As Chamomile said, a big issue is player/DM culture assumptions about whether or not retreat is something they could imagine happen. If the PCs try to run away once and the DM has the monsters chase them all down and eat them, that's probably going to leave a sour taste in everyone's mouths. Echoing others, earlier versions of D&D tended to involve larger numbers of combatants than current versions do, and they also had explicit morale rules. In those paradigms, it's generally easier to ensure that retreat is something that occasionally happens, at least on the side of Team Monster. (They also had rules for determining distance between characters and monsters when combat music starts.)The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:How many game have explicit retreat mechanics? PCs have a hard time knowing when to call it quits, especially in non-ancient D&D games and their spinoffs. I figure that if there's an express mechanic for fleeing combat in the rules, then players might feel more comfortable running away since they know the GM won't be pulling everything out of their asses.
ACKS has explicit chase mechanics, with separate rules for dungeon, wilderness, and naval chases. Dungeon chases more or less keep everything in boardgame mode, with the additional restriction that sharp turns and the like require Reflex saves to avoid falling. There's also this weird line:
which suggests that you literally only need to turn a single corner before you're safe. Wilderness and naval chases immediately switch out of narrative mode and give probability tables for escape chances. I think the implicit assumption for any of these cases is that there will be a fair amount of magic tea party involved in providing modifiers and adjudications.ACKS core wrote:A monster will stop chasing the adventurers
if they manage to get out of the monster’s range of vision.
tl;dr: Retreat mechanics probably make the most sense when contextualized with further systems for encounter distance, reactions, and morale, but, even then, they're dependent on a variety of "psychologically soft" factors that are difficult to turn into mechanics.