NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Boldo" data-source="post: 9692895" data-attributes="member: 7047369">Something important that is blamed on players despite being a mechanical failure is that several systems, most notably the d20 system from 3.0 through all their offshoots, forced this mentality in numerous situations with extreme prejudice.Under these systems, 'hit it until it's dead' is the absolute bottom rung of capability. You can get lucky with your rolls, take advantage of your action economy, and maybe get it to run out of HP. By the time you couldn't just beat it down, far too many encounters had far surpassed your ability to run from it, barring perhaps burning some rare teleport scroll or the such if you're not yet at levels where this is normally available. Even this assumes they can't counter or follow that...<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I say 'hit'; diplomacy is also on the "defeating it face on" side of things. It's standing your ground in a fashion, so it can work. It can work insanely well sometimes...</li> </ul>You can do these well after you can no longer run from it, due to movement modes often getting faster with more hit-dice/levels - and if A person in the party CAN run from it still by the time the party can't kill the thing, it's at the cost of everybody else's chance to live since there's now one less person's worth of actions involved.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">This gets even worse when things gain stuff like 'pounce', where every turn spent running is a turn where someone's getting their face bitten off with possibly no fighting back at all.</li> </ul>You can still hit it until it's dead long after your ability to evade detection has been utterly mangled by their senses, detection modes and perception bonuses, and again, if A specialist in the party can hide from it at that point, it's at the cost of everybody else's chance to live should the critter or NPC decide to fight and you don't then join in. We had plenty of chances to get lucky with combat that simply did not happen with other ways of getting through an encounter. Leaving someone as a decoy could hammer the mood at the table and kill the group far more effectively than a mere TPK.In systems like Silhouette, if you can massively outrun the other side, chances are you need and want to. If you have the advantage on who detects whom, you decide the terms of engagement if there is one. Attacking may not be your best option, but the important thing is it's never your only option. In other systems, 'that it isn't' was a bit more of a lie.</blockquote>

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