No cost to Knock Creatures Unconscious?!

[CapnZapp]

Help - my players have read page 295 of the PHB, and have decided "we always knock all foes unconscious, all the time". This to never miss any possible nugget of information from interrogating them after winning the combat.

Can they do this? There seems to be no cost of doing so (no penalty to either attack or damage), and no risk of having creatures die away from you either (no Death saves).

As a GM I would like there to be a real cost attached to this benefit (of possible information), so that players only do it when they really want to.

I'm sure this has been discussed before? Pointers to any reasonable solutions? (Perhaps houserules even)


Regards,
Zapp

 

[James McMurray]

Method 1) Bore them to tears with the interrogations. Every creature has its own personality and its own things it'll do to try to survive. Most of them talk like the mail man from Night Court (veeery slooowlyyyy).

Method 2) Have RP problems creep up. Not every defeated enemy just disappears into the wind. Some want vengeance. Some lie during interrogation. Some try to escape.

Method 3) Tell the players that this isn't fun for you, and that you will make sure they never miss a major piece of information because they didn't capture someone without letting them know in advance that the person has that information.

 

[Wolf88]

Moral Dilemma, what to do with the prisoners?

Do not leave any "easy" answer for them

 

[WereMike]

I concur with James...

At least my players only use it on those monsters they suspect have info, but yeah, it gets old (for me, at least) playing the prisoner dilemma and interrogation skill challenges.

My solution was to adopt different accents and roleplay the prisoner as a whiny, wheedling low-life that will say anything to escape with their lives. So far, I've butchered a German, British, Australian, and Italian accent for various prisoners who had no important info to convey.

Now, when a player strikes a foe unconscious, I start to warm up an accent and the player does an immediate interrupt: "Forget it. I'm hitting for lethal damage."

 

[Paul Strack]

End every combat encounter with "You interrogate your prisoners for an hour and learn no useful information." That way, you are wasting at most of minute or so of game time.

That is, unless you want to give the PCs a useful tidbit of information.

 

[DracoSuave]

Besides, in a realistic sense, knocking an enemy unconscious is the first step to killing them. It's not like there's an endless swath of enemies dying before they even hit the ground.

Unconscious isn't a problem, hell, it's a far more healthy way of dealing with it than KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL KILL MURDER KILL.

 

[Skallgrim]

I had this problem while co-running another game. I used several different solutions, depending on the situation.

Some lackies were fanatics, and devoted to the cause. It really caused them surprise when they put a sword to the guy's throat, and he eagerly threw himself on it.

Some (cultists of a god of stealth and assassination) were mutilated, and had no tongues.

Some would lie, often quite convincingly.

Others were no use to the party, though they were willing to talk. They were hired help, isolated cell members, or just "not in the know".

When the wizard in the group started wising up and using mind-reading secretly during the "interrogation", I would occasionally let him get disturbing glimpses of what they were thinking (did you really want to know what the male cultist of a god of torture and pain was thinking when talking to the pretty woman?).

On the other hand, sometimes they genuinely got good information. This led them to be a bit more selective when choosing interrogations.

The other thing you can do is impose an opportunity cost on interrogations. Let a patrol find them while they are questioning a prisoner. Let them decide what they are going to do with the prisoner afterwards (most good, especially lawful good parties may have a lot of qualms about killing someone after negotiating with them for information in exchange for their life).

Finally, if the adventure gives the players time and opportunity to interrogate prisoners, aren't they dumb not to do so? Put them under time pressure. They don't have 30 minutes to revive this hobgoblin, put the fear of Kord in him, and squeeze him for information if the ritual is going to be completed in the next half hour, do they?

It is like a lot of encounters. Make sure that your encounter isn't assuming the PCs will not do something, when there's no good reason for them not to. If the hidden fortress has only one door, and you can block it, and there are no prisoners inside, why not just let the evil-doers starve to death?

 

[Blizzardb]

In my game I just ruled that even if the players try to knock an enemy unconscious, they will not always suceed doing so in the chaos of battle. At the end of the battle they find out if they managed to keep the enemy alive, or he died (as determined by the DM for story reasons).

This is a house rule, but it find it more realistic (hard to imagine a wizard lobbing a fireball, but trying to keep the target alive), and as I see it, doesn't change the combat part of the game at all.

 

[GRStrayton]

You could also apply to monsters the PC death rule (also from page 295 of the PHB:

"Death: When you take damage that reduces your current hit points to your bloodied value expressed as a negative number, your character dies."

That might cause some monsters to die, especially if they only had a couple of hits points left before the attack that takes them into negatives.

 

[WalterKovacs]

If all the monsters are knocked unconcious, at the end of the short rest, there is now an entire encounter worth of opponents (albeit with minion level hit points) awake, and have all their powers recharged. The PCs could be carrying around enough items to secure all the opponents, but that's a lot of money being used on chains and manacles, etc.

It would be quite difficult to interogate each one, especially if they end up killing someone that "talks" before going to the next one.

It depends a lot of who the PCs are fighting ... putting them against humanoids that speak common is going to increase the chances of them trying to take people "alive" to interogate them. Beast and demons and devils and oozes, etc are less likely to give up valuable information. Certain creatures may actually kill themselves sooner than allow themselves to be captured ... cyanide capsules in their teeth, those kinds of ideas.