Like in Stalker where the mutant dogs will turn tail and flee if they take too much damage or if you kill enough of their pack members. Red Dead Redemption’s animals also ran away if a fight wasn’t going their way.
Actually, Rockstar games are pretty good with this sort of stuff in general. I’m pretty sure you could shoot guns of of people’s hands in RDR to make them put their hands up, or cause a fatal gunshot wound that would make them crawl around on their belly and call for help. Both GTA 4 and 5’s enemies have injury states where they will take potshots at you with a pistol while bleeding on the ground or just passively clutch their wounds until they die.
I guess it wouldn’t work in arcadey or linear games where the point is to kill everything on screen, but for anything more open-ended that tries to go for something approaching realism it’d be nice if the enemies you faced felt more alive and/or showed some basic survival instincts.
I kinda get a lot of players would just warcrime surrendering enemies, but what I’m baffled by is tabletop RPGs not doing this more. Most players and GMs are fairly progressive, but combats tend to go to last man standing, which is not realistic and is in fact extremely pessimistic.
I think our Blades in the Dark game was fairly low lethality.
my Pathfinder group rarely kills anyone; it’s weird. They didn’t start that way but I tend to give every NPC possible a fully rounded personality, even when hostile, so maybe it’s training them somehow.
sign of a very good GM. my GM is like this as well. even his evilest bad guys have reasons for what they’re doing, and fleshed out personalities and all. when the evil terrible super-lich isn’t busy with his evil plans, he’s perfectly willing to have a chat about philosophy or magic or something and isn’t going to be doing anything evil. it doesn’t mean we didn’t crush his fucking skull later when he tried to take over the world or whatever, but it does mean we did that consciously based on knowing who he is, not just because he’s The Bad Guy.
lower level threats like bandits often have very good reasons for doing what they’re doing, and sometimes we’ve misunderstood and they aren’t even bandits to begin with.
sign of a very good GM
even his evilest bad guys have reasons for what they’re doing, and fleshed out personalities and all. when the evil terrible super-lich isn’t busy with his evil plans, he’s perfectly willing to have a chat about philosophy or magic or something and isn’t going to be doing anything evil. it doesn’t mean we didn’t crush his fucking skull later when he tried to take over the world or whatever, but it does mean we did that consciously based on knowing who he is, not just because he’s The Bad Guy.
When the party finally got around to destroying the Big Bad Evil Guy of the campaign, a recurring villain that has been a menace for decades of real life campaigns, they still got wined and dined (no poison!) before the final confrontation because it meant that much to the BBEG to formally meet the particular heroes that would either permanently cement his invincibility and godhood (if they were defeated and spiritually harvested at the peak of their power) or annihilate him for all time. It was a tense dinner but a dinner all the same.
Imo this is more of a D&D problem than a TTRPG problem, but most people are introduced through D&D so it has propagated. D&D used to have morale mechanics in I want to say AD&D 1e and 2e but I’m almost certain they were removed by 3e. At the end of the day, murdering everything is just easier for everyone involved. It wouldn’t really be that hard to add them back in, but it would likely be problematic in D&D played as intended for a number of reasons.
Do you get more XP for killing things (encouraging murder anyway)? If the XP is the same, what happens if you end up fighting the same person twice (it’s not unreasonable for many beings to seek revenge)? What do the PCs do with defeated banditos etc when they’re halfway through a dungeon and the prisoners quickly outnumber them? Is it expected that the PCs will rob anyone/thing who surrenders of their things (and what does it do to the intended progression if they don’t)?
For what it’s worth I typically use a loose morale system in my games (typically GURPS so based on Will with modifiers), combined with common sense. Eg in our last session a skilled enemy combatant was outnumbered 2:1 and had been shot despite turning invisible, so she ran for backup, and once she was away, the party fled with their mission incomplete because they didn’t figure they could deal with her and the backup.
D&D used to have morale mechanics
Nobody used them. Monsters fought to the last man. Players really enjoyed that part of the game when the monsters were losing and yet fought on. The PCs felt in control of the situation. For many, this was the first time in their lives they felt this way.
I kind of agree. It makes sense for robots or undead creatures to fight till the end. It doesnt really make sense for say bandits/raiders to fight to the last man.
I’ve had undead fight to the end because the person they used to be is still in their and they are begging for death. Good way to up the creep factor.
In tabletop battletech we use the Forced Withdrawal rules for our battles to simulate the fact that most military engagements are not fighting to the last man, until one side totally kills the other
My wargame encourages voluntary falling back, but you can fight to the end if you want. It’s not good for losses and is pretty ineffective at giving enemies a bloody nose, but it can hold up enemies for up to half a day at a time!
Generally you want to conserve strength and retreat if fatigue gets too high (fatigue being a general measure of a unit’s readiness, tiredness, the supply situation etc), but sometimes you gotta hold that bridge or linchpin town
Especially in Battletech! The whole knightly courtesy, spare your honorably defeated foes, then steal their mech is so important to that setting.
also that in-universe near-peer mechs rarely take each other out quickly in big battles, it’s more like battleships slugging at each other
so as your side starts losing a lot of armour, you have quite a bit of warning to start a fighting withdrawal before too many of your pretty finite mechs need a low-loader to get back to base
Shadowrun at least recommends not just up and murdering people, even when fighting, on the reasoning that racking up a body count is a good way to draw the wrong kind of attention to your band of professional criminals. It also has plenty of alternatives and some expectation that you might neutralize a threat with one shot without actually killing them, because of composure tests. It also discourages players from killing in the nastier ways like mind control.
Icon (Lancer, but fantasy instead of mecha space opera) is still being worked on but that explicitly states that sapient enemies should probably open with threats rather than actual combat and that they should flee or surrender when combat doesn’t go their way. I can’t remember but I think it mentions living enemies in general being more likely to flee that to fight to the death as well.
Can’t just go shooting up the place if the place has a contract with Knight Errant or Lone Star. In Ecplipse Phase it’s often Direct Action - If you cause enough noise for someone’s security contract with Direct Action to activate you’d better hope you have a near by exit or some really big guns.
I’m playing a game now that involves mostly human opponents with basic human motivations, and surrender happens a lot more frequently than in the typical dungeon crawly monster stomp game. When you’re fighting a group of bandits, thugs, conscripted fighters, etc., it starts making a lot of sense that the battle is over when it looks like there’s no hope of one side winning, or if the head honcho gets killed or incapacitated. There’s also more opportunities for negotiation or intimidation to end a situation before it goes to combat.
I think it’s just a thing that the players and GM need to agree is an option. Having specific surrender mechanics seems like it would be clunky and open to metagaming. It’s easy enough to get to the top of a round, look at the situation, see that it’s pretty lopsided, and end the combat in favor of a surrender or retreat. Or look at a given situation and decide not to get into combat at all because it’s clear that one side has an overwhelming advantage. It’s good for keeping the game moving, imo
Sorry, could you give an example of clunky and metagamey surrender rules?
I haven’t run a game in a while
I meant that surrender rules would probably be clunky and metagamey if they were implemented. I can’t think of a TTRPG with defined surrender rules.
What makes me think of it is the Warhammer break/panic rules. If you haven’t played (and I haven’t in a while, so take with grain of salt), there are conditions where an entire unit of soldiers can lose morale, which costs you time and positioning while they regroup. Further, if they end up running away into the enemy, you lose the entire unit, which can be pretty disastrous as you might only field four or five units in an army.
Warhammer is a pure tactical game, so it makes sense, and is fun, to be able to use morale-breaking tactics in addition to simply out-fighting or out-maneuvering your opponent. However, if you had similar rules in a TTRPG, I could see it getting metagamey and get in the way of the roleplaying. Plus, it’s just another layer of things on top of initiative order, the action economy, saving throws, etc.
There are plenty of talented designers out there who might have games with decent morale/surrender/retreat rules, but my gut tells me that it’s probably more straightforward for the GM and players to agree that where it makes narrative sense, the GM won’t fight to the last NPC, and the players won’t be killed outright if they surrender.
i think it’s just that the most popular TTRPGs mechanically revolve around killing enemies and getting rewarded for killing enemies
Blades in the Dark has mechanics that explicitly punish you for killing, and 90% of its rules don’t revolve around a separate wargame minigame you pull out every time you start a fight
I don’t think I’ve played a loot and kill-xp RPG in ages, but nonetheless very few surrendering gangers or stormtroopers. Maybe it’s my GMs.
The last part of combat is usually just mopping up anyway, can probably be handwaved
I give players XP for resolving the encounter. Doesn’t matter how they do it - Sneaking by, talking their way through, fighting, or one of the absolutely bizarre take a third option things players come up with. As long as they figure out a way to “win” (and usually if they “lose”) they get XP and usually some amount of treasure out of it. Something I really dislike about older D&Ds and Pathfinder is how tightly player progression is tied to finding treasure and gold, as it can get in the way of narrative.
it’s not just that kill = xp, it’s also that popular TTRPGS whether it’s GURPS, D&D, or the newest Star Wars rpg, will have like 500 rules for bashing someone’s health bar to zero in the wargame minigame and then have one line at the back of the dusty GM section going “i guess you can make people retreat or surrender or whatever lmao”. yeah you can handwave it, but it’s a problem when the default assumption for the game’s rules and balancing is that everyone fights to the death and surrender/retreat being treated as optional rules or often not at all
the game mechanics affect how the players and GM interact with the setting, and Blades in the Dark ending up less lethal was a reflection of it not being focused on murder minigames and having mechanics reinforcing less lethal resolution
I like to GM mecha tabletop, usually early Gundam inspired.
Nearly all enemies are voiced and acted characters, so my players often avoid killing if they can. NPCs run when losing, they don’t want to die.
Character deaths are often framed tragically, aside from the more unforgivable antagonists.
I’d love it if my tabletop group wanted to do a mecha RPG instead of yet more fantasy standard
Try Lancer. It’s set so far in to the future that it’s deep in to “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and combines a fun mech skirmish merchanic with a narrative, rules light out-of-combat system. You can do a lot of fantasy tropes with 50 foot tall battle robots without straying from the setting much.
Loved that game. I imagine that it would be pretty hard to run that game without killing a lot of people. I think the OP is still mostly correct, and BitD is a linear tabletop game.
But yeah if your tabletop game doesnt have naturally evil things like a demon, something that cant make decisions and lacks a sentience or a self-conscience, then a lion’s share of combatants should recognized defeat and try to barter their way out of it.
kevin crawford games (stars without number, worlds without number, whatever the cyberpunk one is called… without number) have enemy morale as an explicit mechanic
once their health drops low enough, the gm rolls a morale check and if they fail they get themselves out of danger in whatever way seems most fitting to the gm (and it’s a kevin crawford game so there are also roll tables if you can’t decide lol)
whatever the cyberpunk one is called… without number)
Cities Without Number
This is how I’ve always run my games. I hate the idea of NPCs just being hitpoints and loot. Whenever I set up a combat I’m always thinking about why these people are fighting, what the stakes are, and when they’re going to decide they don’t want to die and either flee or surrender. Sometimes they might be fighting for something they really believe in, or have their backs up against a wall, and fight to the death. But if it’s just random bandits or pirates or something eventually they’re going to take their chances fleeing or begging for mercy.
And then the players have to figure out what to do with them, which makes for good RP opportunities and a way for the players to elaborate on who their characters are. I had to tell one of my rogues to stop recruiting every bandit they defeated because her gang was getting too big to keep track of.
I guess it wouldn’t work in arcadey or linear games where the point is to kill everything on screen
Nah Space Invaders where they run away after you kill half of them would be, like, an artist’s statement or something.
I remember in the Socom games enemies would surrender if wounded and you could zip cuff them. That’s actually shockingly progressive for a shooter, especially one from the early 2000’s that was more than happy to have scary middle eastern people as “terrorists”.
We might of actually gotten worse since then. I might not be remembering right but I think at the start of the GWOT the view of special forces guys was that they were cool professionals, and it’s only since then that image of SpecOps as torture cowboys who do what they want because they’re cool guys became the dominant public image.
YOu can definitely see it in how spec ops clothing is depicted. 20 years ago they wore uniforms in most depictions, now they were a random mish-mash of civilian cool guy gear in a lot of depictions.
I think it could be done with a modifier to reduce experience and/or affect drop rates of equipment. Like you’d get armor if you kill the guy or he gives you the location of a treasure in another location if you spare him.
I tried to spare bandits in Skyrim before reading that their surrender was temporary. Like I get having enemies do false surrenders, but I’d like a little bit of a survival instinct.
Or the option to show humanity to a mook
I always prefer the systems that incentivize players to do the right thing (yeah corny I know). I think the best way (depending if the genre allows it) is to have enemy combatants not drop anything when they surrender, but their faction grants you some favor, or something that’s otherwise hard to get. It might be a little hard to work into the story if the enemy faction is supposed to be at complete odds with the player, or if the player has no reason to sympathize with the enemies, but I think it can work in a lot of games.
Maybe hostile factions could reciprocate mercy, players might not care at first but I bet that changes when they get captured and an enemy lieutenant goes down the line, identifying the players and deciding who gets what treatment
Your comment on giving you treasure was reminding me of a situation that was harder and changed the end state of the game to do that but gave you more for it. That game was monster hunter world, that capturing them gave you more resources but… man that was not better for the monsters man, they run away from you!
Skyrim bandits: You have bested me! I yield!
Also skyrim bandits: NEVER SHOULD HAVE COME HERE
