What do your PCs do with prisoners?

[Rechan]

So the party has defeated the enemy, and they round up the survivors. The party then questions the survivors as to their mission, their boss's plans, etc.

Then what?

Does your group typically let them go? Do they kill the prisoner?

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Kill, eat, torture, befriend, or seduce, usually in that order.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Nothing good.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Depends.

Some are let go, some are recruited (unlikely, but has happened), some are given a trial and executed, some are executed in a state of grace, and some realized we were done with them when the avenger gave them a lobotomy with her axe. (If you behead them, they might survive for a minute or two, but just completely destroying the brainpan gets around that. It's kinder that way.)

In our current Dark Sun game, that's where our Thri-kreen gets most of his Survival Days.

Brad

 

[Crothian]

If they take prisoners then they get turned over to some other authority. Niow, most of the times they don't bother taking prisoners.

 

[Shemeska]

They rarely took prisoners. When they did, they seemed to have a penchant for turning them to stone. By the end of one campaign they made a rock garden decorated with stone yugoloths.

 

[KiloGex]

What's a "prisoner" and a .... "survivor"? My players have no clue what either of these words mean.

 

[SoulsFury]

The last prisoners for both of my groups let them go. I don't surrender NPCs very often just because it is a chore. They spend days arguing over what to do, and in the end, they always let them go.

 

[JamesonCourage]

As they're currently warlords that rule a small region through force, and seeing as one of the PCs is an interrogator and has a dungeon...

Honestly, it varies from group to group, and character to character. They usually turn the mover to authority. Currently, they're basically authority, and they've imprisoned, executed, released, returned, and recruited people. One PC is a really evil bastard and tortured someone for a while before he escaped last session. Oh, the revenge planned...

 

[Hussar]

My problem generally isn't that the PC's don't take prisoners, it's that so many DM's have trained players that any prisoner will always die before talking, will always lie, and is generally just this huge black hole of a time sink, so, players never take prisoners on principle.