Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
Two scenario from a one-shot I ran a few years back:

PCs are level 1 and fighting bandits in their camp. The PCs attacked them on the word of a local sherif, and are are trying to find the main camp. The Life Cleric decides to capture the last one, and grapples him and demands surrender. Bandit surrenders, blabs the main camps location, and starts blubbering "please don't kill me" over and over again in a great begging, scared, and frankly apparently annoyingly whiny voice. The vengeance Paladin says something like "I stab him" and I respond with "okay, he's dead". Everyone else at the table is shocked and doesn't know what to say. The Life cleric was especially upset.

I feel that player action have consequences. If they happen, they happen. The two mistakes I made was not giving anyone else a chance to interrupt, and more importantly not reading my table.

This was the same one shot where the PCs later had been encountering humanoid whelps, and letting them run away after killing the adults. Mot that they had much chance of survival, but I was describing them as older so maybe they were thinking "teens". And then a PC Wizard fireballed a cave mostly blindly after being shot up with arrows, only to find out there had been whelps hiding near the back. That really disturbed them. Again, I should have read the table from both the bandit incident, and the way they'd previously been reacting to finding whelps in the caves.

---------

Attacking and killing 'bad-guys' in combat isn't an issue for the standard player. But they hate having to deal with questions of 'bad-guy' prisoners, and they really hate to deal with young bad guys. If the table wants a game about these issues go for it. But IMX very few do.

I understand from some Player's perspective, they want to play the cool rebel of a bad guy race without getting attacked and killed on sight. But from a DM perspective, obviously bad 'bad-guys' are an extremely useful tool, to give players the kind of game they want.
When I'm a player, my characters don't take prisoners. Everyone in my group knows this.