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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 6808443" data-attributes="member: 8835">10) Almost never try to capture the party, and certainly NEVER write "the party will be captured" on your adventure notesThis advice has exceptions, but an inexperienced GM should follow it.  You might break this rule if you are "saving" the party from a TPK or something.  Getting arrested (a form of capture) might be a logical outcome of doing crime.  But otherwise, scripting in a party capture attempt is fraught with peril for the GM.At the extreme end, writing "the party will be captured" is a form of railroading.  It sets the GM's mind into throwing ever increasing forces at the party to override their desire to be free.  It gets ridiculous quickly as the GM struggles to complete the directive on the piece of paper he wrote.Now let's look at the more practical side of this advice.  You have a reason that make sense for somebody to want to capture the party (maybe they committed a crime).How are you going to do it?  Send twice as many cops as their are PCs?Now you have dead cops, and a reason to escalate.How you escalate quickly becomes an arms race as you try to counter their powers, some of those attempts become dubiously justified of GM abuse of power and knowledge (in that you know more than the NPCs in charge should about what the PCs weaknesses and abilities are).Nextly, what happens when you are successful?  The party is in handcuffs and off to jail.Now you need to stop the game for the night, and design a jail that has the potential for escape.  Because otherwise, you just stopped the party from doing anything, because they are in jail in an escape proof system.There's extra fallout from this.  A smart warden will strip the PCs down to their undies or worse.  Now the PCs are emasculated.  Which leads to prison sexual assaults and such.  Guess how many women in the US already face such things.  1/5.  I hope you don't have any women in your group, or you've just made them VERY uncomfortable.The short of it is, if you actually capture and imprison the PCs, that's not actually a good thing in many cases.  So if you're not prepared for it, aware of the pitfalls, etc, it is worth avoiding until you are.And that can mean realizing that capturing the party leads to a different set of encounters/adventure where you've set up opportunities for escape, etc.  Where the jailors are not perfect.  Because perfect imprisonment is pretty much a game breaker.</blockquote>

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