How does Darkest Dungeon decide if I'm toying with an enemy?

In Darkest Dungeon, I like to arrange battles so that there's only one weak enemy left so I can tank its hits and focus on healing. For example, leaving a weak skeleton around so that I can re-cast stress healing skills on my party that heals more than the skeleton hurts.

The problem is, the game recognizes this eventually by having a random character shout "We should move on!" or something equivalent, which starts stressing my party out faster than I can heal it.

I know that the game doesn't just punish me for long fights. I've had skin-of-my-teeth encounters that have lasted 20+ turns where I wasn't in control of the situation and nobody complained about taking too long. So there's something the game is using to determine if I'm playing with the enemy.

I want to know what that is so that I can figure out the minimum amount of effort needed to artificially prolong fights.

Solution 1:

The system was changed with the most recent DLC, so I'm just going to defer to the wiki:

Stall Penalties will not occur if the remaining enemy is a 'large' creature (takes up 2 spaces).

The first Stall Penalty will occur if either of these 2 conditions are met:

• At the end of two full rounds after there is 2 or fewer enemies remaining.
• When a player uses 2 or more stalling moves when there are 2 or fewer enemies remaining.

If the remaining 2 enemies are one of or a combination of the below enemies, the first Stall Penalty is reached after only 1 round.

• Bone Arbalist
• Bone Courtier
• Bone Rabble
• Bone Soldier
• Collected Man-at-Arms
• Collected Vestal
• Crone
• Fungal Artillery
• Madman
• Maggot
• Pelagic Guardian
• Pelagic Shaman
• Swine Drummer
• Swine Skiver
• Webber

There's also a long list of stalling moves, the gist is that it's any move that doesn't deal damage to the enemy.