Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ExploderWizard" data-source="post: 7309069" data-attributes="member: 66434">The rules of 5E are not set up to handle this situation very well at all. While custom combat rules can be created to handle these situations, in order to be fair the PCs will get to make use of them also. Think about the consequences of the players using the rules to their advantage before implementing them. While as a DM you may only employ special capture rules sparingly, the players will arrange to set up situations where they can employ these rules whenever possible if they are actually effective and end conflicts quickly. The majority of players will usually choose to go down fighting rather than surrender. A variety of factors contribute to this. The players do not like the the feeling of being powerless for the sake of some narrative. The game rules also make being revived from the dead fairly easy and consequence free so why not fight to the death? Some players would rather simply have a beloved character dead for good than have an annoying or hated NPC gloat over their capture. These types of factors will not be addressed by simply making the capturing force overwhelmingly powerful or even with the ability to one shot PCs. Players under such circumstances will simply smile, smack talk the bad guys and try to take down as many as they can before dying a heroic death, at least I probably would. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Best advice would be to not design scenarios in which the PCs MUST be captured. It is ok to have monsters or NPCs attempt to take captives if it makes sense to do so but avoid plot device tricks to engineer such outcomes.</blockquote>

Verification