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.
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.
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.
Aww, I love shit like that. My party encountered the aforementioned lich just wandering down the road. We were camping, he stopped by the campsite to have a chat. I can't remember what he was doing, he might have been actively searching for the macguffins required to enact his evil plans. But he was just on a long walk across the continent, and he did some high level wizard fortunetelling for us to prepare us for the difficulties we'd face where we were headed. And then he carried on. The whole thing was a little tense as well, because we could tell this guy was really powerful and probably evil. But there was no betrayal, no ulterior motives. He was just feeling nostalgic I think.
Later on someone mentioned his name, and my character, the only surviving party member from the time of that campfire chat, was just like "wait what? ive met that guy, he was some kind of turbo-evil super-lich?" and then they were like "what? the super-evil turbo-lich told you your fortune and carried on?" and they were just like
at each other
I love this so much.
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.
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.
The knife twist at the end
Yeah. People joke about it now but being a nerd back in the 90s and prior could be very, very rough. Especially given how many nerds were neurodivergent kids violently excluded from other options.
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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
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.
I mean it even makes sense that "some" humanoid creatures might fight to the death. Like maybe the honor guard of a king or something like a berserker. But the majority of opponents you face should surrender or flee if they have no chance or are heavily wounded.
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.
Depends on the shadowrun and the stakes, I've found, and how much of our faces they've seen.
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 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’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 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.
I'm aware, and it's great. I even like the art style.
... The problem is getting my tabletop group to want to try it.
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Hell yeah!
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)
Cities Without Number
thanks!
i vaguely remembered "nets without number" but i think that was a working title
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.