On Morale, or should enemies run away

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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.
These are really good points, and reflect my gamed experience.

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 :smile:
 
Yes, but it is a choice to run games in such settings. And it is a choice to play in such campaigns if a GM offers them. If you don’t like it, choose not to.
Well yes but it's also a choice to run Pendragon where capturing people for ransom is a thing.

This is kind of the issue in this thread.

Is running away from enemies that are defeating you a viable strategy? It depends.
Is surrendering to enemies that are defeating you a viable strategy? It depends
Are the players reasonable in chasing down and slaughtering enemies that try to run away from them? It depends.
If players act like murder-hobos is it likely to have a big effect on their reputation and come back to bite them? It depends.

Are there any conclusions about morale and surrender and player behvaviour we can make based off this thread? Yes. It depends.
 
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Course there were exceptions but they are notable exactly because they are exceptions. And early on many of the bosses were able to avoid jail due to endemic corruption but once the FBI stepped in in the 70s that free ride came to an end. Bonnano is an odd example though as he was released from prison only due to health reasons and his old age, not exactly a free man.

One thing I've noted reading true crime histories though is that the omerta (within North America at least) was largely a fiction propagated by bosses but when it came down to it and they had to decide to roll over or do hard time, they almost all took a deal if it was available.

I recall one crack Kingpin from the 90s noting that he wasn't willing to die old and in jail without every getting to hug his grandkids based on some bullshit macho code that no one actually followed in practice.

Bodie on The Wire sums it up nicely in this classic scene.


Bonanno was in prison for contempt of court when he was released early for health reasons, not anything like murder or racketeering. He wouldn’t have spent years in prison for that. And he was released in 1986 and died in 2002. So I think he’s a good example.

Omertà being mainly a fiction, yeah for sure. Maybe it was more seriously followed hundreds of years ago but in the last hundred years it’s just been a dog and pony show.
 
These are really good points, and reflect my gamed experience.

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 :smile:

There used to be such a thing as a magic item, though I've forgotten what it was called. Mirror of Life Trapping perhaps? Unfortunately it was a pretty high level item in practice.
 
Realistically, there would only ever be one dominant species in the same 'family'

For half a million years on Earth there were multiple different Homo species or subspecies, such as Neanderthals, Denisovans, Flores Man, Callao Man…
like how Homo Sapiens killed the Neanderthals to take the top spot.

That doesn't seem to be what happened. The genetic evidence of Neanderthal and Denivsovan ancestry in human populations outside Africa is rather that our African ancestors married our Neanderthal ancestors and raised kids together.
 
For half a million years on Earth there were multiple different Homo species or subspecies, such as Neanderthals, Denisovans, Flores Man, Callao Man…
Which in the span of evolutionary years is a very tiny blip.
That doesn't seem to be what happened. The genetic evidence of Neanderthal and Denivsovan ancestry in human populations outside Africa is rather that our African ancestors married our Neanderthal ancestors and raised kids together.
My bad, when I said 'killed' I didn't mean literally. My point is that by hook or by crook Homo Sapiens became the dominant humanoid species on earth, with all the rest effectively extinct. I should have been more clear.
 
We can't conclude that because it happened it was inevitably going to happen. We simply don't have a sufficient sample size for that.
 
Which in the span of evolutionary years is a very tiny blip.

Maybe. But nevertheless it is a hundred times as long as the history of civilisation. The co-existence of multiple species and sub-species in the same "family" is not so fleeting that observing it is implausible: it is 99% of of the story of humanity.
My point is that by hook or by crook Homo Sapiens became the dominant humanoid species on earth, with all the rest effectively extinct. I should have been more clear.

I don't think that is meaningful. It depends on supposing that we modern exo-African people are the same as our unadmixed African ancestors but not the same as our European and Asian (Neanderthal) ancestors, whereas in fact we are different from both. At 1.5–3% of the populations of Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas, Neanderthals are more numerous now than they were at any time before the double sapiens came out of Africa. Neanderthals are only extinct in the same sense that my grandfathers are.
 
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We can't conclude that because it happened it was inevitably going to happen. We simply don't have a sufficient sample size for that.
We have all of earth, and the various creatures that got supplanted by their superiours. But to be fair, I'm no evolutionary scientist, so you may be right.
 
We have all of earth, and the various creatures that got supplanted by their superiours. But to be fair, I'm no evolutionary scientist, so you may be right.
The battle such as it is over respective niches. Sometimes an animal becomes extinct because an animal that is superior in it's niche takes over - this seems to have happened with the joining of the Americas or the arrival of the Dingo in Australia (although even there it is complicated. eg the Dingo may well have wiped out Thylacines through direct predation as much as competition).

However, we do have example of multiple species filling the same niche, or at least overlapping ones. Think of all the large grazing animals in Africa and all the different predators that hunt them, so there's no necessity for one animal to come out on top. And in a lot of cases it seems that animals come to fill a niche because climatic events have already caused the extinction that left it open.

Humans, of course, are very adaptable; part of our intelligence, it it theorised, arose as a response to a rapid series of climatic changes in Africa several million years ago, so we don't really fill a single ecoystem niche that we must compete with other species of humans over.

We don't really know why Neanderthal's disappeared. Personally I suspect it's a combination of climatic change and the fact that the areas they would have moved into to escape climactic change were already filled by Homo Sapiens. But I think in the same circumstances a culture of homo sapiens in the same position would have suffered largely the same fate (including partial assimilation).
 
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We have all of earth, and the various creatures that got supplanted by their superiours. But to be fair, I'm no evolutionary scientist, so you may be right.
Indeed, a scientist wouldn’t frame it in terms of superiority, or evolution in terms of a zero-sum competition leading to dominance by superior species. That sort of thing is coming from humans in the 19th and early 20th century using science to justify certain political ideologies, and it inevitably leads to some very unpleasant places.

I’d like us not to drift toward those places, if we all don’t mind.

As for the initial question of the thread… it seems it was asking about a generality and we’re now quibbling over edge cases. I don’t think a general principle of “it’s better to treat NPCs as if they’re people with a desire to preserve their lives” is incompatible with there being situations where fleeing or surrendering isn’t feasible. But I’m still gonna hold that it’s a good principle. Pretty much every principle has exceptions.
 
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But then, a lot of this thread hasn't been arguing about that, the last couple pages notwithstanding, but how practical it is to do either in the majority of RPG type situations, and how well game systems support the retreating end. And all of that is going to vary enormously, and what can seem like a given in one direction to one person can seem quite the opposite to another depending on his particular game experiences both in terms of how campaigns are structured and what systems are used.
 
Player groups are effectively like special forces teams , often operating deep in enemy territory. They often have no facility to take prisoners.

Some are.

On the other hand, some are major case squads of detectives investigating crimes. Some are firms of private detectives. Some are groups of investigative journalists. Some are samurai or household knights keeping the peace in their lords' domains. Some are art thieves, tomb raiders, and unscrupulous antiques dealers, trying to make a buck out of the hicks on backward planets. Some are hit-men for the Mob. Some are the crew of tramp-merchant starships. Some are soldiers trying to convey an elephant from India to Greece as a gift from Alexander the Great to Aristotle.
 
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Some are.

On the other hand, some are major case squads of detectives investigating crimes. Some are firms of private detectives. Some are groups of investigative journalists. Some are samurai or household knights keeping the peace in their lords' domains. Some are art thieves, tomb raiders, and unscrupulous antiques dealers, trying to make a buck out of the hicks on backward planets. Some are hit-men for the Mob. Some are the crew of tramp-merchant starships. Some are soldiers trying to convey an elephant from India to Greece as a gift for Alexander the Great to Aristotle.
Lots of great campaign concepts there.

I should have qualified with an 'often' so very fair point.
 
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