D&D 5E My group is questioning everyone.

[dd.stevenson]

I always tell players to narrate their own kills. The way that turns out, very few monsters survive that narration in any kind of interrogation-ready state.

 

[Plane Sailing]

I suggest eliminating the "knockout" rule and instituting the following house rules:

Not even house rules! PHB p198

"Mighty villains and special non player characters are common exceptions: The DM might have them fall unconscious and follow the same rules as player characters"

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

That's a good thing, if you ask me. In real life, true heroes don't do a lot of killing. Whenever I play anything but chaotic evil characters, I make a point of not killing when it's not strictly necessary (usually in self-defense or legitimate defense of others). While I love D&D, the amount of slaughtering of human-like creatures that goes into your typical adventure (my own adventures included) is really weird. Makes me think that players don't spend a lot of time thinking about the meaningfulness of the choices their characters make, and I think that should be a huge part of playing.

 

[Psikerlord#]

You could always add a dose of "realism" to it:

When you try to knock out a creature, there is, say, a 50% chance that you accidentally kill them.

I quite like this. I think my houserule will be, to knock out, you have to make the last hit with disad and then the foe gets a death save. If he makes the death save (55% chance), he's unconscious, if fails (45%), he dies.

The other good point made earlier is if you threaten someone, they may well lie to you just to get the threatening to end. So yeah throw some unreliable info at the party from time to time to keep things interesting.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

With the rule that you can knock people out instead of killing them, my group is doing this to an unusual amount of people. If the creature refuses to talk, they just threaten to kill them. After while, I run out of new conversations for my monsters to have!? Any ideas?

Use more monsters where the PCs don't speak the critters' language.

Though really I think what you've stumbled on is a feature, not a bug.

 

[MechaPilot]

I quite like this. I think my houserule will be, to knock out, you have to make the last hit with disad and then the foe gets a death save. If he makes the death save (55% chance), he's unconscious, if fails (45%), he dies.

The other good point made earlier is if you threaten someone, they may well lie to you just to get the threatening to end. So yeah throw some unreliable info at the party from time to time to keep things interesting.

Naturally, it all depends on how difficult you want it to be to K.O. an enemy, but your rule sounds doubly punitive to me. I don't see the need for the death save on top of rolling to hit with disadvantage. If I were to apply a penalty, I'd likely go with one or the other, but not both.

You could even make it a Con save vs a DC equal to the damage done instead of a death save. That would encourage PCs to use less lethal weapons when trying to K.O. an enemy.

Also, as someone else has pointed out, the DM can rule that monsters just die at zero HPs.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Naturally, it all depends on how difficult you want it to be to K.O. an enemy, but your rule sounds doubly punitive to me. I don't see the need for the death save on top of rolling to hit with disadvantage. If I were to apply a penalty, I'd likely go with one or the other, but not both.

You could even make it a Con save vs a DC equal to the damage done instead of a death save. That would encourage PCs to use less lethal weapons when trying to K.O. an enemy.

Also, as someone else has pointed out, the DM can rule that monsters just die at zero HPs.

I wouldn't always impose disad, depends on the weapon - a fist, chair or club, normal attack. A sword disad. Or maybe treat ad improv weapon (pommel, flat of blade, etc).

 

[AmerginLiath]

I honestly like the idea of seeing parties where killing intelligent creatures isn't the go-to answer. Yes, sometimes there isn't information to be gotten. But, nevertheless, the change to be made when the party is refusing to automatically slaughter everything in sight might not be on the "punish them for not killing" side, but rather on the DM's side. Your average humanoid opponent (goblins, orcs, random thugs) are 'bully' fighters who aren't going to come back after someone who brought them down to unconsciousness in what's basically a fantasy mugging. The benefit of a party not defaulting to killing is that alignment – which in 5e isn't as mechanical as it was before – can have better use for moral quandary and legal situations, and those moments where the PCs do decide that fighting directly to the death against an enemy gain a narrative traction that 99.99% of D&D games never reach.

 

[RotGrub]

I'd strongly suggest you come up with some house rules for interrogation. It actually takes weeks of interrogation to get information out of an enemy.

I suggest you turn their foes into religious fanatics who will even spit in their face when threatened with death. "Screwface kill me a thousand deaths worse than you"

I found that PC won't interrogate an NPC for too long. They usually question them, and if they don't answer immediately they give up and/or they kill the guy. Once that happens a few times they will start to realize that a single diplo check is not enough. Even with a diplomacy check someone can be friendly and still not want to become a traitor.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Thank you to the folks who have suggested that maybe it's actually nice to encourage players having their PCs incapacitate rather than kill. Long before 4e, I was using the house rule that you could declare normal or subdual damage as you liked on any given hit, thus ensuring that if the players wanted to bring down a baddie using nonlethal damage, they probably could. (Offer did not apply WRT outsiders constructs oozes or undead, but YMMV.)

Honestly, if your problem is that the players are doing this to the point of tedium, my solution would be to just talk to the players out of game and explain that (a) yes, this is a good idea in general if the bad guys are likely to have usable info but (b) not every evil minion is going to know something useful. The more immediate in-game approach is to just tell them "look guys, yes this is the 15th kobold sentry in a row you've interrogated, and NO, he doesn't know any more about the plots of the clerics running the Elemental Nodes of Evil than did the jackalwere you ran into on the road." Just cut the interrogations short.

Personally, I would jump for joy if my players' PCs knocked out and arrested every sentient humanoid opponent they encountered; it would strike me as far closer to an actual in-practice "Lawful Good" ethos than the chop-'em-to-bits standard of D&D, even heroic D&D.