Comments on: Captured! …Now What?

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:29:43 +0000

@amatriain: Thanks. That sounds like it should be an enjoyable session, set against the backdrop of a war. There are a couple of World War II movies you might want to look at for inspiration. The Great Escape being perhaps the most obvious.

You’ve got a good point about staging the situation. I think I’ll take that and turn it into another post. Might be a while, though; I’m off to Gencon tomorrow, and doubt I’ll have time to write it up tonight.

By: ScottM

ScottM — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:26:52 +0000

In 4e, you can define the status of the foes you drop– no more improvised attacks at -4. Use that to your advantage– after a TPK, they instead wake up imprisoned.

By: Tomcat

Tomcat — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:43:00 +0000

It's funny, just this past session our group was captured. It was actually the catalyst for a good old fashioned dungeon crawl. The DM did all the things you suggested, and it worked out great! Tomcat's last blog post: Balancing Crunch and Fluff as a Player

By: amatriain

amatriain — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:13:53 +0000

Really loved this post. I really like how you are focused in how to make different kind of rpg’ers enjoy a capture situation. Highly relevant to me, too, because in a couple sessions I plan on running an “escape out of prison” session for my players, right in the middle of a military invasion.

If anything I miss some discussion about how to capture players without it being forced or a TPK. You assume they are in this situation and discuss how to make it enjoyable , but for me it’s always been hard to pull this off. Players really, really hate being captured and defenseless; in my experience they never recognize a situation in which it’s wiser to surrender, and instead fight to the death. As a GM I find it difficult to give the message of “you can’t win this one guys, better surrender and fight another day” instead of “this seems like a hard fight, but heroes like you are supposed to win hard fights”.

The alternative is making the NPCs subdue the PCs, but it’s hard to do it without it being forced. If you play it realistically you get either a TPK, or some PCs escape capture, which lands you with a divided party which is something you generally do not want in this kind of stories.

Almost the only time I feel I’ve been able to successfully GM this kind of story was the time I simply started the session like this: “you slowly awaken in a dungeon, your head feels dizzy and you suspect you’ve been drugged. You have no recollection how you’ve gotten here at all”. And then during the session there were several flashbacks in which they learned how things had turned that way, but they knew they were going to end up in the dungeon no matter what. Somehow they didn’t complain about railroading.

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:10:46 +0000

It can definitely make for some great roleplaying experiences. Certainly far more so than a total party kill would. I don’t believe I’ve ever had any players whose characters chose surrender as a first option, but it sounds as though it worked out well for you.

I tend to be leery of splitting the group, as a player, because I know what sorts of headaches it can lead to for the GM. But if you’ve got a situation where one player just can’t stand combat, as in your case, and doesn’t mind allowing the others their fun, it’s probably worth a shot.

By: Ravyn

Ravyn — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 01:49:51 +0000

I have a rather odd approach to capture-plots, coming from the player’s side; I tend to walk into them, partly OOC-deliberately (I mean, come on, the RP opportunities! Besides… it wasn’t a. win or b. lose. See CommentLuv’d blog post.) and partly because of the tendency of the character to a. engage in what she called “stupid heroics” and b. to consider surrendering to be just a chance to attack the problem from another angle. (It was common enough to be a running joke in my primary game: Any plan that began with my character being captured by someone would usually work. Even if we hadn’t yet made it when she was captured.) Way I see it, it tended to be the only way I ever got a chance to figure out what made the antagonists tick, it created moods that didn’t tend to show up in the main portions of the game, and it led to some of the best improvisation I’ve ever pulled.

What this tended to result in in that game–which I find can work pretty well, particularly on a chat-game–was the partial-group capture-plot. That way part of the group is free (meaning you’ve got at least someone who’s at something approximating full power, and you can avoid putting the player who’d be bored to tears by the situation into the situation while still satisfying the ones who’d have fun with it.) Decent balance, and worth checking out.

Ravyn’s last blog post: 0 and 1, or The Problem With RPG Combat