All the enemies are dead except the boss who says he surrenders, what do you do?

[Quertus]

Reading this, I am reminded of this thread, where we could count on the Paladin to murder the prisoner once we've gotten any useful information out of them. If I run a Paladin, I'm running someone like *that*. No issues with *that* paladin being a wet blanket on murder.

What im getting from this is that all of my good character's are exalted level compared to your guys' 'good' characters.

It is a surrender, the morality of killing someone who has surrendered is vastly different from killing someone currently trying to kill you. It is the difference between self defense and murder.

Who said we're all playing Good characters when answering the question?

Yeah, I'm kinda batting for team Lawful Evil most of the time. Any GM who "cares" about alignment, I'm *almost certainly* playing Evil.

IRL maybe, but in D&D I don't think the reasons hold up so well:
* You can fairly easily do nonlethal damage, and unlike RL it is reliably nonlethal.
* Depending on your relative power, some foes aren't really a serious threat to you even when armed and swinging.
* Conversely, some foes can be 90% as dangerous even when fully disarmed and tied up.

So I'd say that in D&D, it's both less justified to kill people in the heat of battle and more justified to kill them afterwards than IRL, with the result that there's less of a moral line between the two acts.

It's not like you were fighting those bandits just to survive, you probably sought them out and started the fight for (hopefully) good reasons.

there is a wide range of evil beings. From random thieves to full on murderers to technically evil but redeemed fiends.

Killing random thieves because they tried to con you out of a dozen gold pieces is a wild overreaction. Even if you try to contend that they've stolen from countless others, it is still overkill.

Killing people when you don't need to is pretty damn evil.

In contrast, getting the evil being to be redeemed through one method or another is a Much more good aligned action than killing them during a fight, much less after they've surrendered.

It's certainly rather evil Chaotic to accept their surrender, then kill them.

The question is, do we *accept* their surrender?

Historically, surrender is accepted, not for humanitarian reasons, but for advantage: taking the former enemies as slaves, ransoming nobles, etc. D&D "Good" doesn't believe in slavery, leading to some questionable World-building for them to believe in surrender.

That aside, as I tried to say earlier, in D&D, it's really easy to take people alive. From the premise of the question, that we have *killed* all the (likely less-culpable) minions, it is clear that we have considered their deeds beyond redemption / have no intention to redeem them, so it makes no sense to consider accepting the leader's surrender unless there is some additional outside impetus to do so.

So, from the question, if we've already *killed* the minions, we're going to *kill* the leader, too.

For comparison, one time my character, a LG artificer, and company got attacked by some random bandits. I got them to surrender as quickly as possibly. One of their leg's was almost torn off, so I paid to create a scroll to heal it. We found out that they were bandits because they were poor as ****, so I gave them jobs in the party's silver mine.

That wasn't a paladin or an exalted character, but it sure seems like he was compared to the majority of other people's responses.

That is what I would hope a good aligned character would try to do, instead of all of this "execute them immediately" nonsense. Yeah, you don't have to be gullible about it, you can knock them unconscious, disarm them, take precautions, but if at all possible, don't kill prisoners. Killing prisoners or people that have surrendered is pretty much always going to be an evil aligned action in my book.

You *judged* them. In this case, you *judged* them redeemable. You deemed the root cause of their disruptive behavior to be "poverty", and you addressed this root cause. Good for you.

We have been killing all the minions. We've already killed them all to death. We have clearly judged them beyond redemption. We will kill their boss to death, too (unless we have reserved an even worse punishment for him).