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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elric" data-source="post: 4648385" data-attributes="member: 1139">It can't, at least not reliably.  But that doesn't mean it thinks it will definitely win the fight if it has (approximately) rational expectations but doesn't have much information.  As I said before,Given that the monsters know there is a possibility that they'll lose a fight if the five of them charge at the invaders of their hall, they'll generally go get reinforcements a few rooms back and take the invaders on 15 to 5 instead of 5-5.No, that was actually the exact point of anecdote.  You can justify the monsters being overconfident about easily killing those five adventurers in the entrance hall if a bunch of groups of five adventurers have come in and been easily dispatched before.  But this isn't a satisfying rationalist explanation, because while the monsters now have correct expectations, the previous adventurers must have been incredibly stupid.They’d probably go to get reinforcements almost every time.  If their only options were “run, without getting reinforcements” and “fight”, then we’d end up in a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_game#Perfect_Bayesian_equilibrium" target="_blank">perfect Bayesian Nash equilibrium</a> where some weak parties attacked, all strong parties attacked, and the defenders sometimes fought them and sometimes ran away, such that the weak parties are indifferent between attacking and not, and the defenders are indifferent between fighting and running (this assumes most parties are “weak”, where weak means weak relative to the kobolds).  This is essentially example #2 in <a href="http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/fk41" target="_blank">Frank Karsten’s great article</a> on game theory applied to magic: the gathering.  This is the “there are other dumb adventurers out there, which is why the monsters are justly overconfident” story I mentioned above.  Again, it’s not really a rationalist explanation as mentioned above.  This isn’t to say that non-rationalist explanations are wrong.  Rational expectations itself is quite implausible; rationality in general is a useful approximation.But it shows that if you start from a strong premise of rationality, it’s hard to get the preponderance of “fight without getting reinforcements” that D&D assumes is typical.  I don’t think this is a serious problem; D&D isn’t trying to simulate an entire fantasy world, after all.  It’s just a game that uses multiple encounters a day, so things play out to give you multiple encounters per day.</blockquote>

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