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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6698839" data-attributes="member: 6787650">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.</blockquote>

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