zanshin
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- Jan 13, 2021
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These are really good points, and reflect my gamed experience.Having enemies fight to the death rather than surrendering can in fact be a way of avoiding the moral implications of execution, especially if the PCs are not really in the position to look after prisoners.
Personally as a GM, if surrender looks like an NPCs most viable option then they'll try it. What players have done in response to previous such attempts is only relevant if the NPC is likely to have heard about it. (And who's going to tell them, given that the witnesses are dead?)
If I'm trying to run a game where the PCs are all heroic (in a moral sense) and that's the tone I'm aiming for, then I would be careful about surrender. This is perhaps another reason why GMs have npcs fight to the death, because it avoids the moral implications of surrender when keeping prisoners is not viable, or of chasing down and killing fleeing enemies when you really can't afford to have them getting away.
It seems much more heroic if your enemies die on their feet facing you.
Player groups are effectively like special forces teams , often operating deep in enemy territory. They often have no facility to take prisoners. Some enemiies in some campaigns (Chaos in Runequest Glorantha for example) will be considered so vile that extermination is a duty.
Perhaps we need the imprisonment equivalent of Leomunds little hut as a spell