D&D General As GM, do you have bad guys kill downed PCs?

[Charlaquin]

I talk about yhis during my session 0. So it just depends on how lethal people want combat.

Good answer

 

[THEMNGMNT]

When a character thwarts the villain multiple times, the villain targets them. For example, the last kill I had was a wizard. He'd been dropped to 0 hit points. The fighter administered a healing potion. He got back up. Then he was hit again and dropped to zero. This happened three times in a row. Finally, the villain had had enough, and targeted him when he was down. Fortunately, the other characters had the means to bring the wizard back to life, and the complications from that particular fight sent the story in some really fun directions.

 

[Dragonsbane]

Depends on how smart the bad guys are, but it happens heh. Downed healers get that 2nd shot often from smart adversaries. Our game is a little gritter, and my players understand smart bad guys are just as smart as them. Besides, who wants to play the same PC forever?

 

[Morrus]

The default assumption of D&D isn't that going unconscious = death, roll up a new character. I don't do that myself, leaving death to fate and the whims of the death saving throws.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

No. I want my players to not be murder hobos. Part of doing that is doing things which encourage them to take prisoners and treat their prisoners well. One aspect of that is showing that it is (a) worth their time to do so, and (b) something that even their opponents will do.

 

[James Gasik]

The last time I was in one of these kinds of discussions, someone brought up that "it made sense" for monsters to double tap, since people get up all the time with a heal. But the truth is, that's not actually true.

Only player characters really do this, everyone else just lays there and dies!

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I also think it's situational.

Usually, the NPCS are trying to achieve something, which is often surviving being attacked by Team Sociopath as they are just doing their 9-to-5 job of guarding the necromancer's tower door. They will priorize removing the threat and focus on active Sociopaths before finishing unconscious ones doing their death saves. In some cases (ghouls have been given as an excellent example) they will take a sample of flesh because they are unintelligent. It is telegraphed. They might also be trying to feed, and in that case, they will just flee with the prey if they can instead of continuing the fight (usually Team Sociopath will block that plan).

On the other hand, as soon as someone raises from unconsciousness and resume fights, usually through the use of a healing ability, then it makes sense to finish the wounded off. I don't have many opponents assume healing abilities in a low-magic world, but in say Eberron, where most of the population exits from a century-long magic-rich war, "finish them off before the battle medic can get to them" and restore their fighting ability to full" is a common command from officers.

 

[Ancalagon]

very rarely - it has to make sense for the foe to do it from an RP/tactical sense.

However, I've been in a game (online) where the GM rolls in the open. Technically speaking, you can roll one attack at a time - say you are a fighter fighting 2 goblins. You can attack once, see what happens, ,and then declare your second attack. But this GM would roll the foe's entire attack sequence, resulting in "first attack brings PC down, second attack is a crit (double ping on death saves), third attack hits and your PC is dead"... so it happens and it depends sometimes on how the GM manages their rolls

 

[DEFCON 1]

Like @Hussar, when I have a monster that has Multiattack and that monster is choosing to just go after a single target... I usually roll all the attacks at once, and my players know that they are all headed to that target and will not be switched elsewhere. Thus if the target goes to 0 HP on the first one, then the next ones are headed in towards a now-downed foe. But that being said... because I treat a Multiattack in this way, I DON'T use the rules for attacking an Unconscious foe on the subsequent attacks (so no Advantage, and not auto-crit if the attack was within 5 feet). To my mind the two or more attacks are all happening almost simultaneously... so while they cannot be re-directed, they don't gain the bonuses of attacking Unconscious creatures. (Of course if the creature has another attack they can do in addition to their Multiattack, then that one could either get re-directed and go after a different target, or would gain the bonuses for attacking an Unconscious target if they didn't change.)

To me, this is mainly a narrative thing-- these rounds have all this crazy stuff happening across the battlefield in 6 second chunks. If you stab someone and they fall to the ground, you have no idea (in the narrative) if they are dead or unconscious or dying or just hurt. So the idea that you would spend precious seconds just chopping away at this body "just to make sure" while all of your allies are potentially seconds away from being stabbed and killed themselves just doesn't sit well with me. If you got one target down, get over and help out your friends! There's no time to waste!

And by the same token, I also don't particularly care for it when healing characters DON'T come to an ally's aid because they think "Oh, the PC still has a couple rounds to fail their Death saves before I have to worry about them, so let's just let them lie there. I consider both of these things a form of metagaming-- knowing that there is a 3 Death Save "window" for game rule purposes only-- and thus changing your actions away from what would make more narrative sense to take advantage of or to deal with that "window" is one of the few times metagaming kind of annoys me.

 

[Reynard]

And by the same token, I also don't particularly care for it when healing characters DON'T come to an ally's aid because they think "Oh, the PC still has a couple rounds to fail their Death saves before I have to worry about them, so let's just let them lie there. I consider both of these things a form of metagaming-- knowing that there is a 3 Death Save "window" for game rule purposes only-- and thus changing your actions away from what would make more narrative sense to take advantage of or to deal with that "window" is one of the few times metagaming kind of annoys me.

It is a game, though, and metagaming such things is part of play. Do you track the PC hit points for them and just tell them how they feel? HP are, after all, a purely metagame concept and don't actually reflect anything in the narrative. (Well, I guess the last one does...)