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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6845918" data-attributes="member: 4937">I get your point about metagame artifacts effecting the outcome of the game, but I'll one up that by saying that the outcome of an encounter in 3e depends on how you orient and align the 5'x5' grid with the walls of the room.  You can change an outcome completely by rotating the grid on a room that lies diagonally across the grid lines of the rest of the dungeon so that the encounter now lines up with the walls... of course this now cause artifacts if a chase suddenly develops out of the room.  Without dropping to using protractors and dividers - which in 1e I have used before - you can't actually avoid the fact that the battle grid doesn't actually exist in the game world.Also, the same basic issue occurs more subtly whenever a DM says, "Roll for initiative."  In practice, most DMs are encouraged to have 'combat' and 'non-combat' minigames, something like the old Ultima IV system where movement was handled as a party until combat began, and then as individuals once combat began.  And yes, in Ultima IV and many similar systems you could manipulate the outcome of the fight by timing how you went in and out of combat.  And as has been shown in prior threads, the outcome of an encounter in 3e D&D depends powerfully on whether or not combat is assumed to began and can only begin when initiative is rolled for.The clocks analogy falls apart because it assumes that there is an objectively right answer.  The answer is always dependent on decisions we make when applying the rules, and this is particularly true because there are always situations not covered by the rules or which the table collectively agrees the rules ought not to apply to (because the rules are silly).  There are numerous problems with attempting to apply the combat rules to a chase.  If for example a character spots another one at a distance of 120', by the combat rules if the character loses initiative - even if he is not surprised - he can't do anything but watch the other character run across the intervening distance.  The character is frozen in time.   The AoO system is supposed to handle this, but it's designed for fights occurring in a small area, not for fights ranging over hundreds of yards.Equally bad is that running is a full round action that causes you to lose your threat zone and during which you may not attack.  What this means is that a very fast character may be able to catch a foe that is running away, but they can't attack them.  They can run up next to them; they may even be able to run over them.  But nothing really allows them to catch the person.  The only way to catch someone in 3e RAW once a chase is underway turns out to require bracketing them such that they cannot move without being in someone's charge range.   Because of the large gap in speed between charging and running, this is hilariously difficult.It's worth noting that it wasn't the PC's being chased that brought this to my attention.  I wasn't concerned that the PC's were 'unfairly' getting away.  I was concerned that the NPC's were tediously hard to catch without resorting to magic and that the whole scene was horribly unrealistic and immersion breaking, since the outcome of it depended again on metagame artifacts of the system like the big bag between the charge speed and the run speed and the fact that you can't attack anything at a run.However, if you really are going to worry excessively about this sort of thing, it would be fairly easy to ensure that the two systems never overlapped simply by creating a rule that determined which subsystem applied.  For example, we might say something like, "If at the beginning of the round, a character is not within the charge range of any other character, that character may declare their intention to evade combat.  Resolve that evasion as a Chase scene, until either the character successfully evades or any chasing character is at melee range with an evading character and the evading character has the Checked status."Interestingly, 1e AD&D has exactly this sort of rule, which determines whether or not the remainder of an encounter is to be resolved by the Evasion subsystem or the Combat subsystem.  The two systems give wildly different answers, allowing slow PCs to successfully run away from monsters which - if we were still using the combat subsystem - they would never be able to retreat from.</blockquote>

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