How to avoid killing your player characters as GM

[mburr0003]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

And yet, if the GM runs monsters by this logic, many a good hack and slash game becomes frustrating.

That's not necessarily a bad thing if you view frustrating = challenging and use enough monsters that it's still difficult to force them all to flee, and make pursuit and finishing routed foes off permanently so they cannot recover and eventually counterattack an important part of the game.

But it's certainly different than the common default behavior.

Only if you're running the "D&D you only get exp if the NPCs are slain" style. Otherwise, it's neither common nor default.

I've played plenty of D&D games where we didn't kill everything, allowed for surrender, took prisoners, allowed a defeated foe to flee, etc, going all the way back to 1984. A few in between were 'murder hobo' fests, where you only got exp for killing the enemy, but most were not, so, we did not.

That behavior was expected in the Gauntlet arcade, not our rpgs.


Also, my games have never featured that, even in a pure dungeon crawl, because I don't run NPCs to be stupid. A few mooks drop, and the mooks will get spooked. Unless the NPCs have a decent leader amongst them, mooks will flee as soon as it looks like it's necessary (roughly 30-40% have fallen).

Originally Posted by Rupert

I blame the modern view of hack 'n' slash dungeoneering on D&D3's removal of morale stats for monsters (because rolling for this stuff was too hard or something) and then having many of the D&D adventures have monsters explicitly not retreating or surrendering, to the point where it became the assumed norm that unless it was specifically noted that an encounter was with creatures that might retreat or negotiate, they wouldn't.

That's because it was left to the GM. However 3e also explicitly calls out that PCs get exp for any 'defeated' encounter, whether that be via physical or social combat (either killing/defeating foes or diplomacy/fast-talk/intimidation) or even by successfully avoiding it entirely!

But yes, Gauntlet and Diablo had a strong impact on D&D for the worse (and Mike Mearls "back to the dungeon" and "orc and pie" nonsense didn't help either).