What are your opinions on PCs always dealing lethal damage to enemies?
Should they instead act to always deal nonlethal damage against enemies instead and try to secure them for interrogation and imprisonment?
Please assume an all-round good alignment and they're going against a slew of enemy types.
Depends on the setting.
Just your run of the mill fantasy setting, ir FR, Greyhawk, your homebrew etc.
Ultimately, it's probably the result of bad Dming. I've long since lost track of how many games I've had where every single monster, hostile NPC, or just enemy group attacks all PCs on sight, never retreats, never surrenders, tries to kill the PCs for very vaguely defined reasons, and will pursue until cornered, in every single fight.
If you make all fights to the death against mindless mooks with 0 characterization, don't be surprised when your 'good' players just opt to slaughter them all without pause. If you want them to not always kill, you should build a world in which that makes sense.
Do the enemies throw down their arms and start begging for mercy? Telling the PCs how they've got kids and a wife at home? How they were forced into doing it by circumstances or some shit?
If they don't, then it's fine to just kill them all.
I dunno.
My group nonlethal'd a group of bandits who were trying to kill them alongside Chitines, but when it came time to fight the Drow belowground, they set up explosive barrels around one of them they had put to sleep with a spell and blew them up.
Sometimes PCs aren't logical
Do they have reason to think the enemy could be sitting on information they need? Do they stand to gain anything from imprisoning the enemy? Wouldn't it be a bother to drag a bunch of prisoners around?
A dead enemy tends to be nothing mroe than a problem solved, permanently.
depends on enemy of course
for instance, doing nonlethal damage to an non-sentient undead makes no sense. you should just try and kill them.
on the other hand, dealing nonleathal damage to a guard or bandit or such who has possible information makes sense.
and, as you mentioned, paragon-of-virtue heroes likely don't want to kill anyone. they might prefer nonlethal damage.
Like a lot of questions that get asked on Veeky Forums, there's just too many variables that could come into play, especially without stating a system. Does attacking non-lethally incur any kind of penalty except for when done with certain weapons? How will the party deal with transporting a hostile prisoner? Is the enemy a monstrous humanoid, such as an orc or goblin, or one of the "civilized" races? What will they do with them when they've finished interrogating them; is it better, morally, to slay a hostile captive who has outlived their usefulness, or to release them knowing that they could do the party, or other, more defenseless innocents, harm in the future?
That said, live capture does have its place, and any party with a member who has an intelligence over 11 should keep it at least as an option.
IMHO more games should do the 4E thing (yes, yes, I know) where you don't need to declare nonlethal damage in advance and instead just ask for the result when the opponent goes down to 0hp.
Because fuck having to keep track of two separate HP tracks, complicated submechanics (hello, OD&D's percentile rolls), and minus-four-to-hit penalties that disincentivize the whole thing in the first place.
Also, the whole problem with giving someone a love tap and accidentally exploding them due to a crit or whatnot. That's just fucking stupid and should never have been possible.
Submission rules in D&D have a penalty because in the old editions - OD&D, AD&D et. al. - it meant that you could sell the fucker on the market for extra XP and, hence, extra loot. So giving the entire mechanic a penalty makes sense since it's more of a risk-reward thing.
But when the only incentive to do nonlethal damage is that, well, the target survives? Yeah, that hit penalty is probably overkill. You're actively disincentivized from doing it at all. Hence everyone does lethal damage all the time because NOT doing lethal damage means you're worse at fighting in one way or another - less hit chance, less damage, etc.
Also, of course, the lack of morale rules in modern RPGs means that all fights are to the death and none of those bandits will surrender to interrogation or whatever. That kind of screws things up further.
I'm not really sure how relevant this all is to your thread, OP, but I felt the need to rant a bit.
>implying killing people that refuse to die with dignity isn't fine
Well, if you're roleplaying a goody-two-shoes character who believes in morality, then I don't think it's fine for the PC to just kill them.
This is a pretty good discussion and topic.
>>implying killing people that refuse to die with dignity isn't fine
I had read this three times to get what you were saying.
>Well, if you're roleplaying a goody-two-shoes character who believes in morality, then I don't think it's fine for the PC to just kill them.
It depends on where honor and groveling place in their morality.
Super-Noble Not!Worf killing a man for being a spineless worm as well as opposing the forces of good?
Yeah I can see it.
Imagine the Tick as a Klingon and you'll get where I am at.
It depends on the moral context of the situation and place.
If a town surrenders when an army marches upon it, treating the inhabitants with grace is proper.
If a town bars their gates, sets siege, and holds the army off for half a year, and eventually that army breaches the walls with horrendous loss and enters, everyone is getting raped, beaten, and murdered, not necessarily in that order.
Assuming you follow the laws of war. Moral anomalies like PCs, who often have values rooted in a weird morality alien to those natural circumstances of the place and era may not do either. Of course, in a realistic game, the latter is probably happening whether the PC's like it or not.
I enjoyed your rant, user.
This.
A respected knight who faces his defeat honorably is fine to spare. Hold him for ransom according to his station.
A nameless brigand who has probably murdered a dozen innocent travelers suddenly decides to grow a conscience? Stab him in the guts and let the wolves finish him off.
No, it's pointless. I prefer not to take enemies alive, because it means having to deal with them later. Like, what do you want to do? Tie them up? Put them in prison? Take them back to town?
Fuck that, it's just pointless bookkeeping. Kill them, and the group can move on to the next encounter. It makes my job as a DM or a PC much easier, because I don't want to have to deal with a huge train of prisoners.
Bump.
Players should do what they see fit. They need to raid a base to get an idea of where the bbeg is? Sure. They murder everyone in sight and expect a big glowing quest arrow? Fuck that. Lessons are learned. When they say "well now we are fucked, what do we do?", you reply back "you tell me."
If I'm feeling generous, sometimes I'll give them the ol' "you can hear the groans of agony from one of the bandits. He's gravely wounded, but act fast, and you might get another day out of him.".
But ultimately: players should smarten up, and if your just giving them answers for the sake of moving forward, you are rewarding murder hobo tendency.
>Also, the whole problem with giving someone a love tap and accidentally exploding them due to a crit or whatnot. That's just fucking stupid and should never have been possible.
I like that risk. If you use the same tactics to kill someone that you use to try and take them alive, you run a serious risk of killing them.
If you want to take someone alive, use methods designed to take them alive. Methods which probably expose you to more risk.
And he never has the same problem twice.
Its a waste of good rope but tie them up and stick them in a tree. I prefer for them to be able to eventually squirm out
Really depends on the tone of the game you're going for. If you want less lethal, have there be consequences. Of course this means the enemy has to make sense, after all what are the guard going to do about some slaughtered monsters? Boo hoo.
You don't have to have these be getting caught or something direct, but have people comment on it. Have people question how good the party really is if they have a 0% mercy rate. People deal with them a little differently, don't treat them like the heros they want to be.
And finally, context.
Now say an antagonist just so happens to be a prince, and their entourage just happens to be made up primarily of lesser nobles. Maybe not so great of an idea to cut your way through them (even if you don't get caught you might be losing out on one hell of a ransom).
I'm running a homebrew game and I roll morale for pretty much everything that isn't mindless. The PCs are strong and famous enough by this point that most encounters end with the opponent(s) fleeing after a single turn of combat.
It all depends on what character I'm playing as and what I'm in the mood for.
Does always killing every evil creature mean the party is a bunch of murderhobos?
After a few characters committed a handful of (believable, non-murderhobo) murders over the first year of the game, and began to help raise families, and made a promise to a crazed drugged up lunatic, they've grown a lot of regret and disgust and taken to using every single resource and skill they can muster to try to manhandle people down. They just don't have the stomach for it anymore after the consequences.
It's hilarious to me that the one person they HAVE expressed a desire to murder gleefully is someone they unknowingly really care for
No. Worse.
They're boring.
Depends on who they're fighting, though sometimes a good mix should be considered
Monsters? Stab the fucker. Evil BBEG Wizard doing some kind of incantation? Probably knock 'em out in case things go fucky when they stop. 'Course if they're immune to non-lethal stab them extra hard
A party member once succeeded in defeating a Gravity Elemental because that one non-lethal punch they threw at it twenty turns ago was non-lethal damage that was forgotten about. Though against things that can heal it's still useless
Spot on. Even gung-ho "ROLEPLAY not ROLLPLAY ok" DMs will often run combat like this.
I have a LOT of enemies do this. Anyone who takes a nasty hit usually goes running fast for cover and escape unless they have some random or intent-assigned traits that'd leave them still pushing back.
mah nigga
The real magic button here is when enemies scream they don't want to die or make a genuine surrender
Players don't know WHAT the fuck to do
>all my enemies run or cry after one turn
>so realistic!
You guys know you don't have to pick between roleplaying and game right? You can and should run encounters that engage both equally.
I do? They fight people who run, people who surrender, people who fight to the death, people who just want to toy with them or distract them for a while, people who try to trap them, and when I just want mindless gore and trouble, I just flood in the undead, hostile predators (who get beaten into pets half the time), and truly villainous SOBs there to play hero at for a spell.
I'm saying though if Mook A gets his fucking hand torn off by a guy with vorpal teeth, HE RUNS.
As long as you do that, that's fine. The content of the posts made it sound like a lame, one-note deconstruction where all enemies break down after getting a booboo.
I imagine this cheapens "mindless undead", like skelebos and zombies. Everything else has complex motivations: Goblins want your stuff, wolves are any combination of afraid or hungry, humans (/elves/dwarves/whateverthefuck) are REALLY interesting. They all want to survive.
But a zombie? It's just a straight up murder robot from hell. Kill it or escape it, those are your options. And that's cool and scary.
Unless everything is gonna fight like that. Then it's just how it is. Boring.
Well, I try to mimic sensible behavior for the situation. Very often, this means running, as the PCs, despite their new outlook, still have a lot of murderous and can't-pull-punches-powers, so most intelligent rank and file just get the fuck outta dodge.
>goblins try to rob some random travelers
>oh shit it's the four heroes cheese it
>several goblins die in the escape
Also, they don't always run after one round, that's just how it seems to happen.
Make sure you acknowledge the power of motivations like "not wanting to look like a bitch in front of the other bandits". The first guy who takes a big hit might back off, but not immediately flee. And once the battle goes pear shaped and the enemies all turn tail? They might have motivations beyond mere survival. Maybe they'll drink some healing potions and regroup with reinforcements, and this time change up their strategy to better deal with whatever tricks they've seen from the PCs. And maybe one guy - who is obviously younger and greener than the others - will break down and not run and beg for mercy instead.
I'm saying there's lots to consider and that people whose livelihoods are at stake will take big risks. And the more factors you consider, and the more you differentiate enemy behavior, the more authentic your game will become.
Interrogation is very rarely necessary and imprisonment is very rarely viable.
PCs are almost invariably on a mission of vital importance and the delay to non-lethally punish a criminal would be negligent in the extreme. Nor would it be just, a murderous brigand deserves death as do most enemies we face.
Not to mention, imprisonment is a very 20th century concept.
> Should they instead act to always deal nonlethal damage against enemies instead
So you want them to put themselves at a disadvantage for no reason?
> and try to secure them for interrogation
This is assuming the enemies they're fighting will ever have any useful information in the first place, if they don't just outright lie.
> and imprisonment?
Where, and on whose authority?
You realize that you can ransom captives or sell them to slavery? That's why nonlethal has a disadvantage, it's a risk to reward thing.
> good party
> slavery
Bandits, goblins, and orcs are just another type of critter to kill and eat. Only difference is that sometime they've got useful stuff equipped to them.
It's no worse than killing them outright. In fact you could argue that slavery is more merciful because of the possibility of earning freedom at some point, versus death which is final.
Killing evil enemies is a good act, doubly so if they're also trying to kill you. Trying to capture, prosecute and imprison the said enemies is almost certainly NOT a viable option, especially if the fight takes place outside urban areas. And chances are the said enemies would end up being executed ANYWAY.
In short, in the majority of campaigns, 99% of the time killing enemies is the Good option while trying to capture them alive is either REALLY stupid or actively evil.
Death means they get their just reward(or punishment) in the afterlife.
Perhaps, but that still doesn't make slavery less moral option than killing them.
That depends. They could just be dealing with a mediocre GM or have bad experiences with letting enemies live.
I was thinking the other day, how would I prevent my PCs from just knocking out the BBEG and torturing him for information?
Its a pretty ignominious death for the primary antagonist to just be knocked out.
I mean if its just some street punk looking for trouble, I'll turn on the Stun setting in the FFG Star Wars game.
Also generally, sometimes you wanna knock someone out but not kill them.
That describes my current game pretty well. If the DM doesn't even bother to make the enemies anything else besides speed bumps, then why should the players feel bad when they run over them?