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Combating fights to the death
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<blockquote data-quote="Kurotowa" data-source="post: 7607368" data-attributes="member: 27957"><p>This is excellent advice and a good intro to the core of the issue: Make sure your incentives are structured correctly. If you only award XP for kills your players will try to rack up the highest body count possible. If your monsters ignore attempts at parley, fight to the death, and pursue a group attempting to make an orderly retreat then your players will learn not to waste actions with anything but attacks. If taking prisoners turns into a tactical headache and moral quagmire that costs party resources rather than rewarding bounties or ransoms, your players will try to avoid leaving survivors to trouble themselves with. And remember, your players aren't blank slates. They're coming to your campaign with the habits of every previous game they've played. Breaking them of old habits takes time and reinforcement.</p><p></p><p>There's an interesting Let's Read thread over on RPGnet going through the AD&D 1e DMG right now, and it's really illustrating for me what an interconnected web some of those old rules were. Sure, the Random Encounter tables could throw out encounters that it would be suicidal for the PCs to tackle head on. But there were rules for surprise and encounter distance that meant the party had a chance to notice the enemies at a safe range and avoid them, or vise versa. There were Reaction rolls that allowed for results besides Attacks On Sight. Movement scales were such that retreat was possible, and one poster recounted his group having drop bags of food or coin to throw open and bait pursuers into giving up in favor of the easy reward. Every monster had a Morale score that gave their own chance of breaking and fleeing combat, and groups of monsters would check under various conditions like having lost enough group members or the group leader falling. Heck, even the fact that PCs usually ran with a posse of henchmen and hirelings in the back who could secure prisoners and leave the PCs free to do PC things.</p><p></p><p>So here's the steps you need to go through. First you need to figure out how to make options like retreat or surrender <em>better options</em> than fighting to the death. Then you need to clearly communicate to your players how and why these options not only exist but are worth taking. Then you need to show them being better in action, probably with some adventure scenarios scripted to deliberately highlight them.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Kurotowa, post: 7607368, member: 27957"] This is excellent advice and a good intro to the core of the issue: Make sure your incentives are structured correctly. If you only award XP for kills your players will try to rack up the highest body count possible. If your monsters ignore attempts at parley, fight to the death, and pursue a group attempting to make an orderly retreat then your players will learn not to waste actions with anything but attacks. If taking prisoners turns into a tactical headache and moral quagmire that costs party resources rather than rewarding bounties or ransoms, your players will try to avoid leaving survivors to trouble themselves with. And remember, your players aren't blank slates. They're coming to your campaign with the habits of every previous game they've played. Breaking them of old habits takes time and reinforcement. There's an interesting Let's Read thread over on RPGnet going through the AD&D 1e DMG right now, and it's really illustrating for me what an interconnected web some of those old rules were. Sure, the Random Encounter tables could throw out encounters that it would be suicidal for the PCs to tackle head on. But there were rules for surprise and encounter distance that meant the party had a chance to notice the enemies at a safe range and avoid them, or vise versa. There were Reaction rolls that allowed for results besides Attacks On Sight. Movement scales were such that retreat was possible, and one poster recounted his group having drop bags of food or coin to throw open and bait pursuers into giving up in favor of the easy reward. Every monster had a Morale score that gave their own chance of breaking and fleeing combat, and groups of monsters would check under various conditions like having lost enough group members or the group leader falling. Heck, even the fact that PCs usually ran with a posse of henchmen and hirelings in the back who could secure prisoners and leave the PCs free to do PC things. So here's the steps you need to go through. First you need to figure out how to make options like retreat or surrender [I]better options[/I] than fighting to the death. Then you need to clearly communicate to your players how and why these options not only exist but are worth taking. Then you need to show them being better in action, probably with some adventure scenarios scripted to deliberately highlight them. [/QUOTE]
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