It is time to throw the party in the dungeon

[IceFractal]

Quartz's suggestion is the way to go. Simply asking them why they are in jail will get them playing along without resentment (as long as they trust you), and also means it happens in a way they can accept. Of course, this only works if you're tossing them in jail for the sake of a cool adventure, and not to screw them over.

If you are trying to screw them over (they lose all their items, they get tortured in prison, they end up marked with a geas or something) - don't. They will fight you every step of the way and resent you for it, much more than a TPK. Campaigns have broken up over things like this.

But definitely don't go with the "guards show up and ask them to surrender" approach unless you have talked to the players beforehand. There's maybe a 50% chance they will, and a 50% chance they will hack up the guards and become even more outlawed, eventually ending up in a "kill all townsfolk" style campaign. Or quite likely, some of the players will want to surrender, and others will want to fight, which is even worse.

 

[GammaPaladin]

Well, I always explained things to my players ahead of time... That actions have realistic consequences in my games, if you break the law repeatedly you will find yourself up against the city guard, and you won't be able to kill them all, because there are thousands in the big cities.

And basically 95% of all play in my campaigns took place in cities, very politics driven stories.

 

[IceFractal]

Well, escaping from a city doesn't usually require you to kill every guard - it might not require you to kill any. While a strong guard will make players more cautious about breaking the law, it won't incline them to go along with getting captured - heck, it might incline them to flee pre-emptively if anything shady goes down.

 

[GammaPaladin]

Yes well... If you don't go into the cities, you don't get jobs. The wealthy types who pay adventurers to... adventure... don't like leaving their comfortable city life.

 

[shilsen]

Did I mention that the cell was suspended over an active volcano?

Did I mention that they're 9th level? If they can walk into that room through a door, I'm betting they can take that door down in short order and walk out. Or just Teleport, Dimension Door and all the other options PCs of that level have.

And that's assuming that they didn't just keep from all walking in when they saw that the cell was above a volcano. Unless it's a shadowdancer volcano, in which case it can hide in plain sight and then jump out and freak them out.

Or you could go for what's behind Door #2: The PCs awaken as bone creatures, stripped of their lives, their skins, and their sanity.

So a TPK then? Why is that entertaining?

 

[Ayrk]

Sorry, I should have been more specific.

First off, this takes place in Ptolus so the goofy wacky stuff is mildly common.

In essence, the characters have made some enemies of some of the bad guys in the city (although they may not know it).

For the next adventure, I wanted the game to basically start out with the characters somehow captured and sold into slavery below the city. They would essentially wake up in chains in cells beneath the city. They would need to break out, reclaim their stuff, and punish those who sought to punish them.

We are all mature roleplayers so I could say "This is what happened" but I'd really prefer to have an in game way of making it happen. I feel that if you bend the rules too much to serve your GM needs, it tends to undermine the creativity of the players because they may figure that you'll just hand wave away their cool moment.

Right now I'm leaning towards the "just roleplay it" method.

Thanks.

 

[Aeolius]

Did I mention that they're 9th level? If they can walk into that room through a door, I'm betting they can take that door down in short order and walk out. Or just Teleport, Dimension Door and all the other options PCs of that level have.

Time to break out the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook, then. There are various ingredients one may mix in the mortar, to prevent teleport and similar spells from working with the cells. The same could apply to the bars. Still, planning such an escape is half the fun.

Perhaps the dungeon cell was once part of the local law enforcement's complex, but that area of town was destroyed in a magical cataclysm long ago. Should the party escape from their cell, they would find a simple set of stairs leading upward. The top of the stairs would be blocked by a massive rockslide.

Should the party clear the rocks away, they would find themselves beneath the local lake. As the stones are loosened, the chamber begins to flood.

Did I mention the lake monsters?

So a TPK then? Why is that entertaining?

I didn't say kill them. I said they awaken as bone creatures. That was the basis of a Halloween one-shot I devised, called "In Your Skin". The party had to recover their stolen skins or remain sentient skeletons forever.

 

[akbearfoot]

If my DMs told he 'hey this is a plot device, I need you to all go along with it' then I would do exactly that, and I'd do my best to come up with creative ways to escape, because I'd know there was a way to escape.

If my DM says throws some impossible to resist sleep effect, or 10,000 guards at us, or the 'you all wake up in prison' scenario, then I'm liable to walk over to the real life couch and ask them to wake me up when the DM was finished railroading us. Loss of player freedom is a definite campaign killer.

As an example, basically this exact thing happened to us in a new Earthdawn game we started last week...We were the only survivors of our destroyed village, and we decided to visit the villiage who was in control of the territory to inform them someone had invaded their airspace. Pretty much the first words out of their borderguards mouths was 'great, you can be our slaves now, come along quietly' When one of the players resisted, he was hit with an attack that did about twice his total hitpoints in 'subdual' damage (with a mounted lance attack) and the rest of us were pretty cowed by that. It's been 2 sessions so far, and already our homes have been destroyed, one player had a family member killed and then reanimated and he had to re-kill his own brother, and we've been railroaded into unconditional surrender. The next session will consist of me sitting at the table quietly, not contributing anything until the DM decides to let us play our characters instead of him playing them for us. I trust the person who's DMing and he's a good friend of mine...but at this point the fun that I was having is completely gone.