i think everyones familiar with surrendering bosses in story lines(which i hope theirs a few of here and there), but what most games lack and what would be really cool is if their was a chance(varying with different enemy types and difficulty ranks ideally) for them to surrender when very close to death, say last 5 or 10% of hps(if the end up in that zone for long enough to surrender of course), and turn yellow and stat cowering or run away with some text maybe of i give up or i see the error of my ways extra and their loot if any dropping where they surrendered and then you can either just keep AOEing or chase them down, whatever and kill them or chose to leave them alive, would add some flavor and help with people not feeling their only path through lay in outright killing every living thing
you could even then make them intractable and have mini quest they where able to give so you could put 1 or 2 mini quests in each task force and each map area accessed via capturing one of them alive

So let me throw a situation at you in a way I could picture this working.

If you listened to our livestream where I talked about how the honor system and the alignment system work together. So your honor system is changed by how honorable of a player you are, this would not be effected by your alignment, there are villains and hereos that both have honor and there are some that are considered honor-less.

So having that information in mind and we apply a system that allows minions to surrender to it I can see a great opportunity for RPing.

So we could apply a random event to named bosses to provide you as the player with a chance to be honorable or honor-less, when you reach the boss in a mission, its hp gets down to 10-15% you get a very obvious visual cue that he surrenders. Now here are your options

1) You dont kill him, this would be a +honor situation as no one kills a defenseless man
2) You kill him because you dont care about honor.

Ok so this is the most basic situations because we are not even trying to tackle if you are RPing a character that would kill the defenseless boss because he could do damage in the future or any other RPing effects on the system. But in this situation where you have a choice to kill or not kill, it makes sense and is pretty easy to do and even better I like it!

BUT, now lets say your on a team, if someone on the team kills the surrendered enemy and you wanted to let him live. Or what if the choice isnt made and you just accidentally kill the target.

Lets play out some scenarios. Discuss!

When it comes to that point during the Task Force, the boss could be put in a temporarily invulnerable state while a voting screen comes up. It could be labelled "Decision Time" or something. You could get two or more options, and each will give you a different incremental change in your honor level. They could have a bit of flavor text to describe the general possible outcome of that decision, without giving too much away or assuming the player's motives too extensively.

The winning decision could be selected by either the highest number of votes for one choice or whoever rolls the highest. As for making sure that people still get rewarded with an honor increase or decrease based on their personal decision - their personal vote could decide what their personal reward is. Kind of like how in SWTOR if you're in a group, you get light or dark side points based on whatever you picked to do rather than whoever on your team happened to win the roll.

Maybe allow a popup of allow PvP match with your teammate if you decide you want to stop them? I'm not sure if this will complicate matters when forming a group as someone may want an option to turn off/on PvP when grouping so they don't have to deal with this situation. It's not unheard for heroes to fight one another when they disagree on principles. This seems like it could get over complicated. Do you allow just the leader of the group to make this type of decision and the rest must follow? Do you make it a voting system? Maybe the easiest is you get to retain your honor if you disagreed but were outvoted.

I don't think these are bad ideas, but I'd personally like it to be configurable somehow, e.g. "always pick the honorable option" or whatever. I think it's really disruptive to have a popup in the middle of a boss fight, especially a really intense one.

I get that real fights are about actions and choices, but it's unrealistic (I think) that everyone's going to stop and deliberate. Understood it might be necessary in team settings, and I also get the RP applications, but for someone who tends to solo, I would not be a fan of the interruption.

You bring up an interesting point.

Having the option pop up at the end of the fight instead of at any threshold above 1% might be preferable. Especially considering that some people might just pick the accepted surrender option every time to save themselves another 15% of the fight. With such a high health threshold, it does create a breakage in the flow of combat, and can be exploited.

Reducing the threshold significantly could be an effective solution, and it also seems a little more realistic. Many 'moral kill choices' made by heroes/anti-heroes/villains take place in a single act. A dramatic execution rather than a lingering continuation of the fight that was already taking place.

Well, I like this idea with how to handle bosses, and if the duel option was a thing I'd actively get better at PvP. but what about the mooks you fight along the way? Frankly, for every like, eight Punishers or Like, a thousand Jokers, there's a Batman or a Carmen Sandiego.

Carmen Sandiego doesn't really fight last I checked.. she just steals big things.

That's kinda my point, but gimmie a break, it's hard finding a mildly-villainous character who had an aversion to hurting people to go with the "joker" bit of that.

cristobal03 wrote:
Is it too disruptive if it does it every fight or just during certain missions in the main story line? I was just kind of thinking about Old Republic. I didn't play it a lot but it didn't seem to pop up a lot and was not that disruptive.

I agree it would be tedious if it did it every time when you are just doing some type of 'newspaper' mission and defeating random boss for the 130th time. Though a PvP aspect would be a nice touch as it keeps in line with the superhero tropes of friends becoming temporary foes, I don't want to add too much complexity to a game that sounds like we are already getting a ton of new systems we did not enjoy in CoH. I'm also happy with the "always honorable/dishonarable" option that you can either choose when joining a team or is just on permanently via character settings for simplicity's sake.

Fair enough, I don't think it would be a problem in certain arcs, like alignment-type stories. That would be really similar to the recent topic of flagging PvP through an arc or progression.

But if it's integral to the basic game system, I'd prefer to opt out somehow. I was perfectly happy pretending I was "arresting" mobs in CoH.

Jaximus wrote:
so in a situation like this would there be any sort of reputation to go with your honor? if someone has a history of killing npcs even after they surrendered, would npcs be less likely to surrender in the future? >.>

I can see this being hard to implement in a team where some people just won't stop the dps. or if there's heavy DoT effects on the boss.