The chase mechanics may have helped here ...
Probably not because the chase mechanics in the DMG are rubbish. Not that anyone knows that since no one reads the DMG (except for me).
Define fun.
I'm playing Jedi: Fallen Order right now.
Is it fun to die? No, it's usually annoying.
But it would be even less fun to not die. Indeed, one of the most fun parts of the game is when I had to take like six tries to beat the 9th sister, and a lot of the time when I'm playing I'm thinking "I'm not playing well enough to be beating the game this easily."
Is it fun when you fail? No, it's usually annoying.
But it's even less fun when you can't fail. The complaint to me feels like, "I made my best attack, but I missed!" The possibility of "rolling a 1" is always there. Something can always negate your action. It's frustrating, but it would be even more frustrating if it couldn't.
The main difference here is that
Jedi: Fallen Order is a single player game, and when you fail, you get to try again immediately. In a cooperative team-based game where you're all constructing the narrative together as you play, when you fail, you can't just try again. What happened is generally set in stone, and you have to just accept it and move on, which is fine.
For me, it's not failure in and of itself that's frustrating or unfun. It's when I have a repeated run of failures due to poor dice rolls / bad luck / etc. It's when I spend the better part of an hour or more not actually getting to contribute to the game in a meaningful way (and get teased about it on top of that).
The party fighting a heroic, effective, but losing, battle until the wizard drops a fireball on them is awesome.
Dropping that fireball and killing them all in the first round... is an issue of encounter design. When the party wizard has Fireball, how did you make an encounter that could be defeated by a single use of the spell? They're all low hit points and bunched up to start? What was the GM thinking?
Or, to put it in this thread's idiom - It is not fun when the encounters are not well-designed for the party.
Exactly. In my last session, we were fighting some warforged in the Mournland when an oni and its gnoll minions ambushed us. The oni's
cone of cold took out the remaining warforged for us, so we were able to quickly shift our focus to the gnolls and the oni. We took out the gnolls and then beat on the oni. As it tried to flee invisibly, the artificer PC cast
sleep, hoping to roll well enough against the wounded oni's reduced hit points. It worked! It was a brilliant end to a tough fight.
If, however, the artificer had cast
sleep right at the start and had somehow managed to knock the oni out right away, while we undoubtedly would've felt relieved, I don't think it would have been as fun/satisfying.