D&D 5E Mike Mearls live streaming of DnDNext with R&D superstars

[Weather Report]

Pro, yet worthless and inaccurate, snark.

"Pro", "worthless", "snark", and the other thing, what on earth are you on about?

 

[MerricB]

In AD&D, there are three levels of morale failure. At the lowest level, the orcs try a fighting withdrawal - moving backwards at half speed, facing the enemy, and engaging blows if pursued.

The highest level of morale failure has them fleeing in absolute panic, provoking attacks, and possibly dropping held items.

 

[Gargoyle]

Morale rules as an optional module would be great for DM's desiring such mechanics. I'd certainly not like to see it in the core though; most of the time they simply are not needed or desired. I've used them when I can't decide what the monsters are thinking though, so I don't think they are worthless, just that they shouldn't be the default.

 

[Manbearcat]

Again, this is all about playstyle preference. In many campaigns, some or most evil humanoid types are fundamentally cowards at heart, possibly including orcs. In others, different orcs from different orcish cultures may have different levels of cowardice. So, while it's fine that orcs in your campaign wouldn't be freaked out by humans under the circumstances in the encounter we're discussing, it's not fair to assume that no orcs in anyone else's campaigns would be. And in fact, Mearls' dming proves my point.

Forgive me if I'm misinterpreting, but it seems that you're saying Mearls was doing it wrong. Yet it seems as though everyone at the table had great fun- which is pretty much the definition of "doing it right" when you're dming.

So is your issue that Mearls didn't play Orcs the same way you would in your game? The thing is in the default world of D&D humans are the wildcards, they can be anywhere from the power of a commoner to a near-god depending on class and level... so why after seeing his comrades dispatched so easily would an Orc not be afraid again?

These arguments really do seem more of a "Mearls didn't do what I'd do" nitpick, which i't's your right to feel... but isn't something you can judge as objectively wrong or bad if, as TheJester said above, his players are enjoying themselves that's really the only metric that counts.

I'd like to think my position wasn't as shallow as that and that I conveyed the multi-faceted issues at the core of my dispute. Perhaps not.

D&D 5e is all about tradition and orthodox from D&D's vestigal stages. If we know anything about 5e's design ethos, it is that. So, with that guiding influence, I harken back to the very first Wandering Monster's article where they outlined the orthodox, traditional story of the obviously extremely important Orc; the same one that is in every single one of our Monster Manuals (hence why their story has a fundamental coherency which we can point to and say; "yup, that's an orc".) - edited for brevity and relevance:

WotC Wandering Monsters Column number 1
[h=3]Orcs[/h]Orcs are savage, both in the sense of being fiercely violent and untamed, and in the historically loaded sense of being uncivilized and primitive in their technology.

And they’re known for their fury in combat, launching a ferocious and violent assault against their foes.


They rely on their sheer ferocity to keep them going despite their wounds, rather than wearing heavy armor to protect them from wounds.

They’re chaotic evil, gathering in loose bands or tribes where the strongest rule and the weak are bullied or killed. They do have a modicum of social order, with a rough hierarchy based on relative strength, and they use ritualized combat to resolve challenges. In combat, it’s every orc for itself, with each orc more interested in earning personal glory than in securing victory for the group.


half-orcs with human parentage can put their superior intelligence to good use in leading groups of orcs, though they must constantly prove their strength and ferocity to defend their positions against challengers who see them as weak.

Yup. That's an orc. That is the orc we all know. Both of you and myself included. Are their anomalous deviations driven by setting, etc? Of course. There are anomalous everything. But they wouldn't be composing these articles and working so very, very, very hard to prove that they understand that 4e's implied setting deviations and incarnations (of which I care little to nothing about) were heretical to canon and they are being removed or shipped off to some corner of the multiverse such that their taint cannot be said to infect the standard, core implied setting.

Why we would make the assumption that Mearls is working off of some odd, unorthodox orc "story" iteration is lost on me. Given all of their efforts at reigning in the counterculture and going stridently back to orthodox in their presentation of the edition (of which this is), that makes no sense to me at all so it wouldn't ocurr to me. It would only ocurr to me that he was using the stock, bog standard, edition-spanning (including 4e) Orc story...outlined so well above in their article; "ferocious, only the strong survive, humans are weak, prove yourself in battle or perish, etc." The kind that certainly wouldn't reflexively run, and expose themselves to certain death where Gruumsh or Orcus or whomever wouldn't cull them to be servants in their afterlife...certainly not "scared witless" which was primarily what I was disputing as it was given justification for the bad (edition-spanning) tactical retreat/withdraw/pursuit mechanics of "OA suicide." People have issue with forced movement (which I find to wonderfully simulate martial combat, of which I have a ton of personal experience with, incredibly well) and decry it regularly...but we're ok with "OA suicide" as the mechanical architecture for tactical retreat/withdraw/pursuit mechanics due to "scared witless" even for the "sheer ferocity of orcs"?

So yes, issue with the story of the orc displayed here. But that is primarily due to the bad apparatus that we have in place for tactical retreat/withdraw/pursuit. If we had a simple sub-system in place that allowed strategic (not tactical...not at the combat engine level) retreat that wasn't an auto/insta-gib, then it would make for a more dynamic experience. As is, it is nothing more than "this guy jumps on your swords to get the combat over." It comes off as trite and it is very antagonistic toward hardened berserkers whose steel (internal) is smelted, worked and perfected in the crucible of non-stop combat and brutality.

I see... would you say the same thing about a party of characters in 4e who happen upon a group of minions and are able to kill all of them before the second round of combat? If not, what differentiates one from the other?

Or perhaps some players enjoy the ability to get a first strike on an enemy and they not have so many hit points that the PC's can't dispatch them and get a quick and decisive victory? Maybe it's fun just to see how awesome your PC's are ina situation like that. I mean I agree with The Jester it's a playstyle thing and as long as the players are having a good time, that's all that matters.

Now, putting that aside for a moment...again I ask you in a 4e game the same thing could happen with a group of minions that the PC's encounter (especially if they get initiative and have a controller or two in their group). Should that type of combat be skipped because it has a high likelihood of being non-challenging for that particular groups make-up... should all easy encounters, according to the XP budget, just be skipped over mechanically? I think for some groups getting lucky enough to pull something like this off is one of the things that makes the game interesting and fun. YMMV of course.

This is clearly a matter of opinion, deriving (I suspect) largely from playstyle preferences. I would call it combat, even if all the bad guys had been cut down without a chance to act, simply because everyone was on initiative and attacks were rolled.

While this is all very valid, remember that, for some playstyles, this encounter would be great fun. (In fact, it sounded like it was, on the 'cast.) Not only that, nobody knew that things were going to pan out the way they did until dice hit the table and the pcs hacked down most of the orcs before they could act.

As far as bringing in 4e here, I don't know what the point of that is. I suspect I've GMed more games in the other iterations of D&D here than the vast, vast, vast majority of folks on this board. I like 4e. I'm sorry you can't stand it Imaro. I defend it as I enjoy it. Stop framing an issue that has nothing to do with 4e in a way that is asking for an edition war.

With respect to gradations of "combat", I'd say there are many. In my 4 long-standing AD&D and 3.x campaigns, my players were all very "The Black Company." They ganked, insta-gibbed and set up fights "so there wasn't a fight" regularly. The Rogue in my last epic 3.x campaign was outrageously lethal. Just absurd. He would gank Maraliths. He passed Stealth on a melee BBEG, gutted him, lost initiative, and absolutely destroyed him with on his next turn with a FotW combat round and passwalled before his guards could enter the chamber. That was not a combat and no one at the table thought it was as we were all laughing hysterically. My 4e campaign has a Rogue/Ranger built to gank. The Bladesinger and Druid can easily insta-gib an encounter set up as a swath of minions and a Standard. When the Rogue wins a Stealth Skill Challenge, I move the one or two sentries HP to Bloodied. When he ganks them, I don't consider it a combat. When the three of them go nova and utterly destroy an of-level combat composed primarily of minions and a Standard in one round, I don't consider that a combat.

"Gank"
"Nova Insta-gib"

These are very different than an ebb and flow "heroic comeback" or a "BBEG setpiece" or even just a 2-3 round one-sided affair. My 4e players "Gank" and "Nova Insta-gib" now and again. Neither I, nor they, consider it "combat". I've playtested plenty of 5e and there are combats to be had. I don't include a less than 1 round massacre where the GM decides to have the remaining enemy, in effect, volantarily skewer himself (because he's "scared witless") on the swords of the 3 PCs around him (because there is no mechanism for a retreat that works outside of the tactical combat interface...which handles it terribly because retreat in the scenario ONLY equals suicide). And I certainly don't herald the swiftness of its "combat" because of that example in the same way that a 4e or 3.x gank or nova insta-gib anyway shouldn't be championed as resembling the duration and dynamics of a standard, multi-round combat...and then have regalings of its swiftness.

Neither of you may see it that way. Fair enough. That is my reasoning. It is nothing so shallow as picking a nit or edition warring. I would like there to be functional retreat/escape rules and I would like them to be segmented away from the combat rules. If Mearls wants to handle his orcs as "scared witless" in the face of "humans", then have at it. Its also my opinion that this is quite odd and well astray from orthodox. If his table had fun, have at it! I'm not so presumptious as to tell him how to run a game (he certainly wouldn't solicit my opinion I'm sure) nor to tell his players that they're "doing it wrong". But I have opinions on orthodox orcs and what constitutes a combat and I have opinions on the deficiency of the tactical combat interface of D&D (all of them) to handle retreating and pursuit. And now you have them (at last I hope so...after my last round of efforts all that seems to have been gleaned from it was BADWRONGFUN, HOW DARE YOU? AND ARE YOU A HYPOCRIT, LET'S HAVE A TEST, EH?...or at least that was the apparent take home given the response.). And you may ignore them, deride them, or engage them as you will.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Okay, one last try, then I'm done:

Tactical decisions are impossible when you are scared witless.
Yes, tactically, it would make far more sense to back away and try to make a fighting retreat. But in reality, panic does not work that way. You don't get to pause and take stock of the situation, then formulate a plan.

Indeed. I'm not suggesting they do that. I'm suggesting they recoil, disengaging, rather than throw themselves on the enemy's swords.

Remember, this was more than just "They're stronger than us!" This was the sort of crippling fear that comes from spending weeks, even months knowing that you're being hunted, that there is something out there killing your kind off one by one, and that nobody knows what is doing this. Then suddenly, on what you think is a routine shake-down, three of your buddies die bloody in the span of a few seconds, and these creepy, imposing and angry people are now bearing down on you.

OK. So they are scared witless and then go into a dark alley to commit a routine shakedown. This is an ... interesting ... combination of things to do. If they were actually scared witless before the fight started why would they have set foot outside? Rather than being huddled together and in massive blocks? And why would they have gone down a dark alley to shake someone down? That isn't the action of someone who starts out as scared witless.

In AD&D, there are three levels of morale failure. At the lowest level, the orcs try a fighting withdrawal - moving backwards at half speed, facing the enemy, and engaging blows if pursued.

The highest level of morale failure has them fleeing in absolute panic, provoking attacks, and possibly dropping held items.

Indeed. The orcs went in confident. Confident enough to try shaking down other people with weapons. But slightly wary of something else so it wouldn't have been an absolute shock when it turned. There was no direct intimidation or fear-enhancing magic. Merely fast and brutal combat. So Mearls has them behave at the highest possible level of panic (I'm prepared to bet that the intermediate morale failure has those who can flee safely fleeing, and the rest withdrawing until they can flee). Jumping straight to all out panic was a spectacular change in tone - and not one that was called out as spectacular by Mearls.

1) I wouldn't call what occurred there "combat". It was handled as an Action Scene, but it was, in effect, exclusively color with mechanics as a peripheral element in ultimately deciding the resolution of the conflict.

I'd agree here.

2) The "wild-eyed, flee in terror action" does not require mechanical resolution. The tactical Attack of Opportunity rules added nothing to this but unnecessary table handling time; no tension, no odds of anything happening beyond the death of the fleeing orc.

This. This is why I suggested a much more interesting situation would be the two orcs withdrawing then running in opposite directions along the wall.

3) I don't agree at all that the orcs would be freaked out by humans (despite members of their clan being ganked) to the degree that they would be "scared witless".

This too. Humans are no better at physical violence than other orcs. And aren't supernatural (and certainly didn't display supernatural abilities until the entangle spell). Heavy violence is fairly mundane for orcs. The orcs would have grown up round violence, inflicted it, and received it.

 

[Imaro]

I'd like to think my position wasn't as shallow as that and that I conveyed the multi-faceted issues at the core of my dispute. Perhaps not.

D&D 5e is all about tradition and orthodox from D&D's vestigal stages. If we know anything about 5e's design ethos, it is that. So, with that guiding influence, I harken back to the very first Wandering Monster's article where they outlined the orthodox, traditional story of the obviously extremely important Orc; the same one that is in every single one of our Monster Manuals (hence why their story has a fundamental coherency which we can point to and say; "yup, that's an orc".) - edited for brevity and relevance:



Yup. That's an orc. That is the orc we all know. Both of you and myself included. Are their anomalous deviations driven by setting, etc? Of course. There are anomalous everything. But they wouldn't be composing these articles and working so very, very, very hard to prove that they understand that 4e's implied setting deviations and incarnations (of which I care little to nothing about) were heretical to canon and they are being removed or shipped off to some corner of the multiverse such that their taint cannot be said to infect the standard, core implied setting.

Why we would make the assumption that Mearls is working off of some odd, unorthodox orc "story" iteration is lost on me. Given all of their efforts at reigning in the counterculture and going stridently back to orthodox in their presentation of the edition (of which this is), that makes no sense to me at all so it wouldn't ocurr to me. It would only ocurr to me that he was using the stock, bog standard, edition-spanning (including 4e) Orc story...outlined so well above in their article; "ferocious, only the strong survive, humans are weak, prove yourself in battle or perish, etc." The kind that certainly wouldn't reflexively run, and expose themselves to certain death where Gruumsh or Orcus or whomever wouldn't cull them to be servants in their afterlife...certainly not "scared witless" which was primarily what I was disputing as it was given justification for the bad (edition-spanning) tactical retreat/withdraw/pursuit mechanics of "OA suicide." People have issue with forced movement (which I find to wonderfully simulate martial combat, of which I have a ton of personal experience with, incredibly well) and decry it regularly...but we're ok with "OA suicide" as the mechanical architecture for tactical retreat/withdraw/pursuit mechanics due to "scared witless" even for the "sheer ferocity of orcs"?

Let's look at that description again...

WotC Wandering Monsters Column number 1
[h=3][top]Orcs[/h]Orcs are savage, both in the sense of being fiercely violent and untamed, and in the historically loaded sense of being uncivilized and primitive in their technology.

And they’re known for their fury in combat, launching a ferocious and violent assault against their foes.


They rely on their sheer ferocity to keep them going despite their wounds, rather than wearing heavy armor to protect them from wounds.

They’re chaotic evil, gathering in loose bands or tribes where the strongest rule and the weak are bullied or killed. They do have a modicum of social order, with a rough hierarchy based on relative strength, and they use ritualized combat to resolve challenges. In combat, it’s every orc for itself, with each orc more interested in earning personal glory than in securing victory for the group.


half-orcs with human parentage can put their superior intelligence to good use in leading groups of orcs, though they must constantly prove their strength and ferocity to defend their positions against challengers who see them as weak.

Emphasis mine.

What I took from it was that Orcs are chaotic, so I'm not sure an organized and protected retreat would be true to their style anyway... Also that in a position of strength Orcs are fierce warriors, however when faced with opposition and foes stronger than themselves, they become cowards thus why a weaker Orc can be bullied by stronger foes... and I would definitely say a group that slays multiple orcs in less that a round of combat would probably qualify as "stronger" in the primitive mindset of an Orc, YMMV of course but I still don't see how Mearls wasn't true to the archetypical Orc as defined above in that instance and that does seem to make your complaints (at least about how the Orcs behaved) coms off as a nitpick.

So yes, issue with the story of the orc displayed here. But that is primarily due to the bad apparatus that we have in place for tactical retreat/withdraw/pursuit. If we had a simple sub-system in place that allowed strategic (not tactical...not at the combat engine level) retreat that wasn't an auto/insta-gib, then it would make for a more dynamic experience. As is, it is nothing more than "this guy jumps on your swords to get the combat over." It comes off as trite and it is very antagonistic toward hardened berserkers whose steel (internal) is smelted, worked and perfected in the crucible of non-stop combat and brutality.

Eh again, your interpretation of Orcs doesn't jibe with their chaotic and primitive nature, or their submissiveness towards stronger foes... if anything your orcs seem more like hobgoblins. As far as a retreat or morale mechanic goes, personally as a DM I don't need it. I can make that call and I like too because I know my players, and I'm not keen on just being a number processor at the table. Fleeing from a group of armed combatants you have been in a life and death struggle with should, IMO, be difficult and should often be a death sentence when you are outnumbered, outgunned and afraid. Again, IMO, only the lucky (either through missed AoO, a clear path the PC's left open, terrain advantage, etc.) tend to escape situations like that.

As far as bringing in 4e here, I don't know what the point of that is. I suspect I've GMed more games in the other iterations of D&D here than the vast, vast, vast majority of folks on this board. I like 4e. I'm sorry you can't stand it Imaro. I defend it as I enjoy it. Stop framing an issue that has nothing to do with 4e in a way that is asking for an edition war.

It had something to do with 4e because 4e was the first edition that created a specific monster to be used in "combat" that is ganked in one hit... so yeah if you claim ganking monsters in the first round isn't combat, it does seem kind of relavent that there is an edition that has a specific monster to allow PC's to do just that. Now, please stop ascribing motivations and actually read what I wrote. I didn't say anything disparaging about 4e but just asked you a simple question concerning comparing it's mechanics and what happened in the Orc fight. If you didn't want to answer cool, but trying to flip it like I was condemning 4e, when I did nothing of the sort is not cool.

With respect to gradations of "combat", I'd say there are many. In my 4 long-standing AD&D and 3.x campaigns, my players were all very "The Black Company." They ganked, insta-gibbed and set up fights "so there wasn't a fight" regularly. The Rogue in my last epic 3.x campaign was outrageously lethal. Just absurd. He would gank Maraliths. He passed Stealth on a melee BBEG, gutted him, lost initiative, and absolutely destroyed him with on his next turn with a FotW combat round and passwalled before his guards could enter the chamber. That was not a combat and no one at the table thought it was as we were all laughing hysterically. My 4e campaign has a Rogue/Ranger built to gank. The Bladesinger and Druid can easily insta-gib an encounter set up as a swath of minions and a Standard. When the Rogue wins a Stealth Skill Challenge, I move the one or two sentries HP to Bloodied. When he ganks them, I don't consider it a combat. When the three of them go nova and utterly destroy an of-level combat composed primarily of minions and a Standard in one round, I don't consider that a combat.

"Gank"
"Nova Insta-gib"

These are very different than an ebb and flow "heroic comeback" or a "BBEG setpiece" or even just a 2-3 round one-sided affair. My 4e players "Gank" and "Nova Insta-gib" now and again. Neither I, nor they, consider it "combat". I've playtested plenty of 5e and there are combats to be had. I don't include a less than 1 round massacre where the GM decides to have the remaining enemy, in effect, volantarily skewer himself (because he's "scared witless") on the swords of the 3 PCs around him (because there is no mechanism for a retreat that works outside of the tactical combat interface...which handles it terribly because retreat in the scenario ONLY equals suicide). And I certainly don't herald the swiftness of its "combat" because of that example in the same way that a 4e or 3.x gank or nova insta-gib anyway shouldn't be championed as resembling the duration and dynamics of a standard, multi-round combat...and then have regalings of its swiftness.


Neither of you may see it that way. Fair enough. That is my reasoning. It is nothing so shallow as picking a nit or edition warring. I would like there to be functional retreat/escape rules and I would like them to be segmented away from the combat rules. If Mearls wants to handle his orcs as "scared witless" in the face of "humans", then have at it. Its also my opinion that this is quite odd and well astray from orthodox. If his table had fun, have at it! I'm not so presumptious as to tell him how to run a game (he certainly wouldn't solicit my opinion I'm sure) nor to tell his players that they're "doing it wrong". But I have opinions on orthodox orcs and what constitutes a combat and I have opinions on the deficiency of the tactical combat interface of D&D (all of them) to handle retreating and pursuit. And now you have them (at last I hope so...after my last round of efforts all that seems to have been gleaned from it was BADWRONGFUN, HOW DARE YOU? AND ARE YOU A HYPOCRIT, LET'S HAVE A TEST, EH?...or at least that was the apparent take home given the response.). And you may ignore them, deride them, or engage them as you will.

So you have your own arbitrary definition of combat. I guess mine is simpler, a combat is any portion of the game where the combat rules are used to determine the outcome. The length of time, ebb and flow whether it's a setpiece or if there is a "heroic comeback" as the determining factor to whether it is combat or not... but like you said to each his own

 

[I'm A Banana]

If you can call it a fight when despite a lack of surprise, and due to something the DM admits in to doing arbitrarily the orcs don't get to make a single attack roll.

It's really very meta-game, but I'm a fan of having each side in a combat take turns. The highest person in initiative goes first, followed by the highest enemy, followed by the next highest person, then the next highest enemy, etc.

Since I like my combat fairly abstract, it doesn't bother me too much, and it keeps things like this from happening, where the PC's all lay waste to the enemy before the enemy really gets to act, simply because they rolled low on their Initiative.

But it's pretty shamelessly meta, so I don't think it would work for everyone.

 

[Manbearcat]

It had something to do with 4e because 4e was the first edition that created a specific monster to be used in "combat" that is ganked in one hit... so yeah if you claim ganking monsters in the first round isn't combat, it does seem kind of relavent that there is an edition that has a specific monster to allow PC's to do just that.

I'm not going to engage with the rest of your post as there is literally nothing that can constructively come from it as we can apparently parse text and find diametrically opposed (or at least orthogonal) meaning and then extrapolate again in the opposite direction. We're from different planets so we can leave it at that.

With respect to the above though, we can possibly achieve some clarity (but perhaps not as again we may have orthogonal or diametrically opposed readings and extrapolation.). The way I've always understood (and correspondingly used) the term "ganking" is as follows:

Ganking - To kill a singular enemy or enemy force that has no chance to defend itself (eg The Red Wedding or Renley Baratheon being killed by the shadow in The Song of Fire and Ice).

Minions, I thought intuitively, are there to serve as mooks or cannon fodder. They are the AD&D Heroic Fray rules but moved from player-side to GM-side. A Heroic Fray is called out by the Fighter when enemies outnumber the PCs and are at least 10 HD lower than them. This grants lots of extra attacks to mow down the one-shottable enemies (minions),

The DMG 1 rulebook provides their role via invoking genre expectations and encounter-building instructions:

4e DMG p54 and 55

Minion

Sometimes you want monsters to come in droves and go down just as fast. A fight against thirty orcs isa grand cinematic battle. The players get to enjoy carving through the mob like a knife through butter, feeling confident and powerful. Unfortunately, the mechanics of standard monsters make that difficult. If you use large numbers of monsters of a level similar to the PCs, you overwhelm them. If you use a large number of monsters of much lower level, you bore them with creatures that have little chance of hurting the PCs but take a lot of time to take down. On top of that, keeping track of the actions of so many monsters is a headache.

Minions are designed to serve as shock troops and cannon fodder for other monsters (standard, elite, or solo). For minions are considered to be about the same as a standard monster of their level. Minions are designed to help fill out an encounter, but they go down quickly.

<snip minion mechanics>

Use minions as melee combatants placed between the PCs and back rank artillery or controller monsters.

You can use them any way you'd like such as using them as sentries for "ganking" but that isn't what they were constructed for. They're the inverted Heroic Fray cannon fodder of AD&D.

 

[Warbringer]

To paraphrase .. "These aren't the orcs your grandfather ran from"

There was definitely some inconsistency in the orcs behavior, either vs. cannon or internally in the story. But, so what. Yeah, Orcs showing weakness around each other is tantamount to suicide ("bully or kill the weak"), and in a situation of feeling threatened I'd expect them to throw the weakest under the bus ("every orc for itself"). So, I'd have role played it differently; which basically given the two key traits (in quotes) is aggressively respond to anything that isn't your own reflection (and then check twice). They probably know the others feel the same (they're Orcs) so haven't slept in days, probably haven't eaten anything they didn't kill themselves etc ... In other words "Paranoid".

As to them going into a dark alley, sure, if they felt confident enough and the target looked weak enough, which it did, chance to get some "credibility" back.

Mike probably has reasons why the orcs were on patrol, not humans (maybe they aren't stupid enough to take night duty and let the non-humans kill each other), but i'd have just ad the patrol be human, let that engagement play out. I'd probably have thrown some goblins in with the orcs and let the craven elements come through there and the orcs fear emerge through violence.

YMMV

 

[Cyberen]

The actual combat chassis could make some room to skirmishing and retreat options.
I'm thinking of something like the "disengage" action being contested :
* the escaping guy forfeits his attack (and, possibly, his future reactions) and initiate a Disengagement with a check (of his choice - you can plug here whatever lurking/skirmishing ability : moving fast, hiding,...)
* the pursuing guys can forfeit their move a action to contest the evader check. If one wins, he can follow up with an attack. If he loses, he can forfeit his attack to try again and catch up.
Basically, it makes disengaging a contest where the pursuers have advantage.