When Characters Don't Accept Surrender

When your characters won't ever accept an enemy's surrender, you have a serious problem, because it also means that those characters won't ever surrender themselves (because they know it always means certain death), and that you can never have two characters (PC and NPC) fight and later end up as allies (unless they're both chaotic evil, for instance).

You can enforce the right of your NPCs to surrender (and expect to live through it) through a couple of means.

First, a surrendering character who is about to be butchered could "turn out" to have some information critical to the characters, and say something like "Kill me and you'll never learn about (fill in the blank)." This stubborn NPC won't reveal the information, even on pain of death, unless the PCs promise to accept his surrender (and those of his friends) and keep the NPCs alive afterwards. (If the PCs promise, and later renege, you can always visit other revenge upon them.)

Second, a local deity, spirit or monster could see the PCs hacking on surrendering NPCs and grow offended. Much tougher than the PCs will ever be, this being snatches up the most offensive of the PCs, tells him what he's doing and why, and then curses or kills the PC as a lesson to the others.

This is a brute-force technique, but such players have already shown that they understand little but brute force anyway.

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