So I'm running a homebrew game that presents a secretive group that the party has to uncover. This has lead them to declaring non-lethal damage as ANY monster that drops to 0HP. Even the beasts are being brought back so the druid can interrogate them. I'm thinking of adding a table rule: either a percent chance they die anyway or making the attack more difficult. What do my fellow DM's think?
RAW, PC's can knock out enemies without rolling. You could incorporate a DEX saves for your PC's to avoid knocking people out. Also, perhaps, you could have devoted villains that sacrifice themselves for their cause.
You could also have villains that wont give any info when interroagted. If your PC's are using magic to charm their prisoners then you could put in more elves, they "have advantage on saving throws against being charmed".
People can’t say what they don’t know. Word will get around the PCs are doing this, and then the bad guys will stop telling their people anything. Or hire mercenaries and not tell them anything beyond, go here and stop anyone else from entering. No names, only meet in public locations while wearing a disguise.
I have to say interrogating the animals sounds clever, you should reward the PCs for thinking like this and not worry about putting an end to it out right. That said here are a few suggestions to keep your game running smoothly and your players happy.
1. Have the bad guys try to get away if a fight isn't going their way. Seriously, not enough DMs do this. Baddies that get away can't be interrogated.
2. Limit what the baddies know or are willing to reveal. If they're interrogating low level flunkies, they probably don't know too much about the details of a large powerful organization. They will know 1 clue that points the PCs to the next plot point/minor boss fight ect. :)
3. What do the PCs do with the people they're interrogating when they're done? Let them go (nice but risky since the baddies can report back), kill them (pretty evil but less risk) ect. Consider the consequences that are reasonable given the PCs actions. In a game I heard about the PCs interrogated and released a baddie that made their way back to EVIL INC. where they were brutally tortured. The PCs then found and released the baddie who blamed the PCs for their misfortune and came back to haunt the party as a major and memorable bad guy. Just an idea about where these things can go.
Hope this helps you manage clever PCs and keep the game going!
You could also have a smart captured enemy feed the party believable lies. A well-timed and judiciously executed disinformation campaign can inject some fun intrigue into the game as well as make the party question their tactics.
I wouldn't punish them for their ingenuity, but turnabout is fair play.
I understand the problem, I've had this with a group as well. The problem isn't that it gives the PCs too much information or anything like that, it's that every combat encounter is then immediately followed by an interrogation. These interrogations get boring, and it's much worse if you allow the players to brutalise prisoners. Roleplaying a frightened NPC who is being tortured is a very unpleasant experience for the DM, and I won't do it. Even if the PCs just tie them up and ask them questions, the players seldom believe the NPCs or monsters who claim to have no knowledge, and there's little way outside of Insight checks to tell whether the creature is telling the truth.
This slows down the game a lot and is really boring for the DM. The DM knows that the lackeys don't know anything very useful, but the problem is that the PCs don't. Throw in that they just captured 6 Cultists or Badgers, and that's a lot of boring RP.
I play the following house rules:
Non-lethal damage can only be dealt with unarmed attacks (how do you do non-lethal Fire Bolts, arrows, greatsword attacks?) or improvised weapons.
In case an interrogation does occur, unless it's with a vital NPC, we will skip roleplaying it and the PC leading the interrogation goes like so:
Choose an interrogation style: Good Cop, Bad Cop, or Trickery
The PC then makes a Persuasion check (Good Cop), an Intimidation check (Bad Cop), or Deception check (Trickery). This is contested by a roll by the interrogated creature, which could be Deception (the creature is likely to lie), Constitution (they stone-wall), or Charisma (try to charm their way out)
Depending on the level of success and what the creature knows, the PC receives 0-3 pieces of information. They receive 1 piece of information plus another 1 for every 5 points they beat the opposed check by, up to a maximum of 3.
Feel free to let your players know that after they've rolled for interrogation and you've given them the information they earned, no further attempts will yield a different result.
This won't stop your PCs from trying to interrogate everything, but it will skip past a lot of the tedium of interrogating every single thing they come across.
Put a ticking clock over their heads. What I mean is, design some situations where the BBE(s) will escape/win if the party doesn’t hurry. Make it so “there’s no time!!” If they feel there’s no time, even for a short rest, then they will be less likely to want to stop and play 20 questions after every battle. And if they do, have the BBE(s) escape/win some minor victory. Actually give them consequences to face for their not hurrying. Or have them come across the devastated village scant moments after the BBE(s) have finished their dastardly deed and teleported away to find a grieving father clutching the body of his slain daughter who says “if you had only gotten here sooner….”
You stated the problem very clearly. The opposed check is a great idea. Last time I had a "sheriff" step in and take over the interrogation, and that's what I did with him.
Beasts won't be very useful for getting good information from. Their INT isn't high enough to know the difference between humanoid races, or many other humanoid-relevant visual observations.
I understand the problem, I've had this with a group as well. The problem isn't that it gives the PCs too much information or anything like that, it's that every combat encounter is then immediately followed by an interrogation. These interrogations get boring, and it's much worse if you allow the players to brutalise prisoners. Roleplaying a frightened NPC who is being tortured is a very unpleasant experience for the DM, and I won't do it. Even if the PCs just tie them up and ask them questions, the players seldom believe the NPCs or monsters who claim to have no knowledge, and there's little way outside of Insight checks to tell whether the creature is telling the truth.
This slows down the game a lot and is really boring for the DM. The DM knows that the lackeys don't know anything very useful, but the problem is that the PCs don't. Throw in that they just captured 6 Cultists or Badgers, and that's a lot of boring RP.
I play the following house rules:
Non-lethal damage can only be dealt with unarmed attacks (how do you do non-lethal Fire Bolts, arrows, greatsword attacks?) or improvised weapons.
In case an interrogation does occur, unless it's with a vital NPC, we will skip roleplaying it and the PC leading the interrogation goes like so:
Choose an interrogation style: Good Cop, Bad Cop, or Trickery
The PC then makes a Persuasion check (Good Cop), an Intimidation check (Bad Cop), or Deception check (Trickery). This is contested by a roll by the interrogated creature, which could be Deception (the creature is likely to lie), Constitution (they stone-wall), or Charisma (try to charm their way out)
Depending on the level of success and what the creature knows, the PC receives 0-3 pieces of information. They receive 1 piece of information plus another 1 for every 5 points they beat the opposed check by, up to a maximum of 3.
Feel free to let your players know that after they've rolled for interrogation and you've given them the information they earned, no further attempts will yield a different result.
This won't stop your PCs from trying to interrogate everything, but it will skip past a lot of the tedium of interrogating every single thing they come across.
Ooooo! I like your rules set! I don't have this issue with my games but this is a very nice thing to have in my back pocket.
Bear in mind that doing nonlethal damage is only an option for melee attacks. However, I would just go with the normal methods of dealing with interrogation, which is mostly making sure that the mooks don't know anything of particular value.
Bear in mind that doing nonlethal damage is only an option for melee attacks. However, I would just go with the normal methods of dealing with interrogation, which is mostly making sure that the mooks don't know anything of particular value.
This doesn't help; it actually makes the problem worse, because even with Zone of Truth up, the NPC may just be withholding information. I guess you could require every PC in the party make an Insight check when the gnoll says "I know nothing of value," set the DC at 2 and let them all succeed.
The problem comes from the PCs believing that the NPC might have information, no matter how much they protest that they don't know anything. They get into their heads "But what if they do?" and "They must know something" and then you end up having to name them when they were just meant to be Disposable Gnoll #4. Worse, the DM then has to invent backstory for them, where they were from, a personality, and the better the DM does at this, the more Disposable Gnoll #4 feels like they must be an NPC of purpose. An hour later, the PCs have had a long conversation with an irrelevant Gnoll stat block, and gained no information which is no fun for anyone.
Generally when my players are interrogating everything, or when I'm doing that as a player, it's because they don't know what to do next.
If this is the case, I would consider giving them what they want. Have someone they capture actually know a piece of actionable intel, give the players some information about your main plot that they can move on. Nothing earth-shattering or twist-spoiling, think of something the henchman would know, like do did hire them? What are they after? Etc.
If you're worried about what this will do to your main plot, don't be. Your players have already set themselves up in "information gathering mode" and continuing to deny that is only going to cause more problems the longer it goes on, the more you deny the party's fantasy of being cool investigators as they're clearly going for. Instead, I would adapt your plot to this new development. As a DM, it's your job to--among other things-- approach the world as if you are the villain trying to enact their evil scheme. Step 1 of that is that no plan survives contact with the enemy. That means that you should allow for choices the players make to have an effect on the plot of the adventure. Your big scheme should not look the same the whole way through, rather it should adapt to changing circumstances brought on by player action.
Say your villain is secretly the advisor to the King, and you were planning to reveal that dramatically in a climactic moment, BUT your players have other ideas and keep kidnapping all the assassins the advisor secretly sends after the rest of the royal family, and the players--wanting to be cool investigators-- actually learn that there is a source close to the king that is actually working for the Assassin's Guild! That kind of kills your big reveal when the players start investigating the royal court and eventually search the advisor's rooms and find a whole bunch of compromising correspondence tying him to the assassination attempts, but think how much fun the players will have discovering that information for themselves and then being able to bring their evidence to the King, maybe oust the advisor in a big climactic battle where them and all the corrupt guards under the advisor's thrall are driven from the castle and the players are hailed as heroes for their cunning and daring do. That's arguably better than the big reveal you originally planned because it was brought about by the players.
Now imagine the reverse. You're going to reveal the advisor as the bad guy in a big climactic moment, but the players are chomping at the bit to solve this mystery you've put in front of them because they want to see the world as something real they can effect, so therefore they should be able to solve this. But they can't. They interrogate assassin after assassin and nobody knows anything, nobody behaves as a human being would and offers some information in exchange for their life/freedom (not that all of them would, but at least one of them would), and everywhere the players look, they find dead ends since, as the DM, you've determined they're not meant to find out before the big climactic moment. Then it comes. After whatever events the advisor weaves as distractions to get the heroes off his trail (which automatically works because in this scenario he leaves no trail), with the enemy at the gate, the heroes fight through a castle full of bad guys to go save the king or what-have-you, and then as they burst into the throne room the advisor announces "ha HA! it was me all along!" Big dramatic moment and the players....yawn. They're not invested, because this isn't really happening to them, it's just being shown to them. They tried to get into it and just kept hitting walls and eventually they saw the big "KEEP OUT" sign written on the plot and took those words more to heart than you intended even after you've thrown open the gates to it.
See the difference?
DISCLAIMER: now, I don't know what your plot actually is, so my example might be a little harsh, but I just wanted to make my point really overt just to demonstrate it well. You're probably doing fine as a DM overall and I don't want it to sound like I'm saying you're not. This is just the lesson I might try to learn from this situation, where your players are signaling to you what they want, but what they want doesn't seem to work with the plot you set up.
Even then, if the players find out the advisor is in league with the assassins before you intended and the plan you had for your plot is ruined, that doesn't mean the end of your campaign. Perhaps, now that they're exposed and driven from the castle, the former advisor becomes more dangerous than ever, now that they can only get what they tried to get through stealth, by force. Maybe now you see the bad guy taking a much more active role in the plot, the stakes raising as the advisor's mercenaries attack the countryside and such. All it takes is for you do look at the situation from the bad guy's perspective and go "ok that blew up.. how will I respond?" Maybe take the next session off if you need more time to come up with a new plan. Your players will probably feel kind of cool about it, like "wow we were so smart and good at DND that we broke the DM's plot for a week," and then you all can sit back down next week and deal with the fallout.
TLDR: sometimes players' playstyle is a cue on how they would like things to go, and fighting that can be counterintuitive.
The problem comes from the PCs believing that the NPC might have information, no matter how much they protest that they don't know anything.
They shouldn't know nothing. Just stuff of limited value (that, depending on how the PCs arrived at this point, the PCs might already know). Generally speaking they know who told them to eliminate the PCs, and what if anything that person told them about why, and what they normally do when not being assigned to attack the PCs.
So the answer I came up with hinges on that it must be a melee attack. With a hard line of ONLY a melee attack not a sneak attack or an opportunity attack or an extra attack. I know that probable wasn't the intention behind the rule, but it could be viewed in that way, My players thought it was a good solution and agreed to it. We concluded that the knock out rule should have more clarity or constraints. Some of us thought it was an over simplified patch for monsters being dead at 0hp and therefore couldn't be healed back to consciousness (like a PC).
AS an example- The story, so far, is that the land the players are in had been occupied by another nation that believe humans are the dominant race. They were defeated, but there are remnants that are trying to pave the way for reconquest. A group of these fanatics(called "The Stone") are trying to acquire an ancient artifact that may help them achieve that goal. The party has been interfering with that plan and are now being watched/mislead by infiltrators. I fully expected (as did my main villain) that the party would capture some of these guys for info. They first captured 3 goblin's, from a larger goblinoid raiding party, that had suspiciously gone out of their way to attack a strong house.
The party knew the above information and the following: The house was occupied by the non-human leaders of the town they are in; "The Stone" had resorted to bribing non-humans to unwittingly work for them; one of the intended victims of the raid had been helping them. Also, an easy search would have lead back to a ferry boat(by far the biggest clue)
The party used about 2 hrs of game time to interrogate the captive and find out one of the dead goblin leaders had been given the boat and a promise of loot by someone in a dark cloak. Then they went and looked at the boat they found the critical information that it belonged to a well known riverman who operates from a specific place up river and deals with a particular group people. Game time 10min. And yes during the 2 hrs -the goblins mentioned the boat a dozen times. If I had known how it was going to go. I would have slapped some urgency on it. Something along the lines of "If any goblins got away they would go back to the boat"
I don't think making non lethal attacks harder is going to eliminate your interrogation problem. What will make interrogation less time consuming is if you treat the interrogations as uncontested unless the prisoner is going to have truly new information. Most minions assigned to guard, picket, or patrol aren't going to know squat about the BBEG's plan so the "information" a party can gain is going to get redundant really fast. I think most players when they realize they're not called to roll and the DM says "Your prisoners don't tell you anything you haven't yet heard before" may recognize the key to learning what's going on is simply proceeding with the adventure.
What do they do with these prisoners once they extract the info? Survivors with tales of PCs waylaying should lead things to more robust patrols etc. PCs completely slaughtering adversaries, including prisoners will lead subsequent prisoners to not bother knowing that talking won't save them etc.
In real life intelligence designed to penetrate an organization, no one ever thinks the lowest tiers of the pyramid are going to be able to provide the whole picture, that's why the effort is to to always develop information by "working up" the network. In game terms the PCs should recognize they're dilly dallying (and thus exposing themselves to greater risk) and the only way they're actually going to make headway is to work up to bigger fish (usually further down the line in the adventure). As a DM it's perfectly your purview to indicate through narration that the PCs tactics are not working and likely self-sabotaging (all this low level probing is going to lead logically to more robust encounters).
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The party used about 2 hrs of game time to interrogate the captive and find out one of the dead goblin leaders had been given the boat and a promise of loot by someone in a dark cloak.
I don't think the problem is capturing enemies. The problem is how long it takes them to do a simple interrogation. Which would be okay if there was something interesting about it, but it doesn't sound like there was. I recommend at a certain point just turning the remainder of the interrogation into a simple die roll (this is a good rule of thumb for any RP scene: once it becomes boring, abstract the rest with a die roll).
I appreciate and admire the suggestions about how to roleplay these captive interrogation encounters. That's not really my issue. Let's try this- a fighter with a great axe checks his sheet makes sure he is using every modifier he can to attack and damage because he has to put this guy down else the party might lose. And wham -solid hit- great damage roll- the bad guy goes down and THEN the player tells me "I just want to knock him out". It is that easy. it lacks realism and frankly encourages lazy gaming,
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So I'm running a homebrew game that presents a secretive group that the party has to uncover. This has lead them to declaring non-lethal damage as ANY monster that drops to 0HP. Even the beasts are being brought back so the druid can interrogate them. I'm thinking of adding a table rule: either a percent chance they die anyway or making the attack more difficult. What do my fellow DM's think?
RAW, PC's can knock out enemies without rolling. You could incorporate a DEX saves for your PC's to avoid knocking people out. Also, perhaps, you could have devoted villains that sacrifice themselves for their cause.
You could also have villains that wont give any info when interroagted. If your PC's are using magic to charm their prisoners then you could put in more elves, they "have advantage on saving throws against being charmed".
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
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HERE.Seems like a smart move by the players. What's the problem? Why are you wanting make it more difficult?
(My personal home-brew is on a roll of 1 on a d20 the attack accidentally kills the target - just enough to make the attempt dangerous)
I'm guessing it's because this can help the PC's get information to early and possibly mess up the plot of the game.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.People can’t say what they don’t know. Word will get around the PCs are doing this, and then the bad guys will stop telling their people anything. Or hire mercenaries and not tell them anything beyond, go here and stop anyone else from entering. No names, only meet in public locations while wearing a disguise.
I have to say interrogating the animals sounds clever, you should reward the PCs for thinking like this and not worry about putting an end to it out right. That said here are a few suggestions to keep your game running smoothly and your players happy.
1. Have the bad guys try to get away if a fight isn't going their way. Seriously, not enough DMs do this. Baddies that get away can't be interrogated.
2. Limit what the baddies know or are willing to reveal. If they're interrogating low level flunkies, they probably don't know too much about the details of a large powerful organization. They will know 1 clue that points the PCs to the next plot point/minor boss fight ect. :)
3. What do the PCs do with the people they're interrogating when they're done? Let them go (nice but risky since the baddies can report back), kill them (pretty evil but less risk) ect. Consider the consequences that are reasonable given the PCs actions. In a game I heard about the PCs interrogated and released a baddie that made their way back to EVIL INC. where they were brutally tortured. The PCs then found and released the baddie who blamed the PCs for their misfortune and came back to haunt the party as a major and memorable bad guy. Just an idea about where these things can go.
Hope this helps you manage clever PCs and keep the game going!
You could also have a smart captured enemy feed the party believable lies. A well-timed and judiciously executed disinformation campaign can inject some fun intrigue into the game as well as make the party question their tactics.
I wouldn't punish them for their ingenuity, but turnabout is fair play.
I understand the problem, I've had this with a group as well. The problem isn't that it gives the PCs too much information or anything like that, it's that every combat encounter is then immediately followed by an interrogation. These interrogations get boring, and it's much worse if you allow the players to brutalise prisoners. Roleplaying a frightened NPC who is being tortured is a very unpleasant experience for the DM, and I won't do it. Even if the PCs just tie them up and ask them questions, the players seldom believe the NPCs or monsters who claim to have no knowledge, and there's little way outside of Insight checks to tell whether the creature is telling the truth.
This slows down the game a lot and is really boring for the DM. The DM knows that the lackeys don't know anything very useful, but the problem is that the PCs don't. Throw in that they just captured 6 Cultists or Badgers, and that's a lot of boring RP.
I play the following house rules:
This won't stop your PCs from trying to interrogate everything, but it will skip past a lot of the tedium of interrogating every single thing they come across.
Put a ticking clock over their heads. What I mean is, design some situations where the BBE(s) will escape/win if the party doesn’t hurry. Make it so “there’s no time!!” If they feel there’s no time, even for a short rest, then they will be less likely to want to stop and play 20 questions after every battle. And if they do, have the BBE(s) escape/win some minor victory. Actually give them consequences to face for their not hurrying. Or have them come across the devastated village scant moments after the BBE(s) have finished their dastardly deed and teleported away to find a grieving father clutching the body of his slain daughter who says “if you had only gotten here sooner….”
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You stated the problem very clearly. The opposed check is a great idea. Last time I had a "sheriff" step in and take over the interrogation, and that's what I did with him.
Beasts won't be very useful for getting good information from. Their INT isn't high enough to know the difference between humanoid races, or many other humanoid-relevant visual observations.
Ooooo! I like your rules set! I don't have this issue with my games but this is a very nice thing to have in my back pocket.
Er ek geng, þat er í þeim skóm er ek valda.
UwU
Bear in mind that doing nonlethal damage is only an option for melee attacks. However, I would just go with the normal methods of dealing with interrogation, which is mostly making sure that the mooks don't know anything of particular value.
This doesn't help; it actually makes the problem worse, because even with Zone of Truth up, the NPC may just be withholding information. I guess you could require every PC in the party make an Insight check when the gnoll says "I know nothing of value," set the DC at 2 and let them all succeed.
The problem comes from the PCs believing that the NPC might have information, no matter how much they protest that they don't know anything. They get into their heads "But what if they do?" and "They must know something" and then you end up having to name them when they were just meant to be Disposable Gnoll #4. Worse, the DM then has to invent backstory for them, where they were from, a personality, and the better the DM does at this, the more Disposable Gnoll #4 feels like they must be an NPC of purpose. An hour later, the PCs have had a long conversation with an irrelevant Gnoll stat block, and gained no information which is no fun for anyone.
Generally when my players are interrogating everything, or when I'm doing that as a player, it's because they don't know what to do next.
If this is the case, I would consider giving them what they want. Have someone they capture actually know a piece of actionable intel, give the players some information about your main plot that they can move on. Nothing earth-shattering or twist-spoiling, think of something the henchman would know, like do did hire them? What are they after? Etc.
If you're worried about what this will do to your main plot, don't be. Your players have already set themselves up in "information gathering mode" and continuing to deny that is only going to cause more problems the longer it goes on, the more you deny the party's fantasy of being cool investigators as they're clearly going for. Instead, I would adapt your plot to this new development. As a DM, it's your job to--among other things-- approach the world as if you are the villain trying to enact their evil scheme. Step 1 of that is that no plan survives contact with the enemy. That means that you should allow for choices the players make to have an effect on the plot of the adventure. Your big scheme should not look the same the whole way through, rather it should adapt to changing circumstances brought on by player action.
Say your villain is secretly the advisor to the King, and you were planning to reveal that dramatically in a climactic moment, BUT your players have other ideas and keep kidnapping all the assassins the advisor secretly sends after the rest of the royal family, and the players--wanting to be cool investigators-- actually learn that there is a source close to the king that is actually working for the Assassin's Guild! That kind of kills your big reveal when the players start investigating the royal court and eventually search the advisor's rooms and find a whole bunch of compromising correspondence tying him to the assassination attempts, but think how much fun the players will have discovering that information for themselves and then being able to bring their evidence to the King, maybe oust the advisor in a big climactic battle where them and all the corrupt guards under the advisor's thrall are driven from the castle and the players are hailed as heroes for their cunning and daring do. That's arguably better than the big reveal you originally planned because it was brought about by the players.
Now imagine the reverse. You're going to reveal the advisor as the bad guy in a big climactic moment, but the players are chomping at the bit to solve this mystery you've put in front of them because they want to see the world as something real they can effect, so therefore they should be able to solve this. But they can't. They interrogate assassin after assassin and nobody knows anything, nobody behaves as a human being would and offers some information in exchange for their life/freedom (not that all of them would, but at least one of them would), and everywhere the players look, they find dead ends since, as the DM, you've determined they're not meant to find out before the big climactic moment. Then it comes. After whatever events the advisor weaves as distractions to get the heroes off his trail (which automatically works because in this scenario he leaves no trail), with the enemy at the gate, the heroes fight through a castle full of bad guys to go save the king or what-have-you, and then as they burst into the throne room the advisor announces "ha HA! it was me all along!" Big dramatic moment and the players....yawn. They're not invested, because this isn't really happening to them, it's just being shown to them. They tried to get into it and just kept hitting walls and eventually they saw the big "KEEP OUT" sign written on the plot and took those words more to heart than you intended even after you've thrown open the gates to it.
See the difference?
DISCLAIMER: now, I don't know what your plot actually is, so my example might be a little harsh, but I just wanted to make my point really overt just to demonstrate it well. You're probably doing fine as a DM overall and I don't want it to sound like I'm saying you're not. This is just the lesson I might try to learn from this situation, where your players are signaling to you what they want, but what they want doesn't seem to work with the plot you set up.
Even then, if the players find out the advisor is in league with the assassins before you intended and the plan you had for your plot is ruined, that doesn't mean the end of your campaign. Perhaps, now that they're exposed and driven from the castle, the former advisor becomes more dangerous than ever, now that they can only get what they tried to get through stealth, by force. Maybe now you see the bad guy taking a much more active role in the plot, the stakes raising as the advisor's mercenaries attack the countryside and such. All it takes is for you do look at the situation from the bad guy's perspective and go "ok that blew up.. how will I respond?" Maybe take the next session off if you need more time to come up with a new plan. Your players will probably feel kind of cool about it, like "wow we were so smart and good at DND that we broke the DM's plot for a week," and then you all can sit back down next week and deal with the fallout.
TLDR: sometimes players' playstyle is a cue on how they would like things to go, and fighting that can be counterintuitive.
They shouldn't know nothing. Just stuff of limited value (that, depending on how the PCs arrived at this point, the PCs might already know). Generally speaking they know who told them to eliminate the PCs, and what if anything that person told them about why, and what they normally do when not being assigned to attack the PCs.
So the answer I came up with hinges on that it must be a melee attack. With a hard line of ONLY a melee attack not a sneak attack or an opportunity attack or an extra attack. I know that probable wasn't the intention behind the rule, but it could be viewed in that way, My players thought it was a good solution and agreed to it. We concluded that the knock out rule should have more clarity or constraints. Some of us thought it was an over simplified patch for monsters being dead at 0hp and therefore couldn't be healed back to consciousness (like a PC).
AS an example- The story, so far, is that the land the players are in had been occupied by another nation that believe humans are the dominant race. They were defeated, but there are remnants that are trying to pave the way for reconquest. A group of these fanatics(called "The Stone") are trying to acquire an ancient artifact that may help them achieve that goal. The party has been interfering with that plan and are now being watched/mislead by infiltrators. I fully expected (as did my main villain) that the party would capture some of these guys for info. They first captured 3 goblin's, from a larger goblinoid raiding party, that had suspiciously gone out of their way to attack a strong house.
The party knew the above information and the following: The house was occupied by the non-human leaders of the town they are in; "The Stone" had resorted to bribing non-humans to unwittingly work for them; one of the intended victims of the raid had been helping them. Also, an easy search would have lead back to a ferry boat(by far the biggest clue)
The party used about 2 hrs of game time to interrogate the captive and find out one of the dead goblin leaders had been given the boat and a promise of loot by someone in a dark cloak. Then they went and looked at the boat they found the critical information that it belonged to a well known riverman who operates from a specific place up river and deals with a particular group people. Game time 10min. And yes during the 2 hrs -the goblins mentioned the boat a dozen times. If I had known how it was going to go. I would have slapped some urgency on it. Something along the lines of "If any goblins got away they would go back to the boat"
I don't think making non lethal attacks harder is going to eliminate your interrogation problem. What will make interrogation less time consuming is if you treat the interrogations as uncontested unless the prisoner is going to have truly new information. Most minions assigned to guard, picket, or patrol aren't going to know squat about the BBEG's plan so the "information" a party can gain is going to get redundant really fast. I think most players when they realize they're not called to roll and the DM says "Your prisoners don't tell you anything you haven't yet heard before" may recognize the key to learning what's going on is simply proceeding with the adventure.
What do they do with these prisoners once they extract the info? Survivors with tales of PCs waylaying should lead things to more robust patrols etc. PCs completely slaughtering adversaries, including prisoners will lead subsequent prisoners to not bother knowing that talking won't save them etc.
In real life intelligence designed to penetrate an organization, no one ever thinks the lowest tiers of the pyramid are going to be able to provide the whole picture, that's why the effort is to to always develop information by "working up" the network. In game terms the PCs should recognize they're dilly dallying (and thus exposing themselves to greater risk) and the only way they're actually going to make headway is to work up to bigger fish (usually further down the line in the adventure). As a DM it's perfectly your purview to indicate through narration that the PCs tactics are not working and likely self-sabotaging (all this low level probing is going to lead logically to more robust encounters).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I don't think the problem is capturing enemies. The problem is how long it takes them to do a simple interrogation. Which would be okay if there was something interesting about it, but it doesn't sound like there was. I recommend at a certain point just turning the remainder of the interrogation into a simple die roll (this is a good rule of thumb for any RP scene: once it becomes boring, abstract the rest with a die roll).
I appreciate and admire the suggestions about how to roleplay these captive interrogation encounters. That's not really my issue. Let's try this- a fighter with a great axe checks his sheet makes sure he is using every modifier he can to attack and damage because he has to put this guy down else the party might lose. And wham -solid hit- great damage roll- the bad guy goes down and THEN the player tells me "I just want to knock him out". It is that easy. it lacks realism and frankly encourages lazy gaming,