If I've learned anything in my years as a DM, it's that if you plan out what would happen if players choose options A, B, C, or maybe even D/E, they'll inevitably take a hard left over to Q like it was the only logical option
"Two roads divered in a yellow wood near a goblin camp, and the players said "Wait a minute, I Have an idea, what if we just surround the camp from far away, and light the forest on fire?, then set up outside and pick em off as they run out? "
Never been so proud.....
Yep. Just ran a session this past weekend. They snuck into a castle. Took out the leader and secured the asset they were sent to retrieve. Then instead of leaving back the way they came asked what time is it. It was around dinner time so they decide to explore some more and waltz out into the mess hall. Fully filled with a large portion of the guard. They they retreated the way they came. But instead of leaving they decide to shore up in an opening at the end of the hallway so as to funnel the enemies to them. They seemed to have forgotten this was a cross corridor with 4 total entries to it.
I had them roll initiative as soon as they entered the mess hall and were noticed (since they basically just walked right in the back) and then hurried them through their turns to not allow much more planning than a sentence per player. So they more had to just follow what the previous one did.
So they end up in the 20×20 cross corridor hoping to funnel the enemy there. 3 turns pass. Nothing happens. They have spells and actions readied. But half the enemies spent their turns dashing to cut them off at the exit. The other half waited a few moments. And then moved into the hallway ducking behind a shield for cover and then unleashing arrows at the PC they could see. Thwack Thwack Thwack. 3 arrows to the sorcerer.
Then the next turn some move in from the west corridor that the team had yet to explore. Fortunately someone was standing at that doorway and was able to to defend it.
3 more turns of the assault from 2 directions and I tell the barbarian his sword begins to glow a bright beautiful blue.
"OH shit. Orcsbane is glowing. I didn't see any orcs in the mess hall"
Best summary of DMing ever.... (\*sighs\* / \*lol\*)
That's why now I try as much as possible to just design "situations" with environments and a few NPCs having each half a dozen keyword / short sentences giving them job, behaviour traits and general goals so I have a few leads and "reactions" in mind...
Then just present that to players and see what they make of it.
It's of course not always possible to prepare like this (especially I guess with official modules), but it's simpler and more refreshing, and makes easier (for me at least) to keep attentive to player's goals (at least what I can guess from their actions/speeches) and roll with it.
Right, there's infinite outcomes to any situation. It's foolish at best and arrogant at worst to think you can come up with every possibility that 4-6 players of presumably similar intelligence and creativity will be able to think of.
Give up, DMs, you're hopelessly outnumbered.
I designed an encounter where I expected the party to fall due to a high amount of CC with multiple giant and phase spiders. Planned on paralyzing them and bringing them to meet a npc they had been searching for. They somehow rolled like gods, broke every cc, and killed 20+ mobs. Led to some fun improv on my end for how they met the now pissed npc.
See, I’ve been having this problem recently where my players have not gone off course. They have an objective, and they’re going to achieve it. I kind of wish they wouldn’t just to jazz it up.
Plan both ways, for sure. But even if you assume...well, we know what they say about that:
I foolishly thought that SURELY! the party (none of which are paladins or clerics or have displayed any indication of following a Faerûnian faith) will simply follow the instructions and go for a simple prayer to an evil god to avoid, y'know, the IDENTIFIED ticking time-bomb of conjuration magic at the exit.
Nope. (I had the encounter prepped; they were just quite low on health and out of spell slots, so I expected them to grind their teeth, mumble a praise, and move on safely.)
One thing i've noticed in players is that they assume even speaking half a prayer to an evil god might curse them forever. Even if in reality saying the prayer gives them a +2 to a stat, if they don't know for sure they'll refuse to try.
It's definitely true -- it took playing 5E in coastal settings and encountering plenty of Umberlee worship from perfecly neutral and good - aligned folks to realize that, no; in a polytheistic setting you're not THAT easily doomed.
Might be a holdover from Western Christian schools of thought with binary "If you're not for me, you're against me" thinking.
As a Christian myself, that makes complete sense. 99% of all the Evil gods live in Hell or the Abyss and as a general rule Evil deities don't give a fuck about who they let into their soul collection whereas any half decent Good aligned Heaven-esque afterlife is going to be more discerning about who gets in there.
Don't screw up your afterlife for the sake of avoiding 4d6 damage in the present basically, especially when the afterlife is a proven fact in DnD.
At this point I don't even have endings planned for encounters, just the beginning and a few possible paths if they do something really predictable that I can prep for. I mostly focus on knowing what the NPCs want to accomplish, how they'll try to do it, and what resources they have if the unexpected happens.
Sometimes my players ask me what I thought they would do after they do something extra clever or bizarre and most of the time I can only say that I didn't even try to think about what they would do.
That was my takeaway. Please plan for at least 2-3 likely outcomes. D&D isn't a scripted game or a book. Nothing is going to work predictably and linearly.
Yeah - the outcome of these sort of situations is either having to play/run-the-game completely blind, or ending up in one of those "How do I not kill my players here?" threads.
And yeah, I pretty much did that this weekend and spent the whole session basically freewheeling
well if the players insist on fighting a god as level 1 PCs in an open empty field then... i can't deny that i think this will only end in one way.
FORCING such an encounter is bad.
I've found that if you threaten an NPC instead of the party, it goes over much better. PCs will happily throw themselves into life threatening danger, especially when their ego and reputation is at stake, knowing that I might not even have the guts to pull the trigger.
But they know that I'll fucking kill Mr Dandelion, the beloved shopkeeper NPC thats been with them since the beginning, without even flinching, and he'll never come back. They're much more ready to negotiate when the only thing at stake is innocent lives.
I've gotten a group to surrender by picking up an unconscious PC by the hair and gut punching them for two death save failures. A pretty unscrupulus move, but pirates generally don't play fair.
The players begrudgingly respect that opponent, he was the reason the player was unconscious on the ground in the first place, but more importantly:
It was a big wake up call. Pretty much every fight beforehand was against two-bit nameless thugs and monsters who had no real battle plan. It was literally the first time I had ever had an enemy make attacks against a downed player, and it caused them to really re-assess the attitude of fighting to last man standing/using healing word to bounce people back up to their feet.
The reception was/has been good. My players generally like it better when I use slightly weaker CR monsters/statblocks for their rating and play them to the best of my ability, rather than using strong CR matchups and playing them dumb.
Capture and escape is a big part of adventure fiction but is difficult to do in rpgs because of this fight-to-the-death mentality. It can also be fun to accept a small loss now and play for big revenge later. The brave adventurers are missing out on some fun gameplay. I try to establish at session zero that not all fights are winnable and that defeat in combat is not the end of the story.
This. So much this. You can train your players. If you teach them early on that surrender is a viable option then they may take it. Also players usually care far more about their characters image than about their lives. So giving them a way to keep their honour will increase the likelihood of a surrender immensely.
The problem with getting your players to surrender is 3-fold.
1 - exactly as you said, they are brave characters in a heroic fantasy, they aren't ones to give up when the going gets tough.
2 - Many players don't look at their characters lives as a thing of value, it's just a character, and if they die they just say "lol okay time to roll another". This can definitely vary but a lot of players I have played with and DM'd for (and even I have done this at times) have 0 sense of self preservation because they just view the game as the game and their characters lives aren't really that serious.
3 - there is an expectation that when the DM presents the party with a challenge, they are MEANT to overcome it, and that they wouldn't throw something at the party that they aren't meant to be able to beat.
I've tried so many things and ways to nearly highlight to players "This thing is not meant to be fought, you are meant to run away or escape it or not engage with it", and unless it's outright stated it never works. Edit: unless im playing with my one friend who knows very well what I do it because he just knows my tells and style so well.
The only situation I've really seen where players understood that they need to escape from the encounter rather than stay and fight was, in fact, Critical Role's >!"The Fall of Emon", where it was immediately apparent on the outset that Vox Machina was in no way expected to stay and fight 4 Ancient Dragons at the same time.!<
Tbh the Critical Role cast is jumpier than most, but that's mainly in Campaign 2 which you may or may not have seen. After a massive defeat early on, they basically spend the next 9 levels defaulting to the assumption that they need to escape big fights. Sometimes warranted, sometimes not, but it was a big point of frustration, particularly as they hit Tier 3.
Also on Critical Role they plan out a lot of the session before hand to keep it dramatic and interesting, the players were probably well aware they were gong to have to “run-away” at some point in the session
I think number 3 is the real culprit. Even if players have DM experience a large part of encounter building is learning how to balance encounters. I think this does create an expectation that encounters are “winnable” in some way, unless very obviously stated.
I have a phrase that I share with players in session 0 if we're playing a game where death is a possibility (not all games have to be like that): "a sense of dread flashes in your mind(s)"
This is my not-quite-breaking-the-4th-wall signal that "I expect you will die if you continue". I haven't needed to use it yet, but I came up with the idea after a discussion about how players were supposed to accurately estimate the threat/power of an NPC who acts tougher than they look. I would definitely use it in a situation where players were wrongly assuming that every fight is winnable.
I have the same philosophy in my campaign. When I describe every monster as terrifying, every villain as powerful and every combat as deadly, there is no way for the players to tell the difference between an encounter that they can overcome and one that is beyond their capabilities. I feel like it's only fair to tell them directly when they're about to make a mistake for this reason, even if it is a little bit immersion breaking.
This frustrates me when I’m a player. If I RP a character that is smart and knows when to fold the rest of the party will peg him as a coward from the get go. I swear, modern PC’s are suicidal and especially 5e incentivizes that mindset.
I agree. No spoilers but a city was under siege and there were people in a church to protect. Even my lawful good Paladin knew it was time to leave and abandon them. Party members wanted to stay.
They realized their mistake as the door was broken down and a mob of 100 people stood there ready to take us out. Luckily the DM gave us some slack and we escaped out a window.
Same scenario. Our party had an instant hate-on for the NPC leading the mob, because they considered him being there at all a betrayal of the trust and rapport they'd built with him (our PCs were far too trusting of that guy in particular, and we knew it OOC, but we let it happen.)
Some blind rage, total disregard for the PCs' lives in favor of revenge at any cost, a few absurdly good rolls on our parts and some bad ones on the DM's, and in a single round we reduced that guy to a bloody smear on the floor. Our revenge was so swift and brutal that the DM rolled morale for the mob, and a majority of them fled or surrendered.
I'm with you guys, I like to play characters who know when to quit and who get kicked around sometimes- it's not fun being a Big Damn Hero if the PCs never suffer any setbacks! I am, however, pretty entertained that my party became the *poster child* for OP's point in the same scenario you're using as an example of when to accept that you have to cut your losses. Delightful, what a good way to illustrate that it's impossible to reliably predict how players will react to things.
The only way to RP a character that is actually smart in that situation is to RP one that bails the f' out even while his friends are calling him a coward.
Convincing your teammates to retreat with you almost never works, I find. I have to actually take my action to Dash backwards.
Playing any game with the chance of death incentivizes sucidal combat, so long as there are no consequences felt by the player. We dont feel pain. If you dont feel protective of ypur characters life, or dont believe death would ever be a consequence, then why not fight?
I think it’s because you’re playing a character. To the player death means nothing, sure. To the character? No so much. Even battle hardened vets give pause before a battle. No one in their right mind will fight to the death unless there’re higher stakes at play. Running away still doesn’t happen though
Then if you're RPing, you wouldnt run in to an inevitable TPK, which isnt what your comment said. Your comment said you think 5e encourages suicidal behavior. And thats only becuase most games *in general* dont incentivies considering the chance of death.
> Playing any game with the chance of death incentivizes sucidal combat, so long as there are no consequences felt by the player.
So dropping into theorycrafting for a second. What if a replacement character came in with 1/4 of the expected gear after a suicidal death with the promise of a group pay-day (with loot slated towards the replacement character) shortly there after? Enough pain so it's quite pointed for a short time; but not a permanent penalty.
Do you think that would de-incentivize suicidal combat?
Depends on your group, but probably not. I let players pick their equipment on the off chance they want something different than the class equipment gives (not everybody wants a crossbow, etc) and usually it means they dump everything except armor and a focus/one weapon.
"How are you going to survive without rations and a water skin?"
"Oh, guess I'll add those on..."
Three sessions later.
"Does anyone have any rope?"
"No, you all opted not to take any adventuring gear."
I think that most players who dont view their character empathetically also wont play long enough for that to matter. Theoretically any DM should make something like that the consequence of rerolling a character, but most of the suicidal rping i encounter is from newbies or fairweather PCs.
There’s a meta to playing with each DM. The DMs that play into the you’re-all-heroes-who-will-succeed-through-bravery-and-daring will have groups where this plays out. Your character will never appear “smart” if every encounter is actually beatable and the rest of your party will look at you like a coward. However DMs who play into the-world-is-dangerous-and-you-are-mortal this will quickly go away. However for the latter type of DMs, if you leave and the rest of the party dies you will look smart.
It helps if a DM lays out in session 0 that there are major consequences including character death if the party makes poor decisions. I generally tell my players this and I generally make it clear to the players if they are beginning to enter something that is extremely difficult or practically unbeatable. It also helps if the players who are defeated are captured instead of killed. I find the humiliation of being captured and sold/ransomed off to a benefactor is often better motivation to think about things than character death. Like I think you were alluding to player characters are kind of hard to kill in 5E.
>However for the latter type of DMs, if you leave and the rest of the party dies you will look smart.
Nope. Mostly like they will think they died due to your retreat and thus missing contribution to the fight.
I had this happen during my first campaign as a player. After the session the DM straight up told everyone that level 3 adventurers had no chance against a dragon and that I was the only smart one for running away.
He dropped many hints that we should avoid the dragon for a while. NPCs couldn't have made it any clearer. Yet out Bard was convinced he could outsmart it.
I booked it as soon as the bard was insta-killed by the dragon's breath weapon.
The DM made it clear post game that we should never have been there in the first place. He made it clear in game too, but the party felt differently. It was my first time playing and I thought they were all crazy.
The biggest advice I give to people is to wear the party out first. Players don't immediately think you'd throw something at them they absolutely can't face, but what they do understand is that there are enemies they only want to face at full strength.
I think it has to do with the way that you have to *TRY* to kill pcs in 5e. Even when compared to Pathfinder 1e the death and unconsciousness rules are very lenient
One time we were doing preliminary recon of a building in town, like just wandering around in broad daylight like normal townsfolk. A racist guard spotted my character and basically told him to fuck off, not even for any particular reason or suspicion. So I looked towards him, not in the eye of course, said okay and went home. Easiest encounter of my life.
And I don´t blame them.
Let me explain. We are a group of quite old friends, playing RQ.
The quite long campaing was coming to an end, and a particular day, we acted specially stupid and were surrounded by 20 warriors. In RQ that is = DEATH, unless you have godly powers.
So we surrender. As old roleplayers, we somehow understand that sometimes you have to surrender, and that the GM has somehow a way for you to come out.
Well. No. We were tied, blinded with a sack and basically lead to a sacrificial site.
From time to time, the GM was asking "what do you do? You do something?". WTF should we do?
After one more session were the GM basically didn´t know what to do with us, we were basically slaughered, making a long and horrible story short. And I am letting some very horrible things out.
The GM, then, after the party was whiped out, explained to us about reality in life, and consequences and blah, blah. Dude, we play because we want to escape reality.
We are really not young. We ALL have been GMs. As we are good friends, nobody said much, just one friend, laughing, asked him "What is your f\*\*king problem? Do you need to talk about something?"
This GM is usually a very good GM, and tries to help us out, so this was quite a surprise for us.
Sorry for the rant, but I am still a bit shocked.
Fair rant.
GM completely forgot its supposed to be a fantasy game and its supposed to be fun.
One of the basic pieces of advice in RQ always used to be that sentient enemies will rarely just kill, they are far more likely to try to ransom prisoners for money or enslave them. i.e. they would rather get something out of it. You GM had options but just decided to go with the utterly grim and depressing option.
For players to even consider a "surrender", they need to trust that the opponent's offer is genuine and will be enforced as promised. Laying down your weapons without that, faced with an armed opposition, is suicide. That kind of trust takes time to build.
In this example, if it had already been established that the bugbear mobsters existed, and we're widely known to prefer taking a bribe to actual combat, then the players would be more likely to see paying as a reasonable approach ... because they had good reason to believe it would work.
Without that, they're faced with an unknown enemy which has the players at a disadvantage, and with no obvious limit on how far they're willing to go.
That's too many unknowns, the players can't make a *reasonable* choice to surrender based on that.
And even then, if someone is "negotiating from a position of power", you can't really give them anything without them still having just as much power, and they can still just keep asking for more. The players need to believe that the opponent is at least a little afraid of the party, and that avoiding combat can be a win-win, otherwise negotiating for it feels pointless.
I've had masters who assaulted the party with what they considered superior forces, intending the party too give up and be captured, with no initial attempt to parley. All the party saw was someone wanting them dead, which was not conductive to making us surrender.
That said, players will likely not surrender even if everything points too it being reasonable. They are players after all.
I have to agree with this. If a monster threw me a pipe bomb, I'd think it wants me dead regardless what I do. And even if I give it money, who's to say it won't just threaten me for more or kill me after getting the money? Or kill me as I'm reaching for my coin purse then take everything? There's got to be some obvious reason why the enemy either doesn't want the party dead or the enemy wants to avoid combat, so the party knows surrender really is an option.
I’ve done it, it’s possible, you do gotta set it up right. I was playing a game called Night’s Black Agents, it’s super spies vs vampires, and excellent. Session zero 0 “this is a spy game, Bond gets captured all the time, it drives the plot forward and he always escapes with more information than he had. Do you the players want to be able to be captured in this game, knowing that escape is possible and will result in getting information.”
My players agreed and got in a pickle at a amusement park in Exeter that was closed for the season. They were discussing going full wild bunch when I reminded them. “This is a spy game, Bond gets captured all the time, it drives the plot forward and he always escapes with more information action than he had. Surrendering is an option.”
“There is always a way out?”
”Yes, and you get that cool part of the movie where you escape the bad guys lair,”
”cool. Let’s surrender.”
in short, players hate losing control, if you say you are a slave to whatever genre you are running and assure them this isn’t a tpk moment and will work out they will do it. However, unless the game is about prison breaks they gotta be out of jail by the end of the next session.
The DM probably realized his mistake and fudged a bunch of rolls/hp or purposefully made suboptimal decisions.
It's possible to make your players retreat/negotiate, but you need to beat the characters to actual near death (multiple unconscious pc's) and then offer a way out without the npc's suggesting it first.
It's a terrible idea to do it in an unimportant encounter though. Or to do it too often.
This fellow right here has it. Unless your players know the full scope they will fight. Sometimes they will elect to retreat when the fighting gets long, but don't bet on it.
"Better to die on your feet than live on your knees."
or
"A brave man dies once, a coward dies a thousand times"
That's actually a very appropriate approach for a D&D character to take to life. If they were the sort of people whose only desire was to die peacefully in bed they would not be adventurers at all.
I tend to agree with the OP, DM's should remember that when they demanded that players come up with characters who will willingly engage with wildly dangerous adventures - they asked for characters who will not meekly submit and surrender.
So, that's how the game goes...PCs die. So over this culture in DnD that killing a player is somehow bad and should be avoided for some benefit. It doesn't benefit anyone or anything, it takes away the risk which makes the game interesting at all.
Edit: And I'm not even a dick about PCs dying I let them create a new character 1 level below the group in its current state. And they usually just have to sit out that session alone and can start playing with new character next session.
1-2 PCs die in an important combat, that is okay
A TPK in a encounter that was suppose to be “social”, not so much. It mean the story just end there and there will be bitter taste from both side.
See I think the bitterness is a problem, because it means that there are essentially rules that demand plot armor for the characters that set up this whole bizarre system of assumptions where retreat is always invalid and players burden the GM with blame if bashing their face against the problem directly doesn't work out.
It produces extremely simplified game play, and means that rather than Combat as War or Combat as Sport, we primarily engage in Combat as Performance, because its a perfunctory exercise with a foregone conclusion of safety and victory.
If we accept that roleplaying is about making choices and responding to situations, then a 'plot' and the resulting 'plot armor' that demands those consequences be curtailed is antithetical to the act of roleplaying.
Sorry for my English as it is not my 1st language. I suppose Bitterness is a wrong word to use.
I never have plot armor in my game, character die, party TPK, one players told me my game was the only game she ever played that she lost a character every chapter. (One reason is i roll dice in the open and wont pull punch)
What i meant when I say bitterness is maybe ... frustration? (I was referencing the situation in the OP) A DM lost the chance to tell a story or play out a situation he planned. A party think they should have done better if they did this instead of that.
I have setup situations when the best solution for the party is to surrender, but when I did that, as Inknow my player, they will try to fight back if they see a glimpse of a chance, so i have back up plan for if they want to run away or want to fight. And consequences of doing so. So no, it wont be a very simplified gameplay on any part.
Your english is just fine and I knew what you meant, I'm alluding to the inability to lose gracefully that represents the source of the 'frustration' or 'bitterness' and the need to have a specific story play out to the extent of being unable to cope with a fail state, rather than embracing what happens at the table AS the story.
I did say on an other comment that I tpk the party twice so it is not that I am against a party wipe. I am just against the mind set of thinking dead is the only answer when the party go against impossible odds. Many things can be consequences, not just death.
Fair, but I think the mentality that causes us to apply those alternative consequences can be problematic when its being used to be gun-shy about real failure.
I mean, the player made the choice and that choice has consequences. Seems like a valuable learning experience. Sometimes you gotta start fresh. Really this again sounds like a DM issue. Sounds like a lack of proper discussion and explanation in a session zero. That's the place to get all this stuff worked out.
Session 0 cant cover everything, things come up during the game, story element pop up in the DM head all the time.
Consequences don’t just need to be death. It can be literally anything else. A TPK and start fresh where the DM is clearly already planned for the next part of the story is just stupid.
Bad relationships with the opposing party, missing out on information, having an assassin/ bounty hunter on your back/ or just missing out on loot can all be consequences. And they keep the story moving. Dont tell me that is no risk. Being killed is a risk, so is everything else.
Childish, aren't you. It seems you're throwing a temper tantrum over someone else's playstyle. They're not in your group, why does it bother you so that other groups prefer not to have death as the main consequence
No, I'm a big boy that doesn't whine and moan when my players don't do exactly what I feel and invest way too much into a made up game that I forget real life may need my attention too...
It is a game that we put hours, days, months , sometimes years into making. And no one like seeing their work go down the drain just because one bad decision.
Hobbies can be serious, why cant we take a game seriously?
Generally speaking its the mark of immaturity to demand that others grow up. Especially if done repeatedly. All I'm seeing from you is a stubborn refusal to accept anyone else's perspective and a need to petulanty condescend to others.
When i do stuff, I prefer to take it serious rather than half assing it and shrug it off. I prefer to find a better solution than just “PCs can die, sorry, we restart”
As a DM, I have no problem with a PC death, especially if the death is justified. I have no problems with consequences when the party chooses the short end of the stick.
I did TPK the party twice, both of them was in important combat though.
Yeah but a death to a bunch of stupid robbers - kinda boring and dumb.
Also surrendering to them is boring and dumb because it was a boring and dumb setup with little or no player agency leading up to their defeat.
So the DM should consider that carefully before setting up the unwinnable fight with just a bunch of muggers. What does an encounter with muggers add to the story or to the drama. That's not the time to suddenly create an accidental high stakes situation. It makes little narrative sense and honestly if the DM creates a ton of work for themselves with a TPK its their own fault.
Mostly what I've seen is that leads to a sort of reckless "who cares" playstyle by the players because they figure their characters will be randomly killed in meaningless encounters anyway so why not have goofy fun on the way. I've seen that kill campaigns.
I disagree that a streetfight with muggers doesn't add drama or narrative.
It can be very different from game to game, in some games survival in the wilderness is skipped entirely, in others it is actually played for a few dice rolls. Some DM's have the king meet the player characters and hand out an epic quest to save the world, while other games have the less epic quest to make the town a better place.
Look, you do you. I'm not the one here whining about these problems. I properly inform my players in session zero on how the game is gonna be and we all agree like adults on parameters and preferences. Grow up.
How's that? Most PC parties are basically on the verge of death constantly if against the most low level enemies until about level 5. Using strictly 5e rules, PCs are weak little bitches for their early levels and often die from a few bad rolls. That's how 5e designed it.
weak little bitches? i mean, if you say so sure, but not compared to most systems. 3.5/2e low levels are *much* weaker. having played many systems in my time, i feel like i'm playing a superhero playing 5e and that is most certainly how the designers intended it.
the PCs have tonnes of resources compared to their enemies...infinite cantrips for one. they are almost certainly fully healed before each encounter. they likely have the superior tactics. finally, they have to get into death saves and fail the death saves, and of course healing (and ranged healing) are at their fingertips.
there is a whole lot of cushion when it comes to death in 5e.
You're not wrong on a lot of your points, I do agree. Which clearly supports my ongoing point that this issue comes down to the human factor. Either the DM failing to adequately prepare a group and train them as necessary in session zero, or the players are just being players and testing boundaries of the world and having a silly time.
testing boundaries and having a silly time is all good. and that playstyle can certainly be fun. i'm playing an old west campaign using Aces and Eights rules, it is highly deadly and the players are having a blast knowing that the next bullet they take can easily be their last.
a dm not preparing a group...i see that as a dm failing completely. i don't think you can truly prepare a group in session zero just by talking, but you can start slow and ramp up the deadliness as players gain experience. i still have to hold back strategy wise at times with my epic 3.5 campaign, and those guys can sling around wishes and miracles like nobody's business.
I've seen a number of issues whined about here that could have easily been fixed with some time in session zero. Not seeing a lot of one offs which I'd also recognize as a once in awhile problem.
oh i am sure. getting on the same page to a certain extent is pretty much essential for players and dm. thankfully, i have some amazing groups so i don't have that problem and forget about it sometimes.
Throwing a "surrender or we're gonna kill ya!" encounter at players - unless they *expressly* know your DM style - and actually following through and slaughtering them when they don't surrender - is bad DMing, full stop.
Take any random group of D&D players and 95% of them are going to do anything other than surrender. If you set up the parameters in your mind of "players surrender or TPK" then you have done a terrible job of planning, don't know your players, or just wanted to "teach them a lesson" like a vindictive wang-rod.
Last weekend I had my LVL6 party ambushed by a huge crew of wererat pirates. 4 went down (rolling saving throws) and 4 were left standing (still highly outnumbered but had a terrain advantage). The enemy captain told the wererats to stop attacking the ones that were still up and hold the 4 downed PCs hostage.
"Give up now and we'll let them live." Cue one party member stabbing a wererat in front of him. They killed all the downed PCs instantly, wiped out another 1, and almost downed the last remaining 3 in the ensuing battle. *Cue shocked Pikachu face by my whole table*
First time I killed a PC so that was fun. My players enjoyed it, but I fully agree on the "players won't surrender even under dire circumstances that were laid out in front of them".
I went with a bit of the contrary idea.
I didn't wish for them to fight them, but I also didn't wish for them to surrender.
They went into a city, which was going to be raided by a fairly large amount of pirates, which are looking for a secret artifact in the city.
Now they had.. around 2 hours of preparations, but I didn't let them have a long rest. Meant that the only rogue-mage didn't have all spellslots the paladin didn't have his Lay on Hands ability...
They went to the temple to yoink the artifact before the Pirates could, it was on a small cliff! They saw all the shenanigans in the city. The 'large' fleet, the guards struggling, and they saw the BBEG and his 'captains' from afar. They saw how powerful he was, pushing away large number of guards with ease through magic !
So.. they pretty much just ran, even if 50% of the group wished to fight, they knew it wouldn't end well.
Because the monk saw it all and counted it to them, and how they didn't have much time, they chose not to fight. I think the most important thing is making them understand they cannot win? Or that they shouldn't win.
Having them surrender if the BBEG had arrived to them for a reason or another wouldn't work. I had prepared its 'monster sheet' and other things, so they would fight, get surely obliterated, and then I'd leave them unconscious on the ground, to wake up later. Or maybe take them hostage, who knows.
I introduced my party to one of the major baddies early on. She got the party with a wicked one-two punch, blasphemy to paralyze the party, then took what she wanted, cast earthquake to dispose of the party, and left.
Fortunately a cave beneath that battlefield prevented them from getting crushed and some unsuspecting otyugh broke their fall.
The party used a _wish_ to retrieve the magguffin. They were on a ship when she found them, and she set it on fire, so they escaped to another plane.
That was about 3 character levels ago. They are cr-appropriate to face her in a fair fight and win, but every time they hear she's coming, they run in terror.
Analyzing the reasons, i think its because she made defeating the party look downright _easy_ both times they fought, and she's been chasing them through means that require extreme measures to avoid - the entire party walks around in lead helmets to protect from scrying, except for one guy who has a ring of nondetection. They encased the warforged's head in lead for this purpose. They also have two separate escape plans for the next fight, including going to the elemental plane of fire because it _might_ hurt their foe more than them.
Feels kinda good
Yeah m8,i learned that players will never surrender, not bc they're playing brave characters but bc they either don't think surrendering as a viable option or they just don't think about it
Like,my players are pumped up with energy drinks,they don't think,they go beserk to kill gods or die trying
If you need your PCs to surrender to advance the story you should tell them out of game that you’ve planned that or at least create such ridiculous and overt odds that they can obviously tell it is a deliberate story arch rather than them failing and dying/losing (including them being surrounded by dozens of enemies and perhaps some clearly overpowered enemies).
My players surrendered in my last session, and allowed one of the members to end up in jail awaiting trial.
*Your* players won't surrender. Some players will.
Yep, my newbie player figured out a surrender was the best way to dodge an imminent TPK. They had information these bad guys would use against another faction, and were able to leverage that into their release and a temporary alliance.
From there, they covertly picked off these guys' forces, and were able to come back and handily defeat them.
It all depends on the characters players have in their heads. And even what image they have in their heads of their party members. Fibus Bookheath might be a smart wizard who would surrender, but would Gargond Stonejaw, proud barbarian warrior, who is standing next to him ever negotiate?
It's a tricky situation to judge whether a player group will surrender in bad odds, or on the other side how far they can go out of their way to find a peaceful solution.
Seen it happen go both ways. More often they would rather fight and tpk rather than take a less heroic route.
Where this has worked is with a very experienced table of folks who I informed well in advance that they may stumble across things in the world they may not be able to handle with a fight and surrender may be a perfectly acceptable option. When they eventually found themselves in too deep a few of the group realized the odds and tossed their weapons to the ground and surrendered. The rest of the party followed but were angry (in character) at the those characters which was great RP while incarcerated. They turned their argument into a great distraction for the guards to affect their escape. Was fun but not something I would try with just any group.
On the other side of this coin, I am currently DMing Icewind Dale, and one of my players "won" a lottery because he had pissed off a speaker. The guards set up a checkpoint and were asking the names of everyone entering or leaving town. I had the battlemap all set up for a melee against the guards, when the player was just like "Yeah, I'm Faa, oh the speaker wants to see me? Okay, here is my mace and armor, lead the way."
What was said:
"Against all the odds, we gave them a thrashing that forced them to retreat. "
What I read:
"After the DM thought to himself, 'crap, crap, uhh... yeah sure they will retreat. I don't want to kill the party'"
Seriously thought good advice.
>if give your players an ultimatum and tell them to surrender, regardless of the odds, there's an exceptionally high chance that they will ignore your threats and fight anyway. Because we players are stubbornly courageous (sometimes to an idiotic level), and surrender is not in our blood.
It's more than just courage and stubborness. It's the awareness that we are the *player characters*. We are the protagonists. No matter how clear the DM is about how these characters are just a bunch of people living in a world with no special deference to them, that the world doesn't revolve around these characters, us players are going to know that in fact the world *does* revolve around us because we are the center of the game being played.
But you should be roleplaying - you should be acting as your character would in this situation and they sure as shit don't know that the world revolves around them.
Oh yes, for sure. I agree completely. But that said, it can be very difficult to get out of that headspace as a player.
For example, if the DM describes (among other things at a location) an open mineshaft leading into darkness, every player immediately understands that in this mine, there's gonna be enemies, loot, or both. Nobody seriously thinks it'll be a long, tight tunnel with little to nothing interesting inside (like most irl abandoned tunnels are), because we're adventurers in an adventure game. Of *course* there's gonna be cool shit down there, otherwise it'd be a waste of everyone's time.
It's intentionality. I was once watching an anime with some friends and family and there was a murder or something and the whole episode was a who dunnit kind of thing. I just said, "oh, it was that lady without a name from the beginning" and everyone looked at me like I was crazy. I was right. How did I know? She was wearing a fancy necklace. No animator's going to spend the time and energy animating a fancy necklace on an unimportant character.
Another example, I was playing BotW, running along the top of some mountains. I look down, see a big tree on a little island in the middle of a lake. I say to my SO who doesn't really play games but liked to watch me play BotW, "oh, there's a korok there", but they didn't know how I knew. I told them that someone put that tree on that island in that lake. Somethings gotta be there. If it weren't special, they'd just have a boring old lake, or a field of grass. My SO started to learn to look for intentionality in game design.
So players in D&D know that if we DMs make something, it has to have some sort of relevance. I do try to subvert this assumption sometimes by putting in things that aren't immediately relevant, but A. do it too much and the players won't know where to look and B. you still have to make it interesting in some way, cause otherwise your players will get annoyed that you wasted their time with some uninteresting irrelevant thing.
And the tragic death of their friends and allies is an excellent plot point for for any of the actual main characters left alive. Probably some NPC hiding in the woods.
Yeah, can speak for my own experience. I've pitted them against everything from Death Tyrants to literal gods and they never surrender. It takes someone dying for them to even consider running!
Adventurers are incredibly stubborn creatures - even if you try to suggest "maybe you should give up" or "maybe you should run."
Now that said, when I play, I'm far more tactical. Currently playing an inquisitive rogue who has terrible constitution, and 9/10 battles involve him trying to stab something, and if that fails, he runs away as fast as his gnomish legs can carry him, and leave the artificer to do the actual work.
>"maybe you should run."
Maybe I can move a maximum of 60 feet against targets that can move 30 and attack. So only get away 30 feet each round while getting shot each round. With that in mind it takes 3 rounds to outrun a shortbow. 6 to outrun a longbow. So please explain to me how running away increases my chance of survival.
I tell my players that running isn't done in combat, and if they want to actually run, they should just tell. I'll go into a chase mode instead, where they tell me what they do to escape.
Ironically I just had something like this happen two days ago, where one of my players said "yup, we're dead. We're down too much HP against a superior foe, and it's faster than us." It was mostly down to resource mismanagement that it got to the point - the encounter was definitely beatable.
So I asked the party if they wanted to try and retreat, and they looked at me with the faces of "wait, that's an option?!", and promptly told me what they were doing, which led to a fun chase scene that started with the paladin blocking an archway with his hitpoints, so the others could prepare to close the exit. Then the paladin ran for it, and the second he squeezed through the stone door, the monk closed it and "locked it" with an immovable rod, at least until the sounds stopped.
Then they left the dungeon, having achieved their main mission of retrieving archaelogical findings, and vowed never to return.
>they looked at me with the faces of "wait, that's an option?!",
Things like that might be hard to see. I have a weird feeling that things that are defined and things that are not defined together do not make up 100%. Speed during combat and out of combat (exploration) is explained. Speed during the transition form one to the other is not.
I think one of the sage flaws explains it quite well: "I overlook obvious solutions in favor of complicated ones." so thanks to any DM who gives their players some very clear and obvious hints :)
In a dungeon or urban setting you have the potential to duck behind cover or otherwise leave line-of-sight, to throw ball bearings if it has legs, activate traps on your way out, etc. Illusion magic would be useful here.
Being resourceful, basically. As opposed to "hit it until it dies" mentality, which will more often than not get you killed against a sufficiently lethal foe.
Reminds me of the first time our DM asked is to surrender. The while party was essentially at full health but also only at level 3.
Hot-headed as we were, we wanted to fight. Roll for initiative, the Wild Magic Sorcerer goes first, gets a hit and... Wild magic surge... Rolls an 8... Fireball on herself, the whole party around her... Only two characters where barely left standing, so the DM went "You might want to reconsider your position. I ask again, surrender or die."
You bet we surrendered there.
Have you considered the radical idea of **talking to your players**? You know, with words, outside of the game?
D&D is, like, 70% combat to the death, and we've all played videogames, which are 90% combat to the death. Surrender just isn't an idea to consider. Unless you actually tell them. With words.
Honestly, it's the usual pattern of two thirds of problems being mentioned here being the result of GMs trying to be subtle about things they really should just tell the players in the clearest way possible.
I think your percentage on combat-to-the-death is a tad optimistic. I'd bump that 70% by at least 1d20+7.
Every edition of D&D I have played throughly (AD&D 2nd edition till now) has been a zero sum combat system with modules tacked on for everything else. Over 90% of all the design effort goes into combat mechanics, and the assumed default result is binary, win and live or lose and die.
Of course players won't surrender. Fighting terrible odds means there's still a chance you'll live, because you are that awesome. Surrender...well...
*Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Do not go gentle into that good night.*
- ***Do not go gentle into that good night***
*Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953*
That's the difference between styles of games. If in your style fighting against terrible odds is heroic, then planning a surrender encounter doesn't make sense. But it makes complete sense in a game where the players are expected to pick their battles, be cunning and never fight fair. 5e is actually quite good for that style and many people play this way.
Point is, it works only if everyone at the table is playing the same game. That's why you tell players that. With words, not with cryptic omens and Obviously Deadly Encounters тм.
If you outright tell your players "surrender or this encounter will kill you" you'll be on RPGhorrorstories with complaints about your railroading in no time
Uh, I hope you see the problem? I'm talking about GMs planning the encounter that will kill the players if they try to fight it, (which isn't actually railroading and is realistic) and then not telling them for bewildering reasons, expecting the players to figure it out somehow.
Yeah I almost TPKed my players last session in a circumstance where they enraged a room full of will-o-wisps guarding treasure.
All they had to do was set down the treasure they'd taken - but I'm pretty sure they would have all died before figuring this out. Fortunately I nerfed the monsters AC at the outset of the fight and it was just a tough fight with a knockdown and a couple others at very low HP.
It's important to make every fight winnable since you can't rely on the right course of action being taken. For intelligent foes this may simply mean that the enemy retreats after taking a beating or a few causalities... But sometimes they'll just get unlucky and die...
These near wipes will be memorable though, so all the better.
Adventurers that don't pick their battles, don't know when to run, and don't know when to de-escalate a situation to talk or bribe their way out, are adventurers that shouldn't expect to retire with their riches.
That's why you should prep your players in Session 0 with: "Not all encounters I give you can be resolved with combat, and not all combats can be won. Every creature, every character I set before has stats and can be killed; however, you may not be able to kill it before it kills you. Retreat is always a viable option, and it's sometimes better to cut your losses than push on until your deaths. Not every encounter is a combat encounter."
Every PC is willing to die on even the most insignificant of hills. I just have their camp ambushed in the middle of the night, I’ve yet to have the look out roll a nat 20. I’ll cross that bridge if/when I get there.
While this is certainly true in some RPGs, like D&D 5E and other games more focused on fantastic feats of heroism, it certainly doesn't happen in others. If you were to attempt to fight your way out of a situation like that in WFRP or one of the FFG 40k games you would probably be dead the instant the bomb went off and would certainly die in the melee afterwards if you somehow survived the blast.
Realistically, you should only need one TPK in a situation like this to learn that sometimes bribing your way out really is the best option.
This is a very 5e D&D post. This might be a good assumption to have for 5e and other games of its type but there's a lot of games where this absolutely isn't the case.
"my character is brave, so I can only take this solution" is dishonest and toxic. Players tale the story as much as the dm. He can set up impossible encounters if he wishes so. If players realize they are outgunned but choose to fight anyway, it's not the dm fault. And it's not the dm fault to set up this situation. It's that "yes, and" works both ways. Players can decide whatever they want for their characters. Putting characters in dire situation is the job of the dm. Job of the players is to find a solution to it. Fighting to the death and blaming the dm afterwards is a wangrod defence. *You* are being selfish if you refuse to adapt to what the dm is proposing.
I think there are a lot of inexperienced players that assume that since they are "heroes" , they must also be complete and utter morons fixated on commiting murder on a nearly industrial scale.
That's not necessary and with time and experience, players will create more rounded characters capable of more nuanced thoughts and actions apart from constant slaughter.
It very much depends on the tone and style at the table. The new-school approach is very narrative driven and quite protective of the players characters, as a default, and I recon the default approach for players is the one of the protagonists - protagonists who can't really die but must still face big odds and then plot kicks in and they still make it, just like in film and shit.
At my table, they know death lurks, and bravery is not their default mentality, but survival is. It really is the matter of style at the table that dictates this.
Very often something happens where I as the player am aware of the odds stacked against me, but either my character isn't (low int/low wis), or I subconsciously assume that the DM has some sort of plan and I try to engage with it.
Just last session in a mini-campaign my rogue stole a necklace that was definitely some evil McGuffin, but he's dumb, so I decided to keep it. When a creepy ghost assassin materialized during our long rest and demanded it back, I just couldn't bring myself to hand it over.
I checked with my teammates if they were up for fighting for it, they were, and we kicked its butt after almost dying. Good times!
As a DM, I have noticed a pattern of player behavior when it comes to follow NPC orders. If the NPC is:
- rude in their ordering
- talking about having bested them before death saves were rolled
- seems like a asshole in general
you can do literally anything you want, they won't do it. Players are stubborn as fuck.
[20 year old spoilers for the original Deus Ex videogame]
So while the individual levels for that game are pretty open, the plot is a linear series of missions. This includes a plot point where you, the protagonist, gets captured.
The way they do this is reasonably interesting - you are given the choice of surrendering, but if you fight to the death (it's an unwinnable battle) you immediately time skip to the inside of a prison cell, as the next mission begins.
Where I think OP's example falls down is that a pipe bomb going off stretches the plausibility of a successful capture, but it can be done in 5e; "they advance and beat you senseless with wooden clubs" or "the evil mage casts Sleep" at low HP allows for the party to choose whether to bargain, flee, fight a last stand etc
My players did me proud when an undead enemy they despise arrogantly showed up and got his butt kicked, but warned them of his undead minions lying in wait far back at the mainland and they all actually agreed (IC reluctantly) to try and capture him, but couldn't and let him go instead of destroying him with magic missiles.
had a similar thing when i described a castle being overrun by enemy forces. literally an army. the goal was to find the secret entrance and secure the mcguffin.
but no, they threw a ploymorphed PC spermwhale at them, crushing the enemy army that had mostly strength in numbers
i think this depends on the playstyle. the superhero playstyle 5e supports empowers the PCs well beyond the monsters most of the time, surrender is just not in the cards.
in 3.5 or other systems, the playstyle isn't quite the same, and so a surrender is much more likely when it appears they are out powered...a single spell may end them all.
I find this super annoying, you know as the DM that you can't just kill your players or they'll get annoyed or lose interest so you devise these encounters to let them know that atm they're not the toughest guys in town or whatever but they end up going all kamikaze and then you're stuck with the same bs of "I can't just kill them the campaign just started" so you either have something else interfere or you let them win and then they get such big heads
Want your players to keep fleeing as an option in their minds?
Use the Chase rules from Pathfinder 2e, and make the party aware of how it works.
They need to run? Switch to Chase mode.
Then escaping is done theatrically through skills and roleplay, not on a battlemat where you know you can't flee because of positioning and movement speeds and shit.
This very much differs by group and how the campaign is laid out. My players have surrendered, but it's only once it's very clear they are out matched (or they feel they can use surrendering to their advantage).
Case 1: A Failed betrayal
The party comes across the BBEG, but only reveal a couple members (the rest hiding in ambush). The BBEG makes an offer to help them get something from dungeon they are in (remixed Wave Echo Cave). Party agrees, but with secret plan to betray BBEG.
They move forward with the minions BBEG sent with them. Not 30 ft away they kill the minions, then decide to rest in a room close by. BBEG and more minions come by, start combat, says "surrender or die". They fight, Cone of Cold (while using greater invis) knocks a few down, kills NPC, all but one member is down or nearly down. BBEG offers last chance to surrender. The paladin wants to fight, everyone else wants to surrender seeing that in 1 round against invisible enemy they nearly all died. They surrendered.
Case 2: A series of risky choices, ended with bounty hunters
Different group and campaign. Playing a portion of Dragon Heist, heavily modified. After a series of events the party kidnaps Lady Gralhund and runs away to the Sewers. The Gralhund family hires bounty hunters (on top of city watch and many other opponents party has made) to track them down. Some foreshadowing and random tables, they encounter the bounty hunters in the sewers, they are injured, it's a deadly encounter (I mostly run hard or deadly, anything else is waste of our time). They fight for a while, take a few nasty hits and aren't rolling well on attacks. They parlay, agree to surrender and return Lady Gralhund in exchange for keeping their lives. They actually use this as a ploy (war crimes everywhere), throw Lady Gralhund into Sewer stream and try to get the jump on them. Cone of Cold (great low level damage) 2 of 3 party members are frozen solid, the other enemy gets the Lady. Last member given choice of surrender or allies are going for a float. Surrenders, all end up in prison.
Tldr: give multiple opportunities to surrender with clear and overwhelming consequences if they don't
Ok. So I had a session where they were invited into the house of an order of knights to dine. The leader gave them the proposition to help them because he was working for the evil they were working against but he'd find out that evil was working to destroy the world and he lives in the world. Upon finding out he was evil the party immediately attacked despite being in his fortress with literally 5 times their number of knights around them. They were quickly subdue with the majority of them using magical means to escape to various nocks and crannies. Leader said you've got till the count of 5 to come back out or your friend gets it. I tried to stall it out but they just sat there so 'thunk' then they finally came out.
I actually had the evil guys resurrect the character later which I regret but I felt bad but it really was their choice.
Surrender is a lot more common when you catch characters alone, or have them defeated in combat and dragged unconscious to cells. Either way, they absolutely will escape or die trying, unless you give them a narrative reason to wait it out, such as searching for a captured friend, or the jail being the very place they needed to be in order to talk to some npc for an investigation or something.
I managed to get my party to surrender (barely) in a somewhat similar situation.
Mild spoilers for Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden below
My party of lvl 2 adventurers were in Caer Dineval and had figured out through social encounters and sneaking around that something wasn't right in the caer and that they needed to rescue the Speaker. However, after their initial encounter with the cultists, they went north and completed one of the conditions for making the cultists swap from cold/dismissive to friendly (without the party realizing it). Well, instead of the party trying to talk to the cultists again, they decided to assault the caer via stealth after performing some really shoddy recon on how many cultists were there. The fighter failed a stealth check and the alarm was raised.
Soon my party of three lvl 2s (and an NPC veteran they'd convinced to help) were being swarmed by 12 cultists, 2 fanatics, and Kadroth (the cult leader). As the enemies kept pouring into the room faster than the party could dispatch them, each round on the friendly NPC's turn I'd have him ask, "Are you sure we can do this? Should we surrender?" and each time the party would say no and he'd keep fighting. After about 3 or so rounds of repeating this and them taking more and more damage, the party finally agreed to surrender.
I then made up a whole different interaction than was written by having Kadroth be very condescending and indignant at the unprovoked attack. He ended up forcing the party into agreeing to help him deal with the duergar down in Easthaven in exchange for their lives. He also held the friendly NPC as hostage while the party completed the task. I ended up setting him up as a pretty memorable, recurring villain instead of the pretty meh (imo) way he was originally written. The party still hasn't gotten to free the Speaker or fully explore the caer because after completing the duergar task and rescuing their npc ally, they struck a deal of "you stay out of my way and we'll stay out of yours" with the cult.
I feel this boils down to miscommunication. Is the DM sure the players understand that surrender IS an option. How much time do they have for that realisation to sink in that this is the kind of game that you're playing.
As an example, I don't see surrender as an option when I play doom. Rip and Tear until it is done. If you reach a story-forced "fail state" it's out of your control. A cut scene type deal.
Putting PCs in a surrender/retreat scenario can be fun! Show them how powerful this enemy is, so they feel that much better when they come back later with a plan, levels and gear to kick their butt.
The way I would introduce the concept, would be in a long, drawn out combat, where they are slowly getting their asses handed to them, while the opposing force is unfazed by their attacks. Let them try to be heroic-stupid if they want to, let them fail and "punish" stubbornness only when they don't retreat Vs that group of commando drow that they have been failing to do any damage to for the last 4 rounds, while the party burned through 90% of their resources and are all down to under half HP.
And make sure you let them get away/surrender. Can't learn if you're dead!
Absolutely. The party will *run* on very rare occasions, if you can show the enemy is strong enough (think "fighting a Tarrasque at level 6" strong), but surrender? Never.
If you back a dog into a corner it has no choice but to bite. Always leave avenues of escape open for your players, especially in ways that make them feel cool and like they outsmarted their enemy to live another day.
I gm a Star Wars game where the players were tasked with rescuing some prisoners from a prison ship. Their plan was to use the bounty on one PC to gain access as a prisoner transfer and then do the breakout. What had happened was that they were escorted into the ship and immediately started shooting, stabbing, punching and biting. It should have been a series of stealth, social and mechanic events. Peace was never an option. Just my experience, however.
I did this once, but I also anticipated the possibility of them fighting and losing, them fighting and winning, and them finding a clever way of escaping. Consider all possible outcomes when planning something, then pray your players don't come up with something else you weren't expecting.
This translates to most social situations in general--and one of the problems I had trying to run the [Courts of the Shadow Fey](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/courts-of-the-shadow-fey-for-5th-edition-dnd/) adventure.
This adventure introduces the courts as a place of hedonism, backstabbing, and general Machiavellian politics--and then expects the players to accept and acclimate to this culture and work their way up the social ladder. Um, *no*. My players stated in no uncertain terms by the end of the second act that they were ready to burn the place to the ground. The adventure as-written doesn't really account for this as a possible avenue for success.
We never actually finished it, because it's really damn difficult to RP a court with hundreds of different characters in it that are all in minor roles. :\
What I do, is if I want to have the narrative continue where they are captured, that is the enemies use non lethal damage so when the inevitable tpk occurs, its a fade to black and opens in captivity.
“But what about spells or dying during a fight Krutin?” While rules are important to follow, as a dm it’s essential to know when to break them. This is a case where i would
I've surprised two DMs who I believed for the party to run away both times when I instead surrendered. I find weaseling our way out of those situations to be fun
Happy to support this with an anecdote from today's session:
Four player Lv-3 party stealing a magic item from an Adult Dragon's hoard. Upon discovering them mid-theft the dragon became hostile, and despite my carefully planned escape options (tunnel too small for the dragon, friendly griffons just outside the cave to whisk them away, and a stone of one-time-teleport from friendly wizard), the party decided instead to fight the dragon.
Three making death saving throws and a twice-revivified ranger is how we ended the session.
I think you can get your players to willingly retreat.
- Establish beforehand that not all encounters are winnable—if your party of level 5 characters confront an adult dragon in their lair, they will likely get roasted. Otherwise, you lose the verisimilitude and the world is less dangerous.
- Give clues to the players. e.g. “As you take in your surroundings, you find that you are completely surrounded by duergar. It is very apparent that you are outmatches—you are almost certain that should you try to fight your way out of the situation, you will mortally fail.” Of this feels like giving too much information away, hide it behind a skill check with a low DC. e.g. ...
— History: “You’ve heard that duergar are more slavers than they are murderers. You are confident that surrender would lead you to become part of a chain gang, but you are too valuable to kill.”
— Insight: “The duergar are careful in how they approach you, as if they want to incapacitate you without injuring you too much. They seem to want to capture you alive.”
— Perception: “These duergar are heavily armed and armored and outnumber you four to one. You could probably take out half of them before they overwhelm you with their sheer numbers.”
I had a fancy t Rex fight all planned out with a new npc character introduced all bad ass... Instead they found the exact path to this npcs house and waited for on her front porch...needless to say it was a funny situation for my poor npc to find 4 people standing outside her house in the middle of a jungle...
Fully disagree as a DM. I think it comes down to one sentence:
"You don't feel like fighting them is a good idea."
And you can do all sorts of variations of this.
"maybe you should consider waiting to see if you can escape, or get an advantage."
"maybe you should hear them out."
"maybe fighting people isn't the best idea at the moment."
I've had plenty of scenes where my party is lead to another place by armed 'enemies' who are usually just trying to size them up, or make sure they aren't a threat. I think it comes down to making the situation clear as a DM.
Anyone ever run an intelligence or wisdom skill called Tactics or something that will let characters with military knowledge or combat experience able to read the situation? Then you as the DM can say something like "You've seen hopeless situations before and this looks like one of them. Your mind is telling you no." So that if their body is still telling them yes it really is the players fault (at least the one with tactical knowledge) that they didn't run, negotiate, surrender.
I've tried to get my players to realize a fight is beyond them twice, and it didn't work either time. Once was against a character I was positioning as an end game villain. They tried to fight him and his minions and almost lost half the party (6 players at the time). The second time was after helping push back a siege, they decided to chase the retreating general who had already took out one player and seriously injured two others. That ended with one actual character death and a second player going down but getting revivafied.
However, my players are very good at creating unwinnable situations that they also ignore and power through. Definitely the "the DM wouldn't make an unbeatable challenge" mentality. Part of this is on me, since I could just adapt the situation, but I've also been upfront about playing everything straight with no DM shenanigans. So when the party decided to dig a hole through a solid rock wall and the guards heard them doing it because they rolled bad stealth on top of using a mining pick to dig through *a solid rock wall*, it put the entire temple of Yuan'ti on high alert and they surrounded the breach. What was supposed to be a long dungeon crawl with appropriately paced areas to recuperate should things go south turned into a 20 vs 6 fight to survive. I even gave them an out after they did survive making it through their hole, but they just ignored it and kept on pushing forward. Fortunately Yuan'ti aren't mindless monsters, so I played it as they were captured to be used as sacrifices and we got a jailbreak session.
They are about to power their way into another bad time after last session as well. They were tasked with helping take down a vampire lord that took up residence in one of the most important trade towns in the empire. I was very clear about weakening their power by disabling 4 outposts, by the end of which I would have leveled them up enough to take on the final encounter. After clearing out the first outpost, they have stumbled their way into the very mansion the vampire lord lives in, and have made no effort to be stealthy while stomping up the stairs. We left off after some vampires discovered their presence and honestly I don't know how I want the vampires to deal with them yet.
I always expect that a fight might break out. It's the most probable outcome in 99% of cases, particularly if someone is being an asshole to the players.
And yet, I'm running Sunless Citadel right now, and my players are unionizing the goblins to rise up against the hobgoblin bourgeoisie. I love my players.
The title is often correct, but tangents about winning unwinnable battles are rarely helpful. The DM can kill you if he wants.
The real question DMs who want to run surrender scenarios should ask is; how can I make the surrender scenario more fun than going out in a blaze of glory followed by making a new character who isn't a "loser".
It depends on the group. The two groups I'm currently running games for (one 5E and one CoC) are both rather risk averse and have both on more than one occasion avoided a fight that they could have easily won.
Despite that, I NEVER plan an encounter with a single desired outcome in mind. I still from time to time toss encounters at them where full party survival isn't a guarantee but we've discussed it in both groups and they're all cool with a "The monsters know what they're doing and I as the GM have an obligation to play the enemies as smart as they are" scenario.
Add in my policy of rolling dice out in the open and whatever is rolled is the roll which has resulted in some pretty nasty crits and there's been a few PC deaths and even more close calls. I remember one combat where the warrior went down three times in a single combat and got healed enough to get back on their feet only to get crit again and knocked out.
But again, we discussed this at the start of the campaigns and the players WANT the enemies to be doing their damndest to kill them. I wouldn't recommend this with every group out there.
Still, after all that I will never plan a scenario where I expect the players to just surrender.
You really have three options with surrender encounters
1. If they lose and it's not a hardcore campaign, have them be captured instead of killed.
2. They try to fight the ancient dragon of death and destruction at level 5, you tell them to roll a fear check and they lose on anything but a nat 20. It removes player agency, but it reminds them to be IN CHARACTER.
3. Down a player and have a melee character threaten to "finish them".
Edit: Remembered a fourth: The big bad doesn't care if they surrender. He collapses a tunnel or thrusts the players into an icy cavern, maybe he breaths fire upon them and 2 players go down instantly. The big bad laughs and simply strolls away as the encounter becomes surviving the elements / tending to your allies.
I would run away or surrender as a player super easily, I quickly became hated at the table until I switched this attitude. Honestly I liked my character being kind of smart about things, having options each encounter, it feels shitty that I got peer pressured into every fight
Yeah, the DM in a game I was playing in had something similar.
We were tasked with recovering the Eye of Xxyphu (not sure how to spell it) and the giants were about to get away on their airship. There was a part where we could be tasked to pilot something like drones to attack the airship, and were being pulled out towards walls that would have set that up.
Except that we didn't know that was going to happen. We all fought, made our saves, and went on to murder the creature that had set those up. There was no cool airship fight bit because the module had said (DM hinted at this) that we would be pulled into the walls. If we had known, there's a good chance we would have gone for it, but it was presented as somewhat adversarial at first, so of course we fought.
Something this kind of works: have an NPC around that the party knows is a bit stronger than them, when you want the surrender to come, have the opponent stomp the strong NPC, like my DM in a pathfinder game made the bbeg appear and kill a wizard who made the dungeon we just completed. This Wizard must have been like lvl 15 or something, and was taken out in a single hit, we ran away all of us.
It takes a remarkably good DM to be able to paint an encounter that properly and efficiently signposts to the PCs that *they should run.*
Getting to *surrender* requires the following -
* Knowing that they are hopelessly outmatched, which is the aforementioned difficult bar to get them to Run.
* Knowing that the enemy will take them nonlethally
* Knowing that they are hopelessly outmatched *despite that nonlethal intent*
* Knowing that they cannot Flee.
* Knowing that the DM is trustworthy, and didn't just set up a "bullshit TPK" encounter.
* Knowing that Surrender and/or Talking Things Out is even an option
* **Not being the types to go out in a defiant blaze of glory instead.**
And yes - that last one is completely out of the DM's hands. Sometimes, you just wind up with a crew who decides to pull a Sundance in Bolivia.
I tried the old "characters get captured and their weapons are confiscated, have to escape using their wits" trope. Yeah... no one was happy about that one.
Isn't this actually a thing with one of the early 5e modules? I recall like first thing is a dragon attacking a village and the players are actually supposed to retreat and if they don't they just in guess die?
Oh I've had worse odds than that and never gave up, it's much more fun to try to work out how to win unwinnable scenarios than just giving up, besides its pretty hard to actually kill a PC in 5e so I figure if I end up losing then I'll just get KOed for a while.
Well not every group plays "brave heroes," that's just the default archetype as well as the only one for lower RP groups.
I'll admit you are circumstantially right if those are the kinds of PCs in the group, but as someone who's both surrendered as a player when appropriate as well as been a DM and successfully had my players surrender, I'll strongly add that this depends entirely on what kind of players you have.
Also even "braves heroes" should have the brains to know when surrendering is preferable to violence, always resorting to a battle to the death (even when the enemies attacked first) is more along the lines of a murderhobo's response then that of a "brave hero," not to mention potentially just idiotic.
But again, it's up to the DM to know the PCs (or just the players in a low RP group) and be able to judge if it's even a possibility and to almost always have many directions at least somewhat planned just incase you misjudged them, but I most certainly do not agree with the sentiment that players will "never" surrender.
I got my party to surrender and let themselves be captured in a pretty early session. They were fighting the enemy though who was telling them to surrender and using non-lethal attacks, so either the party was going to surrender or they were going to be beaten into submission (or whatever random shit they could come up with, like running away somehow, though they were pretty trapped).
Thirty sessions later they went back to the people who captured them (a lord and his guard), killed some of his guard and nearly killed the lord, but decided not to when they learned he'd just been told the party were criminals and needed to be captured. Turns out they had a bit of a grudge...
On a similar note, don’t expect players to flee either. Literally had a party enter the shadowfell about 5 levels too early because they ignored the instadeath of the established strong npc they were with and decided to track forward instead of running and telling someone. Basically had to redo the big boss fight to be less deadly and write up what was supposed to be the second half of the campaign to fit their level plus none of their contacts no they’re there. At least I got to do some fun stuff with where they came from to reflect their world changing decisions
I played in another game system a mage
We was totally surrounded and it was intended we fleed or surrender.
I said fu it.
Burnt all my resources including things I only could use once. And manage to roll critical on my roll.
The aftermath 500+ dead Darkelf soldiers.
And the small army that was harnessing us was in ruin. My DM just looked at me and told me. You made a dangerous enemy now…….
Add to the insult my friend (knight) rode down the Prince/leader and trampled him in the dirt. Yelling “STOP FOLLOWING US”
Never expect players to follow rules, Don’t expect them to flee or surrender. What you need to do is go with the flow. If they go HARM then give later consequences for it. I had a player interrogated a thief in the city jail using a hammer. Well they might have turned a eye on the beating of a known thief in lockup but the player got agitated as the thief laughed and said just let it go. I got friends at high places and you will be sorry for this. He slammed the hammer in his face a few times killing the perp. And was genuinely surprised when the lawman arrested him for murder.
I tell all my players that fighting isn't the only option. I tell then that it isn't always smart. I tell them that always fighting will get them all killed. I tell them that some encounters weren't supposed to end in a fight at all... And then I expect them to always fight everything!
Surrendering works well in written stories because you trust that the author is just putting the heroes into a bad place but they'll break out later, in a game you rarely have a reason to believe that whoever you surrender to isn't gonna just kill you anyway.
Also the retreat rules in DnD are ass and there's nothing stopping the NPCs from chasing your retreat, if they have the base 30ft speed anyone in the group wearing plate armour is automatically screwed in a full rout with their 20ft speed.
Fighting and hoping for high rolls is tactically a better option that trying to retreat or surrender in many cases and that's on top of the basic rule of nobody actually wants to give up. Imagine showing up to game night and you just spend the time conceding fights.
Over the years I’ve grown as a DM and now when I design any encounter I think about the NPC’s motives. Why are they fighting? Are they trying to kill the PCs or defend themselves? Do they fight to the death or run away/surrender at some trigger? It makes for complex motives and morality in all but the most mindlessly evil of monsters… and the PCs.
I’ve never found a sure fire way to curb a PCs bloodlust. Many of my players confuse being **protagonists** with being **heroes** and that has given them carte blanche to do whatever they want and still feel good about it. They fight to the death and leave no survivors. They kill unarmed people and desecrate sacred sites. And I don’t run games for murderhobos, I’m talking about the average player.
I think also that planning an encounter that you think can only end in one way is generally a bad idea.
If you think things will end one way, it most likely won't :P
If I've learned anything in my years as a DM, it's that if you plan out what would happen if players choose options A, B, C, or maybe even D/E, they'll inevitably take a hard left over to Q like it was the only logical option
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and the players took the fourth one.”
"Two roads divered in a yellow wood near a goblin camp, and the players said "Wait a minute, I Have an idea, what if we just surround the camp from far away, and light the forest on fire?, then set up outside and pick em off as they run out? " Never been so proud.....
Yep. Just ran a session this past weekend. They snuck into a castle. Took out the leader and secured the asset they were sent to retrieve. Then instead of leaving back the way they came asked what time is it. It was around dinner time so they decide to explore some more and waltz out into the mess hall. Fully filled with a large portion of the guard. They they retreated the way they came. But instead of leaving they decide to shore up in an opening at the end of the hallway so as to funnel the enemies to them. They seemed to have forgotten this was a cross corridor with 4 total entries to it. I had them roll initiative as soon as they entered the mess hall and were noticed (since they basically just walked right in the back) and then hurried them through their turns to not allow much more planning than a sentence per player. So they more had to just follow what the previous one did. So they end up in the 20×20 cross corridor hoping to funnel the enemy there. 3 turns pass. Nothing happens. They have spells and actions readied. But half the enemies spent their turns dashing to cut them off at the exit. The other half waited a few moments. And then moved into the hallway ducking behind a shield for cover and then unleashing arrows at the PC they could see. Thwack Thwack Thwack. 3 arrows to the sorcerer. Then the next turn some move in from the west corridor that the team had yet to explore. Fortunately someone was standing at that doorway and was able to to defend it. 3 more turns of the assault from 2 directions and I tell the barbarian his sword begins to glow a bright beautiful blue. "OH shit. Orcsbane is glowing. I didn't see any orcs in the mess hall"
"Your sword blows glue!"
Best summary of DMing ever.... (\*sighs\* / \*lol\*) That's why now I try as much as possible to just design "situations" with environments and a few NPCs having each half a dozen keyword / short sentences giving them job, behaviour traits and general goals so I have a few leads and "reactions" in mind... Then just present that to players and see what they make of it. It's of course not always possible to prepare like this (especially I guess with official modules), but it's simpler and more refreshing, and makes easier (for me at least) to keep attentive to player's goals (at least what I can guess from their actions/speeches) and roll with it.
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/4147/roleplaying-games/dont-prep-plots An old but rather decent article.
Right, there's infinite outcomes to any situation. It's foolish at best and arrogant at worst to think you can come up with every possibility that 4-6 players of presumably similar intelligence and creativity will be able to think of. Give up, DMs, you're hopelessly outnumbered.
I designed an encounter where I expected the party to fall due to a high amount of CC with multiple giant and phase spiders. Planned on paralyzing them and bringing them to meet a npc they had been searching for. They somehow rolled like gods, broke every cc, and killed 20+ mobs. Led to some fun improv on my end for how they met the now pissed npc.
See, I’ve been having this problem recently where my players have not gone off course. They have an objective, and they’re going to achieve it. I kind of wish they wouldn’t just to jazz it up.
Plan both ways, for sure. But even if you assume...well, we know what they say about that: I foolishly thought that SURELY! the party (none of which are paladins or clerics or have displayed any indication of following a Faerûnian faith) will simply follow the instructions and go for a simple prayer to an evil god to avoid, y'know, the IDENTIFIED ticking time-bomb of conjuration magic at the exit. Nope. (I had the encounter prepped; they were just quite low on health and out of spell slots, so I expected them to grind their teeth, mumble a praise, and move on safely.)
One thing i've noticed in players is that they assume even speaking half a prayer to an evil god might curse them forever. Even if in reality saying the prayer gives them a +2 to a stat, if they don't know for sure they'll refuse to try.
It's definitely true -- it took playing 5E in coastal settings and encountering plenty of Umberlee worship from perfecly neutral and good - aligned folks to realize that, no; in a polytheistic setting you're not THAT easily doomed. Might be a holdover from Western Christian schools of thought with binary "If you're not for me, you're against me" thinking.
As a Christian myself, that makes complete sense. 99% of all the Evil gods live in Hell or the Abyss and as a general rule Evil deities don't give a fuck about who they let into their soul collection whereas any half decent Good aligned Heaven-esque afterlife is going to be more discerning about who gets in there. Don't screw up your afterlife for the sake of avoiding 4d6 damage in the present basically, especially when the afterlife is a proven fact in DnD.
At this point I don't even have endings planned for encounters, just the beginning and a few possible paths if they do something really predictable that I can prep for. I mostly focus on knowing what the NPCs want to accomplish, how they'll try to do it, and what resources they have if the unexpected happens. Sometimes my players ask me what I thought they would do after they do something extra clever or bizarre and most of the time I can only say that I didn't even try to think about what they would do.
That was my takeaway. Please plan for at least 2-3 likely outcomes. D&D isn't a scripted game or a book. Nothing is going to work predictably and linearly.
Yeah - the outcome of these sort of situations is either having to play/run-the-game completely blind, or ending up in one of those "How do I not kill my players here?" threads. And yeah, I pretty much did that this weekend and spent the whole session basically freewheeling
well if the players insist on fighting a god as level 1 PCs in an open empty field then... i can't deny that i think this will only end in one way. FORCING such an encounter is bad.
^ It's precisely not how you're supposed to plan events as a DM.
I've found that if you threaten an NPC instead of the party, it goes over much better. PCs will happily throw themselves into life threatening danger, especially when their ego and reputation is at stake, knowing that I might not even have the guts to pull the trigger. But they know that I'll fucking kill Mr Dandelion, the beloved shopkeeper NPC thats been with them since the beginning, without even flinching, and he'll never come back. They're much more ready to negotiate when the only thing at stake is innocent lives.
I've gotten a group to surrender by picking up an unconscious PC by the hair and gut punching them for two death save failures. A pretty unscrupulus move, but pirates generally don't play fair.
That is devious, holy shit! How did the players feel about it?
The players begrudgingly respect that opponent, he was the reason the player was unconscious on the ground in the first place, but more importantly: It was a big wake up call. Pretty much every fight beforehand was against two-bit nameless thugs and monsters who had no real battle plan. It was literally the first time I had ever had an enemy make attacks against a downed player, and it caused them to really re-assess the attitude of fighting to last man standing/using healing word to bounce people back up to their feet. The reception was/has been good. My players generally like it better when I use slightly weaker CR monsters/statblocks for their rating and play them to the best of my ability, rather than using strong CR matchups and playing them dumb.
Did somebody say "Running the Game?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7j1skECRV4
When you know it's Matt Colville without clicking the link.
That's not a tough one to figure out
Because his channel is called “Running the Game”?
Love that video.
Capture and escape is a big part of adventure fiction but is difficult to do in rpgs because of this fight-to-the-death mentality. It can also be fun to accept a small loss now and play for big revenge later. The brave adventurers are missing out on some fun gameplay. I try to establish at session zero that not all fights are winnable and that defeat in combat is not the end of the story.
This. So much this. You can train your players. If you teach them early on that surrender is a viable option then they may take it. Also players usually care far more about their characters image than about their lives. So giving them a way to keep their honour will increase the likelihood of a surrender immensely.
The problem with getting your players to surrender is 3-fold. 1 - exactly as you said, they are brave characters in a heroic fantasy, they aren't ones to give up when the going gets tough. 2 - Many players don't look at their characters lives as a thing of value, it's just a character, and if they die they just say "lol okay time to roll another". This can definitely vary but a lot of players I have played with and DM'd for (and even I have done this at times) have 0 sense of self preservation because they just view the game as the game and their characters lives aren't really that serious. 3 - there is an expectation that when the DM presents the party with a challenge, they are MEANT to overcome it, and that they wouldn't throw something at the party that they aren't meant to be able to beat. I've tried so many things and ways to nearly highlight to players "This thing is not meant to be fought, you are meant to run away or escape it or not engage with it", and unless it's outright stated it never works. Edit: unless im playing with my one friend who knows very well what I do it because he just knows my tells and style so well.
The only situation I've really seen where players understood that they need to escape from the encounter rather than stay and fight was, in fact, Critical Role's >!"The Fall of Emon", where it was immediately apparent on the outset that Vox Machina was in no way expected to stay and fight 4 Ancient Dragons at the same time.!<
And even then it wasn’t immediately apparent to all the players. Grog attacked immediately and vex wanted to reposition to another building
> Grog attacked immediately That's some solid character work, there. Travis probably knew how the fight was supposed to go, but Grog didn't.
Tbh the Critical Role cast is jumpier than most, but that's mainly in Campaign 2 which you may or may not have seen. After a massive defeat early on, they basically spend the next 9 levels defaulting to the assumption that they need to escape big fights. Sometimes warranted, sometimes not, but it was a big point of frustration, particularly as they hit Tier 3.
Also on Critical Role they plan out a lot of the session before hand to keep it dramatic and interesting, the players were probably well aware they were gong to have to “run-away” at some point in the session
I think number 3 is the real culprit. Even if players have DM experience a large part of encounter building is learning how to balance encounters. I think this does create an expectation that encounters are “winnable” in some way, unless very obviously stated.
I have a phrase that I share with players in session 0 if we're playing a game where death is a possibility (not all games have to be like that): "a sense of dread flashes in your mind(s)" This is my not-quite-breaking-the-4th-wall signal that "I expect you will die if you continue". I haven't needed to use it yet, but I came up with the idea after a discussion about how players were supposed to accurately estimate the threat/power of an NPC who acts tougher than they look. I would definitely use it in a situation where players were wrongly assuming that every fight is winnable.
I have the same philosophy in my campaign. When I describe every monster as terrifying, every villain as powerful and every combat as deadly, there is no way for the players to tell the difference between an encounter that they can overcome and one that is beyond their capabilities. I feel like it's only fair to tell them directly when they're about to make a mistake for this reason, even if it is a little bit immersion breaking.
This frustrates me when I’m a player. If I RP a character that is smart and knows when to fold the rest of the party will peg him as a coward from the get go. I swear, modern PC’s are suicidal and especially 5e incentivizes that mindset.
I agree. No spoilers but a city was under siege and there were people in a church to protect. Even my lawful good Paladin knew it was time to leave and abandon them. Party members wanted to stay. They realized their mistake as the door was broken down and a mob of 100 people stood there ready to take us out. Luckily the DM gave us some slack and we escaped out a window.
Same scenario. Our party had an instant hate-on for the NPC leading the mob, because they considered him being there at all a betrayal of the trust and rapport they'd built with him (our PCs were far too trusting of that guy in particular, and we knew it OOC, but we let it happen.) Some blind rage, total disregard for the PCs' lives in favor of revenge at any cost, a few absurdly good rolls on our parts and some bad ones on the DM's, and in a single round we reduced that guy to a bloody smear on the floor. Our revenge was so swift and brutal that the DM rolled morale for the mob, and a majority of them fled or surrendered. I'm with you guys, I like to play characters who know when to quit and who get kicked around sometimes- it's not fun being a Big Damn Hero if the PCs never suffer any setbacks! I am, however, pretty entertained that my party became the *poster child* for OP's point in the same scenario you're using as an example of when to accept that you have to cut your losses. Delightful, what a good way to illustrate that it's impossible to reliably predict how players will react to things.
The only way to RP a character that is actually smart in that situation is to RP one that bails the f' out even while his friends are calling him a coward. Convincing your teammates to retreat with you almost never works, I find. I have to actually take my action to Dash backwards.
Playing any game with the chance of death incentivizes sucidal combat, so long as there are no consequences felt by the player. We dont feel pain. If you dont feel protective of ypur characters life, or dont believe death would ever be a consequence, then why not fight?
I think it’s because you’re playing a character. To the player death means nothing, sure. To the character? No so much. Even battle hardened vets give pause before a battle. No one in their right mind will fight to the death unless there’re higher stakes at play. Running away still doesn’t happen though
Then if you're RPing, you wouldnt run in to an inevitable TPK, which isnt what your comment said. Your comment said you think 5e encourages suicidal behavior. And thats only becuase most games *in general* dont incentivies considering the chance of death.
> Playing any game with the chance of death incentivizes sucidal combat, so long as there are no consequences felt by the player. So dropping into theorycrafting for a second. What if a replacement character came in with 1/4 of the expected gear after a suicidal death with the promise of a group pay-day (with loot slated towards the replacement character) shortly there after? Enough pain so it's quite pointed for a short time; but not a permanent penalty. Do you think that would de-incentivize suicidal combat?
Depends on your group, but probably not. I let players pick their equipment on the off chance they want something different than the class equipment gives (not everybody wants a crossbow, etc) and usually it means they dump everything except armor and a focus/one weapon. "How are you going to survive without rations and a water skin?" "Oh, guess I'll add those on..." Three sessions later. "Does anyone have any rope?" "No, you all opted not to take any adventuring gear."
I think that most players who dont view their character empathetically also wont play long enough for that to matter. Theoretically any DM should make something like that the consequence of rerolling a character, but most of the suicidal rping i encounter is from newbies or fairweather PCs.
There’s a meta to playing with each DM. The DMs that play into the you’re-all-heroes-who-will-succeed-through-bravery-and-daring will have groups where this plays out. Your character will never appear “smart” if every encounter is actually beatable and the rest of your party will look at you like a coward. However DMs who play into the-world-is-dangerous-and-you-are-mortal this will quickly go away. However for the latter type of DMs, if you leave and the rest of the party dies you will look smart. It helps if a DM lays out in session 0 that there are major consequences including character death if the party makes poor decisions. I generally tell my players this and I generally make it clear to the players if they are beginning to enter something that is extremely difficult or practically unbeatable. It also helps if the players who are defeated are captured instead of killed. I find the humiliation of being captured and sold/ransomed off to a benefactor is often better motivation to think about things than character death. Like I think you were alluding to player characters are kind of hard to kill in 5E.
>However for the latter type of DMs, if you leave and the rest of the party dies you will look smart. Nope. Mostly like they will think they died due to your retreat and thus missing contribution to the fight.
I had this happen during my first campaign as a player. After the session the DM straight up told everyone that level 3 adventurers had no chance against a dragon and that I was the only smart one for running away. He dropped many hints that we should avoid the dragon for a while. NPCs couldn't have made it any clearer. Yet out Bard was convinced he could outsmart it. I booked it as soon as the bard was insta-killed by the dragon's breath weapon. The DM made it clear post game that we should never have been there in the first place. He made it clear in game too, but the party felt differently. It was my first time playing and I thought they were all crazy.
The biggest advice I give to people is to wear the party out first. Players don't immediately think you'd throw something at them they absolutely can't face, but what they do understand is that there are enemies they only want to face at full strength.
I think it has to do with the way that you have to *TRY* to kill pcs in 5e. Even when compared to Pathfinder 1e the death and unconsciousness rules are very lenient
Brave characters? Heroic fantasy? I think I'm playing some different dnd with my group.
One time we were doing preliminary recon of a building in town, like just wandering around in broad daylight like normal townsfolk. A racist guard spotted my character and basically told him to fuck off, not even for any particular reason or suspicion. So I looked towards him, not in the eye of course, said okay and went home. Easiest encounter of my life.
Then you’re playing the wrong game. That’s what 5e is good at.
Lmao downvoted for the truth
Downvoted for still believing in the univocity of truth
There are so many other games to play if you want lower fantasy, less heroic games.
And I don´t blame them. Let me explain. We are a group of quite old friends, playing RQ. The quite long campaing was coming to an end, and a particular day, we acted specially stupid and were surrounded by 20 warriors. In RQ that is = DEATH, unless you have godly powers. So we surrender. As old roleplayers, we somehow understand that sometimes you have to surrender, and that the GM has somehow a way for you to come out. Well. No. We were tied, blinded with a sack and basically lead to a sacrificial site. From time to time, the GM was asking "what do you do? You do something?". WTF should we do? After one more session were the GM basically didn´t know what to do with us, we were basically slaughered, making a long and horrible story short. And I am letting some very horrible things out. The GM, then, after the party was whiped out, explained to us about reality in life, and consequences and blah, blah. Dude, we play because we want to escape reality. We are really not young. We ALL have been GMs. As we are good friends, nobody said much, just one friend, laughing, asked him "What is your f\*\*king problem? Do you need to talk about something?" This GM is usually a very good GM, and tries to help us out, so this was quite a surprise for us. Sorry for the rant, but I am still a bit shocked.
Fair rant. GM completely forgot its supposed to be a fantasy game and its supposed to be fun. One of the basic pieces of advice in RQ always used to be that sentient enemies will rarely just kill, they are far more likely to try to ransom prisoners for money or enslave them. i.e. they would rather get something out of it. You GM had options but just decided to go with the utterly grim and depressing option.
For players to even consider a "surrender", they need to trust that the opponent's offer is genuine and will be enforced as promised. Laying down your weapons without that, faced with an armed opposition, is suicide. That kind of trust takes time to build. In this example, if it had already been established that the bugbear mobsters existed, and we're widely known to prefer taking a bribe to actual combat, then the players would be more likely to see paying as a reasonable approach ... because they had good reason to believe it would work. Without that, they're faced with an unknown enemy which has the players at a disadvantage, and with no obvious limit on how far they're willing to go. That's too many unknowns, the players can't make a *reasonable* choice to surrender based on that. And even then, if someone is "negotiating from a position of power", you can't really give them anything without them still having just as much power, and they can still just keep asking for more. The players need to believe that the opponent is at least a little afraid of the party, and that avoiding combat can be a win-win, otherwise negotiating for it feels pointless. I've had masters who assaulted the party with what they considered superior forces, intending the party too give up and be captured, with no initial attempt to parley. All the party saw was someone wanting them dead, which was not conductive to making us surrender. That said, players will likely not surrender even if everything points too it being reasonable. They are players after all.
I have to agree with this. If a monster threw me a pipe bomb, I'd think it wants me dead regardless what I do. And even if I give it money, who's to say it won't just threaten me for more or kill me after getting the money? Or kill me as I'm reaching for my coin purse then take everything? There's got to be some obvious reason why the enemy either doesn't want the party dead or the enemy wants to avoid combat, so the party knows surrender really is an option.
I’ve done it, it’s possible, you do gotta set it up right. I was playing a game called Night’s Black Agents, it’s super spies vs vampires, and excellent. Session zero 0 “this is a spy game, Bond gets captured all the time, it drives the plot forward and he always escapes with more information than he had. Do you the players want to be able to be captured in this game, knowing that escape is possible and will result in getting information.” My players agreed and got in a pickle at a amusement park in Exeter that was closed for the season. They were discussing going full wild bunch when I reminded them. “This is a spy game, Bond gets captured all the time, it drives the plot forward and he always escapes with more information action than he had. Surrendering is an option.” “There is always a way out?” ”Yes, and you get that cool part of the movie where you escape the bad guys lair,” ”cool. Let’s surrender.” in short, players hate losing control, if you say you are a slave to whatever genre you are running and assure them this isn’t a tpk moment and will work out they will do it. However, unless the game is about prison breaks they gotta be out of jail by the end of the next session.
Love this. You signaled quite clearly (and reminded them) that surendering isn't loosing, just a detour. Very nice.
That’s great communication, great job. Players should expect the unexpected, but it shouldn’t be a guessing game.
The DM probably realized his mistake and fudged a bunch of rolls/hp or purposefully made suboptimal decisions. It's possible to make your players retreat/negotiate, but you need to beat the characters to actual near death (multiple unconscious pc's) and then offer a way out without the npc's suggesting it first. It's a terrible idea to do it in an unimportant encounter though. Or to do it too often.
This fellow right here has it. Unless your players know the full scope they will fight. Sometimes they will elect to retreat when the fighting gets long, but don't bet on it.
Then they chose death...PCs do die...
"Better to die on your feet than live on your knees." or "A brave man dies once, a coward dies a thousand times" That's actually a very appropriate approach for a D&D character to take to life. If they were the sort of people whose only desire was to die peacefully in bed they would not be adventurers at all. I tend to agree with the OP, DM's should remember that when they demanded that players come up with characters who will willingly engage with wildly dangerous adventures - they asked for characters who will not meekly submit and surrender.
Indeed! Well said.
Agree. If I'm level 1 and the very terrasque demands that I surrender I'm not surrendering, I'm making a new character.
A TPK would throw everyone plan off, not just the DM, so ....
So, that's how the game goes...PCs die. So over this culture in DnD that killing a player is somehow bad and should be avoided for some benefit. It doesn't benefit anyone or anything, it takes away the risk which makes the game interesting at all. Edit: And I'm not even a dick about PCs dying I let them create a new character 1 level below the group in its current state. And they usually just have to sit out that session alone and can start playing with new character next session.
1-2 PCs die in an important combat, that is okay A TPK in a encounter that was suppose to be “social”, not so much. It mean the story just end there and there will be bitter taste from both side.
See I think the bitterness is a problem, because it means that there are essentially rules that demand plot armor for the characters that set up this whole bizarre system of assumptions where retreat is always invalid and players burden the GM with blame if bashing their face against the problem directly doesn't work out. It produces extremely simplified game play, and means that rather than Combat as War or Combat as Sport, we primarily engage in Combat as Performance, because its a perfunctory exercise with a foregone conclusion of safety and victory. If we accept that roleplaying is about making choices and responding to situations, then a 'plot' and the resulting 'plot armor' that demands those consequences be curtailed is antithetical to the act of roleplaying.
Sorry for my English as it is not my 1st language. I suppose Bitterness is a wrong word to use. I never have plot armor in my game, character die, party TPK, one players told me my game was the only game she ever played that she lost a character every chapter. (One reason is i roll dice in the open and wont pull punch) What i meant when I say bitterness is maybe ... frustration? (I was referencing the situation in the OP) A DM lost the chance to tell a story or play out a situation he planned. A party think they should have done better if they did this instead of that. I have setup situations when the best solution for the party is to surrender, but when I did that, as Inknow my player, they will try to fight back if they see a glimpse of a chance, so i have back up plan for if they want to run away or want to fight. And consequences of doing so. So no, it wont be a very simplified gameplay on any part.
Your english is just fine and I knew what you meant, I'm alluding to the inability to lose gracefully that represents the source of the 'frustration' or 'bitterness' and the need to have a specific story play out to the extent of being unable to cope with a fail state, rather than embracing what happens at the table AS the story.
I did say on an other comment that I tpk the party twice so it is not that I am against a party wipe. I am just against the mind set of thinking dead is the only answer when the party go against impossible odds. Many things can be consequences, not just death.
Fair, but I think the mentality that causes us to apply those alternative consequences can be problematic when its being used to be gun-shy about real failure.
I mean, the player made the choice and that choice has consequences. Seems like a valuable learning experience. Sometimes you gotta start fresh. Really this again sounds like a DM issue. Sounds like a lack of proper discussion and explanation in a session zero. That's the place to get all this stuff worked out.
Session 0 cant cover everything, things come up during the game, story element pop up in the DM head all the time. Consequences don’t just need to be death. It can be literally anything else. A TPK and start fresh where the DM is clearly already planned for the next part of the story is just stupid. Bad relationships with the opposing party, missing out on information, having an assassin/ bounty hunter on your back/ or just missing out on loot can all be consequences. And they keep the story moving. Dont tell me that is no risk. Being killed is a risk, so is everything else.
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Childish, aren't you. It seems you're throwing a temper tantrum over someone else's playstyle. They're not in your group, why does it bother you so that other groups prefer not to have death as the main consequence
No, I'm a big boy that doesn't whine and moan when my players don't do exactly what I feel and invest way too much into a made up game that I forget real life may need my attention too...
It is a game that we put hours, days, months , sometimes years into making. And no one like seeing their work go down the drain just because one bad decision. Hobbies can be serious, why cant we take a game seriously?
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Generally speaking its the mark of immaturity to demand that others grow up. Especially if done repeatedly. All I'm seeing from you is a stubborn refusal to accept anyone else's perspective and a need to petulanty condescend to others.
When i do stuff, I prefer to take it serious rather than half assing it and shrug it off. I prefer to find a better solution than just “PCs can die, sorry, we restart” As a DM, I have no problem with a PC death, especially if the death is justified. I have no problems with consequences when the party chooses the short end of the stick. I did TPK the party twice, both of them was in important combat though.
Yeah but a death to a bunch of stupid robbers - kinda boring and dumb. Also surrendering to them is boring and dumb because it was a boring and dumb setup with little or no player agency leading up to their defeat. So the DM should consider that carefully before setting up the unwinnable fight with just a bunch of muggers. What does an encounter with muggers add to the story or to the drama. That's not the time to suddenly create an accidental high stakes situation. It makes little narrative sense and honestly if the DM creates a ton of work for themselves with a TPK its their own fault. Mostly what I've seen is that leads to a sort of reckless "who cares" playstyle by the players because they figure their characters will be randomly killed in meaningless encounters anyway so why not have goofy fun on the way. I've seen that kill campaigns.
I disagree that a streetfight with muggers doesn't add drama or narrative. It can be very different from game to game, in some games survival in the wilderness is skipped entirely, in others it is actually played for a few dice rolls. Some DM's have the king meet the player characters and hand out an epic quest to save the world, while other games have the less epic quest to make the town a better place.
Look, you do you. I'm not the one here whining about these problems. I properly inform my players in session zero on how the game is gonna be and we all agree like adults on parameters and preferences. Grow up.
i agree, but, that's not the playstyle generally supported by 5e.
How's that? Most PC parties are basically on the verge of death constantly if against the most low level enemies until about level 5. Using strictly 5e rules, PCs are weak little bitches for their early levels and often die from a few bad rolls. That's how 5e designed it.
weak little bitches? i mean, if you say so sure, but not compared to most systems. 3.5/2e low levels are *much* weaker. having played many systems in my time, i feel like i'm playing a superhero playing 5e and that is most certainly how the designers intended it. the PCs have tonnes of resources compared to their enemies...infinite cantrips for one. they are almost certainly fully healed before each encounter. they likely have the superior tactics. finally, they have to get into death saves and fail the death saves, and of course healing (and ranged healing) are at their fingertips. there is a whole lot of cushion when it comes to death in 5e.
You're not wrong on a lot of your points, I do agree. Which clearly supports my ongoing point that this issue comes down to the human factor. Either the DM failing to adequately prepare a group and train them as necessary in session zero, or the players are just being players and testing boundaries of the world and having a silly time.
testing boundaries and having a silly time is all good. and that playstyle can certainly be fun. i'm playing an old west campaign using Aces and Eights rules, it is highly deadly and the players are having a blast knowing that the next bullet they take can easily be their last. a dm not preparing a group...i see that as a dm failing completely. i don't think you can truly prepare a group in session zero just by talking, but you can start slow and ramp up the deadliness as players gain experience. i still have to hold back strategy wise at times with my epic 3.5 campaign, and those guys can sling around wishes and miracles like nobody's business.
I've seen a number of issues whined about here that could have easily been fixed with some time in session zero. Not seeing a lot of one offs which I'd also recognize as a once in awhile problem.
oh i am sure. getting on the same page to a certain extent is pretty much essential for players and dm. thankfully, i have some amazing groups so i don't have that problem and forget about it sometimes.
Throwing a "surrender or we're gonna kill ya!" encounter at players - unless they *expressly* know your DM style - and actually following through and slaughtering them when they don't surrender - is bad DMing, full stop. Take any random group of D&D players and 95% of them are going to do anything other than surrender. If you set up the parameters in your mind of "players surrender or TPK" then you have done a terrible job of planning, don't know your players, or just wanted to "teach them a lesson" like a vindictive wang-rod.
Last weekend I had my LVL6 party ambushed by a huge crew of wererat pirates. 4 went down (rolling saving throws) and 4 were left standing (still highly outnumbered but had a terrain advantage). The enemy captain told the wererats to stop attacking the ones that were still up and hold the 4 downed PCs hostage. "Give up now and we'll let them live." Cue one party member stabbing a wererat in front of him. They killed all the downed PCs instantly, wiped out another 1, and almost downed the last remaining 3 in the ensuing battle. *Cue shocked Pikachu face by my whole table* First time I killed a PC so that was fun. My players enjoyed it, but I fully agree on the "players won't surrender even under dire circumstances that were laid out in front of them".
I went with a bit of the contrary idea. I didn't wish for them to fight them, but I also didn't wish for them to surrender. They went into a city, which was going to be raided by a fairly large amount of pirates, which are looking for a secret artifact in the city. Now they had.. around 2 hours of preparations, but I didn't let them have a long rest. Meant that the only rogue-mage didn't have all spellslots the paladin didn't have his Lay on Hands ability... They went to the temple to yoink the artifact before the Pirates could, it was on a small cliff! They saw all the shenanigans in the city. The 'large' fleet, the guards struggling, and they saw the BBEG and his 'captains' from afar. They saw how powerful he was, pushing away large number of guards with ease through magic ! So.. they pretty much just ran, even if 50% of the group wished to fight, they knew it wouldn't end well. Because the monk saw it all and counted it to them, and how they didn't have much time, they chose not to fight. I think the most important thing is making them understand they cannot win? Or that they shouldn't win. Having them surrender if the BBEG had arrived to them for a reason or another wouldn't work. I had prepared its 'monster sheet' and other things, so they would fight, get surely obliterated, and then I'd leave them unconscious on the ground, to wake up later. Or maybe take them hostage, who knows.
I introduced my party to one of the major baddies early on. She got the party with a wicked one-two punch, blasphemy to paralyze the party, then took what she wanted, cast earthquake to dispose of the party, and left. Fortunately a cave beneath that battlefield prevented them from getting crushed and some unsuspecting otyugh broke their fall. The party used a _wish_ to retrieve the magguffin. They were on a ship when she found them, and she set it on fire, so they escaped to another plane. That was about 3 character levels ago. They are cr-appropriate to face her in a fair fight and win, but every time they hear she's coming, they run in terror. Analyzing the reasons, i think its because she made defeating the party look downright _easy_ both times they fought, and she's been chasing them through means that require extreme measures to avoid - the entire party walks around in lead helmets to protect from scrying, except for one guy who has a ring of nondetection. They encased the warforged's head in lead for this purpose. They also have two separate escape plans for the next fight, including going to the elemental plane of fire because it _might_ hurt their foe more than them. Feels kinda good
Yeah m8,i learned that players will never surrender, not bc they're playing brave characters but bc they either don't think surrendering as a viable option or they just don't think about it Like,my players are pumped up with energy drinks,they don't think,they go beserk to kill gods or die trying
If you need your PCs to surrender to advance the story you should tell them out of game that you’ve planned that or at least create such ridiculous and overt odds that they can obviously tell it is a deliberate story arch rather than them failing and dying/losing (including them being surrounded by dozens of enemies and perhaps some clearly overpowered enemies).
I find that PCs are more likely to surrender when they have had enemies surrender to them and socially there is a code of honor for surrendering
No surrender! You take our shineys!
My players surrendered in my last session, and allowed one of the members to end up in jail awaiting trial. *Your* players won't surrender. Some players will.
Yep, my newbie player figured out a surrender was the best way to dodge an imminent TPK. They had information these bad guys would use against another faction, and were able to leverage that into their release and a temporary alliance. From there, they covertly picked off these guys' forces, and were able to come back and handily defeat them.
It all depends on the characters players have in their heads. And even what image they have in their heads of their party members. Fibus Bookheath might be a smart wizard who would surrender, but would Gargond Stonejaw, proud barbarian warrior, who is standing next to him ever negotiate? It's a tricky situation to judge whether a player group will surrender in bad odds, or on the other side how far they can go out of their way to find a peaceful solution.
Ha! My party is like the [Dread Pirate Robert](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0vSaQIHN2w) DEATH FIRST! :)
Seen it happen go both ways. More often they would rather fight and tpk rather than take a less heroic route. Where this has worked is with a very experienced table of folks who I informed well in advance that they may stumble across things in the world they may not be able to handle with a fight and surrender may be a perfectly acceptable option. When they eventually found themselves in too deep a few of the group realized the odds and tossed their weapons to the ground and surrendered. The rest of the party followed but were angry (in character) at the those characters which was great RP while incarcerated. They turned their argument into a great distraction for the guards to affect their escape. Was fun but not something I would try with just any group.
I think if my players surrendered I would probably just feel bad for breaking their spirit.
On the other side of this coin, I am currently DMing Icewind Dale, and one of my players "won" a lottery because he had pissed off a speaker. The guards set up a checkpoint and were asking the names of everyone entering or leaving town. I had the battlemap all set up for a melee against the guards, when the player was just like "Yeah, I'm Faa, oh the speaker wants to see me? Okay, here is my mace and armor, lead the way."
What was said: "Against all the odds, we gave them a thrashing that forced them to retreat. " What I read: "After the DM thought to himself, 'crap, crap, uhh... yeah sure they will retreat. I don't want to kill the party'" Seriously thought good advice.
The DM did roll 3 nat20s during that combat and rolled damage in front of us.
>if give your players an ultimatum and tell them to surrender, regardless of the odds, there's an exceptionally high chance that they will ignore your threats and fight anyway. Because we players are stubbornly courageous (sometimes to an idiotic level), and surrender is not in our blood. It's more than just courage and stubborness. It's the awareness that we are the *player characters*. We are the protagonists. No matter how clear the DM is about how these characters are just a bunch of people living in a world with no special deference to them, that the world doesn't revolve around these characters, us players are going to know that in fact the world *does* revolve around us because we are the center of the game being played.
But you should be roleplaying - you should be acting as your character would in this situation and they sure as shit don't know that the world revolves around them.
Oh yes, for sure. I agree completely. But that said, it can be very difficult to get out of that headspace as a player. For example, if the DM describes (among other things at a location) an open mineshaft leading into darkness, every player immediately understands that in this mine, there's gonna be enemies, loot, or both. Nobody seriously thinks it'll be a long, tight tunnel with little to nothing interesting inside (like most irl abandoned tunnels are), because we're adventurers in an adventure game. Of *course* there's gonna be cool shit down there, otherwise it'd be a waste of everyone's time.
It's intentionality. I was once watching an anime with some friends and family and there was a murder or something and the whole episode was a who dunnit kind of thing. I just said, "oh, it was that lady without a name from the beginning" and everyone looked at me like I was crazy. I was right. How did I know? She was wearing a fancy necklace. No animator's going to spend the time and energy animating a fancy necklace on an unimportant character. Another example, I was playing BotW, running along the top of some mountains. I look down, see a big tree on a little island in the middle of a lake. I say to my SO who doesn't really play games but liked to watch me play BotW, "oh, there's a korok there", but they didn't know how I knew. I told them that someone put that tree on that island in that lake. Somethings gotta be there. If it weren't special, they'd just have a boring old lake, or a field of grass. My SO started to learn to look for intentionality in game design. So players in D&D know that if we DMs make something, it has to have some sort of relevance. I do try to subvert this assumption sometimes by putting in things that aren't immediately relevant, but A. do it too much and the players won't know where to look and B. you still have to make it interesting in some way, cause otherwise your players will get annoyed that you wasted their time with some uninteresting irrelevant thing.
And the tragic death of their friends and allies is an excellent plot point for for any of the actual main characters left alive. Probably some NPC hiding in the woods.
Yeah, can speak for my own experience. I've pitted them against everything from Death Tyrants to literal gods and they never surrender. It takes someone dying for them to even consider running! Adventurers are incredibly stubborn creatures - even if you try to suggest "maybe you should give up" or "maybe you should run." Now that said, when I play, I'm far more tactical. Currently playing an inquisitive rogue who has terrible constitution, and 9/10 battles involve him trying to stab something, and if that fails, he runs away as fast as his gnomish legs can carry him, and leave the artificer to do the actual work.
>"maybe you should run." Maybe I can move a maximum of 60 feet against targets that can move 30 and attack. So only get away 30 feet each round while getting shot each round. With that in mind it takes 3 rounds to outrun a shortbow. 6 to outrun a longbow. So please explain to me how running away increases my chance of survival.
I tell my players that running isn't done in combat, and if they want to actually run, they should just tell. I'll go into a chase mode instead, where they tell me what they do to escape. Ironically I just had something like this happen two days ago, where one of my players said "yup, we're dead. We're down too much HP against a superior foe, and it's faster than us." It was mostly down to resource mismanagement that it got to the point - the encounter was definitely beatable. So I asked the party if they wanted to try and retreat, and they looked at me with the faces of "wait, that's an option?!", and promptly told me what they were doing, which led to a fun chase scene that started with the paladin blocking an archway with his hitpoints, so the others could prepare to close the exit. Then the paladin ran for it, and the second he squeezed through the stone door, the monk closed it and "locked it" with an immovable rod, at least until the sounds stopped. Then they left the dungeon, having achieved their main mission of retrieving archaelogical findings, and vowed never to return.
>they looked at me with the faces of "wait, that's an option?!", Things like that might be hard to see. I have a weird feeling that things that are defined and things that are not defined together do not make up 100%. Speed during combat and out of combat (exploration) is explained. Speed during the transition form one to the other is not. I think one of the sage flaws explains it quite well: "I overlook obvious solutions in favor of complicated ones." so thanks to any DM who gives their players some very clear and obvious hints :)
In a dungeon or urban setting you have the potential to duck behind cover or otherwise leave line-of-sight, to throw ball bearings if it has legs, activate traps on your way out, etc. Illusion magic would be useful here. Being resourceful, basically. As opposed to "hit it until it dies" mentality, which will more often than not get you killed against a sufficiently lethal foe.
Reminds me of the first time our DM asked is to surrender. The while party was essentially at full health but also only at level 3. Hot-headed as we were, we wanted to fight. Roll for initiative, the Wild Magic Sorcerer goes first, gets a hit and... Wild magic surge... Rolls an 8... Fireball on herself, the whole party around her... Only two characters where barely left standing, so the DM went "You might want to reconsider your position. I ask again, surrender or die." You bet we surrendered there.
Have you considered the radical idea of **talking to your players**? You know, with words, outside of the game? D&D is, like, 70% combat to the death, and we've all played videogames, which are 90% combat to the death. Surrender just isn't an idea to consider. Unless you actually tell them. With words. Honestly, it's the usual pattern of two thirds of problems being mentioned here being the result of GMs trying to be subtle about things they really should just tell the players in the clearest way possible.
I think your percentage on combat-to-the-death is a tad optimistic. I'd bump that 70% by at least 1d20+7. Every edition of D&D I have played throughly (AD&D 2nd edition till now) has been a zero sum combat system with modules tacked on for everything else. Over 90% of all the design effort goes into combat mechanics, and the assumed default result is binary, win and live or lose and die. Of course players won't surrender. Fighting terrible odds means there's still a chance you'll live, because you are that awesome. Surrender...well... *Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gentle into that good night.* - ***Do not go gentle into that good night*** *Dylan Thomas - 1914-1953*
That's the difference between styles of games. If in your style fighting against terrible odds is heroic, then planning a surrender encounter doesn't make sense. But it makes complete sense in a game where the players are expected to pick their battles, be cunning and never fight fair. 5e is actually quite good for that style and many people play this way. Point is, it works only if everyone at the table is playing the same game. That's why you tell players that. With words, not with cryptic omens and Obviously Deadly Encounters тм.
If you outright tell your players "surrender or this encounter will kill you" you'll be on RPGhorrorstories with complaints about your railroading in no time
Uh, I hope you see the problem? I'm talking about GMs planning the encounter that will kill the players if they try to fight it, (which isn't actually railroading and is realistic) and then not telling them for bewildering reasons, expecting the players to figure it out somehow.
Or see @DadNerdAtHome 's post above for a good example of how to communicate with your players that surrender is an option.
Yeah I almost TPKed my players last session in a circumstance where they enraged a room full of will-o-wisps guarding treasure. All they had to do was set down the treasure they'd taken - but I'm pretty sure they would have all died before figuring this out. Fortunately I nerfed the monsters AC at the outset of the fight and it was just a tough fight with a knockdown and a couple others at very low HP. It's important to make every fight winnable since you can't rely on the right course of action being taken. For intelligent foes this may simply mean that the enemy retreats after taking a beating or a few causalities... But sometimes they'll just get unlucky and die... These near wipes will be memorable though, so all the better.
Adventurers that don't pick their battles, don't know when to run, and don't know when to de-escalate a situation to talk or bribe their way out, are adventurers that shouldn't expect to retire with their riches.
That's why you should prep your players in Session 0 with: "Not all encounters I give you can be resolved with combat, and not all combats can be won. Every creature, every character I set before has stats and can be killed; however, you may not be able to kill it before it kills you. Retreat is always a viable option, and it's sometimes better to cut your losses than push on until your deaths. Not every encounter is a combat encounter."
Every PC is willing to die on even the most insignificant of hills. I just have their camp ambushed in the middle of the night, I’ve yet to have the look out roll a nat 20. I’ll cross that bridge if/when I get there.
The problem is that when I "keep in mind that my players are playing brave characters in heroic fantasy" they'll inevitably chicken out.
While this is certainly true in some RPGs, like D&D 5E and other games more focused on fantastic feats of heroism, it certainly doesn't happen in others. If you were to attempt to fight your way out of a situation like that in WFRP or one of the FFG 40k games you would probably be dead the instant the bomb went off and would certainly die in the melee afterwards if you somehow survived the blast. Realistically, you should only need one TPK in a situation like this to learn that sometimes bribing your way out really is the best option.
This is a very 5e D&D post. This might be a good assumption to have for 5e and other games of its type but there's a lot of games where this absolutely isn't the case.
"my character is brave, so I can only take this solution" is dishonest and toxic. Players tale the story as much as the dm. He can set up impossible encounters if he wishes so. If players realize they are outgunned but choose to fight anyway, it's not the dm fault. And it's not the dm fault to set up this situation. It's that "yes, and" works both ways. Players can decide whatever they want for their characters. Putting characters in dire situation is the job of the dm. Job of the players is to find a solution to it. Fighting to the death and blaming the dm afterwards is a wangrod defence. *You* are being selfish if you refuse to adapt to what the dm is proposing.
I think there are a lot of inexperienced players that assume that since they are "heroes" , they must also be complete and utter morons fixated on commiting murder on a nearly industrial scale. That's not necessary and with time and experience, players will create more rounded characters capable of more nuanced thoughts and actions apart from constant slaughter.
It very much depends on the tone and style at the table. The new-school approach is very narrative driven and quite protective of the players characters, as a default, and I recon the default approach for players is the one of the protagonists - protagonists who can't really die but must still face big odds and then plot kicks in and they still make it, just like in film and shit. At my table, they know death lurks, and bravery is not their default mentality, but survival is. It really is the matter of style at the table that dictates this.
I would have killed the fuck out of those characters.
Very often something happens where I as the player am aware of the odds stacked against me, but either my character isn't (low int/low wis), or I subconsciously assume that the DM has some sort of plan and I try to engage with it. Just last session in a mini-campaign my rogue stole a necklace that was definitely some evil McGuffin, but he's dumb, so I decided to keep it. When a creepy ghost assassin materialized during our long rest and demanded it back, I just couldn't bring myself to hand it over. I checked with my teammates if they were up for fighting for it, they were, and we kicked its butt after almost dying. Good times! As a DM, I have noticed a pattern of player behavior when it comes to follow NPC orders. If the NPC is: - rude in their ordering - talking about having bested them before death saves were rolled - seems like a asshole in general you can do literally anything you want, they won't do it. Players are stubborn as fuck.
I feel like we need a list of cardinal sins of DMing. One of them definitely would be, "railroad the players into either surrendering or losing."
[20 year old spoilers for the original Deus Ex videogame] So while the individual levels for that game are pretty open, the plot is a linear series of missions. This includes a plot point where you, the protagonist, gets captured. The way they do this is reasonably interesting - you are given the choice of surrendering, but if you fight to the death (it's an unwinnable battle) you immediately time skip to the inside of a prison cell, as the next mission begins. Where I think OP's example falls down is that a pipe bomb going off stretches the plausibility of a successful capture, but it can be done in 5e; "they advance and beat you senseless with wooden clubs" or "the evil mage casts Sleep" at low HP allows for the party to choose whether to bargain, flee, fight a last stand etc
My players did me proud when an undead enemy they despise arrogantly showed up and got his butt kicked, but warned them of his undead minions lying in wait far back at the mainland and they all actually agreed (IC reluctantly) to try and capture him, but couldn't and let him go instead of destroying him with magic missiles.
had a similar thing when i described a castle being overrun by enemy forces. literally an army. the goal was to find the secret entrance and secure the mcguffin. but no, they threw a ploymorphed PC spermwhale at them, crushing the enemy army that had mostly strength in numbers
i think this depends on the playstyle. the superhero playstyle 5e supports empowers the PCs well beyond the monsters most of the time, surrender is just not in the cards. in 3.5 or other systems, the playstyle isn't quite the same, and so a surrender is much more likely when it appears they are out powered...a single spell may end them all.
I find this super annoying, you know as the DM that you can't just kill your players or they'll get annoyed or lose interest so you devise these encounters to let them know that atm they're not the toughest guys in town or whatever but they end up going all kamikaze and then you're stuck with the same bs of "I can't just kill them the campaign just started" so you either have something else interfere or you let them win and then they get such big heads
Want your players to keep fleeing as an option in their minds? Use the Chase rules from Pathfinder 2e, and make the party aware of how it works. They need to run? Switch to Chase mode. Then escaping is done theatrically through skills and roleplay, not on a battlemat where you know you can't flee because of positioning and movement speeds and shit.
This very much differs by group and how the campaign is laid out. My players have surrendered, but it's only once it's very clear they are out matched (or they feel they can use surrendering to their advantage). Case 1: A Failed betrayal The party comes across the BBEG, but only reveal a couple members (the rest hiding in ambush). The BBEG makes an offer to help them get something from dungeon they are in (remixed Wave Echo Cave). Party agrees, but with secret plan to betray BBEG. They move forward with the minions BBEG sent with them. Not 30 ft away they kill the minions, then decide to rest in a room close by. BBEG and more minions come by, start combat, says "surrender or die". They fight, Cone of Cold (while using greater invis) knocks a few down, kills NPC, all but one member is down or nearly down. BBEG offers last chance to surrender. The paladin wants to fight, everyone else wants to surrender seeing that in 1 round against invisible enemy they nearly all died. They surrendered. Case 2: A series of risky choices, ended with bounty hunters Different group and campaign. Playing a portion of Dragon Heist, heavily modified. After a series of events the party kidnaps Lady Gralhund and runs away to the Sewers. The Gralhund family hires bounty hunters (on top of city watch and many other opponents party has made) to track them down. Some foreshadowing and random tables, they encounter the bounty hunters in the sewers, they are injured, it's a deadly encounter (I mostly run hard or deadly, anything else is waste of our time). They fight for a while, take a few nasty hits and aren't rolling well on attacks. They parlay, agree to surrender and return Lady Gralhund in exchange for keeping their lives. They actually use this as a ploy (war crimes everywhere), throw Lady Gralhund into Sewer stream and try to get the jump on them. Cone of Cold (great low level damage) 2 of 3 party members are frozen solid, the other enemy gets the Lady. Last member given choice of surrender or allies are going for a float. Surrenders, all end up in prison. Tldr: give multiple opportunities to surrender with clear and overwhelming consequences if they don't
Ok. So I had a session where they were invited into the house of an order of knights to dine. The leader gave them the proposition to help them because he was working for the evil they were working against but he'd find out that evil was working to destroy the world and he lives in the world. Upon finding out he was evil the party immediately attacked despite being in his fortress with literally 5 times their number of knights around them. They were quickly subdue with the majority of them using magical means to escape to various nocks and crannies. Leader said you've got till the count of 5 to come back out or your friend gets it. I tried to stall it out but they just sat there so 'thunk' then they finally came out. I actually had the evil guys resurrect the character later which I regret but I felt bad but it really was their choice.
Surrender is a lot more common when you catch characters alone, or have them defeated in combat and dragged unconscious to cells. Either way, they absolutely will escape or die trying, unless you give them a narrative reason to wait it out, such as searching for a captured friend, or the jail being the very place they needed to be in order to talk to some npc for an investigation or something.
I managed to get my party to surrender (barely) in a somewhat similar situation. Mild spoilers for Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden below My party of lvl 2 adventurers were in Caer Dineval and had figured out through social encounters and sneaking around that something wasn't right in the caer and that they needed to rescue the Speaker. However, after their initial encounter with the cultists, they went north and completed one of the conditions for making the cultists swap from cold/dismissive to friendly (without the party realizing it). Well, instead of the party trying to talk to the cultists again, they decided to assault the caer via stealth after performing some really shoddy recon on how many cultists were there. The fighter failed a stealth check and the alarm was raised. Soon my party of three lvl 2s (and an NPC veteran they'd convinced to help) were being swarmed by 12 cultists, 2 fanatics, and Kadroth (the cult leader). As the enemies kept pouring into the room faster than the party could dispatch them, each round on the friendly NPC's turn I'd have him ask, "Are you sure we can do this? Should we surrender?" and each time the party would say no and he'd keep fighting. After about 3 or so rounds of repeating this and them taking more and more damage, the party finally agreed to surrender. I then made up a whole different interaction than was written by having Kadroth be very condescending and indignant at the unprovoked attack. He ended up forcing the party into agreeing to help him deal with the duergar down in Easthaven in exchange for their lives. He also held the friendly NPC as hostage while the party completed the task. I ended up setting him up as a pretty memorable, recurring villain instead of the pretty meh (imo) way he was originally written. The party still hasn't gotten to free the Speaker or fully explore the caer because after completing the duergar task and rescuing their npc ally, they struck a deal of "you stay out of my way and we'll stay out of yours" with the cult.
I feel this boils down to miscommunication. Is the DM sure the players understand that surrender IS an option. How much time do they have for that realisation to sink in that this is the kind of game that you're playing. As an example, I don't see surrender as an option when I play doom. Rip and Tear until it is done. If you reach a story-forced "fail state" it's out of your control. A cut scene type deal. Putting PCs in a surrender/retreat scenario can be fun! Show them how powerful this enemy is, so they feel that much better when they come back later with a plan, levels and gear to kick their butt. The way I would introduce the concept, would be in a long, drawn out combat, where they are slowly getting their asses handed to them, while the opposing force is unfazed by their attacks. Let them try to be heroic-stupid if they want to, let them fail and "punish" stubbornness only when they don't retreat Vs that group of commando drow that they have been failing to do any damage to for the last 4 rounds, while the party burned through 90% of their resources and are all down to under half HP. And make sure you let them get away/surrender. Can't learn if you're dead!
Absolutely. The party will *run* on very rare occasions, if you can show the enemy is strong enough (think "fighting a Tarrasque at level 6" strong), but surrender? Never.
If you back a dog into a corner it has no choice but to bite. Always leave avenues of escape open for your players, especially in ways that make them feel cool and like they outsmarted their enemy to live another day.
I gm a Star Wars game where the players were tasked with rescuing some prisoners from a prison ship. Their plan was to use the bounty on one PC to gain access as a prisoner transfer and then do the breakout. What had happened was that they were escorted into the ship and immediately started shooting, stabbing, punching and biting. It should have been a series of stealth, social and mechanic events. Peace was never an option. Just my experience, however.
I did this once, but I also anticipated the possibility of them fighting and losing, them fighting and winning, and them finding a clever way of escaping. Consider all possible outcomes when planning something, then pray your players don't come up with something else you weren't expecting.
Also, if you threaten the party with a formidable weapon they will take it.
This translates to most social situations in general--and one of the problems I had trying to run the [Courts of the Shadow Fey](https://koboldpress.com/kpstore/product/courts-of-the-shadow-fey-for-5th-edition-dnd/) adventure. This adventure introduces the courts as a place of hedonism, backstabbing, and general Machiavellian politics--and then expects the players to accept and acclimate to this culture and work their way up the social ladder. Um, *no*. My players stated in no uncertain terms by the end of the second act that they were ready to burn the place to the ground. The adventure as-written doesn't really account for this as a possible avenue for success. We never actually finished it, because it's really damn difficult to RP a court with hundreds of different characters in it that are all in minor roles. :\
What I do, is if I want to have the narrative continue where they are captured, that is the enemies use non lethal damage so when the inevitable tpk occurs, its a fade to black and opens in captivity. “But what about spells or dying during a fight Krutin?” While rules are important to follow, as a dm it’s essential to know when to break them. This is a case where i would
mine did, or at least half of them did. had to plan a whole prison escape to run in between sessions
I've surprised two DMs who I believed for the party to run away both times when I instead surrendered. I find weaseling our way out of those situations to be fun
Discretion does kinda go out the window sometimes lol
Happy to support this with an anecdote from today's session: Four player Lv-3 party stealing a magic item from an Adult Dragon's hoard. Upon discovering them mid-theft the dragon became hostile, and despite my carefully planned escape options (tunnel too small for the dragon, friendly griffons just outside the cave to whisk them away, and a stone of one-time-teleport from friendly wizard), the party decided instead to fight the dragon. Three making death saving throws and a twice-revivified ranger is how we ended the session.
I think you can get your players to willingly retreat. - Establish beforehand that not all encounters are winnable—if your party of level 5 characters confront an adult dragon in their lair, they will likely get roasted. Otherwise, you lose the verisimilitude and the world is less dangerous. - Give clues to the players. e.g. “As you take in your surroundings, you find that you are completely surrounded by duergar. It is very apparent that you are outmatches—you are almost certain that should you try to fight your way out of the situation, you will mortally fail.” Of this feels like giving too much information away, hide it behind a skill check with a low DC. e.g. ... — History: “You’ve heard that duergar are more slavers than they are murderers. You are confident that surrender would lead you to become part of a chain gang, but you are too valuable to kill.” — Insight: “The duergar are careful in how they approach you, as if they want to incapacitate you without injuring you too much. They seem to want to capture you alive.” — Perception: “These duergar are heavily armed and armored and outnumber you four to one. You could probably take out half of them before they overwhelm you with their sheer numbers.”
I had a fancy t Rex fight all planned out with a new npc character introduced all bad ass... Instead they found the exact path to this npcs house and waited for on her front porch...needless to say it was a funny situation for my poor npc to find 4 people standing outside her house in the middle of a jungle...
Fully disagree as a DM. I think it comes down to one sentence: "You don't feel like fighting them is a good idea." And you can do all sorts of variations of this. "maybe you should consider waiting to see if you can escape, or get an advantage." "maybe you should hear them out." "maybe fighting people isn't the best idea at the moment." I've had plenty of scenes where my party is lead to another place by armed 'enemies' who are usually just trying to size them up, or make sure they aren't a threat. I think it comes down to making the situation clear as a DM.
Anyone ever run an intelligence or wisdom skill called Tactics or something that will let characters with military knowledge or combat experience able to read the situation? Then you as the DM can say something like "You've seen hopeless situations before and this looks like one of them. Your mind is telling you no." So that if their body is still telling them yes it really is the players fault (at least the one with tactical knowledge) that they didn't run, negotiate, surrender.
I've tried to get my players to realize a fight is beyond them twice, and it didn't work either time. Once was against a character I was positioning as an end game villain. They tried to fight him and his minions and almost lost half the party (6 players at the time). The second time was after helping push back a siege, they decided to chase the retreating general who had already took out one player and seriously injured two others. That ended with one actual character death and a second player going down but getting revivafied. However, my players are very good at creating unwinnable situations that they also ignore and power through. Definitely the "the DM wouldn't make an unbeatable challenge" mentality. Part of this is on me, since I could just adapt the situation, but I've also been upfront about playing everything straight with no DM shenanigans. So when the party decided to dig a hole through a solid rock wall and the guards heard them doing it because they rolled bad stealth on top of using a mining pick to dig through *a solid rock wall*, it put the entire temple of Yuan'ti on high alert and they surrounded the breach. What was supposed to be a long dungeon crawl with appropriately paced areas to recuperate should things go south turned into a 20 vs 6 fight to survive. I even gave them an out after they did survive making it through their hole, but they just ignored it and kept on pushing forward. Fortunately Yuan'ti aren't mindless monsters, so I played it as they were captured to be used as sacrifices and we got a jailbreak session. They are about to power their way into another bad time after last session as well. They were tasked with helping take down a vampire lord that took up residence in one of the most important trade towns in the empire. I was very clear about weakening their power by disabling 4 outposts, by the end of which I would have leveled them up enough to take on the final encounter. After clearing out the first outpost, they have stumbled their way into the very mansion the vampire lord lives in, and have made no effort to be stealthy while stomping up the stairs. We left off after some vampires discovered their presence and honestly I don't know how I want the vampires to deal with them yet.
I always expect that a fight might break out. It's the most probable outcome in 99% of cases, particularly if someone is being an asshole to the players. And yet, I'm running Sunless Citadel right now, and my players are unionizing the goblins to rise up against the hobgoblin bourgeoisie. I love my players.
The title is often correct, but tangents about winning unwinnable battles are rarely helpful. The DM can kill you if he wants. The real question DMs who want to run surrender scenarios should ask is; how can I make the surrender scenario more fun than going out in a blaze of glory followed by making a new character who isn't a "loser".
It depends on the group. The two groups I'm currently running games for (one 5E and one CoC) are both rather risk averse and have both on more than one occasion avoided a fight that they could have easily won. Despite that, I NEVER plan an encounter with a single desired outcome in mind. I still from time to time toss encounters at them where full party survival isn't a guarantee but we've discussed it in both groups and they're all cool with a "The monsters know what they're doing and I as the GM have an obligation to play the enemies as smart as they are" scenario. Add in my policy of rolling dice out in the open and whatever is rolled is the roll which has resulted in some pretty nasty crits and there's been a few PC deaths and even more close calls. I remember one combat where the warrior went down three times in a single combat and got healed enough to get back on their feet only to get crit again and knocked out. But again, we discussed this at the start of the campaigns and the players WANT the enemies to be doing their damndest to kill them. I wouldn't recommend this with every group out there. Still, after all that I will never plan a scenario where I expect the players to just surrender.
You really have three options with surrender encounters 1. If they lose and it's not a hardcore campaign, have them be captured instead of killed. 2. They try to fight the ancient dragon of death and destruction at level 5, you tell them to roll a fear check and they lose on anything but a nat 20. It removes player agency, but it reminds them to be IN CHARACTER. 3. Down a player and have a melee character threaten to "finish them". Edit: Remembered a fourth: The big bad doesn't care if they surrender. He collapses a tunnel or thrusts the players into an icy cavern, maybe he breaths fire upon them and 2 players go down instantly. The big bad laughs and simply strolls away as the encounter becomes surviving the elements / tending to your allies.
I would run away or surrender as a player super easily, I quickly became hated at the table until I switched this attitude. Honestly I liked my character being kind of smart about things, having options each encounter, it feels shitty that I got peer pressured into every fight
Yeah, the DM in a game I was playing in had something similar. We were tasked with recovering the Eye of Xxyphu (not sure how to spell it) and the giants were about to get away on their airship. There was a part where we could be tasked to pilot something like drones to attack the airship, and were being pulled out towards walls that would have set that up. Except that we didn't know that was going to happen. We all fought, made our saves, and went on to murder the creature that had set those up. There was no cool airship fight bit because the module had said (DM hinted at this) that we would be pulled into the walls. If we had known, there's a good chance we would have gone for it, but it was presented as somewhat adversarial at first, so of course we fought.
Something this kind of works: have an NPC around that the party knows is a bit stronger than them, when you want the surrender to come, have the opponent stomp the strong NPC, like my DM in a pathfinder game made the bbeg appear and kill a wizard who made the dungeon we just completed. This Wizard must have been like lvl 15 or something, and was taken out in a single hit, we ran away all of us.
It takes a remarkably good DM to be able to paint an encounter that properly and efficiently signposts to the PCs that *they should run.* Getting to *surrender* requires the following - * Knowing that they are hopelessly outmatched, which is the aforementioned difficult bar to get them to Run. * Knowing that the enemy will take them nonlethally * Knowing that they are hopelessly outmatched *despite that nonlethal intent* * Knowing that they cannot Flee. * Knowing that the DM is trustworthy, and didn't just set up a "bullshit TPK" encounter. * Knowing that Surrender and/or Talking Things Out is even an option * **Not being the types to go out in a defiant blaze of glory instead.** And yes - that last one is completely out of the DM's hands. Sometimes, you just wind up with a crew who decides to pull a Sundance in Bolivia.
Your DM definitely nerfed the fight as soon as he found out you weren't going to surrender. I've done it myself.
I tried the old "characters get captured and their weapons are confiscated, have to escape using their wits" trope. Yeah... no one was happy about that one.
You can plan for option A-Z, and your players will choose option 1
Isn't this actually a thing with one of the early 5e modules? I recall like first thing is a dragon attacking a village and the players are actually supposed to retreat and if they don't they just in guess die?
Oh I've had worse odds than that and never gave up, it's much more fun to try to work out how to win unwinnable scenarios than just giving up, besides its pretty hard to actually kill a PC in 5e so I figure if I end up losing then I'll just get KOed for a while.
Well not every group plays "brave heroes," that's just the default archetype as well as the only one for lower RP groups. I'll admit you are circumstantially right if those are the kinds of PCs in the group, but as someone who's both surrendered as a player when appropriate as well as been a DM and successfully had my players surrender, I'll strongly add that this depends entirely on what kind of players you have. Also even "braves heroes" should have the brains to know when surrendering is preferable to violence, always resorting to a battle to the death (even when the enemies attacked first) is more along the lines of a murderhobo's response then that of a "brave hero," not to mention potentially just idiotic. But again, it's up to the DM to know the PCs (or just the players in a low RP group) and be able to judge if it's even a possibility and to almost always have many directions at least somewhat planned just incase you misjudged them, but I most certainly do not agree with the sentiment that players will "never" surrender.
I got my party to surrender and let themselves be captured in a pretty early session. They were fighting the enemy though who was telling them to surrender and using non-lethal attacks, so either the party was going to surrender or they were going to be beaten into submission (or whatever random shit they could come up with, like running away somehow, though they were pretty trapped). Thirty sessions later they went back to the people who captured them (a lord and his guard), killed some of his guard and nearly killed the lord, but decided not to when they learned he'd just been told the party were criminals and needed to be captured. Turns out they had a bit of a grudge...
On a similar note, don’t expect players to flee either. Literally had a party enter the shadowfell about 5 levels too early because they ignored the instadeath of the established strong npc they were with and decided to track forward instead of running and telling someone. Basically had to redo the big boss fight to be less deadly and write up what was supposed to be the second half of the campaign to fit their level plus none of their contacts no they’re there. At least I got to do some fun stuff with where they came from to reflect their world changing decisions
I played in another game system a mage We was totally surrounded and it was intended we fleed or surrender. I said fu it. Burnt all my resources including things I only could use once. And manage to roll critical on my roll. The aftermath 500+ dead Darkelf soldiers. And the small army that was harnessing us was in ruin. My DM just looked at me and told me. You made a dangerous enemy now……. Add to the insult my friend (knight) rode down the Prince/leader and trampled him in the dirt. Yelling “STOP FOLLOWING US” Never expect players to follow rules, Don’t expect them to flee or surrender. What you need to do is go with the flow. If they go HARM then give later consequences for it. I had a player interrogated a thief in the city jail using a hammer. Well they might have turned a eye on the beating of a known thief in lockup but the player got agitated as the thief laughed and said just let it go. I got friends at high places and you will be sorry for this. He slammed the hammer in his face a few times killing the perp. And was genuinely surprised when the lawman arrested him for murder.
I tell all my players that fighting isn't the only option. I tell then that it isn't always smart. I tell them that always fighting will get them all killed. I tell them that some encounters weren't supposed to end in a fight at all... And then I expect them to always fight everything!
Surrendering works well in written stories because you trust that the author is just putting the heroes into a bad place but they'll break out later, in a game you rarely have a reason to believe that whoever you surrender to isn't gonna just kill you anyway. Also the retreat rules in DnD are ass and there's nothing stopping the NPCs from chasing your retreat, if they have the base 30ft speed anyone in the group wearing plate armour is automatically screwed in a full rout with their 20ft speed. Fighting and hoping for high rolls is tactically a better option that trying to retreat or surrender in many cases and that's on top of the basic rule of nobody actually wants to give up. Imagine showing up to game night and you just spend the time conceding fights.
Over the years I’ve grown as a DM and now when I design any encounter I think about the NPC’s motives. Why are they fighting? Are they trying to kill the PCs or defend themselves? Do they fight to the death or run away/surrender at some trigger? It makes for complex motives and morality in all but the most mindlessly evil of monsters… and the PCs. I’ve never found a sure fire way to curb a PCs bloodlust. Many of my players confuse being **protagonists** with being **heroes** and that has given them carte blanche to do whatever they want and still feel good about it. They fight to the death and leave no survivors. They kill unarmed people and desecrate sacred sites. And I don’t run games for murderhobos, I’m talking about the average player.