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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8679203" data-attributes="member: 4937">In ancient warfare, the rout phase of a battle was the part where the most fatalities would take place.  My experience with PC's fleeing fights is that most of the time they are routs, where the PC's turn and run because morale breaks and you end up in a panicked free for all with every PC for himself.  They quite often end in near TPKs because rarely is it the case that the whole party is faster than the monster or that they have any sort of plan for survival other than run faster than the other guy.I think that reality is what motivated PCs to stand and fight.  Because things are often much more likely to go wrong if you start running away than if you stand and fight.  That's in part because parties rarely have a plan for how to flee these days, and generally the plan to flee hasn't been a big part of gaming since the 1970's (when I understand fleeing out of combat was pretty common).  In order to successfully run away, generally a party needs to start running away before it realizes it is in big trouble, and that rarely happens.  Usually what triggers the realization is the early signs of a TPK death spiral with one or more players getting dropped, at which point not only is it hard to run away but doing so means abandoning your comrades. It's also I think in part because there are usually not great chase/evasion mini-games that make fleeing fun, and even the good ones I've seen wouldn't necessarily make fleeing safer than standing and fighting since fighting is often what parties are optimized to do.  I mean mounts are rarely treated as hugely important things.  But it's not easy for a system to have both casual realism and to make it easy for a group to run away.</blockquote>

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