Philotomy Jurament
First Post
If the captured PC has a poor charisma, the witch will turn him into a swine; if he has a high charisma, she'll keep him enchanted as a lover.
How do you deal with captured PCs?
- Thread starter Dog Moon
- Start date
Oryan77
Adventurer
Oh of course, I agree completely. That's why I mentioned that if you are going to deliberately capture them for plot reasons, then there should be absolutely no hint of success if they decide to fight. For example, the last time I did this the PCs needed to be captured by Sahuagin. A tough encounter for the party would have been about 12 Sahuagin. So to be safe so I can get the point across, they encountered 25 Sahuagin warriors, 5 mounted on large sharks, 5 Sahuagin casters, premade traps that already ensnared one PC, they were completely surrounded, and there was only one small exit that was already blocked by Sahuagin. Rather than bring in reinforcements if the Sahuagin lose, they already had their reinforcements there.Scribble said:
It also helps when an NPC gets a PC helpless and threatens to kill him if the other PCs don't surrender.
Well, all I can say is I've captured different groups of PCs a dozen times, sometimes the same PCs have been captured a couple of times in a campaign. They have some good stories to tell about their capture and they all had fun escaping. So I can't agree that it's "never good" because I've done it successfully many many times.GlassJaw said:
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Scribble
First Post
Oryan77 said:
My point was simply what if they manage to win, or escape... Maybe they simply fight long enough to get to the door, or they somehow grab the leader and use him as a shield or...
The idea simply being that, if you create a situation like that, be prepared for what happens if they manage to escape, and not just what happens after their captured. Otherwise, you might run into railroad problems.
Ed_Laprade
Adventurer
It depends. Their captors might treat them the way they treat their prisinors. Make darn sure they're dead! (Maybe even chopping off their heads and burning the bodies if they think there's any chance of mere death not being enough.) Otherwise the PCs find themselves in cells awaiting a feast being held by their captors... as the main course! But I expect my players to fight to the death, so capture is rare. And even more rarely involves the whole party. On the other hand, if I really need them to be captured I'll just tell them so. Metagaming, sure, but most of the people I play with have been players for 20+ years and are usually willing to go along with something like that because they know they're supposed to escape later. If not, the fight gets played out and for some reason the bad guys don't seem to roll as good as they might... 
werk
First Post
I had a 'party is captured if they do x' in the first session of one of my campaigns. It was railroaded, but it pretty much set up the whole campaign path and only lasted a tiny bit of one session, so it felt justified. They were stripped naked and thrown into individual dungeon cells and then starved to weakness and interrogated regarding 'x'. But my goal wasn't to allow escape, much like Janx stated earlier. A lot was handwaved from the capture to release rather than drawing it out detail by detail, failure after failure.
When one of my parties goes against an organization, be it a city watch, ogre tribe, or social club, I try to let them know what their characters know about the group, including what is done with prisoners. I've actually had parties completely change their tactics based on what could happen to them if they were taken alive.
Usually there should not be an out unless the party is captured by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane. Generally communities do not have enough resources, or desire to spend resources, on keeping criminals alive and healthy.
The rats are a great example of this, they'd definitely steal all their gear, infect/recruit any suitable candidates, and kill/eat the remainder. Why tie them up, construct the crosses, waste drugs/poison, waste time/effort? ...doesn't make sense to me.
When one of my parties goes against an organization, be it a city watch, ogre tribe, or social club, I try to let them know what their characters know about the group, including what is done with prisoners. I've actually had parties completely change their tactics based on what could happen to them if they were taken alive.
Usually there should not be an out unless the party is captured by Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane. Generally communities do not have enough resources, or desire to spend resources, on keeping criminals alive and healthy.
The rats are a great example of this, they'd definitely steal all their gear, infect/recruit any suitable candidates, and kill/eat the remainder. Why tie them up, construct the crosses, waste drugs/poison, waste time/effort? ...doesn't make sense to me.
Stripped naked and thrown in a cell is one of m favorite scenarios. I don't make a habit of forcing it to happen, but not everything in my campaigns is perfectly balanced for the characters. One of the homebrews they know well enough to know they can't fight certain forces at 1st level, and if they go up against them, they might well be captured.
I've had PC's captured and held for sacrifice, captured and turned into slaves, captured and turned into half-machines, captured and just imprisoned.
Lots of creatures in DND don't seem to wear clothes, so I'm not sure they would see it as required to keep clothes on characters. We usually keep "on camera" stuff PG, so they can have a loin cloth maybe, but I guarantee you my players would rather use a loincloth as a garrote or a sling than preserve their dignity.
Many great scenarios have resulted from capturing:
I had a low level cleric use his craft (woodworking) to craft a holy symbol from the bones of those who had died in their cell.
One part of a campaign centered around rescuing a PC from a mine. The player played his cohort for a while. We got a great story with some cool mythic elements out of it.
Several professionally written adventures involve capture and escape, so I'm not sure you can say it is completely bad form.
As a player, it happened to me recently in a published adventure, and I didn't mind.
I've had PC's captured and held for sacrifice, captured and turned into slaves, captured and turned into half-machines, captured and just imprisoned.
Lots of creatures in DND don't seem to wear clothes, so I'm not sure they would see it as required to keep clothes on characters. We usually keep "on camera" stuff PG, so they can have a loin cloth maybe, but I guarantee you my players would rather use a loincloth as a garrote or a sling than preserve their dignity.
Many great scenarios have resulted from capturing:
I had a low level cleric use his craft (woodworking) to craft a holy symbol from the bones of those who had died in their cell.
One part of a campaign centered around rescuing a PC from a mine. The player played his cohort for a while. We got a great story with some cool mythic elements out of it.
Several professionally written adventures involve capture and escape, so I'm not sure you can say it is completely bad form.
As a player, it happened to me recently in a published adventure, and I didn't mind.
Eric Tolle
First Post
Oryan77 said:A hero should be smart & know when to pick his fight. If you die because you don't want to hand over your junk...then the bad guys still take your cool stuff from your dead body instead of your living body
And this, IME, is a recipe for a disasterous game. Whenever a GM says the players/characters should do anything, it's an almost certain sign that everybody is going to end up annoyed. After all, players never do what they SHOULD, but rather what they WANT to do.
For instance, when the GM says "Well, the players should enjoy getting captured, having all their stuff taken away, and then sitting around for three months being abused until my GMPC rescues them...", the players are likely to say "You know, a TPK and starting over with new characters will be faster and more fun than watching the GM put his hand down his pants for three months."
Sometimes second guessing players can work, just like capturing, stripping and torturing characters can work. But IME, nine times out of ten it doesen't so its better to be sure of what the players would like beforehand.
Eric Tolle
Oryan77
Adventurer
I tell my players all the time that they 'should do whatever they want in the game'. They never seem annoyed by thatEric Tolle said:
If a player wants to be a numbskull and tell the 20+ burly men in front of him that he'd rather die then hand over his magic sword, they are free to do that in my game. But after they are dead and the NPCs walk away with the dead players magic sword, I will always tell them that they should learn to pick their fights
I never understood that type of player logic. When I'm a player and I think I'm screwed, I will give my captors the fillings in my teeth if it means I have a chance to survive. If I'm alive, I can figure out how to get my stuff back...if I'm dead, well my stuff isn't going to matter anymore since I'll be rolling up a new character.
If something bad happens to a player's character, then he shouts "railroading". So if he's captured and fails to retrieve his stuff, then he says it's wrong for DMs to capture PCs. But I'm sure that same player doesn't call it railroading when the DM creates a scenario for the PC to find magic items. After all, that's also railroading.
There's nothing wrong with capturing PCs as long as the intention is to make the game more interesting...whether or not it was railroading. If the DM has an agenda behind the capture other than for it to be story related, then I agree that it's a bad thing.
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