PCs who kill everyone that attacks them

Actions have consequences. To my mind, the true measure of the versimilitude of a game is the degree to which, in the game, this maxim is true.

In "Mister Othemar's Neighborhood" the fact that the PC's had never left an opponent alive, and had in fact on several occasions gone to great lengths to hunt down and kill survivors meant that their group had almost no reputation at all. The only thing they had ever done to garner any fame whatsoever was to clear a group of small-time thugs out of a neighborhood of the city which had burned down years ago and never been rebuilt.

To their advantage, this meant that people would underestimate them. To their disadvantage, it meant that few people came to them with important jobs that needed doing; only a few people knew of their exploits, and none of them were going to say anything.

is it the lack of alignment restrictions? doubtful. i see it more as the bloody truth of this war. every body left in our wake is one less dagger in the back from a defeated foe.

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Or one dagger less on your side...

Have any of you ever read the Old Shatterhand westerns by Karl May? Unless absolutely nesecary, the heroes almost never killed their opponents (though they were prone to humilate them). More often then not this resulted in a new ally, only the rare real bad guys came back to haunt them again (which eventually lead to their death). Who is to say that the PCs opponents are all so evil that they don't recognize that they are indebted to the PCs? If you reward the PCs by letting a released prisoner reform then you are bound to get the players to release people more often. If they all just return to take vengeance, then obviously they would not take many prisoners.

Personally, when I play I tend to judge how to deal with prisoners or opponents dependend on the character of the PC as well as the opponents. Characters of mine have cold-blooded killed prisoners (admitedly it was a zombie-like thing in a Cthulhu like setting) to releasing them with a stern warning (not even removing their equipment).

I pretty much play my NPCs according to the personality I created for them. Some of them grovel when beaten, some spit in the pcs face, some look for ways to escape, some look to help the pcs in return for freedom, some try to trick the pcs to attempt to kill them a later day.

Theres no standard response with my npcs and that may very well lead to the party killing everyone they end up fighting. I guess its something Ill have to deal with in trying to play the NPCs realistically, as opposed to chits on a battlemat.

In a perfect game, the players would try to see NPCs as a part of the world and as real people, unfortunately, a lot of players adopt the attitude of the party vs. anyone the DM represents. Its sad, because it reduces the game to something like a comp game. (Temple of Elemental Evil crpg is a perfect example of this). Something I really dont want to spend time working on as a DM.

Madfox said:

Or one dagger less on your side...

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But daggers on your side are easily recruited in other, more dependable places. Whereas it only takes one dagger in the back to ruin your entire day.

Regards,


Agback