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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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 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
Right, or killing retreating units punishes the player by making enemies more aggressive.
I think that's a thing in Mount and Blade. I'm not 100% but I think releasing a noble or one of their allies or family members, or just having a reputation that your enemy admires, can result in them releasing you after you're defeated in battle.
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!
IIRC capturing monsters in MHW is strictly better than killing them because it reduces the HP you have to go through by ~20% and you get better rewards. The only hard part is figuring out they're capturable before you accidentally kill them.
Skyrim bandits: You have bested me! I yield!
Also skyrim bandits: NEVER SHOULD HAVE COME HERE
Rimwold kinda has it, when the raiding party suffers enough losses they bail out. There's a mod called self preservation in which wounded pawns would immediately turn around and leave. Mount and Blade too, when the enemy party has had enough they flee.
SWAT and Ready or Not has NPCs that surrender when they face overwhelming firepower or numbers, which makes a lot of sense. STALKER Anomaly adds a chance for NPCs to surrender after getting wounded, but I could never manage it on my own, but I had friendly NPCs shoot an hostile guy, made him surrender and then execute him, I genuinely felt bad after witnessing that situation. That exists alongside vanilla feature of NPCs dropping to the ground when wounded, you can leave him behind, help him out or.. well, kill him.
Faster Than Light has hostile ships that offer their surrender if your ship is much more powerful. But sometimes it can be a trap. Lastly, while it's multiplayer, Project Reality has a way to surrender, even though it's mostly a RP mechanic. I did surrender a few times, and it was pretty cool, I got to throw my arms up as a Marine and submit to arab soldiers.
DayZ and some similar games have surrendering as sort of a player cultural convention. What actually happens when you surrender depends on the players - Some people are assholes about it, but others will politely rob you, and a lot of times people end up joining and working together after one of them gets captured and they have a chance to talk.
I enjoy the long dark's animal mechanics so you don't have to kill everything you encounter. Just gotta either avoid it, scare 'em off, or whack them with a flare enough times they figure you're not worth the hassle
i love turning the survival elements to the maximum settings but have wolves and other predators run from you. i wish there was an in between where they might get aggressive under specific conditions
have you tried having them get aggro at you during the Aurora Borealis? or is that not a setting?
tracked your morals via seven different stats IIRC
eight!
Unfortunately it aged like ass. I'd recommend reading a Let's Play of it instead of actually playing it (but would still recommend doing that, the ideas are cool). The Ultima series doesn't get to the point where it's playable by modern standards until 6 and 7. And 6 had already collapsed the morality system down into a singular karma score.
total war games have dudes who will flee & "captured", as well as dudes bleeding out and squirming in the later titles. also dead guys who weren't really that are restored to the victorious army. i wish someone would make a battle-game that more realistically did the various states of health & morale a real battle involves though.
imagine actual medics taking dudes back to a hospital, real surrendering & captive taking. be very cool imo
Metro Exodus has a pretty good version of this - if you take out enough enemies in a location they surrender
Metro Exodus did a really good job at humanising enemy mooks in general I felt, really incentivised me to try and kill as few of them as possible.
Yeah I thought that was a pretty good strength to the game - you could play it like a regular shooter up to the point that enemies do that and it really opens it up to be about exploration/survival/crafting mechanics in the open world bits
This was supposed to happen in oldschool D&D all the time. Obviously, the players preferred to slaughter the enemies and the DM didn't know Gygax's poorly explained rules enough to implement it.
Yeah, up to at least AD&D 2nd Ed you were supposed to track everyone's morale to figure out when enemies would surrender or flee.
Well, monsters checked morale as a group, not every single one. First when they took their first casualty and again when they lost more than half their number. If they passed both, they would fight to the death. Monster morale was usually 6-8 and passed on a roll of 2d6. Undead had morale 12.
But nobody ever bothered to check morale, unless the DM remembered it to save the party when a TPK was about to happen. Too much fun slaughtering monsters when the fight was already won.
The infamous games give you the option of doing this on good playthroughs.
Mechwarrior had that to a degree. Disable enemy legs or weapons and the enemy pilot would eject. Made for some good nail biter moments when you'd be on the receiving end of the punishment.
train the murderhobo right out of them!
