Torturing PCs for Info

[Norfleet]

Actually this makes me wonder if the prevelance of healing magic might make torture less effective in a fantasy setting. (the orriginal request was for a modern game, which is why this wasn't meantioned most likely.) Pain is a warning - you respond to it because your body is programmed to. You can aclimate to constant pain, and even somewhat to sudden pain if it happens enough. If you have a guy who has expereinced being stabbed through the heart, the effective ending of his life multiple times and effectively recovered from it regularly, the hurt and heal scenerio might be nothing to him...

Kahuna burger

That's why you don't torture the person you want to extract things from, you torture somebody he cares about, or, if he's one of those goody-goody types, you torture random people in front of him. Good people really hate that. Psychological torture like that is much more effective, because you don't run the risk of killing the person you want to talk, and the person you ARE torturing can be considered to be expendable.

Personally, though, I find torture to be a generally ineffective means of interrogating somebody, especially if you don't know whether he actually has the information or not, because people who crack will tell you just about anything you want.