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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6618334" data-attributes="member: 6787650">First of all, I have to say that the fight you ran sounds AWESOME. Congrats to the players on winning instead of dying!Second of all, I'd say that coming within a hairsbreadth of dying is its own punishment/reward. Do you really need to change that?Third, I definitely do have some monsters whose goal is to grab a tasty bite to eat and then leave. Allosaurs, ghouls, mustard jellies, chain worms have all been known to be satisfied with a single kill. Sometimes that is to the PCs advantage (monster is eating your dead buddy for the next minute, which gives you time to sneak away) and sometimes it is not (you won the combat but your buddy is still dead).Fourth, since I take gameworld physics seriously (it is a known fact to all monsters and NPCs that most wounds take less than a day to heal), winning the field is far more important to NPCs in D&D land than it is to armies in our world. There can still be pyrrhic victories, but for the most part as long as you "win" the battle, your casualties are temporary. (Death checks result in life something like 2/3 of the time, which is almost as good of a result as real-world ICU scenarios, but without any requirement to actually get casualties to the ICU.) The most common reason for my monsters to fail a morale check and run away is when the combat turns against them enough that they realize we're not going to win this one, and if I die here I die for real. That didn't faze your PCs, and they toughed it out and won anyway--but the average hill giant doesn't think that way. Instead of toughing it out to win the battle, he saves his own skin by running away.As a result of the above dynamic (monsters attacking only when they think they can win), I use larger monster bands than some DMs do, but enemies also usually break at around the 50% casualty mark, at which point the PCs are often able to kill them while they're running away. (PCs are reluctant to let enemies run away successfully for some reason. It's a very human but nonetheless interesting response.) Intelligent enemies may surrender instead of running, depending on their reasons for initiating combat in the first place. So my combats are both harder and easier than vanilla combats.Conclusion: I don't think it's a problem that your PCs are willing to fight it out to the bitter end, but if you have a reason to make monsters start finishing off downed enemies, go ahead! It may or may not be smart tactics (depending on the situation) but it's certainly not unfair.P.S. One final comment: I also use a AD&D/Speed Factor-ish initiative variant, so it's quite common for monsters not to precisely calibrate their attacks to PC hit points. If you're at 7 HP and there are three monsters attacking you, they're not going to abort their attacks the instant you hit zero HP. It's "oh, two of them hit you, for 8 and 10 points of damage apiece--that means you're at two failed death checks already." So even monsters who wouldn't deliberately waste time finishing you off might do so accidentally, due to the way initiative works.</blockquote>

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