Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5043618" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't particularly agree. I've seen plenty of parties flee successfully. Its a perfectly viable tactic in 4e and in fact one of the things 4e really MADE viable in general since combat doesn't involve so many devastating single attacks. Now in 1e or 2e running was almost always nonviable. It might work for high level parties but they also usually had those "get out of jail free" type powers. A low level 1e party that is over matched? Yeah, unless the monsters are slow they're history barring some kind of DM intervention.Just because a monster is faster than the party doesn't make it a good idea for the monster to pursue either. It doesn't know that the party has no backups waiting a ways down the passage. For all the monster knows the whole thing is a ploy to bait it out. That aside there is always a tendency to hang back. You just won the battle. Sure it would be good to crush the enemy totally but chances are your side took some damage as well and you probably aren't all that hopped up to get into another fight right this minute. Look at history, its replete with examples of victorious armies failing to pursue a defeated foe. Your average Joe monster is more likely thinking about its own skin and hey there's some dead guys back there I can loot and I'm hurt and so what if those jerks come back again, we'll get them next time.Even in a purely tactical sense its not true that an enemy can just pursue and charge. PCs can use the run action and drop an AP too if they want, which will let them immediately go from engaged to out of charge range. If they use that AP they can even do it without taking an OA (shift, run, AP, run some more). If they don't have an AP then yeah, they have to move (take an OA) then run. Its still a pretty good bet they can get clear. A monster with an 8 speed or higher can catch up, but if its got less than that then it has to run as well and now you're trading blows at no advantage to either side, plus you may well have just left behind your nice tactical situation and slower allies.The worst case scenario is a fast monster that the party has no chance to defeat in a relatively open area. Well, in that case what logic is there for being able to disengage with an SC vs just scattering in all directions as fast as possible and hoping for the best? The SC version has no logic for how you escaped except "the enemy got bored and let us go". This is system independent too. Sure some systems may have MECHANICS for how you get out of that situation, but they can't explain how it worked because it just isn't realistic. An SC is no worse than that. This all harks back to the whole dragon debate from a few months back. The DM should obviously know these situations when they come up. Either he wants to let the PCs go and has some explanation available for how, or he just wants to eat them for lunch and nothing is going to save a party from that.</blockquote>

Verification