D&D 5E "Just Kill Them": Balancing PC survival and Monster Intelligence

[steeldragons]

I've run games (and played in games) that ended in a TPK before. Usually, it happens due to some bad dice rolls. And yeah, there are some monsters that aren't going to capture you (an owlbear don't care, he just wants food). But I've seen more than a few TPKs also retconned with "You wake up in a dungeon stripped of all your gear" as a way of continuing the game. Is it fair? Does it lessen the foes involved to do this?

Is it fair? Fair to whom? What is "fair" in this context? I don't think it has a single particular answer. If the group wants to continue in that fashion...if the DM doesn't mind and/or has other grander schemes for the captured/naked "heroes"...then it's fine for, or "fair", according to that group...does that make it "fair" for all games/tables/circumstances of a TPK? I'm gonna go with a big, "Nooo. Nuh uh."

Does it lessen the foes?....If the foes took them prisoner, it's because the DM decided they would do that...so...no. I don't see how that "lessens the foes." The foes are doing what the foes "would do", according to the DM, which is the only way they can do anything. If the DM is just doing it to appease some whiny players? Then it lessens the DM...the fictional "foes" have no intrinsic value to be lessened or enhanced...they only exist by and how the DM says so.

 

[Celtavian]

It seems Corpsetaker isn't very up on Forgotten Realms drow or drow in general. I've read the drow Forgotten Realms books and drow lore over the year. They are a "fun" group.

I disagree with how the drow would deal with your PCs. The drow are not practical. They are powerful. They are somewhat insane. They believe they can break any type of slave including the wizard. These new non-magic resistant drow might worry about mages more. The old magic resistant drow would definitely turn a human mage into a highly valued slave. Drow essentially believe they are the top of the food chain and everything beneath them is subject to their whim. The drow fear nothing because to fear something is to give it equal regard. Killing is too easy for the drow. They do it to defeat their enemies. If they can find some more entertaining and valuable way to dispose of you, they will.

As I see it if they captured a group like yours, they would be rather happy:

1. They know elves live a 1000 years like themselves. Why would they kill them fast when they can kill them over the course of a thousand years? If they have time, they would probably spend time breaking their spirits and turning them against the elf gods, they sacrificing them to Lolth while they proclaimed the Spider Queen their goddess.

2. A traitor dark elf will likely be sacrificed to Lolth depending on his status and class. It would probably be done in ritualistic fashion. They may even do some magic on him to twist him and turn him into something monstrous that causes him to suffer for a long while. They would probably try to find out if the dark elf knew of other dark elves betraying Lolth. They would love to know his family. If it was a family they knew, they could shame that family by outing one of their members as a traitor. They might even try to extract money from the opposing family to hide their crime: producing a dark elf that betrayed Lolth.

3. The half-orc would be the least valuable slave gaining them no social status or favor with Lolth. Just a grunt that will be worked to death with a short lifespan. A cheap slave easily acquired and controlled. No prize at all. The half-orc is the one most likely to die because he is the least valuable.

4. It's drow. This isn't the first mage they've enslaved. They likely have all types of sick tools for controlling mages. Hand-shackles that lock up the fingers. A muzzle for the mouth. They would take their time breaking a slave as valuable as a mage. The mage would fetch a high price from a house willing to take the time to break a slave that knew a high value skill like magic. Then use some type of drow magic to keep him in line.

It's the drow. They don't play the idiot card. They're by nature overconfident, sadistic, and willing to enslave anyone because they believe they can. Prizes like living elves that fall into their capture web are prizes to be savored, not ended quickly. I wouldn't at all be surprised if surface elves fight to the death against drow because being captured by them is a far worse fate.

It is harder to rationalize quick deaths by the drow in my opinion. If you're quickly killing the PCs with a drow enemy, that would seem very undrow-like. Drow are overconfident, racist, zealous, insane, and worship a Demon Goddess that fuels all those traits. They'll take their time dealing with prisoners looking for ways to extract value from them while torturing them.

 

[Celtavian]

Has anyone mentioned that maybe the truth of the matter is that this just isn't a well organized adventure, unless you don't mind handwaving things into things being inconsistent?

My group doesn't work this way so the party would need to be all drow or possibly duergar in order for it to make sense. My player's and I need consistency in order to enjoy the game.

Not sure why you think the drow taking slaves doesn't make sense. They are known slavers. They view every other race as possible slaves including races like mind flayers or beholders. The drow are insane. They believe themselves the rulers of the Underdark and thus the rightful rulers of the world. Little speck PCs don't scare them at all. They would look to sell what valuable slaves they took. They would have the tools for controlling them.

If you played the drow killing PCs they had captured, that would be very undrow-like. They don't look at slaves like people do the regular world. "Oh strong back, he'll be a good slave." They look at slaves for all of their possible uses. "Mage. He can do magic at my bidding." "Cleric. Sacrifice for Lolth after we have thoroughly broken it." "Fighter. Sell him to one of the clubs with fighting pits or use him as a cannon fodder."

Drow are not interested in efficiency. They're not practical. They're not even usually sane. Starting the adventure captured and in a slave facility doesn't at all indicate a disorganized adventure. It may be poor later on, but the initial scenario is very believable given drow love to take slaves. They don't value slaves on physical ability alone. Drow have lots of ways to value captured lower life forms. They don't worry about slaves breaking and running. That's just a way to belittle one of their fellows and play more games with their pawns. A slave hunt for the drow might well be viewed like a fox hunt by surface royalty. Something to be done for entertainment with the hope that the slave or group of slaves will provide an entertaining tale once they have been recaptured enhancing their value on the slave market.

 

[Dausuul]

Another possibility: If I remember right, the premise of OotA is that a rift to the Abyss has opened up and demonic insanity is flooding the whole Underdark. Maybe these drow are just nuts (even more nuts than usual for drow). It could even be a hint to the premise of the adventure.

 

[Lanefan]

If the party get captured and chucked in prison as a baked-in part of the module it won't be the first time.

Anyone else here remember the transition from A-3 (Slave Lords) to A-4 (Slavers' Dungeon)?

As for whether the opponents kill downed PCs I take it case by case. Smart opponents usually realize a downed foe is not a threat as long as no allies can get to it. Dumb opponents, however, might not: on more than one occasion I've had dumb giants or ogres keep pounding (or jumping up and down) on a downed PC because it was FUUUUN! even though there was still a battle going on elsewhere and thier friends were getting pasted by the rest of the PC party.

Lan-"and really smart and devious opponents will kill the downed if they can, just to make sure they're not faking it"-efan

 

[Leatherhead]

I'm reminded of Fallout: New Vegas.
In the very first scene of the game, the PC is shot at point blank in the head with a gun, then buried in a shallow grave.

They get better, obviously.

[sblock] A robot digs them out of the grave and gives them to a local doctor (in order to fulfill a convoluted ploy set up by it's master). Later on you meet up with the guy that shot you, and he is justifiably shocked.[/sblock]

There are more than enough ways to cheat death, or recover from it, especially when you are in a magically rich setting like the Underdark and there happens to be a plethora of Deamon Lords walking around causing reality to crumble and mortals to go nuts. Heck, with the various hells breaking into the prime material world all over the place, you would have to wonder why more dead souls aren't making the trip back.

So in summary: Just kill them, have them walk back from hell via a portal (yes even the paladin and cleric, cause the planes are screwed up right around here now), see their corpses on the ground, and then have the portal collapse behind them. Now you have them all in the same place, without their gear, and ready to start the adventure proper just as if they were captured.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Ignoring OotA or a moment, the same scenario can really apply to any monster with intelligence enough to gauge its foe's abilities. Does it make sense that a foe would risk taking prisoners (for whatever reason) with the abilities most PCs have, especially if they've seen the PCs abilities in action (which combat surely would show)? Would a dragon? Would a lich? Would a mind flayer?

On the surface, it makes a lot of sense for evil monsters to outright slaughter good-aligned adventurers. They tend to be pains in the neck and their abilities make them hard to control or contain. I'm sure any monster with a double digit Int score can determine that. The logical thing is to kill such foes before they escape and come back with reinforcements. The question is, should that logical answer trump the genre trope of "capture and escape" in order to keep the game running. Put another way, is the need for internal consistency worth the cost of rolling up all new characters?

Remember that it's not simply a matter of Int, but also Wis. To paraphrase the 1e DMG, Intelligence is knowing that smoking is bad for you, Wisdom is quitting. So a high Int, low Wis enemy might recognize the risk the PCs pose, but also might not be able to resist the urge to keep them alive for torture. Monsters are typically flesh and blood, rather than emotionless killing machines like the Terminator. They don't have to be Bond villains in order to make mistakes that lead to their own downfall (such as capturing PCs rather than executing them).

I think that if enemies don't always prioritize killing PCs, it makes the PCs less of "special snowflakes" than the converse. For example, a while back in my current campaign the PCs acquired a lich's phylactery without recognizing its significance. The lich was aware of this fact, so he sent his minions (an undead mage and three helmed horrors) to retrieve it. The enemy might have been able to TPK the party but that wasn't the mission. Once they were able to grab the phylactery, they made a fighting withdrawal. Because, to the lich, the PCs were nothing special. He didn't care if they lived or died. But he very much wanted his phylactery out of their hands. If the lich had realized how much trouble these relative nobodies would cause him in the near future, he'd undoubtedly have tried to finish them off, but he didn't. The PCs lived another day because they weren't important enough to kill.

As long as you run a monster as a living being with emotions, desires and flaws (rather than a walking, talking calculator with giant fangs) there's a good chance that you can find a justification to "spare" the PCs. Not that it's necessary in every case. In that same campaign, the rogue was turned to paste when she triggered a pair elementals bound to guard the prison she was breaking into.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

BUT that doesn't make for a fun experience, especially for 5 our of 6 PCs. Instead, OotA creates the infamous James Bond scenario; put the heroes in an elaborate death or imprisonment rather than just putting a bullet in their heads and be done. In D&D, as in most fiction, that is done to create tension and drama. Still, it leaves the "smart and cunning" villains holding the idiot ball as clearly if the shoe was on the other foot (that is, the PCs captured a drow raiding party) they most likely wouldn't leave them with a chance of escape. (To be honest, they'd probably be killed by the PCs and take anything of value.)

IMO it is better to create social customs and norms such that neither the PCs nor the drow have a vested interest in scorched earth strategies. The last time my players fought a drow war party, most of them explicitly tried to leave them unconscious-and-looted-but-alive. (And then the dragonborn death cleric started eating the unconscious drow because he was hungry. Sigh.)

The most obvious reasons for the drow to leave the PCs alive are that 1.) there are diplomatic repercussions to killing them, in the sense of possibly starting a hot war on a new front (e.g. they're all wearing the livery of mind flayer sevants); 2.) it is more advantageous to leave them alive. Since #1 doesn't lend itself to enslavement (because there would still be diplomatic repercussions), here are my ideas for how live elves are more useful to drow than dead elves:

1.) You can Geas them to prevent them from escaping and use them as slave labor. Cliched and kind of boring, but usable.

2.) You can pump them for intelligence on elven military developments and disposition, in preparing for an upcoming offensive. (Or to defend against an expected elven offensive.)

3.) [my favorite] You can save them for trade with mind flayers, either because elven brains are more useful in the recipe for creating Intellect Devourers or because you want to buy some Intellect Devourers and then use the elves as shells for your hired Intellect Devourer spies.

#3 leads to a fun subplot once you get back to the surface, wherein the PCs are struggling to contain a suspected Intellect Devourer infestation of unknown size or prevalence among senior elven leadership, but they don't know who to trust and who is unsafe to be alone with.​

There's a third reason not to kill defeated enemies, although it doesn't apply to elves and drow: it is too much hassle and you've already got what you want. A stereotypical example of this from my campaign would be what happens when a pair of mated tyrranosaurs stumble across a small party of five (N)PCs on horses. The dinosaurs want something to eat, and they want not to be bothered while they eat. What the dinosaur really wants to do as soon as an (N)PC goes down is to eat it, but if other (N)PCs are still attacking the dinosaur might switch targets and attack them instead. Once everybody is down, it might eat everybody, but it might not be that hungry, and any (N)PCs who are downed but not eaten will be left for dead, and their survival rate will depend purely upon whether or not they make their death checks. That is typically how my PCs deal with monsters; they usually don't go around cutting throats once a monster goes down, because they just don't care whether they ever meet these orcs again. (It's just more XP.) Or at least, that is my interpretation of my players' behavior--I haven't ever explicitly asked.

Edit: Oh, I see that Fanaelialae already mentioned this third option.

 

[77IM]

"A game is a series of interesting decisions," and a decision where you have no idea what to expect is boring. So establish expectations, and then follow them:

• If the players are expecting to be captured, the enemy should capture them. The enemy shouldn't kill them, that's just mean, and violates player expectations AND player agency (because the players didn't see it coming they are denied any chance to do anything about it).
• If the players are expecting to be killed, the enemy should kill them, OR the enemy should capture them and this should be commented on as an unusual event -- a mystery for the PCs to solve.

Paradoxically, players expect to have their expectations violated occasionally; if everything happens as expected, it's boring. BUT they expect that there is a good in-game reason for it. "It's a genre trope" is immersion-breaking and unsatisfying for most players. (But not all; YMMV.)

 

[Celtavian]

Remember that it's not simply a matter of Int, but also Wis. To paraphrase the 1e DMG, Intelligence is knowing that smoking is bad for you, Wisdom is quitting. So a high Int, low Wis enemy might recognize the risk the PCs pose, but also might not be able to resist the urge to keep them alive for torture. Monsters are typically flesh and blood, rather than emotionless killing machines like the Terminator. They don't have to be Bond villains in order to make mistakes that lead to their own downfall (such as capturing PCs rather than executing them).

I think that if enemies don't always prioritize killing PCs, it makes the PCs less of "special snowflakes" than the converse. For example, a while back in my current campaign the PCs acquired a lich's phylactery without recognizing its significance. The lich was aware of this fact, so he sent his minions (an undead mage and three helmed horrors) to retrieve it. The enemy might have been able to TPK the party but that wasn't the mission. Once they were able to grab the phylactery, they made a fighting withdrawal. Because, to the lich, the PCs were nothing special. He didn't care if they lived or died. But he very much wanted his phylactery out of their hands. If the lich had realized how much trouble these relative nobodies would cause him in the near future, he'd undoubtedly have tried to finish them off, but he didn't. The PCs lived another day because they weren't important enough to kill.

As long as you run a monster as a living being with emotions, desires and flaws (rather than a walking, talking calculator with giant fangs) there's a good chance that you can find a justification to "spare" the PCs. Not that it's necessary in every case. In that same campaign, the rogue was turned to paste when she triggered a pair elementals bound to guard the prison she was breaking into.

It's also a matter of cultural norms. Even if you have a race of highly intelligent and wise beings like the drow does not mean they will operate at what a different culture might see as maximum efficient behavior. The drow are smart and cunning. They are wise and intelligent. This isn't why they are so dangerous and frightening. A wise and smart culture might also be merciful even if they are militaristic treating prisoners or defeated nations in a humane and just fashion due to their cultural norms.

The reason the drow are so frightening is their cultural norms are far away from the cultural norms of other groups. Slavery, greed, status climbing, survival of the fittest, lust, physical appearance over other traits highly valued, materialistic, merciless, depraved, torture loving, and power starved. The cultural norms of the drow fuel their motivations and actions.

When deciding to kill fallen PCs I always look at the type of enemy they're fighting not just in terms of their intelligence and wisdom, but also their cultural ideals.