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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 2774936" data-attributes="member: 1165">Noted. I had one "GM's favorite PC" pull that off on me, but I had a bad GM at the time.PCs almost never try to give orders to other PCs - maybe strong suggestions, or they try to outvote another player, but they're never going to issue orders at gunpoint unless they've already decided to kill or eliminate the other player. I've seen this happen very rarely in a couple of campaigns.I'm running a non-FX Modern campaign. The only NPCs the players would surrender to are the police. They've run away from the police, taken on a SWAT team (and lost), and finally got the hint and got arrested once - after they've had the hell beat out of them in an encounter (which they won) and every other way into town was blocked by bad guys.Any other bad guys would not just capture the PCs. They would kill the PCs. Good reason not to surrender. (The Mafia doesn't take prisoners that I know of - certainly not more than one at a time. Terrorists take prisoners, but they know these heroes are too dangerous to leave poorly guarded in a makeshift jail.)Now I'm starting up a game set in Ancient China, where uneducated NPCs (like low ranking Yellow Turbans) might actually try to capture the PCs, not realizing how dangerous they are, hoping to sell them for phat loot. Then they realize the heroes have no patrons who can pay ransom, and the heroes probably took over their band when they went to answer the call of nature, drawing that form of free enterprise to a sudden and bloody close. Even powerful people were captured and "turned" in that period, but still, not in groups. This would only happen to lone NPCs, and would probably result in them dropping their character (the other PCs would never trust them again).However, in DnD campaigns I've been in, PCs don't surrender either. They don't want to give up their magic items.Maybe my players I whiners, but they hate it when they face "overwhelming" force. They complain about EL when that happens. Some players have low tolerance for defeat, but I ignore them. It's when the whole group complains... Now, if they did something stupid which resulted in them facing overwhelming force, I won't hold back, but I avoid deliberately generating such scenarios.And, of course, they know surrender is rarely an option.Capturing in novels is basically rail-roading from what I've seen. (At least, it would be rail-roading from the point of view of a game.)Worse, it always seems to break 101 tips to be an evil overlord. I've read lots of bad fantasy, where sometimes-intelligent bad guys suddenly turn stupid due to a desire to kill another allied bad guys as the heroes are banging down his door (Katharine Karr*, I'm looking at you) or they capture the hero and tell him all their plans, etc, which results in them losing. Seriously, break out the machine guns and hose down the jail cell three seconds after the PCs are in jail. I appreciate bad guys written/played with a little intelligence and realism.True 'dat. Any romance results in "fade to black" because I've got better things to do than copy the unstable romances I read about in every fantasy novel. (Seriously, I'm happy when the main character is happily married, like in Willow. If the author wants to indulge in sex, go ahead. If they don't, no problem. Either way, I don't want to see "the pursuit" over and over and over and over and over again. It's twice as bad when the protagonist has just barely achieved puberty.)Well, there's a chance you can spin around fast enough and dodge... this only works if the PC is by himself, and hopefull armored, and IMC at least, capture = death anyway, so the PC will just try to survive being shot or stabbed in the back and fight back.No, that occasionally happens. It's just rare, however. The PCs spend more time talking with each other than with NPCs, work as a fairly well-oiled team, won't tolerate friendly NPCs who are better than they are at something (no one wants to find out the skill they've invested in can be outmatched by an ally), etc. I find it's a bad idea to use higher level friendly NPCs for many reasons, unless they're retire or for some reason simply cannot do the PCs job for them.I guess I should add another one: obvious competence. In a lot of fantasy novels, the big good guy is obviously more competent or somehow superior to the bad guys. The good guys are only in danger when the big good guy (Nevyn, Gandalf, resident Chosen of Mystra, etc) are away from the scene.There's also the situation where two fighters "evaluate each other" to figure out who is better. Not only does that not happen in campaign due to lack of appropriate rules, but it would also lead to metagaming. In some novels, the good guy and a henchman met and fought ten years ago, with the good guy winning. So of course we know he'll never lose to the henchman again. That makes the upcoming combat between them really boring/Novels let you see things from the bad guys' perspective. It's really hard to get the PCs to respect the NPCs or even know what they're doing because the info available to them is usually pretty limited. (It has to be - otherwise the bad guys would have been arrested, roasted by Elminster, or whatever is in your setting.)* Most of her fantasy is okay, but she makes it obvious who will win long before it happens, and I hated the Dragon Ascendant.</blockquote>

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