Mind Flayers: What, they befriend their slaves?

[Stalker0]

Mind flayers have tons of slaves, everyone knows this. The serve without question because of course mind flayers dom.... wait, they don't have dominate? They only have charm monster. I always figured they dominated people to make as their slaves, so do they just intimidate them the old fashioned way?

 

[reiella]

Even with dominate, it wouldn't work unless you give them a Thrall-like duration, or dominate with significant duration, but even then, it'd be more productive to do it the Old Fashion Way and just use dominate/charm to help reinforce it.

I remember the 'history' of the Gith presented in Planescape:Torment (Zerthimon's Circle), and it did seem to imply strongly that they 'enslaved' the old fashioned way, and just used their psionic talents to 'reinforce' and 'question'.

 

[Sejs]

and just used their psionic talents to 'reinforce' and 'question'.

and 'punish'.


Look at it like this - illithids enslave their thralls the old fashioned way, but any disloyalty is read right out of the slaves mind before it can blossom into anything, and even if a slave was pushed too far and snapped... attacked a master, all of a sudden the slave can't possibly fathom harming his beloved owner. And becomes passive.

And then later on, that feeling goes away. And the slave knows, just knows that if it happened again, the same thing would occur. They'd lose control of their own thoughts and feelings, and be unable to strike at their owner. There is no way to fight it. There is no escape. There is no hope.

Willpower just... gives out after a certain point.

 

[UltimaGabe]

Look at it like this - illithids enslave their thralls the old fashioned way, but any disloyalty is read right out of the slaves mind before it can blossom into anything, and even if a slave was pushed too far and snapped... attacked a master, all of a sudden the slave can't possibly fathom harming his beloved owner. And becomes passive.

And then later on, that feeling goes away. And the slave knows, just knows that if it happened again, the same thing would occur. They'd lose control of their own thoughts and feelings, and be unable to strike at their owner. There is no way to fight it. There is no escape. There is no hope.

Willpower just... gives out after a certain point.

Exactly. Just because they're not magically Dominated doesn't mean they're not scared as all heck of their squid-like captors.

 

[MerakSpielman]

Every now and then publicly eating a dissenter's brain helps keep rebellion down, too.