On 7/17/2017 at 8:30 AM, HappyDaze said:

It's even more amazing to me how many players have their PCs stay and fight to the bitter, bloody end, when truthfully many of them would indeed say "screw it, I'm outta here!" or at the very least make a tactical withdrawal to regroup and fight another day.

Depends on the players and the game. D&D and its assorted clones with it's notion of balanced encounters are notorious for this, with the game designed under the vary assumption that the PCs are generally going to have at least a fair chance of winning. OTOH, Deadlands Classic is a game where that sort of attitude can and will get PCs killed if they don't bother with any sort of tactics; I had one player during a long-running campaign go through several characters before it finally sunk in that this wasn't D&D and that as the GM I was under zero obligation to "play fair" where the monsters were concerned (it's amazing the amount of sheer terror that a simple werewolf can cause for a group of experienced PCs when used right).

I've been in a number of games where the players wisely retreated in the face of a threat once they clued in that they're outgunned. Even had one encounter with an Inquisitor end very quickly when the PCs (all at about 250 earned XP) simply turned tail and fled, with only one PC making a combat check and that was more of a delaying action to ensure the rest of the party got a running start on what they assumed would be a chase. On paper, the PCs probably could have taken this guy and his squad of stormtroopers in a straight-up fight, but as I'd taken the time to give this foe a bit of build up, they were so paranoid that all he had to do was step into view to cause the players to freak and decide they wanted no part of him.

Of course, if the GM has a habit of constantly treating their players with kid gloves, that only reinforces the attitude of the PCs can tackle anything thrown at them. So if your players never consider backing down from a fight, perhaps you as the GM should ask themselves how much of that is their own fault for coddling the players and building an expectation that tabletop RPGs are more akin to video game RPGs where the challenges scale to a point the PCs are never really in any danger of losing.

Plus, if the GM never has their bad guys fall back, then the players get reinforced on the notion that combats are "all or nothing" affairs where you either win or you die, with no middle ground, making it a two-edged sword.

1 minute ago, Donovan Morningfire said:

D&D and its assorted clones with it's notion of balanced encounters are notorious for this, with the game designed under the vary assumption that the PCs are generally going to have at least a fair chance of winning.

This applies to much of D&D post-2e, but I remember the old days where D&D shredded characters with alarming regularity (but perhaps not so much as CP2020 or many of GDW's games).

1 minute ago, HappyDaze said:

This applies to much of D&D post-2e, but I remember the old days where D&D shredded characters with alarming regularity (but perhaps not so much as CP2020 or many of GDW's games).

Even pre-3.X versions of D&D had guidelines on encounter structure. Nothing specific, but then D&D didn't get super-heavy on specific rules until 3rd edition.

They were just for the most part ignored, especially by those GMs that opted for the Gygaxian mindset of a "DM vs. Players" sort of games, or worse yet took Tomb of Horrors as the how-to of designing a "fun" adventure.