> At least my suggestion was quasi-realistic. There are fright spells, and I've had monsters run away in fear while I was fighting Murkon. It always bugs me when they run away before I can kill them.
>
> Sam, what aspect of a character's stats or whatever makes monsters more scared? Or is it just that Wispballs are scared of everything, and everything else will fight you?

Monsters have a "fear factor" ranging from around -20ish to 12, if indeed they are vulnerable to scare attacks at all. Scare attacks raise the fear factor of individual monsters by however many points specified in the spell. If a monster's fear factor is a positive number, there is a chance he'll either run away or freeze in terror. The higher the fear factor and the higher the average level of your party, the more likely this chance is.

The problem is that the vast majority of the deep monsters are completely immune to scare attacks *except* by CHAOS, and escorts are even immune to that. So although you can wait for certain monsters to run away and avoid the XP that way, you'll still have to kill a lot to get to Murkon. A better plan is to pass through all the monsters en route to Murkon by running away (except from the escorts, which cannot be escaped from) and metamorphing everything (again, except the escorts) that you HAVE to fight into slime blobs.