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Message: <blockquote data-quote="StalkingBlue" data-source="post: 1505764" data-attributes="member: 645">As a player, I've had two very different experiences with captured PCs.  The bad one was all bad because it was one long and tedious railroad.  We ran into an ambush set by goblins with nets, which by the looks of it was as indetectable as it was inescapable and unwinnable.  I did my best to get my PC killed trying to run away while bashing in as many enemy skulls as I could on the way - no such luck.  That GM would never let us read the rules, and this wasn't DnD so I couldn't be entirely sure, but there were certain inconsistencies compared to earlier fights that made me suspect my PC ought to have been killed by a a crit the GM rolled, my hits should have killed at least a goblin or two, and nets had never seemed quite so effective before.  So yup, we were meant to be captured, and the GM couldn't use any dead goblins for his 'overarching story' either because he needed us to ally with our captors later on, so he couldn't let my kills be kills.  His Story consisted in: - tying our PCs up, - carting them around for about half a game session with no input allowed from players, - putting them in a cage for the night (meals and all roleplayed to extinction, without us being able to affect anything grander than eating our meals or not), and then - dumping a long tribe elder speech on us about how this particular tribe of goblins was very peaceful and there was _another_ tribe just down the hill that was the bad one and was holding the captives we'd been stumbling through their mountains looking for.  All that after a couple of sessions of mountain-stumbling with not a clue fed to us.  Very frustrating.  A Story that didn't really need to have players.  The good experience (sorta) I've had was with another PC I was playing under quite another GM, who I'd found didn't deal in railroading or PC-immune Story.  I surrendered my PC, who I was rather attached to, to a bunch of town guards after (slight tactical mistake...) taking down an enemy in plain sight of them.  I was trying to buy time for my PC friends, who were doing their best to bully a local merchant of good standing into owning up that he was in league with the bad guys and into telling them stuff we needed to know.  I did get to be active when the captain of the guard questioned my PC - a brief experience because I was so obviously uncooperative (extremely lawful and uninventive character trying to avoid pointing the guard to what my friends were doing without coming up with actual lies);  and my PC spent the rest of the session chained to a wall in a prison cell.  So, no more input from me.  If my friends hadn't managed to get out of the scrape _they_ were in and paid a staggeringly high bribe to get me released, my PC would likely have been killed that night.    It was still ok because the NPCs' actions were plausible to me and I trusted the GM to run a fair game.  I felt I was living and dying with the consequences of my actions, not someone else's extraneous Plot.  Of course the strange irony is that this second GM was S'mon, whose PC I'm currently holding captive in my Midnight game.  Wheel coming around and all that ...  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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