To Kill or Not to Kill?

I wouldn’t say you let them off the hook. There was a cost to their overconfidence, and they paid it. And furthermore, you told a story together. What could’ve been a simple, ignoble death was a tight, fraught race back to safety.

When I can outsmart death, or the DM gives me a last-minute die roll and I get lucky, I feel cheered and excited. When the DM changes the results to spare a PC, that’s when I feel cheated. When the DM declares 25 points of damage, I say I’m making death saves, and then they say “no, wait, I meant 14,” it feels a hollow save.

For my part, as I’ve said before, I tend to softball my PCs. Enemies may try to take prisoners rather than kill. I’ve given them last chance rolls to avoid things like falling to their death. I’ll let another PC take a blow that would kill another. And I’ve destroyed PCs’ fancy gear instead of their lives (which, some players, honestly, get way more bent out of shape about that). But I don’t walk back my calls (unless I’m actually wrong). If you’ve been declared dead or dying, that’s where you are. You’ll probably have opportunities to get better (in exchange for a subsequent quest), but there has to be risk in this game for the rewards to be meaningful.

Sadras said:

I'd be curious to hear from DMs, but especially players what they think of when the PCs are, for lack of a better description, let off the hook.
Do they feel cheated? relieved? Does the fiction need to make sense and/or there to be an appropriate cost? Some other requirement?

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I like this outcome much better than killing the character. I think the ranger's soon to be animal companion sacrificing itself is a great moment for the character, one that can really propel the characters growth.

Had the character simply been killed, well the player rolls up a new character and just goes from there - not nearly as cool a moment.

Story before math.

Always story before math.

You did good.

Sadras said:

I'd be curious to hear from DMs, but especially players what they think of when the PCs are, for lack of a better description, let off the hook.
Do they feel cheated? relieved? Does the fiction need to make sense and/or there to be an appropriate cost? Some other requirement?

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As a player, If I choose to flee, I'd like to be able to actually have a chance to do so. I totally expect the DM to then decide if my enemy pursues or not, and don't care which. But then if my enemy chases after me, no matter the ultimate result of the chase (escape, death, something else) I'd prefer that some sort of chase rules get used.


As a DM, I am occasionally reminding myself "If I don't want to kill a fleeing PC, don't chase him." In your specific example, my ideal DM move would've been to have the orog choose not to give chase, but just hurl those insults.

I would say that what you did was just fine and the players had fun which was all that really matters.

I always like to have a discussion about this kind of stuff during a session 0. How deadly do players want the campaign to be? Because different people, possibly even at the same table, will have differing opinions and there is no one right answer.

So depending on player expectations, I may have run it differently. I tend to run a moderately deadly campaign by default; if the character does something stupid there's a good chance they'll die. What the ranger did was stupid.

Another possible area of improvement is the chase scene. Once again, there's nothing wrong with what you did but could you have built some tension with this scene? The elf knows the orog is just taunting him so could he have attempted to hide? Jump down a steep embankment/cliff requiring an acrobatics check? Or jumped over some difficult terrain with an athletics check that the orog may have had to slog through? Throw down something hoping to trip their pursuer?

That kind of stuff can be hard to come up with on the fly, so maybe involve the player and the rest of the group. Tell the PC that he has little or no chance to get away, and ask what he's going to do to get ahead or slow the orog down? Encourage input from the rest of the group.

These thing can be tough to improvise, but can be very rewarding.

As a player, I want to feel like the world is real and the DM isn't arbitrarily making things mold around me like I'm the center of a story, because that's the kind of D&D I prefer, exploring a world and getting believable effects for the causes.

So whether I would like that or not depends on how the tressym was handled. Basically, if it had not been previously determined that the tressym wasn't there, and there was a plausible chance it might have been around, and the DM had made a random die roll (even privately) to see if the tressym in fact was there--that would have been awesome.

If, on the other hand, the tressym wasn't supposed to be around, and the DM just had it conveniently be there to prevent the natural effects of the cause...I would have felt it was unsatisfying.

Now, depending on the consequences of death in the campaign (ie, am I going to be able to get raised?) and the level of my desire to continue playing that character, I might have considered the unsatisfying result the lesser of the two evils.

Sounds like a very believable and fair way to play out the encounter. Yes, the Ranger was maybe slightly foolish to go off on his own on a glory hunt, but he did realise when things were going against him and let common sense take hold enough for him to retreat.

I like the idea that the Orog now has a vested interest in this character - the one that got away from him - and that the Ranger has a debt to settle later on.

DEFCON 1 said:

Story before math.

Always story before math.

You did good.

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This confuses me. The "math" is used to determine uncertainty in the story. If you're choosing to ignore the math for the story, you shouldn't have used math to begin with or you're using math when you shouldn't.

Satyrn said:

As a player, If I choose to flee, I'd like to be able to actually have a chance to do so. I totally expect the DM to then decide if my enemy pursues or not, and don't care which. But then if my enemy chases after me, no matter the ultimate result of the chase (escape, death, something else) I'd prefer that some sort of chase rules get used.


As a DM, I am occasionally reminding myself "If I don't want to kill a fleeing PC, don't chase him." In your specific example, my ideal DM move would've been to have the orog choose not to give chase, but just hurl those insults.

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You move at X speed, you can Run for Y rounds. The Bad Guy moves at Z speed and can Run for Q rounds. You can choose move and take an action that may affect your enemy's ability to follow or you can Run.

I don't understand the need for "chase rules". They're already there.

I've run plenty of chases with just the info above.

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@OP I don't know, I don't like how an NPC who ostensibly wasn't there just came out of nowhere and saved the PC. I'm not saying the PC should have died, but it seems more like you wanted to kill someone and couldn't make the math do it to the player, so you killed his friend instead.

Not saying that's bad for the story, but if the Ranger was nearing his own camp, and the Bad Guy knew this, it seems like the Bad Guy would have cut his losses and the PC would have gotten away of his own accord.

Immortal Sun said:

You move at X speed, you can Run for Y rounds. The Bad Guy moves at Z speed and can Run for Q rounds. You can choose move and take an action that may affect your enemy's ability to follow or you can Run.

I don't understand the need for "chase rules". They're already there.

I've run plenty of chases with just the info above.

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I dunno, that looks suspiciously similar to:

Satyrn said:

some sort of chase rules

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