In 26 years of play, I have literally never seen PCs voluntarily surrender. Admittedly, beyond a certain point my villains largely stopped asking.
The only time I’ve had PCs taken prisoner is because they’d been beaten into unconsciousness. There was one incident about 3 years ago where a single PC got separated from the rest of the party and was captured (the rest of the party ended up using a wish spell to rescue her). The previous incident was about 4 years before that where all but one of the PCs were captured (the other PC was somewhere else at the time that the rest of the party was beaten unconscious).
Recently, I was running Eternal Lies, a published campaign which, on two occasions, expected (but didn’t require) the PCs to be captured. In one case, the PCs simply avoided the entire situation by staying three steps ahead of the bad guys. In the other, the NPCs whose “vast numbers” were supposed to make them surrender got hosed down in a hail of machine gun fire before they had a chance to even open their mouths and demand the white flag.
There was one group about 4 years ago who briefly discussed surrendering because they were near death and had been cut off from the surface by a half dozen giants and an entire platoon of orcs. They decided that it made more sense to literally cut their own heads off so that the elven wizard could stick them in a bag of holding, turn invisible, and fly them out to get resurrected. (Surprisingly, that worked out for all but one of them.)
Whenever I see a published adventure that requires the PCs to surrender, I take it as a very strong indication that the product was never playtested. (In my more cynical moments, it also makes me suspicious that the author has never actually played an RPG.)
In my experience, this goes one or two steps further still, applying even to a simple retreat. I flat out told my players when I started DMing that I don’t design encounters of a particular challenge gradient so some battles will undoubtedly be unwinnable. This means I don’t design encounters to all be CR appropriate in some formulaic fashion in that I had no problem throwing a bunch of CR 1s to a party of 7th level characters or a 15th level encounter against the same group. I told them that sometimes, in my encounters, that retreat would sometimes be the best option and they should always consider all of their options.
I did this largely to promote them to think in a much more tactical sense and learn to choose the best options in their disposal because my encounter design tended to use the NPCs and creatures according to their intelligence and they would fight in that manner and use the best options they had available.
Regardless, my players have faced a complete party wipeout on more than a few occasions because they simply refused to give up, even if something like a temporary retreat will avail more tactically superior options (as opposed to simply beating their encounters with brute force.) After all, almost none of my battles were totally unwinnable but I needed to show them that I wasn’t afraid to super-murder them if they think winning means the biggest fist-full of d6s.
I’m glad to say though that after a few choice encounters and some conversations with my players, they began to understand what I was going for and their enjoyment of the game seemed to increase dramatically once they started thinking in terms of how to best use their abilities in different given situations. Yet, my experiences has shown me that players are more than willing to needlessly fight to the death.
In fairness to players, retreat can often be (or seem to be) sufficiently difficult to pull off that fighting to the death seems the only reasonable option. If you try to escape using the same rules used for combat (initiative order, movement rates, attacks of opportunity, and so on) disengaging from a battle (in e.g. 3.x D&D) really just gives the bad guys free shots at you. You double-move or withdraw away, and they charge after you with an attack at the end. If you stop, they surround you, if you run away, you trigger AoOs … the key I think is to transition from the combat rules to some other resolution scheme when players (or monsters, whatever) declare that they are trying to escape/evade.
You might rule that the bad guys get one free parting shot, for example (at least against figures that must run past or through enemies to reach the “open field”), but after that I think it’s best to adopt some other mechanic to resolve the pursuit. That doesn’t mean the party always gets away — but there’s much more involved in a chase than raw foot speed. Think about action movies — there are two key kinds of action scenes: fights, and chases. Fights are reasonably well-served by e.g. the d20 rules, but chases really aren’t. You can do things like duck around a corner (or whatever) and hide, or knock over obstacles behind you, or just out-endurance the chasers, distract them with pretty/tasty goodies … I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and I’ve got about a page of notes on ways to try to streamline resolution of pursuit situations.
I think if you adopt some kind of escape/chase mechanic, you should be VERY explicit with the players about how it works. You don’t want to keep it a secret, because the players will assume they are subject to the combat rules and all that they entail. My thinking is that anyone can declare “I’m running away” on their turn, and at the end of that round they are no longer “in combat” — they are now in a pursuit situation. Make it relatively easy to start to run away and transition into this other mechanic. (You can address special cases, like “to get away you have to get past the bad guys to the only door” in passing.)
I like to keep surrender on the table as an option for PCs that are clearly outmatched but have no hope of escaping.
I tell them upfront that if they surrender to intelligent foes, they’ll likely lose their gear, but they will generally be held for ransom for a period of time (1d4 months of game time) before being returned to whatever faction or patron to which/whom they were ransomed. This encourages PCs to interact with the various factions and/or seek out wealthy patrons, and it also encourages them to at least consider surrender as a viable option (which they usually don’t because they assume that whatever creatures they surrender to are likely to kill and eat them).
Also, I allow them a chance to escape on their own, and recover their gear if they come up with a plan to do so. The key is to be upfront with the players and not try to be sly or coy when it comes to telling them what’s happening. I know that a lot of DMs will always say, “But they couldn’t possibly know whether the monsters would take them hostage or not, and I’m not just going to tell them whether they will or not.” Why not? Let the PCs and NPCs parley, negotiate, or whatever. If they’re worth money alive, then why would the NPCs kill them? You don’t have to keep these things secret from the players or else they will never ever consider surrender a viable option.
Sorry for the lengthy comment. Anyway, nice post.
My players have had their PCs surrender on multiple occasions. (I’ve been gming since 1991.) So, it may have been playtested with very different groups than yours.
That said, I’d say yours are closer to the norm, and surrender isn’t exactly common for my players. When I see an assumption that they PCs will surrender, my kneejerk reaction is to say to the text, “And what if they don’t?”
(Okay, that is my kneejerk rection to most assumptions that the PCs will do any given thing. But, this goes about a hundredfold for surrender.)
I had it happen many months ago. Admittedly, the NPC to whom they surrendered greeted the party with “Kill them,” and they had dealt with him before and knew why he was mad at them. His minions took down two, then he offered surrender, which they took. I used it as a chance to throw a dungeon under his castle.
But basically, PCs won’t surrender unless the alternative is a TPK.
Got to agree with your last couple points I’ve seen players that willquickly a gleefully roll. Upa new PC wen they get killed that will have an aptoplexic fit if they evensuspect they maybe captured. To many capture is a far worse fate than death.
Great anecdote about the stuffed bag of heads and invisible wizard.
I’ve had players negotiate and surrender advantages, items, plot points, service, but never outright surrender, too many (rightly) think it’s tantamount to choosing death. Beyond that there is a dignity issue and few players have such a glorious life that they want to spend their pretend time being slaves.
However, there have been plenty of times when PCs have accepted NPC surrender, sometimes showing mercy, sometimes not.
I have seen player characters to render twice, once in Call of Cthulhu and once in Eclipse Phase. I think the reluctance to surrender comes from a lack of precedent in the stories inspiring the games and their conventions. If correct, then player character surrender should be relatively common in a game like Pendragon. I haven’t played Pendragon, so I don’t know whether that’s true.
It happened not long ago on a D&D campaign I was playing. The DM wasn’t expecting us to just surrender to the city guard when they tried to arrest us, but we decided to try our luck either with a court or with an escape from prison. He already had the fight with the guards planned, it didn’t even look overwhelming nor anything but we just dropped our weapons and went peacefully.
Well, I as a player personally surrended once.
Myself and my party were members of an in-setting organization of psionic rangers, and a renegade of our same organization just happened to lead an attack on the kingdoms’ capital while we were there. So the local police turned up, and since my character was respectful fo the law, she surrendered to the police force in hope to clear our organization’s name; then, when the party showed up to attack the police and spring me, I actually talked them into surrendering themselves, to show our goo-faith and because the police was only doing their job.
We eneded up saving the day and being recognized as ally by the king, but ti totally derailed my Gm’s exectations for the campain; it was a very awesome motive for myself.
I think it’s a matter of who the player characters are if they will surrender or not – but having the certainty you will be spared does help a lot in pushing people to do it.
I’ve had to start planning my adventures to account for my players pulling a Leenik Geelo (in reference to Campaign Podcast) and getting captured in order to be safely escorted to the big bad or belly of the dungeon. Once players realise that “it never doesn’t work!” It becomes a dangerously default tactic and you need your npcs to start escorting them out behind the chemical sheds to execute them.
> I tell them upfront that if they surrender to intelligent foes, they’ll likely lose their gear, but they will generally be held for ransom
The problem I see with this is, in what I see as fairly typical 3e playstyles anyway, that character power is largely driven by gear. There are assumptions pretty strongly baked into the game design that, for example, an 8th level figher (or whatever) will have, I don’t know, a +2 weapon, +2 armor and shield, a few other AC enhancements, and so on. The wealth-by-level guidelines, the treasure-per-encounter and encounters-per-day guidelines, all of that conspires to lead to this expectation that: powerful character means lots of powerful items. And honestly, without their gear lots of characters are SIGNIFICANTLY less-capable, to the point that some (notionally-appropriate) enemies are nigh-invulnerable to them.
There’s a corollary, which is that players that decide to really focus on one facet of their character can sort of break the assumptions of the game. Like, a fighter that decides to be the tank with the highest possible AC. You can build a character with an AC that is literally 15 or more points higher than any of the other characters in the party. The effect of this is that any opponent with even a reasonable chance of hitting this PC essentially cannot miss any other PC. And the way damage output tends to scale means that those other PCs may not be able to last even one round in a stand-up fight.
And you absolutely don’t HAVE to play that way, but I think players can get trained to expect it. And they can focus on their gear (because inherent abilities will just come with time, but their gear is where you get special capabilities), and they (sometimes) plan out just what gear they want, and spend lots of effort to acquire it, and then they REALLY resent it when you take it away from them. To the point they’d rather have their PCs die than surrender.
Personally I’m interested in making games more about what your character can DO, and less about what STUFF you have. Make gear more interesting, but less critical. The ransom idea is another one I’ve considered, but it hasn’t ever really come up in play. I think you want to be very up-front with the players as part of world-building and scene-setting, saying “look, in this world it’s fairly common for people to be captured and ransomed back. Except for the hobgoblins (or whatever), those guys will cut your throat as soon as look at you.”
Back in the AD&D days, we were playing the Dragonlance modules. Minor spoiler – the second module starts off with the players being captured. Our GM didn’t handle it terribly well… the wizard (Raistlin, for those that know the characters) was feeling paranoid and had cast invisibility before the rest of us walked into the place where the trap was sprung, and he was thus able to avoid the no-you-don’t-get-to-roll-to-avoid-it capture the GM did on the rest of us.
The leader of the force that captured us somehow knew that the wizard was absent (probably not unreasonable that he had learned information from the locals about our rather prominent party, although at the time it just felt like the GM using out-of-NPC-knowledge). He came up to my captured character (Caramon, Raistlin’s brother) and held a dagger to my throat, calling out for the missing wizard to come out and surrender or he’d slit my throat. The player running Raistlin didn’t come out, so my character died without a chance to defend himself. Needless to say, I was rather miffed by this development.
Admittedly, we were all teenagers and it was the GM’s first time doing anything other than one-shots, so he didn’t have a lot of experience with coping with the story going off the rails. It was poor module design that it even gave the GM such restrictive rails for the story to come off, though.
>…and then they REALLY resent it when you take it away from them. To the point they’d rather have their PCs die than surrender.
This is why I’m upfront with them about losing the gear, and let them decide whether or not to surrender. I never create situations that force the players to take a certain action – I’ve always hated games where you have to intentionally lose in order to “move the story forward”. In most cases, my players have been pretty aloof regarding their magic items. If they really want them back, they’ll go after the guys that took them after the ransom has been paid, but usually they just move on to new items.
The assumption that characters of a certain level will have a certain number of magic items of a certain power level is also one of the things that I really didn’t like about 3e & 4e. I’ve been blessed, though, with players that are more interested in playing the game than in “being epic”. Ransoming has worked out very well in my games the few times it’s been used, but I realize that every game is different.
All this stems from the original D&D rule that morale never applies to PCs.
Why not? Losing hp applies, unconsciousness applies, dying applies …
A mechanic could certainly be constructed which requires a PC to surrender.
I think part of this is also having to do with how the NPCs act. If the PCs always expect a fight to the death, they may respond in kind. As such, NPCs need to run or surrender as opposed to treating every encounter like a fight to the death.
Even INT “-“, 1, or 2 creatures will flee as their instinct and experience dictate. If NPCs always fight to the death and give chase to running PCs even when they have no reason to do so, then PCs will respond in kind.
A lot of this depends almost entirely on how the DM handles the game and the NPCs.
As a player, I was trained by the DM not to surrender, because the game after a surrender was considerably more miserable than the process of rolling up new characters.
As a DM, who is playing with the same players (but not the DM), I am having a hard time retraining my players to allow it as an option.
But then, how many of us, as DMs, have had the villain tell the PCs, “Surrender and you will be spared”?
I run games in the pulp genre regularly (and players getting caught and placed in a ludicrous death-trap is a common trope). While I’ve never seen my players surrender, they have fallen through trap doors into cages and been captured, been gassed and captured, been hit by tranquilizer darts and captured, had a net or snare spring up beneath them and been captured, walked into a room where the entrances are suddenly sealed and been captured, etc (usually as a result of carelessness or a failed perception check). Having situations prepped that involve captured players doesn’t seem too strange under such circumstances. Watching the players find a clever way to escape is usually pretty cool. Brian Misiaszek suggested a great little tip for handling escapes from death traps… Rather than build a flaw into the trap and hope the players stumble over it (particularly where the trap exists as a plot device to set up a new and interesting encounter), the GM can alternate between the following two means of adjudicating the outcome. Firstly, the third thing the players try in order to escape will always work, or secondly, the first thing they try works but requires the addition of an extra action or idea to succeed. The players feel clever for working it out (and almost never realize that it wasn’t their own smarts that was decisive) and the GM gets to avoid killing the players for failing to guess what was in his/her head regarding a means of escape.
Players won’t surrender when they expect it’s a death sentence. Veteran players have seen dozens of foes executed by their fellow adventurers after yielding, so they expect the same treatment.
I have seen players surrender when lawful authority ordered them to yield, especially when such authorities are clearly prepared for a scrap and offer a credible promise of a fair hearing. To get players to consider surrender under other circumstances, you need to establish NPCs with well-rounded personalities that clearly won’t just slaughter thier prisoners. A notably chivalrous foe (“I seek only a suitable ransom, that my men may be paid!”) or one who offers healing to dying foes (“You fought bravely, but you are overmatched: Let our houses end thier enmity and have peace!”).
In many years of D&D I can only ever think of once, when I convinced my players not to surrender but to negotiate. They had fought their way down to Ant-Queen’s chamber, and it had been hard enough that they weren’t sure they could take her too. Meanwhile, they had been impressive enough that the Queen wasn’t certain of her victory.
So they negotiated a settlement. It was one of my proudest moments as DM.
(In non-D&D games it seems to happen a lot more. I think Leland is right on the money, and I’m going to take his advice.)
How can someone be “knocked unconcious” in D&D?
In AD&D and 3rd Edition, you take nonlethal damage. In 3E, you can also drop below 0 and then stabilize (which will leave you unconscious until you can heal back up to at least 1 hp).
In 4E, you can very briefly fall unconscious when you run out of hit points. (This is one of the many ways in which 4E sucks.)
In 5E, you fall unconscious when you run out of hit points. You can then stabilize, at which point you’ll remain unconscious for 2d6 hours.
Of course, there’s also stuff like sleep spells.