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A while ago, I was over on a well-known RPG forum site and was dicussing the relative merits of some new powers that had just been released through Dragon Magazine. There were a few relevant answers followed by one that jumped out and smacked me upside the head:
“The best condition to put on your enemy is dead. The sooner you figure that out, the better.”
Now I’ll give that forum member the benefit of the doubt that he (or she) wasn’t intentionally being rude, simply stating a point. The best thing to do to an enemy in D&D (or many RPGs for that matter) is just straight out damage, because a dead enemy is no longer a threat. When everything is dead, you have a victory condition known as….
Rout
Rout is the baseline. This is ‘defeat all enemies!’ Note that it’s “defeat” not “kill.” Discussions about the 4E “grindspace” have talked this topic to death (pun intended), so I’ll just skim it here for review and then move on. Even if the objective is to take out every last badguy on the field, they don’t all have to die. They can be knocked out. They can surrender. They can run. They can turn traitor or attempt to bargain for their survival. In this sense, a defeated enemy is one who is no longer attacking you, whether they’re alive or dead. Most of the time, though, Routed enemies are simply out of HP.
The more I thought about, the more I agreed with him; the only reason you stun, immobilize, daze, push or do anything other than damage an opponent is to prevent it from damaging you while you try to damage it. In that light, the whole thing seems very underwhelming, eh? Why not just do more damage?
So that train of thought came onto the platform and got pointed down another set of tracks. Why wouldn’t I want to deal more damage? Is a push, pull, stun or restrain meaningful on its own? Sure, you may have roleplaying reasons to not kill your enemy. Maybe he’s worth more money to you dead than alive. Maybe she’s royalty or should receive a fair trial in the local justice system. Heck, maybe he’s your own family! But mechanically speaking, what incentive do I have to use a less-damaging power or inflict a condition for its own sake?
Enter Fire Emblem. For those who are not familiar, Fire Emblem is a highly-acclaimed series of tactical RPGs that has spanned the entire lifetime of the Nintendo console line. One of the things that makes Fire Emblem unique among strategy RPGs are the Victory Conditions –what you need to do to win any particular battle. Not all battles are simply ‘defeat all enemies.’ There are in fact a wide range of ways that the game measures combat success, many of which fit perfectly well into 4th Edition D&D. In this series of articles, we will be offering to you various battlefield victory conditions to add variety to your combat encounters and make your PC’s Ranger actually decide that Twin Strike might not be the best option for once.
Ryven Cedrylle was introduced to 2nd edition D&D by his father at age 8 and has been hooked ever since. When not out somewhere with his nerd-loving wife, he spends an inordinate amount of time staring at small objects - primarily beakers, stars, books about religion and virtual gaming miniatures. Follow him on 
The use of different victory conations is something I have played around with on several occasions in several games; some times it has worked quite well other times not so much. One of the worst examples was the cattle glom incident in deadlans. The party was supposed to lure a stampeding heard of undead cattle out of town. However the party saw a monster and all went in to kill mode resulting in two party deaths and one player walking away from the table for a month.
On the other side of the coin has been situations were the objective was to keep an item out of the hands of the villains, here the party played along and just kept running while trading covering fie with there pursuers.
Also while powers like push pull slide and stun don’t do damage directly they are useful for moving opponents in and out of areas that cause damage. Also a tacitly coordinated party can use forced motion to better group enemies for burst attacks This is actually a favorite tactic of the mage in my table top game.
I know this is secondary to your proposal for alternate victory conditions, but I have to take a shot at your premise. Pure damage attacks are more efficient when looked at from the one character/player perspective. But when you raise the view to the party level movement and status effects become much more intriguing.
That push shoves the gnoll next to a Flaming Orb. That dazed ogre is now in danger of a rogue’s backstab. Sure, your damage may not be as high, but the party output can more than make up for it.
On preview: Quinn’s last paragraph echoes my thoughts.
Can’t wait to see more of these. I love this idea! I have been trying to explore a variety of different victory conditions for a while because there is so much more you can do than just “kill them all and move on”. The clearest example of this that I’ve done some variations on is the “Protect the bridge for X rounds so the civilians can escape” basic template. In fact protecting someone other than just your own PC’s adds a lot more drama to many encounters and opens up many more possibilities than “kill them all and move on”.
Ken has the correct idea here. Matt – my issue with your counterpoint is that you’re still doing damage. Fire Orb? Automatic damage. Backstab? extra damage dice. I’m talking about winning because you made it to a specific square, encounters that you win because you’re still alive after 6 round, heck – winning a full tactical encounter without ever dealing a single hitpoint of damage! That’s what this series is about. And for a preview – check out the 5th episode of the Power Source Podcast.. whenever it comes out.
I think this is a series that seriously needs to be written. Reading the encounters in the official modules might make you think all enemies fight to the death and prefer to battle in square rooms with uninteresting terrain.
I look forward to seeing a few new victory objectives and hopefully notice them creeping into play.
THANK BAHAMUT.
I have been ACHING for someone to do a series of articles on this. I have been waiting for someone to smooth the rules out and lay it all out there to be usable.
This topic first came onto my radar from this thread: http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/241614-creative-combat-objectives-other-than-kill-em-all.html
I tried one of the victory conditions, or at least, one of the objective-based situations, and it fell flat because I hadn’t ironed it all out. “Why can’t we just do X over and over to succeed?” “How long does Y take? Z? Then why are we rushing to do X?”
I look forward to these articles.
I’ll stop lurking just long enough to say that I’m very excited about this new series. Even as a fairly new GM, I’d love to run some encounters with goals other than “kill everything that isn’t you.”