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Almost never do I bring them back.
Mostly because players get upset and then say things like "Don't forget to make sure everyone is dead" and I don't dealing with the morality of that.
Enemies that I want to be reoccurring characters make it clear they're not dead, usually with some sort ninja-esque smoke cloud exit after having been defeated.
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It really depends on the villain for me, I think. I don't do it often but if it's someone whose arc regarding the players could still have some stories to it then if they don't finish off the bad guy(s) there is definitely a chance they'll be back.
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I generally use all the loose ends that the players give me to help better shape the narrative. My worlds are reactive to the presence of the players, and their decisions matter.
For your circumstance, I'd have the kobolds show up sometime later and recognize the characters... and prompting GTFO. If successful, they will recognize that the characters are going to be a reoccurring danger to themselves, and act accordingly. Have them watch and spy on the players. Have them save any other monsters that players don't outright kill. Have them start building up a resistance to the characters and stage an ambush. Have that ambush inevitably failure due to the improper planning on the kobolds part.
The goal? It gives you a series of encounters that you really don't have to make up from scratch and helps the players get more immersed into the game. It makes them feel their actions (or lack of actions) have real consequences. It makes them feel that your world is much more alive that it otherwise would feel.
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Well, there are multiple options, but IMO first you should ask yourself two questions: 1) What do I want to achieve as a GM? 2) And what are potential side effects?
1) A gritty campaign is served well by survivors coming back for revenge. A shiny campaign usually works better with defeated foes just disappearing. DeathlessOne had another example with saving effort and improving immersion.
2) When players notice survivors come back to harass them, they might want to make sure everyone is really dead. That's probably not what you want as a GM (see Claxon's post). On the other hand, if defeated means gone, without gory details, players might become more used to use violence to solve problems - after all, there is just the impression of a body dropping.
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I've done so in the past with an NPC that had a better-than-expected showing during an encounter or was memorable to the players, should that NPC have happened to survive or there is a neatly plausible way for them to come back.
overdone it becomes tedious and leads to "mutilate the bodies!" as a survival mechanism and I think that detracts from most games (grimdark world is ok however)
I had a Night Hag in a 3rd edition game that the players just hated with a fiery passion of a thousand fiery suns of fire. In their last battle she managed to survive though was thoroughly defeated. About 10 levels later she showed up again, though this time looking for help from the heroes, as something worse than her was about and she was pulling a Darla (though this game proceeded that arc by about 4 years, so suck it Whedon!). Anyways, players really enjoyed seeing her show up again, though totally not in a way they expected.
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2) When players notice survivors come back to harass them, they might want to make sure everyone is really dead. That's probably not what you want as a GM (see Claxon's post). On the other hand, if defeated means gone, without gory details, players might become more used to use violence to solve problems - after all, there is just the impression of a body dropping.
These kind of developments are also usable in a dynamic world. Players that make sure their enemies are really dead, well, that makes their characters often more brutal or thorough in their behaviors. This will generate some rumors and reactions from the NPCs inhabiting the world. For good or ill, the way they move through the world will have consequences.
PC: Why don't these people immediately trust me? I am a Paladin!
DM: Well, there are rumors of your ruthlessness in dealing with your enemies, and well... Most people have things that they don't want known, even if they are Good.
PC: But, I'm Good! I would never...!
DM: They don't have the ability to sense that. All they know is what they've heard. Perhaps your enemies have been whispering in the right ears.
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2) When players notice survivors come back to harass them, they might want to make sure everyone is really dead. That's probably not what you want as a GM (see Claxon's post). On the other hand, if defeated means gone, without gory details, players might become more used to use violence to solve problems - after all, there is just the impression of a body dropping.These kind of developments are also usable in a dynamic world. Players that make sure their enemies are really dead, well, that makes their characters often more brutal or thorough in their behaviors. This will generate some rumors and reactions from the NPCs inhabiting the world. For good or ill, the way they move through the world will have consequences.
PC: Why don't these people immediately trust me? I am a Paladin!
DM: Well, there are rumors of your ruthlessness in dealing with your enemies, and well... Most people have things that they don't want known, even if they are Good.
PC: But, I'm Good! I would never...!
DM: They don't have the ability to sense that. All they know is what they've heard. Perhaps your enemies have been whispering in the right ears.
Don't get me wrong, I like a good living responsive world, but this can go back and forth all day.
When I started playing, I defaulted to never finishing off a downed enemy, it didn't occur to me.
Then, we had a campaign where the GM decided if we didn't announce that we finished off an enemy, they came back. Usually in the middle of that night or some other time when we were weakened, trying to catch us at an opportune moment. After we caught on, the group has ever since in every campaign we play ensured everything is dead when we leave, unless we have to run away from combat.
If later NPCs responded to us that we were brutal and they didn't want to be around us, as a player I would be upset because I would feel like I'm being punished no matter what I do.
If you're going to punish players by bringing back NPCs (more than maybe once per campaign) then don't also punish them when they start making sure the enemy is dead. And please don't turn it into an escalating war either.
Oh, you killed this guy, but his friends resurrected him. And he trained the whole time to kill you, and focused on learning everything about you to counter your strengths and exploit your weaknesses.
For me, that's not a fun game.
Now, that may be fun for some groups, but that's the kind of thing you talk about BEFORE you start the campaign.
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For me, that's not a fun game.
Now, that may be fun for some groups, but that's the kind of thing you talk about BEFORE you start the campaign.
Yes, there also happens to be a thing called "reasonable limitations" and a gaming philosophy of "Don't be an a#$+~%#" that I assume is in play at any given time. So, the GM that you experienced these things with? He wasn't operating under those rules. I hope you either gave him some time off to think about what he did, or promptly fired him from his role and found someone else.
Now, should we assume that these rules are in place from this point forward? Because that will lead to less back and forth about what is and what is not the proper length to take things when dealing with enemies that managed to survive their encounter with the PCs?
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"Pile of bodies. Pile of heads."
-Venom.
As a player, I generally pile the fallen and burn them. If they weren't totally dead, they will be.
As a GM, the players at my table tend to pile the fallen and burn them.
"We left none alive."
-LoTR.
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I've played one game where the enemies kept coming back for more. attack>defeat>imprison>escape>attack I think we defeated one assassin type character 3 times before he died in transport to a prison. That's frustrating.
I've also run a game where nothing could be killed permanently, it was part of an ongoing mystery about how the world was unraveling. But I also had most of the defeated creatures chose to avoid the party after dying and coming back because dying is super not fun.
I also have a house rule that lets you use coup de grace to cripple foes rather than just kill them. Essentially, if they would have died to your coup de grace, you can instead do your HD in con damage to them, blind them, or remove the use of their arms or legs. All of which could be removed by raise dead type magics or recover naturally in 1d4 months of bed rest. Unfortunately, I introduced that rule in a game where the characters are pretty evil people, so there aren't tons of survivors anyway, so it's untested.
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Yes, there also happens to be a thing called "reasonable limitations" and a gaming philosophy of "Don't be an a*#&@~#" that I assume is in play at any given time.
Well, both make good guidelines, but still leave some room for interpretation.
I think we defeated one assassin type character 3 times before he died in transport to a prison. That's frustrating.
Ultimate Campaign IMO has decent advice on enemies coming back. Nowadays, if a GM stresses the trope too much, I'd try to point them to it:
Recurring Villains: Only the very greatest villains should be able to come back from defeat, and this should happen very rarely. Otherwise the players might develop a feeling of futility, along with suspicions about the GM’s impartiality—which can severely disrupt a campaign. The notes on the “pet NPC” from earlier in this chapter apply with particular force to major villains.
In order for a comeback to be possible, the villain must have escaped in such a way that the players do not feel cheated. There are some exceptions to this, but they are few: the villain might come back in undead form, for example, or in a resurrected but still somehow damaged body. In most cases, however, if the PCs killed the villain fair and square, she should remain dead—end of story.
A villain should never come back from death more than once. If the players start to feel that nothing their characters do can put an end to the villain, frustration and suspicions of cheating grow. The reappearance of a defeated challenge should be greeted with shock and surprise, not with knowing groans.
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Do your PCs ever leave foes dying on the battle map? If so, what do you do, if anything, with these creatures? I personally don't always keep such monsters around but once in a while this is a good way to explain recurring villains or reinforcements or something.
In the game I've been running, no. They do one of two things:
- Kill and burn;
- Surround with an alpha strike readied, revive, and cast Diplomancy. This most typically occurs with animals, and often regardless of what the animal did during the fight.
They don't even allow enemies to be put to flight, because they might simply be going to summon reinforcements. Even if the enemies have limited intelligence and were only attacking for food - the evoker does insist on bringing his predator buffet table... err... wagon of show animals - it can't be that the predator is retreating because the risk (being elemental blasted, spiritual-kukri'd, sworded, or arrowed to death) outweighed the reward (tasty eats.)
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I also use Massive Damage Rules, so if they failed the save... dead, like no stabilizing... dead. Keeps the game going, combat already takes forever with an archer and TWF full-attacking each round.
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If the defeated NPC has a reason to go back and attack the PCs, it will, as appropriate. Otherwise it will probably just avoid the dangerous threat.
A reason to attack again might be
* revenge (though this is unlikely and assumes a good chance of success or a strong motive like the PCs killing his wife and kids)
* orders from above
* religion
* mindless / undead / fiendish evil
* wanting to get something back, my precious
* being drunk
And 'attack' might not come as a direct assault. It might be some other form of revenge such as getting someone else to attack them, or stealing their horses or burgling their room at the inn or some other, possibly petty, act of vengeance.
In a 1e campaign, the PCs killed a wizard. He had a beautiful daughter whom they let live because she wasn't a threat. But she was a 2nd level MU who knew Charm Person, and she'd go around convincing every thug and hothead in the city to attack the PCs, and every beggar to tell lies about them. They never did work out what was going on.
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Revenge is one reaction, fear perhaps more likely, but another is gratitude for being spared. Having the full range of reactions show up tends to promote good behaviour which feels like a better game IMO.
If you have a player who insists on killing everything they possibly can in cold blood then that person's been scarred by overly grim GMing.
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I track negative HP and return the survivors to the ranks, tracking their recovery. That said if the party has time to search the bodies then it is assumed that they 'mercifully despatch' any dying unless they want to take prisoners for questioning, which they often do.
I also try very hard not to get my creatures killed if they have a will to live. Retreat is a big thing in my game.
On a related note, evil tends not to have the same access to healing as good. My party has withdrawn from several battles after facing several waves of the enemy only to return a couple of days later once fully restored to find the stronghold poorly defended with visibly injured guards and most of the soldiery healing in their barracks. The few clerical leaders can only prepare and cast so many heal spells between them.
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I tend to go with assuming that unless tracking survival of npcs is somehow relevant(whether because there is healer, fake death abilities, brainwashed people or not that evil people, relevant as witnesses, etc), that they just die when they go down from lethal damage.
I mean when you want to do "How do you wanna do this?" moment with bosses would be kinda lame to be like "Aaand then you coup de grace them after doing your fatality" :p
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If you have some kobolds survive, be prepared for statements like "we stripped their gear and checked them over for stuff but didn't notice they were still breathing? None of them cried out in pain? They were all silent while barely clinging to life?"
Sure, the players didn't say that they made sure the NPCs were all dead, but did you give an indication that some of them might still be alive?
A bunch of other stuff about this that doesn't matter nearly as much:
Having random NPCs survive after dropping below zero hit points seems like a bad idea to me. I've ran 4 APs, at least half a dozen modules, and games in other systems... I've never once had an NPC come back from being down as it teaches the players to be merciless and, often, more graphic than some of the other players are likely comfortable with.
If you really want the random NPC kobolds to live have them limp away never to be seen again. They nearly died against the PCs, likely had all of their gear taken, and have smaller numbers... it seems like a fools mission. If kobolds are supposed to come back later in the campaign have it be other ones that are there to avenge the fallen... Or maybe some of the ones that survived the fight, but make sure you don't make things harder than it would've been for the group otherwise you're punishing them for not being overly detailed, which is boring. Using unstated things against players will likely end up with everyone being paranoid that they're not saying every little thing you want them to say and could end up with the players feeling like you're looking for "gotcha!" moments because the players didn't think of something that the characters would've thought of.
The one time that I had an NPC come back from being captured and arrested by the group was because it was SUPER suitable and I replaced a different miniboss with the one that had been arrested. I made it very clear to the group that if they had killed the NPC earlier instead the same fight would've happened but with a different, unknown NPC and it wouldn't've felt as important. I told them this because, well, it was true, but mostly because I didn't want them thinking that arresting someone was useless and would therefore only kill enemies.
Later in that same campaign they learned how the NPC had escaped prison and used the way in / out to their advantage when they had a different challenge they had to complete involving the prison.
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Our GM's world does not have 20th century morality for the most part so 'gentling' fallen enemies into the afterlife is common on a battlefield.
If your good aligned and an enemy surrenders that is a whole different thing, depending on the honor of your character.
But a foe who fought till you were forced to put him down on the ground but is not quite dead yet? Let him bleed out or put a blade to him to 'stop his pain' is perfectly acceptable in a medieval world with as much clash of arms as most fantasy settings have.
Least that is how we run it.
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If you have some kobolds survive, be prepared for statements like "we stripped their gear and checked them over for stuff but didn't notice they were still breathing? None of them cried out in pain? They were all silent while barely clinging to life?"Well, yeah, they were silent. Did you make a Heal check or just rifle through their pockets? Were you particularly concerned with checking an unconscious enemy for vital signs?
That's how the game rules work and it's only a DC10 (plus penalty) CON check to stabilise. Not everybody is gonna make it, but inevitably some will.
They get a CON (DC10 again) check every hour to see if they regain consciousness so that's an hour where they're silent and clinging to life. How long does it take to search a handful of bodies?
Should players either:
1. Expect that the rules apply differently to NPCs than to them?
2. Be under the impression that somehow, by sheer coincidence, that they always do at least enough damage to bring an NPC to negative-CON HP on their last attack?Both seem less reasonable to me than just understanding the rules and how they apply.
It's about setting the right expectations for your game. If enemies coming back to get revenge on the PCs because the players didn't specify that they slaughtered them all after they were down, then that's fine.
Doing it as a surprise "gotcha" is a jerk move the first time you do it. After that one time expect the players to either get frustrated as it's not something that's come up in a game for them before or to start saying every single thing they do and not trusting you to play another "gotcha" card in relation to things later on.Personally, that's not the kind of game I'd enjoy.
Should players expect the rules to apply differently? Of course not.
Should players expect their GM to want them to say they check and make sure everyone is dead? Depends on the GMs history and what the expectations are for the game.
Understanding the rules and how the GM applies them, what the GM tracks, and what the GM does with them depends on the expectations that the GM has laid out for the game.
Just because it's by the rules doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
As a few people have said, it depends on wat kind of behaviour you want to see in your players.
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The players in my Kingmaker campaign exciled some enemies they let live. Those two particular enemies went to Pitax... the party then "liberated" Pitax.
One of the characters was going to kill them for disobeying, but they argued that they did what they had been told without any way to predict that the kingdom would grow to swallow Pitax.
Pitax WAS excile yesterday.
I thought that was a fun situation for letting enemies live.
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And to be honest, if the party don't kill every downed foe, you create a world where it's easier to avoid a TPK by a bad set of rolls because there can be a reasonable expectation that other people might behave the same for their own reasons when they beat the bejeezus out of your players, and it doesn't have to have the whiff of DM ex machina.
I'll disagree with this, if only because typically the players are the good guys. They might care how the game world reacts to them.
NPCs on the other hand only exist as a foil to the players.
It's rarely in the interest of the bad guys (assuming beyond the first few levels once the party has established who they are) to allow such persons to live.
I try to avoid TPKs by simply not letting it be such a close fight. Which was easy in PF1, considering it was usually more of a struggle to make it a tough fight (post level 5).
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Hell, the returning enemies don't even have to become stronger. Sometimes it's nice to let the party say "you again?!! lolz" and just straight up slap somebody silly.
I can say from experience that the party very much enjoyed encountering the ambushing archers that got away a few levels later when the bard could dimension door the fighters behind them...
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I think this entire discussion shows that people have different expectations.
So long as you let the players know what your expectations are with the game you're running it shouldn't be a problem.
I go into a game thinking that we don't need to state that we make sure everyone is dead. If the GM is running it where people can stabilize, heal, and track us down I'd be annoyed the first time but would get over it. But every encounter after that I'd most likely be making sure everyone is dead. (It does, of course, depend on the game and the situation).
So it might be fun for you, as the GM, to have survivors come back to get the party but I can almost guarantee that you'll only be able to do it once with that group.
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Sounds like a waste of valuable corpses, if you ask us. Waste not, want not.
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Sounds like a waste of valuable corpses, if you ask us. Waste not, want not.
*narrows his eyes*
You do know how expensive it is to raise undead, yes? Why would you waste that precious onyx on kobolds?
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I’m with Claxon on this one. If you drop an enemy NPC to zero, he’s dead, and unless he’s a lich with an undiscovered phylactery or some type of Magic Jar / Spirit Jars nonsense, he doesn’t come back. Otherwise “I check for breathing and slit his throat” is all I’m going to hear all night.
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If you drop an enemy NPC to zero, he’s dead, and unless he’s a lich with an undiscovered phylactery or some type of Magic Jar / Spirit Jars nonsense, he doesn’t come back.That must be super awesome for when an NPC needs to be captured alive.
"Take the non-lethal penalty, even though the enemy is trying to kill you, or lose"
That sounds even less fun, tbh.
Well if their intention is to knock him unconscious and take him alive, then that's not a problem. I'm not a douche.
I'm saying "generally speaking", if they reduce an enemy's HP to 0, he doesn't stabilize after they leave and then start hunting the group. Liches with in-tact phylacteries and Vampires with un-wooden-staked hearts would be an obvious exception to this.
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If you drop an enemy NPC to zero, he’s dead, and unless he’s a lich with an undiscovered phylactery or some type of Magic Jar / Spirit Jars nonsense, he doesn’t come back.That must be super awesome for when an NPC needs to be captured alive.
"Take the non-lethal penalty, even though the enemy is trying to kill you, or lose"
That sounds even less fun, tbh.
If the group expresses that they want to keep someone alive any half-decent GM would then keep track of how close to actually dead the NPC is no matter if they normally do or not.
Implying that someone wouldn't is ridiculous and shows that you're at least pretending to treat things and a solid yes or no rather than shades of grey.Wouldn't all GM threads be way shorter if people stuck to this advice?
Yep!
Sometimes it's good to get opinions from other people, but usually it comes down to what the GM wants to do and what the group enjoys.A GM knows what they want to do and knows their group better than anyone on here.
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Sounds like a waste of valuable corpses, if you ask us. Waste not, want not.*narrows his eyes*
You do know how expensive it is to raise undead, yes? Why would you waste that precious onyx on kobolds?
Undeath is never wasted. But you must think bigger than onyx, dear.