Taken Prisoner

They wanted our gear. All of it. After all, in the crazy economy of most fantasy games, what is the bigget source of portable wealth? A well-geared adventuring party! The whole thing was a setup from the start. We were stripped of gear and left tied. They didn't want to kill anyone. Of course nothing riles up characters as much as losing their hard-earned magic items. We worked on escaping our bonds and plotting our revenge....

Now here is a gang of clear thinkers. If they killed you then they still would have gotten your stuff but you could never be looted again.

Once freed, your party will certainly seek revenge but first you will equip yourselves with more stuff so those guys can rob you again. :D
 

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Now here is a gang of clear thinkers. If they killed you then they still would have gotten your stuff but you could never be looted again.

Once freed, your party will certainly seek revenge but first you will equip yourselves with more stuff so those guys can rob you again. :D

That's pretty good - rob them again. I just watched the movie Zombieland, so that rings pretty funny to me.
 

If you really want to get their goat, ally them with some NPC's early on and have those hapless NPC's captured. The PC's will show their true colors once the dust settles. ;)
 

Addressing "take them alive": that's fine if the PCs understand the language being spoken. Or if the people who naturally speak another language do something like look directly at the PCs (after their cronies get the order), and says in Common: "Just so you're clear, I said 'Take them alive'".

Though there are some cases where the PCs should expect their enemies to try to capture them. Especially when they know right well they're headed into enemy lines.
 

I've heard a few people comment in the past that this always annoys players because they are usually forced into it and end up losing their gear. I'm hoping to make it a fun experience and would greatly appreciate any advice from people with experience with this, DM or player. Thanks in advance!

Hi Selc, you're right. You have to be careful with this technique because a lot of players will typically refuse to surrender under any circumstances. Here's how I handled two situations where the PC's were captured.

1. At the beginning of the campaign. Before the players started the campaign, the text box read that they were in prison already sentenced to death; however, the duchess comes back in town and needs prisoners to undertake very dangerous quests to explore a ruined city filled with demons and undead. Their choice was to either go to the ruins or take their chances against a canyon where no one comes out. Since I started the campaign this way, the players can't complain to me nor argue with me of how they would have fought their way out with the guards, etc.

If you run an episodic campaign where there is no continuous flow in the story line, then starting out the adventure with the characters in the cells or in a prison wagon, captured, etc. is a way to get the adventure rolling.

2. Send an overwhelming opponent who sees the party as something to be subdued and taken prisoner. Players will typically fight to the death against impossible odds. If you throw a red dragon in the hope that the players will run away in order to get to another point of the story, oftentimes, you just ran a TPK, because once one players stays and fight, they all do and then it's crunch, crunch, crunch, end of campaign. Knowing that my players are like this too, I designed an dual trap and combat encounter so that failure is completely in the players' hands.

My players were supposed to eventually get help from a gnomish city, but in order to do that, they needed to be captured by a large patrol of ice trolls. I purposely set the stats of one ice troll to be a tough opponent for the group, so then I set up a party of 10 against the entire group. The PC's would come through a narrow pass where they would set off a net trap that required a high Reflex save to avoid, something that the tough fighters in the group doesn't have. When the trap went off, I only got one of the players, but he was the heavy hitter and two ice trolls went up to him and pummeled him like a pinata until he went unconscious. The ice trolls quickly maneuvered on the rest of the group and were striking to subdue. Even with the -4 penalty, they were not having any trouble hitting and the escape was cut off.

The players realized that the fight was lost and that the ice trolls were intending to capture them so they surrendered. Should they decided to fight to the last, they all would have been knocked unconscious.

I did plan for a contingency of the mage or rogue who if the dice were with them, they would escape. Then that player can make the choice of trying to rescue their comrades (I would then allow that to happen easily) or they run away and find another way to the gnomish city.

So in the end, if you construct an encounter where it looks like a no-win situation for the players, then surrendering will seem like the better alternative. However, you'll need to construct an encounter that will make sense. Ice trolls that want to capture slaves makes sense while a rampaging red dragon wouldn't. If you use bandits or thieves, give them something that will give them a very strong advantage at the beginning of any encounter (such as poisoned sleep arrows, etc.). Combine this with a trap designed to immobilize any other characters and you got the party pretty much cornered.
 

Don't railroad your party with the unwinnable fight!

It's ironic that my first session since posting in this thread involved a railroad fight designed to capture the party. The purpose was to capture the party and, I suspect, a little GM revenge for a PC killing a certain NPC the previous session.

The GM dropped a hook, the party took the hook, the GM clobbered the party. 3 of the 5 PCs were captured along with a major party NPC. 2 PCs escaped. The enemy was shielded against both physical and mental attacks and had units dedicated to stopping any effect we could produce. Adding to the frustration was that the investigation prior to entering the ambush site yielded no warning or clues at to what we were walking into.

As a player, this sucked. My character tried negotiating, mind controlling the leader, and finally offered himself as prisoner if the other PCs were allowed to go free. No dice. Worse, the bad guys never even communicated with us, they just beat tar out of us. The party's big "oh s--t" button was negated effortlessly by a single bad guy.

I was seriously considering pulling a Shaman. Over the last 14 years of gaming, that was easily one of the worst sessions I've played in.
 

Honestly, this is the biggest problem with the whole "captured" scenario - the getting captured part.

My honest advice is still the same - don't roll the dice unless you mean it. The adventure requires a certain thing - the party getting captured - so why bother playing through that part? After all, playing through it presumes that the party has the option of not getting captured. Since they don't, don't bother with it.

Start after the party is captured and most of these problems go away. Presuming that you have a pretty amicable relationship between the players and DM, and the players are willing to trust the DM enough that the DM isn't just being a dick and actually has an interesting scenario in store, this should be a fun scenario.

It's not like the DM is going to do this every single scenario. He's just got a specific starting point in mind. Skip over all the boring stuff that doesn't really matter. After all, does it really matter if you lost ten hit points or not when getting captured? Who cares?

This sort of thing can work, but, everyone's got to be on board beforehand.
 

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