Originally Posted by
Quertus
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.
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).