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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 8549210" data-attributes="member: 6785785">I'm not sure exactly what you mean in the second sentence, but I'm not talking about playing optimally. I'm talking about the GM falling into a habit of running the NPCs from a standpoint of pure tactical optimization with the goal of killing the PCs. Not with winning, but with eliminating the PCs. I don't think this is a good habit to fall into, but plenty of GMs do. I can say that I have done so at times. I justified it as "but this is what a bloodthirsty gnoll would do" and so on. But there's almost always more than one thing that someone "would do". Do I even have to cite the trope of the villain gloating when they should simply put a bullet in the hero's head? Or examples like a wide receiver thinking he's broken away for an easy TD and he starts gloating only to have a defender strip the ball at the 2-yard line? Opponents don't always behave in a perfectly calculated pattern of the kind that games like D&D promote with the math and the turns and so on. GMs should break out of that thinking a bit more if they don't want those patterns to determine everything. So if a party retreat is a desired option....if a given game group wants that to be available to the PCs....then they either need to make rules for it, or else the GM has to allow it to work often enough that it becomes something the players will consider.</blockquote>