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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ChristopherA" data-source="post: 5043909" data-attributes="member: 80302">But the idea here is that the normal combat rules are themselves are not the standards of realism, they are only an approximation. Everything is much more precise and cut-and-dried when playing a D&D combat than in the real/cinematic world. Everyone moves in exactly the way they intend to at all times with no possibility of imperfection. Everyone knows exactly what they can see on the map, where every square is, and everyone's movement is fixed with absolute precision, never slower or faster. It just doesn't lend itself very well to dynamic chase scenes. Once you move to noncombat time, you have more flexibility to move the characters to different terrain types and introduce stuff which would logically allow characters to escape in an action movie, without getting bogged down by the technical combat rules. My players are happy with this sort of thing in principle (though it is devilishly tricky to do well); I obviously can't know what your players would or wouldn't find believable.   You have a good point that failure means a TPK. But the truth is that the "natural" consequence of failing a skill check is often death. That is why the DMG's approach is to mandate that GM's specifically sit down and invent reasons why skill checks don't have catastrophic consequences for failure. Maybe failure means the players find refuge in a dangerous haunted tomb, or fall into a pit into the Underdark, or are saved by interference by someone who wants favors later on. Hmm, I just hope the players don't fail to run away too often, or I'll run out of ideas. I'm thinking more of the cases where the players run before getting engaged with the monsters. Once they are surrounded, I think it is time for a Bluff skill challenge, not a chase scene.  True, but the original poster was speaking from a GM's point of view - how to allow the characters to escape. This means allowing all of the characters to escape. A battle where a couple characters escape with their lives isn't something the GM plans into the adventure (unless he's running Tomb of Horrors); it is something that just happens when the battle goes horribly wrong.</blockquote>

Verification