D&D 5E My group is questioning everyone.

[Gimul]

1. Not everyone has useful information, underlings in particular might only know enough to perform their specific role/job (which might be useful, but not necessarily obviously so).

2. Use the interrogation as an opportunity to feed disinformation to the party. The interviewee might lie, or might truly believe factually incorrect information.

3. Zealots or trained intelligence agents might be able withstand torture or commit suicide.

4. Escape or negotiate freedom and/or payment. It can be supprising difficult to secure prisoners out in the wild or behind enemy lines. Enter side quest hooks, recurring antagonists, comic relief, etc.

5. Handwave some insignificant and/or plot armored interrogations (some so they do not apply an extortionate amount of significance to the ones that are roleplayed out).

6. Healing, the retrieval of fallen allies, revenge and the taking of prisoners are not exclusive to PC's.

 

[steenan]

With the rule that you can knock people out instead of killing them, my group is doing this to an unusual amount of people. If the creature refuses to talk, they just threaten to kill them. After while, I run out of new conversations for my monsters to have!? Any ideas?

Maybe just skip the interrogation in most cases and give players the information they need? Players usually interrogate NPCs because they feel they don't have enough data to make informed decisions and are afraid of missing something important.

And when you roleplay the conversation, spice them up. Have one captured opponent cry and talk about how nothing ever goes right in his life. Have another one try to intimidate PCs, curse them and promise to come back from death to destroy them. And maybe have another one fall in love with one of the PCs and try to help them with more enthusiasm than is reasonable.

 

[AmerginLiath]

In classic D&D, some monsters may be so awful that they are worth killing. Maybe just a few, maybe more. But beyond those others are so threatening that only real weapons and dangerous spells will stop them, in a way that tends to kill them, or at least leave them severally incapacitated for a long time. This is unfortunate, but thats how it goes (I have to be careful here, yes, there are real world analogies with this, and yes, there is a lot of controversy around those...but back to the game).

When you make it easy to knock out opponents with swords and shocking grasps, you have changed the genre. You are now playing a supers game, where only deviant heroes attack to kill. In this genre you are looking to apprehend villains, not kill them (though it if is a movie version, they may do a good job of getting themselves killed at the right time, but anyways). If you can knock out opponents, and just say to hell with it, and kill them, you are basically (mass) murderers.

Its the rules change that does this. It creates this dilemma if you think about it too much. (And if you are torturing after the capture, then its encouraging murder on the one hand, torture on the other).

Its true, D&D is bloody, maybe too much. An optional rule along these lines would be ok. But you would have to have conventions on when monsters just give up and won't trouble the players, and when you would need to capture them, and when it would be ok to kill them.

ALSO, if that wasn't a long enough post, it degrades tactics. Don't want to kill them, don't fight them in the first place. Want to take them prisoner, put in the extra effort. Use charm, illusion, abilities, a way to strike to subdue. But if you go at somebody with an axe, then no, they probably won't be fit to talk to afterward.

What indeed makes it interesting about attempting to not kill (if possible) many intelligent and socialized opponents – true "monsters" are different, even intelligent ones such as beholders are unlikely to get the same sort of mercy given their true otherness and absolute threat – is that it does indeed both bring up the ethics of individual circumstances as well as bring into play how PCs should work to avoid certain (if not many) conflicts and work more stealthily in a more traditional narrative or even classic D&D model (which means the DM will need to be open as what is considered victory in an encounter).

There will be moments where the PCs will need to fight to the death against opponents that they'd prefer not to have to kill in other circumstances, either for their own defense of themselves or others or for the furtherance or an important cause. That tension, however, makes such enemies more like actual NPCs than just bags of XP. I also imagine that the extra focus given to Exploration and Social interaction in 5e would allow to build a campaign that isn't just a slog through battles where life-and-death decisions need to make every round of the day: I consider the focus in fantasy literature by comparison to that in a standard module and think that a less-bloodthirsty group actually makes for a better group with which to play a deeper experience of play.

That doesn't mean that the DM should be throwing moral quandaries at them constantly. Given that this is a hobby, such matters are a punishment of sort. Likewise, choosing to capture versus kill should have both challenges and rewards – there's more work to be done, but the image of a more merciful group among common folk is likely to be different than the image of the standard "death machine" player groups. Likewise, it would be interesting to see them able to play off certain enemy groups against each other: there's strong literary heritage of thugs & brigands being beaten up by heroes and choosing to join them when given that chance of a better life; imagine a street gang not killed joining up as hirelings as a more 'legitimate' way of life and to learn how to use their knowledge of violence in a better way?

 

[Skyscraper]

I'm a proponent of good-aligned PCs knocking out instead of killing.

And I'm a proponent of RP over rolling ability checks.

But if the intent is to avoid having to role-play interrogations, you could skip the role-play in those circumstances and ask your players to use intimidate vs a secret DC determined by you, and simply tell them whether they find out anything useful or not, and if so what it is.

Of course, you then get to decide whether you feed them a lie or truth. Perhaps you can have your secret way to run this kind of test, for example:

if intimidate check is equal to

DC or above: they get a truthful piece of information
DC -5 to DC -1: they get a lie
DC -6 or below: they get nothing out of the interrogation (or obvious lies that they detect)

The idea behind having the lower number being "you find nothing", is that players will know when the roll a very low d20, that they missed, so you might as well let them know. Whereas an intermediate number (say, a 15) that represents a lie, is easier for you as DM to conceal. Ah metagame, when you hold me...

You need to decide beforehand whether the NPC being interrogated knows anything or not. Maybe rolling a natural 20 still yields no valuable piece of information.

You could be very transparent and tell your players that you'll be using this technique simply to move the game forward and because you find it hard to come up with yet more ways to RP interrogations, or you simply dont like those as much as the rest; but you don't want to discourage them from not killing their opponents if they don't feel like it. They'll understand. Also tell them that for some creatures, DCs might be very low, well below 10. And do have some DCs indeed be all over the place, below 10 (the farmer whose afraid for his family), above 20 (the high level religious zealot) and anything in between. They'll never know what to expect. Finally tell them that they need not go into details about interrogation techniques (or torture if they're into that); you assume that their PCs do their best, and all of that is included into that one roll they'll come up with.

 

[aramis erak]

I suggest eliminating the "knockout" rule and instituting the following house rules:

• Some powerful monsters and NPCs have the Heroic trait (which PCs also possess). Heroic creatures cling to life, fighting death to the bitter end. Such creatures follow the PC death and dying rules. They die of massive damage, make death saves, etc.
• Those who lack the Heroic trait (most monsters and NPCs) don't get death saves. Instead, the first time such a creature would make a death save, it simply dies.

So, the PCs can save monsters for questioning, but it isn't easy.

That's already in the rules. NPCs and Monsters may die at 0 or make death saves like PC's at the DM's whim.

PBR v0.2 p.76, PHB p.198

Monsters and Death
Most DMs have a monster die the instant it drops to
0 hit points, rather than having it fall unconscious and
make death saving throws.
Mighty villains and special nonplayer characters
are common exceptions; the DM might have them
fall unconscious and follow the same rules as
player characters.​

 

[Dausuul]

That's already in the rules. NPCs and Monsters may die at 0 or make death saves like PC's at the DM's whim.

PBR v0.2 p.76, PHB p.198

Monsters and Death
Most DMs have a monster die the instant it drops to
0 hit points, rather than having it fall unconscious and
make death saving throws.
Mighty villains and special nonplayer characters
are common exceptions; the DM might have them
fall unconscious and follow the same rules as
player characters.[/indent​

That's not what I was proposing, though it's very close. The key difference is that in my proposal, non-Heroic creatures die the first time they would make a death save, rather than immediately. This gives the PCs a very narrow window in which to stabilize a fallen enemy.

If you eliminate knockout but keep the rest of the rules as written, there is no way to capture an enemy mook. If you keep the knockout rules as written, it's trivially easy. If you apply the death and dying rules to everything, you'll spend 80% of every session rolling death saves for kobolds. My proposal makes capturing enemies possible but challenging, while also keeping bookkeeping to a minimum.​

 

[MechaPilot]

I had a druid character who liked to knock out foes instead of killing them. Once they were K.O.d, she'd bury them up to their necks and leave them there so nature could judge whether they should live or die.

 

[Lanefan]

We usually skip the torture/interrogation part and jump straight to Charm Person (or Charm Monster, as appropriate).

Sometimes, if the party's foes are unusually Lawful in their Evilness, any questioning of uncharmed prisoners will get you only name, rank, and squad number (to replace serial number), no matter what the question.

The general idea behind the knockout rule I quite like; we've long ago instituted the idea that "subdual damage" can be done to any creature rather than just Dragons, with the idea that you're trying to knock the foe down/out rather than kill it outright. Half the damage done is "real", half is "temporary" and recovered after a few minutes' rest, but if the total damage done takes someone to or below 0 they need to roll to remain conscious. It doesn't come up often but it's a really useful mechanic when needed.

Lan-"the difference between our rule and 5e is here you have to declare subdual much earlier in the combat"-efan

 

[Joe Liker]

The best way to discourage prisoner-taking is to stop rewarding the players for doing it. But keep in mind, you have to be consistent, or it will backfire in a big way. In this case, negative punishment (denying them a positive stimulus) can change to random positive reinforcement of the undesired behavior in a heartbeat -- and random positive reinforcement is just about the most powerful tool in operant conditioning.

In my campaigns, a prisoner who is being tortured or threatened with torture will always lie. I don't even care if the players believe the lies. They can pass all the insight and intimidate checks in the world, but the prisoner will never tell the truth. It will make up falsehoods that it believes the torturers want to hear, nothing more, ever.

So unless the players have other methods of extracting information, they soon catch on that there's no point in capturing anyone alive, unless they want to hold them for ransom or something. Note that these other methods (charm, mind-reading, diplomacy etc.) can generally be done without combat -- certainly without knocking someone out.

 

[Tormyr]

I told my players ahead of time that they always had the option of using the knockout rule, and important bad guys always get death saving throws (you should have seen their faces when a bad guy went to 0hp fell off a 40 ft. cliff and then rolled a 20 and got up with 1 hp). I also gave them the option of saying that they want to save a regular enemy that went to 0hp at which point I start death saving throws for that enemy as well.