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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5201692" data-attributes="member: 58197">We could argue semantics all night, so let's change the term to &quot;DM judgement.&quot; I think we can agree that monsters running away, without an Intimidate check, is a DM judgement call in 4E.Now, DMs vary in level of skill. One of the explicit design goals of both 3E and 4E was to support the novice DM, by providing a ruleset which didn't require a lot of DM judgement calls in the regular course of play. Obviously there is room for DM judgement, and players will always do wacky things that aren't covered by the rules, but when the game is running squarely in the center of the intended design space - a straight-up fight against a bunch of dungeon denizens, no tricks - an inexperienced DM should be able to just run things out of the book and have it work.I have played with a fair few novice DMs, and IME it's very, very common in such games to have all monsters fight to the death. For someone inexperienced with the combat system, who may not be very good at judging when a fight has become hopeless, it's the simplest and most logical approach.Hence, if &quot;all monsters fight to the death&quot; results in grind and boredom... then I would say that's a problem, because the game is not supporting the novice DM as it should. (It's also not supporting the historically popular &quot;beer and pretzels&quot; school of gaming, in which nobody retreats, nobody surrenders, and the PCs emerge from every dungeon drenched in blood to the elbows.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 5201692, member: 58197"] We could argue semantics all night, so let's change the term to "DM judgement." I think we can agree that monsters running away, without an Intimidate check, is a DM judgement call in 4E. Now, DMs vary in level of skill. One of the explicit design goals of both 3E and 4E was to support the novice DM, by providing a ruleset which didn't require a lot of DM judgement calls in the regular course of play. Obviously there is [I]room[/I] for DM judgement, and players will always do wacky things that aren't covered by the rules, but when the game is running squarely in the center of the intended design space - a straight-up fight against a bunch of dungeon denizens, no tricks - an inexperienced DM should be able to just run things out of the book and have it work. I have played with a fair few novice DMs, and IME it's very, very common in such games to have all monsters fight to the death. For someone inexperienced with the combat system, who may not be very good at judging when a fight has become hopeless, it's the simplest and most logical approach. Hence, if "all monsters fight to the death" results in grind and boredom... then I would say that's a problem, because the game is not supporting the novice DM as it should. (It's also not supporting the historically popular "beer and pretzels" school of gaming, in which nobody retreats, nobody surrenders, and the PCs emerge from every dungeon drenched in blood to the elbows.) [/QUOTE]

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