Sweet Surrender
Last time we tackled cuteness it was a fiendishly clever critter pulling the bait-and-switch. Today of course, the jelly beans are on the other foot. I guess that’s what happens when your adventuring party only has two PCs. I swear to Gygax, it’s got to be stressful for Druid and Arcane Archer always being one bad crit away from a TPK. You’ve got to get creative with that kind of party composition!
Of course, I doubt anyone is going to make being adorable a full-on playstyle (unless of course you really want to reflavor the crap out of the sanctuary spell). But more generally, I do think that surrendering ought to be a legit option for players.
Here’s where I’m coming from. We all know that players tend to prefer the direct approach. Charging in guns blazing is straight up fun, and running away or surrendering feels suspiciously close to failure. That’s why I wish more players would remember: You get XP for overcoming encounters, not for defeating monsters. When combat is going poorly and the TPK looms, giving yourselves up may be the only path to eventual victory. That path generally winds through some kind of prison, the subsequent prison break, and a rematch against your captors. It’s either that or gladiatorial combat. In both cases though, surrender is better than futilely swiping another few HP from the thing that’s about to kill you.
Will it work all the time? Of course not. In 3.5 D&D for example, “Diplomacy generally takes at least 1 full minute (10 consecutive full-round actions).” The implications are spelled out over in Pathfinder 1e: “Diplomacy is generally ineffective in combat and against creatures that intend to harm you or your allies in the immediate future.” That means talky solutions aren’t the best against frothing barbarians or fanatical cultists. In practice though, I’ve found that most GMs will ignore the RAW and let the scene play out fast and loose. And when it’s your last few hit points (and your lives!) hanging in the balance, a bit of leeway is probably a good thing.
So what do you think? Should players feel comfortable surrendering? Should that kind of mid-combat diplomacy be freely available, or would your rather rely on mechanical solutions like call truce? Sound off with tales of your own attempts at surrender down in the comments!
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They finally got to go on that vole hunting date and THIS GUY just comes in and ruins everything.
The Yelp! reviews will be scathing. And insofar as this date location is popular among foxes, will probably literally be, “Yelp!”
This is where Allie comes charging in from behind and tears into the cyclops.
Nah, Allie would pass by the Cyclops and try to eat Eldritch Archer first.
Huh. Makes me wonder if they hire a pet sitter while they’re on dates.
“I got a sending while you were widdling on the other side of the tree.”
“Ah, dammit, again…?!”
I think this comic needs more adorable fox-forms. Or fox-form merch.
Also Ratfolk. More adorable Ratfolk. It’s been a while since their last (and only) appearance.
Kudos to Lauren for the adorable big eyes and art.
I ought to holler at Laurel about doing some cute merch.
And also finally release that ratfolk dungeon.
Ratfolk dungeon? Go onnnnnn…?
Well yeah, dude. The village of Brie. We pretty much made it last time:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unrewarding
I just need to cobble the ideas together into an actual mini-dungeon.
Here’s a potential encounter, stolen from Mice & Mystics.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/8b/56/b9/8b56b90d7a4becea93b6c32b0dddff79.jpg
On a side note, the poor Ratties aren’t doing well in the poll to be part of the next Pathfinder videogame.
https://forum.owlcatgames.com/t/pathfinder-wrath-of-the-righteous-vote-for-the-playable-race/20295
It ain’t easy competing with Kitsune. And this is supposed to be their year! And the Catfolk got stomped!
Sad times. I’ve got a couple of ysoki in my Starfinder game, so I’ve grown quite fond of the little guys.
The trouble with Pathfinder APs is that surrender ends in three ways most of the time: a pre-planned escape from prison event, a new group of adventurers freeing/replacing the current party, or the immediate end of the campaign as the BBEG wins and cannot be stopped anymore (particularly if you lost an important artifact or are near the finale).
Surrendering and imprisonment are hard. That’s because you wind up losing agency while you’re captured, unable to do anything while the bad guys monologue at you. For that reason, I think that pausing for a smoke break while you figure out the next phase of the story can go a long way to making each “Captured!” scenario feel a bit more original.
One must be careful of being too cute. After all, some creatures (and/or PCs) might have Elmyra Duff social qualities, whilst sporting 24+ STR, grab, constrict, huge size, etc…
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AndCallHimGeorge
Finding your place in the cute ecosystem is easier said than done. While it is a defense against most predators, there are some who specialize in preying upon it.
Is Magus one of them?
And so, Cyclops would turn away from the pair of innocent fuzzballs, discarding the ways of evil and turning a new leaf, eventually adding himself to the Handbook cast of wild PC/Race/Class combos.
Assuming his eyeball doesn’t get promptly gouged out by a certain Vigilante’s gore attack, that is.
If you’re going to be a cyclops, you might as well be a druid. Cheat on that d100 roll and reincarnate the correct race every time!
This comic yearns for a ‘googly eyes’ edit.
They all do.
I might just do it!
My PCs are very good at resolving conflicts peacefully (well, semi-peacefully,) both in terms of realizing that’s an option and in the actual execution. I’ve had a bard use a hill and [i]ghost sound[/i] to convince a bunch of half-ogres that an army was just over the horizon, a magus convince a bunch of goblins he’s a fire god, the party healer patching up a gnoll at death’s door, and so forth.
Surrender hasn’t come up for them, though they were nearly routed by those same half-ogres because only half of the party tried to retreat. But I find that some DMs don’t remember that retreat and surrender can be options for the enemies as well. Unless they’re mindless or utter fanatics, morale is also a concern for the other side. And when you’ve seen three of your buddies get skewered, punched, or incinerated, you start to reassess matters.
Wild animals and mindless undead are one thing, but when you’ve got a pack of intelligent creatures, the bit about morale is friggin’ important.
One trick I like to use is, once the combat is decided, allowing my players to narrate the last round of combat. This is usually “describe how cool you look killing the thing,” but occasionally you’ll get some stuff like “it blunders off into the trees, terrified of us.”
In general I’d like for surrendering being more of an option, but it is usually pretty though to make it so, part of that is because of the player stubborness/unwillingness to fail you mentioned.
There are a few other problems here through.
You need enemies that’d accept a surrender, monstrous foes with no quater given aren’t the best for that sort of thing, and mindless/hungry beasts/monsters are right out.
There’s also the problem that from an out-of-game perspective the penalty for surrendering is a lot worse for many players than the penalty for dying.
If they die, that sucks but they get to make a new PC and go right back to having fun next session. If they surrender on the other hand they might have to sit out and twiddle their thumbs while the other party members run through a rescue mission, or they might have to go through a “prison adventure” like you mention.
Prison adventures are pretty unpopular through since they tend to remove the players abilities and restrict their agency, which a lot of PC’s find rather unfun.
The result can be that the consequence of death is going through chargen but getting to rejoin next session at the latest while the consequence of surrender is one or more session of unfun gaming.
Worse it generally only takes one PC with that opinion to close the option for the entire group, players dislike the implicit failure enough on its own, the added implicit shame factor of surrendering while their friends continue to fight on can make it far too unpalatable to actually go with.
I find it’s less the shame factor and more, “Well Bob is still fighting, so I guess we aren’t surrendering.” At that point, I think it’s worth asking Bob whether he’s A) still trying to win; B) trying to provide a distraction for the others, or C) just wants to roll up a new character. When the monsters are winning and you’re out of plausible ideas as a GM, trying to figure out what the players are hoping to have happen can be a useful source of inspiration.
Yeah, that’s probably a better way of describing the whole we-are-a-unit-that-does-things-togetter-and-I-don’t-want-to-not-contribute/attempt-to-go-with-something-else-on-my-own-thing that I was (and am) trying to vaguely gesture at than “shame”.
“There’s also the problem that from an out-of-game perspective the penalty for surrendering is a lot worse for many players than the penalty for dying.
If they die, that sucks but they get to make a new PC and go right back to having fun next session. If they surrender on the other hand they might have to sit out and twiddle their thumbs while the other party members run through a rescue mission, or they might have to go through a “prison adventure” like you mention.”
Along the same lines, there’s also the issue that (in D&D and similar games, at least), gear and supplies are a critical character resource that is generally lost when you surrender. So if your PC is captured, the rest of the party has to not only retrieve you but retrieve your stuff, or else you have to choose between one of several bad options: 1) Your GM just miraculously provides you with new gear that replaces the old. Workable but hard on believability. 2) You retire this character and create a new one with full gear. Again, hard on believability, plus you lose that character. 3). You make do with whatever shitty gear you can purchase with your remaining funds, and continue playing a crippled character. Not fun. 4) The rest of the party chips in to buy you new gear. Now at least everyone’s on the same level, but the whole party has taken a bad hit to their effectiveness. And that presumes that only *one* PC got caught and the rest of the party still *has* resources to re-equip him.
This actually happened to me last session. My character and another party member got captured by a hostile faction, and though we did break out, we had to abandon our primary weapons to do it, meaning that we’re both badly weakened in terms of combat effectiveness. No clue what our GM plans to do about that, though he’s been a pretty good GM so far so I imagine he’ll come up with something workable.
I’ve made it my DM policy to overlook when pets get caught in AoEs to ensure a lack of dead pets. My Cleric’s new Tressym simply was in the Bag of Holding when the Steel Preadtor ambushed the party.
So in Tomb of Annihlation my DM ruled that since “Speaking is a free action” that making short social checks was too. My Paladin abused the shit out of this being proficient in both Persuasion and Intimidation. Combat looks to be starting? Talk the baddies down. Took out enemy leadership? Convince the enemies they have no reason to continue fighting. Fighting a group known for betrayal and a caste system like the Yuan-Ti? Convince those at the bottom that they are working to their own detriment.
I struggle with this mess as a GM. On the one hand, you want your players to get into the RP. That means having some kind of impact on the game world when you try and face. On the other hand, some combats are too fast and furious for “combat banter” to make sense. I can only conclude that GM discretion is the correct answer here, but that’s frustrating for a player who wants to “talk my way out of it,” but doesn’t know whether it will be allowed this time.
A thick Dwarven accent (Brooklyn. I have no idea where the “Scottish Dwarf” came from, but my Paladin finds non-Dwarves assuming Dwarves have a Scottish accent to be minstrel-show level offensive) and a short statement tends to cut over the noise of combat. “See reason oah see stahs!” (See reason, or see stars) It gets fuzzy when spells with verbal components are involved, but I can still squeeze in a “Surrendah!”
If I ever get back in the player’s chair, and I get to play my Warforged off the ground, I don’t think it will be able to pull of intimidates in-combat due to its’ unique speaking patterns. Read like a monotone Optimus Prime “Non-compliance will result in injury, exsanguination, and severe cranial weight-loss!”
Any chance you guys do commissions? I have a D&D character I’d love to have art of and I love the style of this comic.
Absolutely! The details live on Laurel’s Deviant Art page:
https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/journal/Commission-Updates-227497588
Thanks! I’ll check that out later.
My group have had a lot of fun with this. It started when things were going poorly, and one of the group pulled a Captain Jack Sparrow (“parlay?”). We had a good laugh and then decided to try it. You get a very different dynamic where combat becomes “while it suits us” followed by shenanigans to try to escape it.
The other issue that is quite a lot of fun with negotiation is that one can of course negotiate in bad faith: use it to lull the enemies into a false sense of security, then when you see the archer is no longer covering the door, run through and escape! Naturally this doesn’t work more than once per enemy, and they can do it too.
It also works better with a degree of accepting splitting the party. Just because one character is willing to surrender doesn’t mean that another should be forced to, and the one who escapes can continue the adventure like Bilbo in the court of the Woodland King.
Exactly how it goes will be different based on the sort of enemy but it is a lot of fun to include.
Ever come across a situation where “parlay” wasn’t allowed?
Oh yes. Any opponent that wouldn’t be expected to be able to reason, or any that we have really, really upset (or tricked literally five minutes ago with the same trick). Which doesn’t stop it being tried, and part of the fun is seeing the reaction.
Much like quoting Monty Python (and fleeing), it helps generate a shared idea of what is happening and creates a particular mindset. And I think that because we saw it work like this in the films, it makes a nice segue between combat, talking, and whatever comes next.
My smooth talking Mountain Gnoll is too proud to ever surrender, but he often provides the option to baddies. “Do you want surrender?!” They spit at me or attack or some such foolishness. I disarm and then sneak attack them to death. Look at next baddie, “Surrender is still on the table! Anyone? Anyone?!” So many fights proceed like that until the numbers tip in our favor. Then its all, “have mercy, have mercy, dont eat me.” Poor foolish bastards.
I think I’ve never really surrendered because I always have a backup plan for running away. I’m a big believer in having an exit strategy.
Most PCs I’ve met are big believers in fighting to the last man. :/
I become too invested in my characters to let them throw their lives away. You know, unless that’s my character’s thing.
A bad role model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturm_Brightblade
In my country we have a said…
Now, about today question. Surrendering is a valid tactic, many prefer to die before surrendering, that is why it isn’t used that much. Remember in the Avenger, in Age of Loki when the avengers are storming the hail hydra base and the two leaders say to their underlings they will never surrender just before turning back and saying to each other they will surrender? That is good for the bads, not so good for the heroes. Surrender = defeat = TPK 🙁
“Better to die sword on hand, choking in blood and spells, than to surrender to live another encounter with the shame” – Dead Adventure gravestone 😛
Remember that said in my country? The feeling that is better to die in battle than face a minor defeat plus that can make any player to choose not surrender. Just think of Druid and Arcane Archer. In my country they would be on the grill without problem 😀
I’m confused. What is the saying?
Um? Oh, sorry, i forgot to put that part. It’s a traditional say found on one of the most important books in my country and said in many occasion regarding food. It’s translation to klingon would be: “ghoS ‘e’ yIt ghew qar Hoch grill.” Hope that helps you resolve your confusion 😀
Typically, if things are going bad, fleeing rather surrendering is the preferred option; especially since, if an enemy is civil enough to accept surrender, then that enemy would also likely be civil enough to knock you out and capture you, rather than kill you; if they aren’t that type, then they likely aren’t the type to accept surrender, either.
Also, encounters with high-level BBEGs that you won’t actually fight until later in the campaign have trained players that, if you can’t stand up to the threat, run. It can be hard at times to tell the difference between BBEG-level threat and a bunch of imps who can’t roll below 17.
Of course, the trouble with retreat is that you’re abandoning your already-downed comrades.
“You get XP for overcoming encounters, not for defeating monsters.”
It would be nice if this were so, but here’s the relevant text from 5E DMG, page 260:
“Experience points (XP)…are most often the reward for completing combat encounters.”
Not “encounters”, but specifically “combat encounters”. “Completing” could be read that there are ways other than defeating monsters, except…
“When adventurers defeat one or more monsters-typically by killing, routing, or capturing them-they divide the total XP value of the monsters evenly among themselves.”
While it does not rule out other ways of gaining XP, the strong implication is that combat is and should be primary, and that completing combat encounters means defeating monsters.
Granted, it covers noncombat challenges on the next page, “but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure.” PCs will strive to stack combat odds in their favor – as anyone anticipating combat would. If they manage to defeat combat encounters with CR measured to their level, they get the XP even if there was no significant risk of failure despite the CR. With noncombat encounters, as written, either they must accept “meaningful risk of failure” (which can be read as “you must have at best a 50-50 chance of any degree of success”), which will often fail (and thus get 0 XP), or they must forego XP.
The fuller noncombat challenges guidance highlights another problem:
“As a starting point, use the rules for building combat encounters in chapter 3 to gauge the difficulty of the challenge. Then award the characters XP as if it had been a combat encounter of the same difficulty, but only if the encounter involved a meaningful risk of failure.”
XP is based on combat potential. A court officer is not high CR – even if that officer happens to be a city’s chief magistrate or prosecutor, and the PCs seek to free someone unjustly imprisoned. A wise DM would offer XP equivalent to all the guards that would have had to be fought, but the DMG as written suggests to base it only on that one judge or opposing attorney, as that is the only entity (“monster” in the sense being used here) actually encountered and defeated.
Note: I agree that it would be good if there was more support for gaining XP by means other than defeating monsters.
I’m just saying, given the actual text in the DMG, a lot of DMs can get the wrong impression – e.g. that ending combats without defeating monsters gets no XP, and/or mechanics for noncombat encounter XP that makes attempting them of questionable worth from an XP perspective (which many players, especially new ones, will take as prompting: “what does the game system want me to do”).
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/Gamemastering/#Table-Experience-Point-Awards
That’s Pathfinder 1e. The Paizo modules bear that theory out.
I don’t have any 5e modules on hand, but I’m willing to be they give XP for things like escaping, negotiating, and exploring dangerous locations as well.
YMMV of coruse, but across systems I tend to award XP for “overcoming challenges.” Running away doesn’t count as overcoming the challenge. Happily, that means PCs can regroup and try again.
Actually, many Paizo modules will call out for certain monsters “if the PCs recruit, subvert, sneak past, or do something else to this monster, award them XP as if they had been defeated in combat”. Or something similar.
Yup. I’m thinking about the space goblins on the derelict spacecraft in Book 1 of Dead Suns. Rescue them and you get the XP.
I love that they call it out in the modules, but I wish there was a way to make that sort of thing more apparent in the core rules where more people are apt to see it.
Hmmm I see two main issues that prevent players from running away or surrendering.
The first is that while you might have said “I wish players would remember”, I’ve found it more to be that case of “I wish GMs would remember”. If they do, they very rarely make it clear. In fact I’ve many times seen GMs specifically not give XP for monsters that weren’t slain or ran away from or the like.
The second issue is that these games are on some level often a power fantasy. It’s hard to act in line with the fantasy of being powerful… by surrendering or fleeing.
This is why I like to give out XP for “overcoming” challenges. If the challenge is to get past the Balrog and escape Moria, you get XP for running across the bridge. You don’t get XP for retreating to Balin’s tomb to take a long rest and regroup.
Some of this comes down to scripting. If you prompt your players hard enough with the “supposed to surrender” mojo, it can take. The difficulty lies in making surrender interesting. Prison breaks get old in a hurry, so you’ve got to 1) invent a plausible means of escape and 2) let the players know it.
For example, suppose the evil empire is about to take you. You’re about to sell your life dearly when you notice the Evil Advisor surreptitiously making the rebellion’s hand sign in your direction. Now you know you’ve got a guy on the inside, and all hope isn’t lost.
Unpredictable surrender can be viable if you can rationalize it for your character. In my last game, our party got caught scouting a mad count’s castle, while searching for his vanished wife (the sister of the Duke who hired us) and some stolen treasure from the local not-a-doomsday cult (We probably damned the world several times over, you know how it goes). Naturally, these guards proved far too competent (I insist they were far too well-trained, not that we were underprepared), with half the party bleeding out and the remaining players (my warlock and a bard) on the brink of defeat and with few options.
The other player’s bard was audacious and secretive (even pretending to be human when he was in fact a shapeshifter) and behaved accordingly; his escape was overly dramatic, jumping off a sheer wall into the moat with arrows raining upon him – no surrender for him! Of course, he made it, and later infiltrated the castle to rescue us, a rare instance where “splitting the party” actually worked out. In contrast, my character, a teifling infernal warlock, was completely open with who and what he was, and, aside from the occasional “BURN IN HELLFIRE” bit to scare away riff-raff, preferred more subtle solutions, like persuasion and intimidation (and the odd bit of mind control). Having him surrender to the guard, to get his fallen comrades aid and buy more time, seemed the only natural response.
Mercifully, our DM was very adaptable, and even had the Count coerce us into his service as reparation for our trespass, which gave us a second chance to complete our original missions in a roundabout way.
Sounds like a win all the way around. Everyone got to be true to their characters, the GM did the flexible thing, and the story moved on in a dramatically appropriate way. Kudos!
My group/s enter every combat with the mindset “All of them gonna die or all of us”. To the players there is a very clear delineation between the bit where diplomacy is possible (“talky time”) and the one where I ask for an initiative roll (“happy-fun-murder-time”). The only talk during combat is: battle strategies and quips.
I think I’m contributing to this kind of thinking as a DM. If the enemies wanted to diplomance it out, they would’ve done it before drawing their battleaxe and charging the healer.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad way to play it. After all, if a dude is trying to kill you it’s not the best time to make with the oratory.
I’m beginning to wonder if the solution lies somewhere in the “morale” description in stat blocks. “Surrenders if reduced to 15 or fewer hp” is a fairly common thing in my experience. I could be possible to make that “willing to listen to reason at 15 hp” instead. It would be sort of like the bloodied condition from 4e.
So most of my villains are ‘active recruiters.’ Surrender means terms and conditions apply.
To my surprise, players in my current game would rather their characters be butchered in a fountain of gore than to surrender to some of my villains.
Seems kind’ve harsh. The BBEG benefits and insurance plan is great. Dental covered.
Don’t see why treachery can’t be an option.
I kinda hate to say it, but Gunslinger would fit pretty well into team fox here. Just let him sit on Allie’s shoulders and act as a turret of shooty doom while she goes on a rampage. No ride feat needed, I think.
And they’re already in the badlands, which is a gunslinger’s natural habitat. It just fits so perfectly and oh wait no
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/third-wheel
Oh right. Well, I guess there’s always Street Samurai.
My party is so ingrained against Surrender, it didn’t even occur to them in the Mutants and Masterminds game until I literally pointed out that this was a comic book setting about them being teenagers. Only the most hard core villains are gonna kill a bunch of kids.
And on the subject of cute, I am reminded of the Changing Breeds book from World of Darkness and the “Awwww” merit. Which required a normal animal form and allowed you to “cute” your way out of encounters. Nope, he doesn’t hurt my werecat, I’m adorable. It was fun.
I never got to play as much Werewolf as I would have liked. That merit sounds straight up hilarious for use with a fugly / monstrous character. Can a garou use it, or is it only the bastet?
Anyone with a normal animal form, but you have to be in said normal animal form. So you’d have to be a wolf or cat, not a rampaging murder factory.