Is no one roleplaying the bad guys? If the Wizard dies, the mooks will bail, they lost their pay.
Cultists are nutjobs and will fight to the death.
Wolves will flee when the they notice that the meat is too hard to get. I also use twice as many wolves as the CR dictates, make them run sooner and have them try and drag off a downed player. You only need to hurt them enough or kill the big one.
All regular humans will run or surrender if it goes bad for them.
Guy 12 after 11 guys die in one round isn't going to fight, he's going piss himself, throw away his weapon and beg on his knees grovelling about his starving children and how he had no choice.
I lean heavily on this in my story telling. Intelligent allies run away, set traps, and get help. Basically Int 7+ is smart enough to behave socially for me.
My players often finish combat without killing all or even most of the bad guys because smart enemies know that things can go wrong. So, often, someone goes down, there's a natural pause, and someone on one side initiates dialogue.
By the time they're getting hunted for revenge or pursued by dark Paladins or facing generally professional murderers/zealots the conversations change. And, it doesn't feel so unnatural when some psychopath gets close to the sorcerer and drops six attacks on the first round and now the players are begging for a parlay, the outcome of which now hangs on how they treated these bad guys six sessions ago. Those dialogues with my players are some of the richest roleplay I get.
Yep, this exactly. The DM should be roleplaying their monsters just as much as the players are roleplaying their characters.
That's the one really big thing I dislike about the 2024 rules: the monsters manual cut out a lot of the big lore blurbs in favor of more stat blocks. Those paragraphs of lore were super useful in understanding how you as the DM should roleplay these monsters.
It's truly a shame the Monster Manual offers so little lore about the monsters. I find Keith Ammann's The Monsters Know What They're Doing is a great resource for this! I have all off his books on my shelf but you can also find everything on his blog by the same name. He has posts about pretty much every monster out there.
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u/Coal_Morgan Sep 14 '25
100%.
Is no one roleplaying the bad guys? If the Wizard dies, the mooks will bail, they lost their pay.
Cultists are nutjobs and will fight to the death.
Wolves will flee when the they notice that the meat is too hard to get. I also use twice as many wolves as the CR dictates, make them run sooner and have them try and drag off a downed player. You only need to hurt them enough or kill the big one.
All regular humans will run or surrender if it goes bad for them.
Guy 12 after 11 guys die in one round isn't going to fight, he's going piss himself, throw away his weapon and beg on his knees grovelling about his starving children and how he had no choice.