D&D General Why are we fighting?

[Hussar]

An NPC is "hostile" if they attack you or clearly intend to do so. If a PC decides to strike preemptively, that has more to do with them than the NPC.

Not that there aren't plenty of reasons why that might happen.

Hostile in the sense that they will actively work against you. IOW, the roadblocks that DM's continually place in the way of the players in the name of "believability" simply reinforce the very behaviour that these same DM's complain about.

If every NPC will automatically treat the PC's as untrustworthy and "be leery" of them, resulting in the players constantly being frustrated by trying to resolve situations in anything other than just killing everything, then the players will default to the path of least resistance.

Like I said earlier in my response to @Lanefan - if the fleeing baddie will always result in a negative, then the players will never let anything go. Why bother talking to anything, taking prisoners or letting things run away if it just bites them in the ass?

If you want players to actually behave in a particular way, then that particular way has to be rewarded in some fashion. If it is only ever penalized, then no rational player will ever do it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It doesn't help that D&D has rarely given players tools to address problems non-violently that aren't entirely dependent on properly second-guessing how the GM will respond to them, where the tools for violence are at least fairly predictable and relatively objective.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Hostile in the sense that they will actively work against you. IOW, the roadblocks that DM's continually place in the way of the players in the name of "believability" simply reinforce the very behaviour that these same DM's complain about.

If every NPC will automatically treat the PC's as untrustworthy and "be leery" of them, resulting in the players constantly being frustrated by trying to resolve situations in anything other than just killing everything, then the players will default to the path of least resistance.

Like I said earlier in my response to @Lanefan - if the fleeing baddie will always result in a negative, then the players will never let anything go. Why bother talking to anything, taking prisoners or letting things run away if it just bites them in the ass?

If you want players to actually behave in a particular way, then that particular way has to be rewarded in some fashion. If it is only ever penalized, then no rational player will ever do it.

What would you suggest then? Give specific examples that give those reasons without breaking from the reality of the situation at hand. Not every group of PCs are the Avengers, and they shouldn't have to be.

 

[Lanefan]

Hostile in the sense that they will actively work against you. IOW, the roadblocks that DM's continually place in the way of the players in the name of "believability" simply reinforce the very behaviour that these same DM's complain about.

Some of the DMs, maybe. Not me. If in-character they wanna slaughter everything that moves, who am I to stop 'em?

If every NPC will automatically treat the PC's as untrustworthy and "be leery" of them, resulting in the players constantly being frustrated by trying to resolve situations in anything other than just killing everything, then the players will default to the path of least resistance.

Depends on the NPC. In town some are trustworthy, some aren't - much like a wild-west sort of real life. In the field in enemy territory the ratio of untrustworthies naturally tends to rise.

Like I said earlier in my response to @Lanefan - if the fleeing baddie will always result in a negative, then the players will never let anything go. Why bother talking to anything, taking prisoners or letting things run away if it just bites them in the ass?

We long ago found that Speak With Dead gives the best of both worlds. You get to kill 'em AND you get their info.

 

[Andvari]

Do the captives mostly behave that way because it makes sense in the setting for them to do so, or because it's easier to for the table for them to not be an issue?

Also, how friendly is your PCs relationship with the local law? In my experience, most PCs are too independently minded to essentially act as law enforcement, and most law enforcement officials are very leery of vigilantes.

It usually makes sense as their morale is broken and they’d rather not risk face the PCs again. Though as DM you can typically come up with arguments either way, but I consider them defeated at that point, so I tend to push the fiction in that direction.

The PCs are currently employed by the city council, so local law enforcement is interested in helping them. Especially if it means they don’t have to deal with the monsters in combat. Though they might start executing prisoners on their own if there are too many captives to hold.

 

[Hussar]

What would you suggest then? Give specific examples that give those reasons without breaking from the reality of the situation at hand. Not every group of PCs are the Avengers, and they shouldn't have to be.

Ok, gaming story time.

We were playing Dungeon of the Mad Mage. On one of the levels (I'm avoiding spoilers here), we met a Drow outpost - the main town of the drow was somewhere else. Now, we went in, crushed the outpost and kept one of them alive. And, when I say crushed, I mean it. I don't think we lost so much as a hit point. Now, my very frightening Paladin of Asmodeus tells our prisoner that we will release her to return to her people. We don't want to fight, but, we will if we have too. Just stay out of our way. We've just proven that you are no match for us, we're not interested in you, just stay out of our way.

So, we do a few things, spend some time doing stuff, and then wander into the drow town (mostly by accident since we were pretty much just aimlessly wandering looking for something else). Of course, the entire town comes out to attack us. Tries to mob us.

The entire fight, I'm saying (both in and out of character), We had zero interest in this fight. This is entirely your fault.

Wound up spending most of an entire session dice rolling our way through the fights.

-----

Now, how I would have handled that is entirely different. The released drow, terrified because we just obliterated all the others with ease, goes back to her people, tells them to give us a wide berth and be really polite if we do happen to venture close.

But, of course that didn't happen. Silly me for forgetting the cardinal rule of D&D which is that you must kill every single thing you meet, otherwise, you're just wasting your time.

I'd argue that it's very much a failure of the DM's imagination if they cannot think of why the defeated bad guys stay defeated and don't monkey's paw every single thing the party does.

 

[Quartz]

For those arguing that it's mechanically impossible to flee in 5E, that very much depends on an environment.

It's little-appreciated but Action Surge is the Fighter's flee power.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

It doesn't help that D&D has rarely given players tools to address problems non-violently that aren't entirely dependent on properly second-guessing how the GM will respond to them, where the tools for violence are at least fairly predictable and relatively objective.

That is why I like the Influence Action in One D&D along with the default attitude for NPCs. You could work up a set of morale rules from there.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

It's an old issue. I'm reminded of some of the discussions I participated in, ~25 years ago in the USENET newsgroups, particularly rec.games.frp.advocacy. The problems of both PCs and NPCs fighting to the death and never trying to surrender or flee, problems with GMs trying to set up scenarios where the PCs are expected to surrender, and problems with game mechanics that are weak on breaking away and escaping combat. GMs were expected to wing that last, with all the problems of unsatisfactory arbitrariness that involved. Even the pure Gamist guy's answer was that it should be intuitively obvious to everyone when a fleeing group has broken contact - no crunchy mechanics needed there.

It was a problem with games in general, not just D&D. For PCs fighting to the death, the consensus was that if everyone in the party is still able to fight, then it's too soon to try to run, and if a PC goes down (or is even just slowed by injury) then it's too late to try to run. The right time to run never happens, and no one could come up with a fix for that.

As for the original question of "why are we fighting" - for most players, combat is a big part of the fun, and while players will accept an occasional no-combat session, if offered a no-combat or best-to-avoid-combat campaign, they'll turn it down in favor of vacuuming the cat or watching paint dry. The problem is that combat is generally a lot less fun for GMs than for the players. So there is a lot of online advice on running low-combat/no-combat/best-to-avoid-combat games and getting the players to like it, because on-line discussions about gaming skew heavily (in my experience) toward the GMs' point of view.

 

[Vaalingrade]

It's little-appreciated but Action Surge is the Fighter's flee power.

Which would mean something if there wasn't a whole party trying not to die in this team game that desperately wants to conceal that it's a team game.