Yesterday, I talked about my adventures with surrendering as a player character. I’ve noticed that my sort of strategy is rare, though. In most game groups, one can certainly try to arrange a surrender, but it’s far likelier that you’re going to have to hit them with either overwhelming force or a cutscene. What is it about the players that makes them so unlikely to give up?

The easiest thing to blame is the whole concept of honor. And yes, there are indeed people who can’t stand to give up, and that does indeed make it rather difficult to get them to stand down without offing the characters or just clubbing them over the head until they stop muttering clichéd defiances. But while it’s an easy scapegoat, it’s not the whole story.

In some cases, surrender might not seem like an option. And I don’t just mean the times when it’s a result of the Fight/Intimidate?/Flee mindset popularized by console RPGs, or even the times when the characters are dealing with something nonsapient that just doesn’t have the concept of set down the weapons and step away. Sometimes you’ve got a perfectly sapient opponent, capable of full communication and everything, and they just don’t give any signs that ceasing to resist is actually a viable option. Or they say that it is—but the reward is simply being turned into something slightly less perverse or dying a little more cleanly. If it isn’t signaled one way or another that one who surrenders can expect to live long enough to come up with and at least partially execute Plan B, it’s back to conking them over the head until they stop moving.

It’s also possible that they can’t tell that the fight can’t possibly end well. (Or shouldn’t possibly end well, depending on the level of munchkinry involved.) And yeah, you’d think it wouldn’t be that hard to tell that the echo demon or the honking big dragon or the thing surrounded by corpses of its fallen foes is something one is not ready to fight—but on the other hand, when you’ve got a group that wants to test its limits to the utmost, or one that’s used to people throwing things that are too big at it to see what it’ll do, it’s a lot harder to get across that this force really is overwhelming.

And some of them don’t see surrender as a tactical maneuver. To them, all it is is admitting that they have lost, and ending up deeper in trouble—and who knows, with some character builds they might be right. It might be necessary to play up the advantages: the havoc one can wreak on the way out, the people who can be messed with or possibly recruited, the other messages the act itself can send, or heck, whatever advantages the person requesting their surrender is offering. Even then, no guarantees.

In short, it’s like just about anything else when running a game: if you want it, make it worthwhile.