on a semi-related note, been playing through BG 1 ee and man, sometimes adhering strictly to d&d rules is AWFUL. Fear? Poison? If you're not prepared ahead of time for those kinds of encounters, they're character/party killing situations. The Fear actually lasts a minute of real time(give or take some amount of seconds). so your character is just running around the map for a solid minute, aggroing everything on that map. I had one encounter where my party collected a conga line of like 20 enemies while they were feared. Also, poison lasts FOREVER, so if you dont have an antidote or a spell, you're done.

Those things work well on the tabletop game, but are awful in video-game form.