Advice for my game, please. Party captures.

[hong]

There are several reasons many players hate being captured. One is loss of control. Most captures are obvious rail-roading by the DM, with no chance for the PCs to escape. The DM wants the story to go a certain way, and the players aren't allowed to spoil his precious plot.

Well, lots of things in a game can result in loss of control for the players. However, not many are likely to provoke as visceral a reaction as the threat of being captured.

For most gamers, roleplaying is basically a power fantasy. You get to do things you could never do in real life, whether it's flying around, shooting blasts of lightning around, talking to kings and nobles, or fighting big hordes of monsters. It's "fantasy shopping for guys", as Robin Laws puts it: the kind of shopping that guys would do, if you never had to leave the house, and you were shopping for super powers. The capture scenario, however, turns that entirely on its head. It explicitly takes power away from the players and puts their fate entirely in the hands of the GM. It's no wonder that it causes problems.

There are, of course, some people who will swear on Eric's grandmother's grave that they are into "roleplaying" and not interested in power at all. These people are either 1) GMs who Don't Get It; or 2) Call of Cthulhu players.

Personally, I think Call of Cthulhu would be much improved by giving PCs access to rocket launchers, but that's just me.

 

[Ankh-Morpork Guard]

Personally, I think Call of Cthulhu would be much improved by giving PCs access to rocket launchers.

Yep...then they can just kill themselves AND the rest of the investigating group in one swift shot.

 

[hong]

Yep...then they can just kill themselves AND the rest of the investigating group in one swift shot.

Well, it would certainly save a lot of time and trouble.

 

[Greatwyrm]

Okay, everybody keeps going on and on about trust here. Why? It's a game, folks. Sure, people get attached to their characters, but it's not like your asking to spend the night in their sister's room.

Maybe I'm in the minority, but if I end up captured in a game, I figure I'm going to have one or two good shots at escaping. I've never met a GM that just wanted to round everyone up for an execution. It's just not fun, even for the GM. Why go to all that trouble when turning all the party into dragon-chow or beholder furniture is so satisfying.

And if I blow the opportunities the GM threw in and don't come up with any of my own, then my PC might as well be dancing at the end of a rope because he probably wouldn't have survived long on the battlefield anyway.

 

[DaveStebbins]

There are several reasons many players hate being captured. One is loss of control. Most captures are obvious rail-roading by the DM, with no chance for the PCs to escape. The DM wants the story to go a certain way, and the players aren't allowed to spoil his precious plot.
Just because it happens in the movies doesn't mean it will make a good game.

Geoff (and others who've mentioned it) have it right.

It's really a metagaming issue, so it is best handled outside of the game. Before the session starts, tell the players that the game tonight will involve the PCs being captured. Like the exposition method, it lets them know what's going on without forcing them to play through a "no-win, we're helpless" battle.

Even if they do decide they want to play through the capture, at least they won't feel as powerless, because they know it's supposed to happen and the DM has taken into account what will happen after the capture. In fact, the situation can be a lot more fun as a player when you know how you're supposed to play it. With the sense of impending doom and death removed, you can play up the dialog-with-the-villian, or the "you'll never take me alive" fight-even-against-overwhelming-odds bit which forces the enemy to subdue the PCs to capture them.

The main thing is that the capture scenario changes basic in-game expectations of the players. So it is best handled by letting them know what will happen up front, so they can change their expectations and enjoy it.

-Dave
[edit - corrected annoying tense-shift in the middle of a paragraph]

 

[RangerWickett]

It ended up that we missed out on the actual spooky Halloween aspect of the adventure, because the group spent the early part of the game preparing and roleplaying for fun, which helped ease my guilt. I had several NPCs warn them to be careful because spies might have leaked information for where they'd be, and the party itself even took some mild precautions, so it was obvious they didn't think an attack was an impossibility.

The best thing was, though, they brought along a V.I.P. who the bad guys would want to capture even more than they were interested in the PCs. So they go to this dangerous location where they think the conditions are right to fix the powerful artifact. Soon after they arrive, a scrying sensor is noticed, scanning the area. They all have anti-scrying defenses on them, even the ranger's animal companion and one PC's horse, so it's obvious the person scrying on them can't see anything. But then one of the PCs who is closely monitoring the scrying sensor senses a spell being cast through it. I roll randomly to determine what gets affected by the area dispel magic, and it's the horse. The group quickly figures out that the horse is now visible to scrying.

So now the scrying sensor can see a horse, complete with saddle and equipment, which apparently a moment before was protected by anti-scrying magic. The players spend precious moments debating what to do as the scrying sensor casts more spells (and before you rules-lawyers out there complain, they've seen long-distance scrying spellcasting like this before, so it's not like they were surprised), including a dimensional lock on the area, then a wall of force, which randomly traps about half the party.

The group tries to free their friends and dispel the lock, or at least get out of the area, but attempts are slow enough that the enemy forces arrive, teleporting in just outside of the dimensionally-locked area.

Now, true to PC form, the group gives my 'impossible to defeat' ambush squad a run for its money. True, they never touch the 20th level supreme inquisitor spellcaster who's in charge, but even though that 20th level mage was flinging power word stun and mass hold monster around, they take out several of her bodyguards and stall long enough for two NPCs to escape with the artifact. One PC nearly escapes, but decides to come back to distract the 20th level mage so that their NPC allies can escape with the artifact.

They put up a good fight, and are already both wondering how they'll escape, and lamenting all the cool items they're going to lose. Now I have a few days to think of how I can set up the escape attempt from the husk mines.