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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6668568" data-attributes="member: 4937">You're talking to me like I'm a player that needs tactical advice.  I'm a DM telling you what I've experienced with player tactical choices over the last 30 years, and I'm telling you that your theory is theoretical and not practical.  Or at the very least, it is colored by having a very narrow view of what scenarios happen in D&D.In general, that either means that on the whole the PC's are faster than the monsters, or else it doesn't. Most importantly though, what that tends to mean until comparatively high level is a PC, or a couple of PC's have an 'escape' button, but that the whole party does not.  Sure, Teleport is great emergency button if you can manage it, but that doesn't do anything for you until you have at least 9th level Wizards in the party, and even then if you have a party of 6 or 8 PC's that means probably only half are getting out alive.   And the same is true of spells, abilities, and magic items generally.  They may help individual players, but they don't necessarily help the whole party.Tend to hinder players even more than monsters.  Most monsters are encountered in their natural habitat, which tends to not be the natural habitat of the players.  Sure, there is probably some skill monkey that can tumble, jump, climb, and swim as well or better than the monster, and in practice he can get away, but that doesn't help the party as a whole.  Mostly what you have here is 'difficult terrain' that disproportionately impacts the players.  For example, in my current campaign, one of the closest times the party 'tank' came to dying is when the party decided to evade a pack of hell hounds by fleeing over the rooftops.  Sure, this worked for the party rogue well, but the armored 'tank' was no better dealing with rooftop terrain than the hellhounds were.  In the past 5 years of play, I can't think of one case where either 'clever tactic' (which is really nothing more than a rote example from a stock list of tired theoretical tactics) would have actually worked.  In the case of intelligent creatures, your definition of 'intelligent creature' seems to presume very low intelligence creatures that are easily distracted by shiny baubles and have no real motivation beyond simple greed and no real relationship to the party.  This is a tactic that might work with a randomly encountered goblin warband of the Clown Villain variety but its not going to work with a 19 intelligence big bad that knows that you have been the grit in the gears of their organization or a brain washed cultist fanatic protecting their unholy temple nor the infernal outsider.  And really, which group is more likely to have the resources to make you want to run or need to run?  Likewise, throwing a few iron rations down might distract those four or five feral dogs for a few rounds (maybe), but rarely is there a situation where mere animals can make even a low level party want to run away.  Four or five feral dogs or wolves cease to be a threat somewhere around 3rd level, and even lions, tigers and bears aren't far behind in obsolesce.   In those rare situations where animals can be a threat - a stampeding herd of mastadons or a entire pack of dire lions - its highly questionable whether dumping a box of raisins or even pulling a few hay bales from your bag of holding is going to make much of a difference on the monsters motivations.  (And most predators have the scent ability as well, which makes them difficult to evade.)  In general with animals, some where after level 1 the party tends to acquire more tools to mentally dominate, control, or deceive animals than you are ever going to have moving faster than them and in so far as you can evade them, by literal flight for example, this tends to turn into kiting the foe rather than escaping it.For that matter, while I do have monsters try to run away, it's relatively rare that it works for anything but a high level spellcaster.  By the time the monster knows it's in real trouble, it's too late to get away.  Often this is true even if the monster is generally faster than the players.  Even something extraordinarily fast like an air elemental can take enough missile damage in the two rounds or so it takes to get out of range of its pursuers to finish it off.</blockquote>

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