The stakes of combat need not be death.
Do You Think Encounters Should be Difficult?
The Crimson Binome
Hero
Deadliness is not synonymous with difficulty. You can have a difficult fight with low stakes, or an easy fight with a (small) chance of TPK.
Does the monster think it is a fight to the death? If so, then it sounds to me like a fight to the death.
I use morale checks when the monsters have no chance of winning. That is for situations like a party runs into five goblins, an NPC thief gets caught red handed and surrenders, and so on. The meat and potatoes of the adventure however will always be--at least when I am DM--a creature or character that can certainly kill everyone and only smart playing and strategy will lead to victory. Otherwise I don't know what would be the accomplishment of winning or why anyone would warrant even a single XP from winning a fight they had no chance of losing. It would be like going to the gym and sticking with 2 1/2 lb. dumbbells and then saying "look how much I lift!"
If the players are afraid to die in a fight, then eliminate fights seems the logical way to go.
MichaelSomething
Legend
Of course not!
I'm also happy with the players coming up with non-combat solutions to encounters that I did expect to be combat encounters (or vice versa).
Even against monsters, fights can end with surrender, or parley.
And fights needn't be against monsters (in the strict sense). They can be against other people, for honour or truth or other values.
The AD&D Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures had generally applicable rules for duels of honour (subdual, vanquishing). So even D&D hasn't always regarded the stakes of combat as death.
I'd reiterate - why do the stakes have to be death?
There's no connection between "no chance of losing" and fighting to the death. PCs can lose fights without dying - they get captured, they yield to a superior opponent, they suffer shame, etc. In real life people fight without death being the outcome, and perhaps even moreso in genre fiction.
MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Death‽ Pah! UP THE STAKES
Woo the monster!
There is no greater stake than love!
Woo the monster!
There is no greater stake than love!
Earlier this year I ran a session of In a Wicked Age.
PC stats are Covertly, Directly, For Myself, For Others, With Violence, With Love. One of the PCs was a zombie with the highest stat With Love. He had died in a plague, and come back to life driven by the desire to find his love whom he'd left behind in death.
Ratskinner
Adventurer
Not that I'm saying the stakes of any encounter or even combat encounter should be death...but!
That's all that the basic mechanics address (HP attrition mediated by resource depletion and tactics). I think players tend to lean on the mechanics of the game (whatever game is being played) and in D&D this leads them to address all combats (sometimes all encounters) this way. IME, if there aren't mechanical consequences or at least a framework to directly inform the fiction, there is a large segment of gamers who just won't care. This is what I mean by D&D not being tuned for anything other than this one kind of dungeoneering narrative.
Not that this is always the case to the same degree, even among editions. Early editions had extended mechanics to deal with exploration and some very specific (class-based) non-combat things, 4e had skill challenges*; and in both cases I see players utilizing those mechanics. The way 3e and 5e treat all non-combat as task resolution at best and DM fiat at worst leaves players feeling like they are in an unsupported grey area, and thus something to be avoided when possible.
Now, of course, all that can easily be "bolted on"** and some groups will "trust" the GM enough to go with it anyway, but a robust game that supports other kinds of results would result in more groups exploring those results.
*although perhaps an imperfect mechanic
** e.g. Clocks from the Powered by the Apocalypse games, the clue acquisition and mystery design mechanics from Gumshoe.
I've been taking seriously that this thread is in General, not D&D.
Though even in AD&D there have been rules for duels of honour - Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures had these, under labels like vanquishing and subdual.
