faced, the monsters that were overconfident to the point of not getting reinforcements probably got killed long ago by some other foes.&nbsp; The ones that are left are the ones that don't make that mistake.It can be hard to come up with rationalist explanations for war.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Elric, post: 4648279, member: 1139"] Chances are your games don't feature, say, 10% of encounters being TPKs against the party. Under the simplifying assumption that an encounter will end in a TPK for one side if no one flees initially, then each monster is getting killed 90% or more of the time. So if the monsters had correct expectations about what was going to happen, and valued being killed more negatively than the positive of winning the fight (and didn't really value inflicting damage on the opposition while getting killed), in the vast majority of encounters they wouldn't want to fight if they had a decent chance to flee. While this can work, it requires almost every monster to be very overconfident. Boxing is sufficiently low stakes that overconfidence doesn't seem unreasonable; perhaps it's a good method to motivate yourself to work harder. A monster that actually has a 95% chance to get killed and 5% chance to win the fight (and wouldn't want to take the gamble of getting into a fight at 50/50 odds) would have to be overconfident by a huge factor to want to take the gamble. By comparison, if it has a good chance to get away and get lots of reinforcements by running, its chance of getting killed will go down dramatically. Unless the PCs are the first true threat that the monsters have ever faced, the monsters that were overconfident to the point of not getting reinforcements probably got killed long ago by some other foes. The ones that are left are the ones that don't make that mistake. It can be hard to come up with rationalist explanations for war. [/QUOTE]

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