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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lluewhyn" data-source="post: 7144708" data-attributes="member: 6887379">Recently saw another of those memes discussing "never assume that everything in the world is an appropriate challenge for your level -be prepared to flee". This kind of philosophy has always seemed odd to me, because IMO every edition of D&D has made fleeing/running a sucker's move if you go only by the written rules. Basically, two problems:1. Unless you have fought specific types of creatures before, you don't know their relative challenge level until you fight them (still doesn't help much against specific creatures). Even if you fight them, you might not be able to gauge their true difficulty if the DM is opaque about their exact stats (HP, Attack Bonus, AC, etc.) until it's several rounds in and party members are dropping. Did that guy who hit you with a 25 (not-critical) have a +6 and roll a 19, or did he roll a 13 with a +12? A PC's first few attack rolls are 23 and 24, which are both hits, so couldn't tell the enemy has a whopping 22 AC. Also, half of your team is down and that Ogre hits like a train -but is the 40 points of damage that you have done to him almost enough to drop him or merely a small dent?2. Suppose that you do the math and *do* determine that you are out of your league. This is obvious when the players are vastly out-numbered, but trickier when it's a single creature or a small number of enemies. Party (or whoever is left) decides to flee. Except almost every monster in the book can move just as fast as the PCs and/or has ranged weapons that can pick them off as they flee. To be true to RP, I sometimes have enemy mooks flee when it's down to 1 or 2 of their originally much larger party, and they're almost always mowed down before they can get away. True, not every enemy will chase the PCs down, but the PCs don't know that. So, are people using special rules for fleeing not in the actual books? When I ran Curse of Strahd, I knew that this might be an issue and told the players that they had a special "Flee" action for narrative purposes. If they were not provoking Opportunity Attacks and could move their normal speed on their turn, the "Fled" -gone from the combat, can't be chased without an opposed skill challenge, but can't change their mind and come back until after the battle in case their other party members stay in combat.But for everyone else, how do you resolve the dilemma that it's very hard to determine the difficulty of an opponent until you engage them in combat, and once you are in combat with them it's hard to flee without them following or using ranged attacks to bring you down?</blockquote>

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