Ending the Encounter

A combat encounter typically ends when all the creatures on one side are killed or knocked unconscious. Once this happens, you can stop acting in initiative order. The surviving side then has ample time to ensure that everyone taken out stays down. However, you might need to keep using combat rounds if any player characters are near death, clinging to a cliff, or in some other situation where every moment matters for their survival. You can decide a fight is over if there's no challenge left and the player characters are just cleaning up the last few weak enemies. However, avoid doing this if any of the players still have inventive and interesting things they want to try or spells they're concentrating on—ending an encounter early is a tool to avoid boredom, not to deny someone their fun. You can end a fight early in several ways: the foes can surrender, an adversary can die before its Hit Points run out, or you can simply say the battle is over and that the PCs easily dispatch their remaining foes. In this last case, you might ask, “Is everyone okay if we call the fight?” to make sure your players are on board. One side might surrender when almost all its members are defeated or if spells or skills thoroughly demoralize them. Once there's a surrender, come out of initiative order and enter a short negotiation. These conversations are really about whether the winners will show mercy to the losers or just kill or otherwise get rid of them. The surrendering side usually doesn't have much leverage in these cases, so avoid long back-and-forth discussions. Bypassed Encounters What happens if you've planned an encounter and the PCs avoid it entirely? This could leave them behind in XP or cause them to miss important information or treasure. In the case of XP, the guidelines are simple: if the player characters avoided the challenge through smart tactical play, a savvy diplomatic exchange, clever use of magic, or another approach that required ingenuity and planning, award them the normal XP for the encounter. If they did something that took only moderate effort or was a lucky break, like finding a secret passage and using it to avoid a fight, award them XP for a minor or moderate accomplishment. In an adventure that's more free-form, like a sprawling dungeon with multiple paths, there might be no reward for bypassing an encounter because doing so was trivial. You'll have to think on your feet if information or items get skipped when players bypass encounters. Look for another reasonable place in the adventure to share the information or item. If it makes sense, move the original encounter to another part of the adventure and give the PCs a major advantage for bypassing the encounter in the first place.