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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3263309" data-attributes="member: 4937">The ability to maintain party cohesion is one of the marks of a skilled, experienced player group.I've been in play groups that can manage orderly withdraws, and can agree to retreat to fight another day, but I agree that that is the rarity.  I've seen alot of spontaneous routs.One of the hallmarks of an inexperienced player is how they handle not knowing what is going on.  I've seen so many groups of young players get trashed by an encounter which was very winnable, but contained some element that they didn't understand.  And I've seen alot of groups be trashed because one or more players were so concerned with protecting thier character or scoring loot instead of supporting the party, that they ended up getting thier character killed because thier was no party left to save them.  Often times, no experience at all is better than just a little bit, because a player with just a little bit of experience starts relying on what he knows about the game as a crutch.  But when they can't recognize the monster and their standard tactics that they've developed don't seem to be working, and they panic.  (Players with no experience are always confused and so either panic and flee immediately or else all hang with it and win by sheer stubbornness.)  When players start panicing, you are going to see alot of irrational actions and alot of character deaths.  One thing that will tend to happen is that one or more players will be left behind (having already taken thier action) when everyone else in the party suddenly decides to bolt.  All the sudden a situation which was dangerous for them, but managable, becomes completely unmanagable as they are left surrounded and without aid.  Then the fleeing characters in the party split up, or go in the wrong direction and blunder into new trouble - often while hotly pursued by whatever they were fleeing, and suddenly a situation that was dangerous but managable becomes two or three EL's higher than it was and they don't have a chance.Then I get accused of being unfair, and I get demands to explain why what happened happened to the players as if I'm cheating.And it doesn't even have to be anything wierd.  It might just be the first creature that they've encounter that has DR, and not everyone's weapon was doing full damage, and they could have easily beaten the creature by using thier explosive oil, arcane spells, torches, power attacks, and magic dagger - but no one (even ones that know the rules) figures out that the problem is the creature has DR (because no one recognizes the monster IC or OOC), and the party ends up fleeing from something that only has 4 hit points left and leaves 2 players to die in the monsters evil clutches. DM's don't kill characters.  Confusion, stupidity, lack of teamwork, and bad luck kill characters.</blockquote>

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