Some action games (especially stealth games) give the player the option of not killing any enemies or at least keeping the deaths to a minimum. See Pacifist Run for more information.
- Abomi Nation: As the light spirit, Ioti believes strongly in this, as do your teammates. Even when your opponents are trying to kill you, you will only deal them a Non-Lethal K.O.. This is deconstructed, as Ioti's refusal to kill the villains only comes back to bite her: Sparing Furcifume after the midpoint Boss Battle only extends the war, and the lieutenants you previously spared refight you in a Boss Rush at the finale... only to be killed by Furcifume anyway. After she is awakened, Ioti finally realizes that killing Furcifume is the only option, and does so.
- Bang Shishigami of BlazBlue has this epithet as a memento from his master, Lord Tenjo. No matter what wrongdoings someone does, he will not move to kill them; even Jin Kisaragi, the man responsible for killing Tenjo, is only to be "brought to justice" in Bang's eyes. On the other hand, Bang is sworn to protect the lives of children, and that vow supersedes this one, as he sought to (unsuccessfully) demonstrate to Hazama over beating Tao and Carl to near-death as a masturbatory aid.
- Carol's response in the titular Carol Reed Mysteries when you try to shoot her attacker at the end of Amber's Blood is a shocked "No, I'm not going to shoot anyone!"
- The MMORPG City of Heroes takes this to its natural extreme: the player-characters are always sent to "arrest", "defeat", or just plain "stop" the villainous NPCs, and even if the enemies are "arrested" with a high-powered assault rifle, a broadsword, or repeated fireballs, nobody ever dies. Instead, they're sent to the local Cardboard Prison, The Zig. That's just for human enemies. Robots explode, rock monsters crumble, and spirits are banished.
- Word of God has stated that it's up to players what happens to the Mooks — they could be killed or not, depending on how players roleplay. Named enemies are usually explicitly captured. Robots and rock monsters are confirmed to be non-sentient, the former having no real intelligence and the latter just being the fingers of a massive and powerful ball of jello. The various banished spirits are truly and completely immortal, so banishing doesn't kill them.
- City of Villains, however, sees it quite differently: There are several missions where you're explicitly told to 'kill' someone, or to 'Leave No Witnesses'.
- In Colobot, there is a level where, due to concerns from the Earth's animal rights organizations, you are forced to use a bot that deals with the hostile giant insects in a non-lethal manner, so that you can retrieve the Black Box they are guarding. However, in literally the next level, your base is under attack from the same insects, and your orders are to forgo any attempts at pacifism and just shoot them into oblivion. The issue of pacifism is never brought up again afterwards.
- In Dishonored, you can get two endings, depending on how many people you killed in the game, and all assassination targets have a non-lethal alternative to killing them. Choosing the non-lethal option is treated as the morally correct choice, and sets you on track to the good ending. Despite this, many of the non-lethal "good" options are far worse than just killing them. You can have a man shamed and left to die of sickness in the gutter, or drug a woman and sell her into sex slavery, and all this is treated as morally right.
- In The Elder Scrolls series, this is a rule within the Thieves' Guild, mostly for Pragmatic Villainy reasons. Killing a mark makes things complicated, has to be cleaned up, and usually ends up costing the Guild in order to bribe authorities to look the other way. Additionally, it's just good business sense since, as they say, "a half-dead man can still make his payment, while a dead man pays no gold". The Darker and Edgier (out of necessity) Skyrim branch of the Guild maintains contacts with the Dark Brotherhood, in the event that they need to have someone eliminated and have far looser standards (killing guards in your way does not penalize you and they'll lift the ban on killing if it's to deal with traitors).
- In a single line early in E.V.O.: Search for Eden, a fish tells you to "Kill only for survival and for food," which fits the "thou shalt not murder" version of this trope. It's a dangerous world and you're largely carnivorous, not to mention needing animal meat to evolve, but simply killing animals without eating them is wasteful and doesn't give you Evolution Points, and killing and eating allies invites divine retribution from Gaia.
- In the second timeline of Fairy Fencer F, Fang subscribes to this philosophy after seeing the emotional damage killing Apollonius did to his little sister Emily. This naivete ends up nearly killing him as he tried to recruit Zenke, of all people. He also has to give up on this idea when Sherman loses his soul to the Vile God.
- Used occasionally in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, funnily enough. In Chapter 15, you get bonus points for not killing any enemies except the boss (except you don't really kill him), and in Chapter 22 you get bonus points and a gift for not killing any priests.
- Queen Elincia in Radiant Dawn has a unique special skill called Mercy, which allows her to blast her foes down to 1 HP, but...
- This is one of Dizzy's primary character traits in Guilty Gear, to the point where her Instant Kill in -REVELATOR- doesn't actually harm the opponent. Instead, Dizzy alters the trajectory of her attack, resulting in a nuclear explosion outside of the stage that causes the opponent to SURRENDER.
- inFAMOUS has an interesting way of handling this. Killing your enemies in a fight doesn't affect your Karma Meter, but killing enemies who are already bound is marked as an "Execution," which gets you bad karma.
- Sort of. As you gain Good Karma, your default attacks get replaced with "stun" weapons. Obviously you are still probably killing a lot of them so it is sort of true, but it rapidly falls into the category of Mercy Bullets and the like, plus when you "take down" an enemy, killing them doesn't get you any Karma but Arc-Restraining them gets you Good Karma. Also, Bad Karma lets you get more Bad Karma as you kill enemies in combat.
- In Like a Dragon, though the main characters have ties into the criminal world, they do not have the murderous impulses of their crime sandbox brethren. It is often used to separate the honorable and dishonorable characters. For Kiryu, his reason for not killing was after the deaths of the only three people he considered family, and his vow to renew his life by being Haruka's father-figure. Granted, gameplay-wise Kiryu has been in shootouts where he's shot and blown up his enemies, or when he's tossed enemies out of the windows of skyscrapers or a moving vehicle on the freeway, or when he's shot at people driving cars that were trying to ram him, or when he's smashed people's skulls against walls or the ground, or when he's beaten people on the street with bicycles, or when he's run them through with knives, or when he's grabbed a fistful of nails and jammed them into a person's mouth, of which every scenario had the game itself ignoring the brutality and any beaten enemies are shown as tired and panting (or running away in a good number of substories). That said, by Kiryu's own admission, he will kill if necessary - it's just a matter of last resort, as he doesn't treat death frivolously.Aoyama: This wasn't what I heard! They said you never kill. That you're merciful.
Kiryu: Who told you that? - King's Quest: Mask of Eternity: Thrown out the window, unusually for a King's Quest game.
- In most of the Metal Gear games, the player is given the option of non-lethally defeating enemies through the use of close-quarters combat, stun guns, tranquilizers, or balloons to incapacitate them, though there are some occasional exceptions.
- This rule comes in particularly useful during one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater; if you've killed no one (including the bosses), it will simply be a very short walk down a river. Conversely, if it's been a bloodbath, you're in for quite a hike.
- In Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, to keep with their credo, the heroes of the DC universe get "Heroic Brutalities" instead of Fatalities, moves that punish the enemy without killing them... or so it's supposed to be. In practice, crushing a person's body in a Green Lantern orb isn't exactly nonlethal. Neither is Superman pounding someone into the ground like a hammer to a nail.
- Strongly implied in No Straight Roads with Mayday and Zuke. While they do collateral damage in their quest to free Vinyl City from the grasp of EDM, they go out of their way not to kill any of the artists that stand in their path. At most, they destroy security robots, although Mayday genuinely shows regret for wrecking 1010. Needless to say, they're understandably appalled when Kliff decides to solve the city's energy problem by dropping NSR's satellite towards their tower, potentially and needlessly causing mass casualties, so they set out to stop it.
- In Persona 5, the Phantom Thieves of Hearts exploit the Metaverse to induce a Heel–Face Brainwashing in their targets, but one line they never cross is resorting to murder. This becomes an important plot point on two occasions. The first is when the Phantom Thieves hesitate on their very first mission because they run the risk of killing their target, causing things to escalate to the point of someone attempting suicide. The second is when they're framed for the murder of someone they did target, forcing them to accept the aid of an antagonistic detective who was in on the Frame-Up in order to clear their name.
- This comes up again in the sequel Persona 5 Strikers when the team's Virtual Sidekick asks Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? regarding the new Starter Villain, with them responding that their Code of Honour won't allow it and If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!
- Being a kid-oriented game, Star Wars Droidworks enforces this trope. Although you can build droids any way you want them, weapons are never an option. When the player eventually comes across one of the Imperial assassin droids, all you can do is run away or outwit them somehow.
- In the Thief series, higher difficulty levels prohibit players from killing the guards or bystanders, presumably not out of morality but for the sake of stealth and forcing them to rely on other means of defeating or evading them. A trail of corpses is likely going to be noticed by the guards, which makes it harder to sneak around. It's furthermore a canonical part of Garrett's character that he views killing as "unprofessional"; he's a thief, not a murderer, got to have some standards here. He (and the game) don't have a problem with killing animals or undead though, and in the first game, the invading Chaos Beasts that threaten the city during the last three missions are fair game as well, and Garrett has no problem with indirectly killing the Big Bad of either game since they're far too big a threat to both the city and Garrett himself to be left alive. At high difficulty there are levels where you aren't even allowed to render someone unconscious.
- In the Trails Series, this is the stance of Estelle Bright, Lloyd Bannings, and Rean Schwarzer due to either their professions in general or that they're just adverse to not killing any humans in general. Monsters and other worldly beings are fair game however. Averted with Kevin Graham, a man named "C", and Van Arkride who are more than willing to dirty their hands if need be.
- Touhou Project features a Spellcard System that is explicitly designed to prevent the death of anyone using its rules. This allows the youkai the ability to try and kill the Barrier Maiden heroine, without the risk of destroying their world, while giving Reimu a fighting chance at defeating absurdly overpowered monsters with abilities like the ability to kill with just a thought, total immortality, and the ability to drop someone out of existence. Reimu has the ability to go invincible, so it's usually more helpful to her opponent.
- Averted in the official Forbidden Scrollery manga, in which Marisa crushes a fledgling youkai's head under her foot simply because it turning into a full-fledged Kutsutsura would pose a problem to Kosuzu since it was manifesting through one of her lost shoes. In a later chapter, Reimu outright kills two humans-turned-youkai, the first one by cleaving his head in two, justifying the action with the reasoning that humans turning into youkai is one of the few things that Gensoukyou does not tolerate.
- Luna in Virtue's Last Reward never, ever picks "Betray", which can kill a person if their BP gets low enough. Justified, since she's Three Laws-Compliant.
- The Walking Dead (Telltale):
- Clementine believes in this wholeheartedly in Season 1, where the surest way to make her displeased with Lee is to kill someone. However, this approach is highly impractical in a zombie apocalypse, where it is inevitable that there will be people that are bet that need to be put down, and that there are people who are trying to harm or kill you. From Season 1 Episode 5 onwards, Clem is forced to break this doctrine many times. In The Final Season, she emphasizes to AJ that killing is never good or fun, but may have to be done occasionally to protect others.
- Any of the other playable characters can be played this way (for the most part) if one chooses to spare people where possible.
- After being forced to kill a child for questioning the group's code, James has a strong no kill policy, whether it is towards humans or walkers. If Clem kills a walker at any point when he is with her, he will call her out. He even tries to get AJ not to kill Lilly.
