Surrender Like a Boss: When RPG Monsters and NPCs Should Give Up and How to Get PCs to Accept Their Submission

3 Wise DMs

Sometimes the best stories play out after defeat, but to get to them, bad guys need to occasionally survive the fight. It’s not always so easy to recognize when it’s time to pull back and have the monsters or villains run away or surrender to the PCs, and it can be even harder to get the party to accept the surrender after it’s offered.

When should a DM surrender and how do you make sure it doesn’t turn into a slaughter? It all comes down to how you teach players to play your game. After all, if every bad guy they don’t kill comes back worse, what are you teaching them but to be murder hobos?

In this episode, Thorin, Tony and Dave roll out their best tricks for using surrender as a storytelling tool, combat hack, and reminder that actions in their RPG worlds have consequences. Listen to learn why the greatest DM victories often come from battles your villains lost.

2:00 “Make intelligence matter again”: How and when we have NPCs surrender in our games

5:00 Curse of Strahd: How the Hags escaped Old Bone Grinder to mess with the party for months

7:00 A solution to slow combat: Why DM Thorin has more 5E NPCs run away than previous editions

9:00 Scripted retreats: Steal a trick from Hollywood and give the party a taste of the BBEG to come

12:00 When bad guys running away gets frustrating to the party

15:00 If the villain surrenders and doesn’t deserve death, can they be redeemed?

19:00 The checkmate: Really good villains already have a reason the party can’t kill them

21:00 Should you “punish” PC parties that don’t accept surrender?

25:00 When surrenders lead to conflict in the party or the story

28:00 What do you do with a party that never accepts surrender?

31:00 What happens after the villain surrenders? It can be a more interesting story than killing them off

42:00 DM Dave’s 3-legged stool of villainy!

46:00 If your villain surrenders just to come back worse, you teach the party to never accept surrender

50:00 Is the modern trope that superheroes just beget supervillains a plot-hole-ridden cliché?

58:00 How to make players understand their actions will have consequences (And how DM Tony feels when his PCs can’t kill the bad guys)

64:00 Final thoughts