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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5746503" data-attributes="member: 42582">As [MENTION=4892]Vyvyan Basterd[/MENTION] posted, 4e addresses this with the option to kill or subdue an opponent when reducing him/her to 0 hp.In 4e it's not the PC who has the control, it is the player. It's just one example of 4e granting players a degree of narrative control over aspects of the gameworld other than their PCs. (At my own table, we play it this way: the player must declare in advance of an attack whether his/her desire is death or subdual, and then if the attack reduces the NPC to 0 hp the player's desire is realised.)I can't speak for [MENTION=336]D'karr[/MENTION], but yes, this sounds to me very different from how I like to play the game, and more simulationist.In my game, the weight of the choice between killing and taking prisoner isn't about mechanical trade-offs. It's about thematic/evaluative trade-offs.I agree with you that in a game with a mechanical alignment system, the choice of alignment already predetermines what those thematic/evaluative trade-offs should be. That's one reason why I hate mechanical alignment systems and have not used them since the mid-80s, when I read the article in Dragon 101 called "For King and Country".A similar discussion to this one came up earlier this year when I posted about <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/301282-actual-play-examples-balance-between-fiction-mechanics.html" target="_blank">a skill challenge</a> involving my PCs taming a dire bear without killing it:I tend to agree with Victim in this discussion. If what you want are choices that are thematically/evaulatively expressive, then mechanical penalties and advantages will get in the way of such choices, because they will intefere with the choice situation by overlaying it with the sorts of considerations of optimality and expedience that Victim talks about.In my 4e game, decisions by the players about who their PCs kill and who they take prisoner are highly meaningful and carry a lot of weight, precisely because those decisions were made even though the player could just as easily had the PC not be a killer.</blockquote>

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