Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8388632" data-attributes="member: 70468">I was thinking before the combat even begins. The PCs overhear that the guards are having a bad day, and instead of upgrading it to being murdered, they give the guards some coin or drugs or whatever to go have some fun (provided that the guards forget this ever happened). It can also go the other way. The guard could ask the PCs for something to avoid having to fight or even try to recruit them. There’s a lot of ways things can go just starting from the initial encounter. (Otherwise, I agree once things get going. Not everything is going to run the PCs down until they die tired.)It could also be failing to think strategically. It may be possible that the party “wins” at the cost of losing several or most members. Does that help them accomplish their goal? It doesn’t help that the death safety net makes it harder to realize that you’re in trouble.If someone goes down and hasn’t hit dying 4 yet, you can still heal them and get the back up. I’d expect most parties to try to rescue that person. Maybe once someone really does die, it’s time for the GM to stop and find out the PCs’ intentions. It may be the players are so focused on the tactical game that they’ve lost sight of what they’d actually want to do in that situation. I had to do that in the <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/a-pathfinder-group-tries-old-school-essentials.677957/post-8244014" target="_blank">ghoul rout when I ran OSE</a>.My players are starting to learn though. When they ran into some coffer corpses and couldn’t hurt them, they opted to retreat. I didn’t even have to suggest it! <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😄" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f604.png" title="Grinning face with smiling eyes    :smile:" data-shortname=":smile:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /></blockquote>

Verification