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Take no prisoners!


Epiphanis

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Part of the advice given in Champions Complete is that players hate to have their PCs captured, which is something GMs should try to avoid doing. As a player, I don't feel that way, and as a GM might go-to "first adventure" trope is, rather than meeting in a bar, I have my PCs meet as co-prisoners and bond while escaping.

 

As a player, do you find having your characters captured kills your fun?

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It's very much a matter of question of "touch" - ie. how the GM handles it. My own feeling is that most players just hate to lose (after, they are generally playing bigger-than-life heroes), and they particularly hate being taken prisoner because that is "losing" stretched out over multiple sessions.  At least if your PCs all die, you get it over with. In addition, being captured "takes away control" of the PC to a great extent and players - justifiably, IMO - hate that. After all, the PC is their only direct link into the game world. Remove player control of the PC, and they are just watching the GM tell a story about NPCs. Few GMs are good enough to make that entertaining.

 

If you accept that point of view, you can make capturing the PCs not only a bit more palatable, but actually the basis for some good adventures. I've done it in the past, adapting the old Slave Lord's module (the PCs are captured, escape in their under-roos and have to fight their way out without all their usual crutches in the form of gear, focuses, etc). That series of adventures was a great success - but the players showed how much they enjoyed being captured when they caught the NPC they held responsible for their fate. Despite being mostly good-guy heroes, they flayed him alive, nailed him to a raft and set him adrift in the deep ocean :)

 

I've also used the "One PC is captured and the others must rescue him/her/it)" several times without problems, most recently in the last game I ran. Again, the series of adventures was a success, and everyone - including the player of the captured PC - enjoyed it ... but man, the Player/PC subsequently had a major grudge against her captors.

 

The trick to making these things work was:

First, the actual capture was not forced: none of this "You are all captured, no matter what you do, so just roll with the adventure, already" stuff. It flowed naturally out of the course of the adventure. In some cases, the PCs actually surrendered rather than face certain death. Players won't do that if they mistrust the GM

Second, capture was not used as a way to humiliate the PC or PCs. I just glossed over the time elapsed and general grossness endured in a few short sentences (and really players, already hate capture enough that you don't need to belabour the point: just hinting at what went on after capture is enough to set their blood to boiling).

Third, it was implicit that something would pop up and that the PCs would at least get a chance to richly revenge themselves for the indignities being heaped upon them. This is where player trust of the GM is important - the players assumed (correctly) that as GM, I would not use capture to humiliate/mutilate their PCs unnecessarily. 

 

So, it can work, but it's a sensitive issue and needs to be handled carefully. The situation you outline "You are all captives and must plot to escape together" is not really comparable, because you are already starting at point #3 above: the capture has already happened off-screen.

 

cheers, Mark

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It depends. A lot has to do with the level of trust players have for their GM.

 

One factor I've noticed is that PCs maybe true blue noble heroes, The players OF the PCs can be a bit more petty. They will take a loss or capture with more grace if they trust you to let them get the bad guy who did it to them. :)

 

I would say that I've made some mistakes. I had an NPC help a PC out of a jam and the player  voiced their dislike of being 'rescued' (Though, IIRC, the PC had rescued the NPC first). So I made a note of it not to do that with that Player anymore and it IS best if the pc finds a way to free him or herself.

 

EDIT: Or mostly what Markdoc said above.

 

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As a player, I don't mind it, though I'll admit to fore warning helping. Different genre, but I loved Pathfinder's Skull and Shackles but it was upfront about the whole 'You've been seized by a pirate crew' thing. On the other hand, there can be a frustration to be suddenly  depowered (Say in a power surpressing prison) for too long in Champions. You feel like you played a lot of points for nothing or you wanted 'Bam Pow zap' when you've got a dreary 'scrap just to survive' take. Really, it varies. I've met some good GMs who can pull it off VERY well.

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I actually can't stand that attitude (Death before capture). If your PC's lose a fight, and they would choose death over being captured, this is the comic book genre. It happens. And every so often, they will lose. Bluntly put, this is an extremely unhealthy mental attitude. When I hear "I would rather have my character die than be captured", I worry a little bit for my friend's mental state. Superheroes, for the most part, don't carry cyanide capsules in their molars and aren't raving paranoid lunatics. The entire point of being captured is to give the PC's a chance to escape and discover the villains plan. Wise players will realize that villains like to talk. Wiser players still will start formulating a plan for escape.

 

Escaping deathtraps? Also part of the genre. A lot of the best comic book stories involve getting captured. (The first four issues of Elementals, the heroes spend a ton of time on Saker's Island just being captured, Kraven's Last Hunt, etc.) If this is a problem with player attitude, try asking them if they liked those stories. Then ask them why they hate being captured so much.

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One problem tends to be the players' desire to play out every minute. "Three months pass"? No way - on Day One, my character does this, then this, then that. The escape plans start flying.

 

Balabanto, to your list, let's add Guardians of the Galaxy. The PC's are captured and jailed, then captured (voluntarily) by Yondu and his pirates. Would that have made for a boring game?

 

Combine the two and I think the roadmap for successful use of the "PC's are captured" model starts to appear. They are not "imprisoned for weeks or months, forced to endure painful and humiliating treatment at the hands of their jailers, waiting for some opportunity to escape". They barely wake up and get their bearings before things start popping, and they won't chafe under the restrictions. "How often" is another good question - every villain captures the heroes, holds them for months with tech that disables their powers? Gets stale fast. Once in a while, sure. But not "this is exactly like the last three times we were captured". Different villains, different personalities, so different approaches.

 

Markdoc mentioned not forcing it. Villains and Vigilantes modules always had a "what if the heroes lose?" segment after a major battle which set out the next actions of the villain. Having the possibility planned out as an escape valve for the heroes, rather than being in love with the "PCs are captured" plan and forcing it to happen, allows a capture to flow naturally from in-game events.

 

I've had PC's captured, individually or as groups, on numerous occasions. It's part of the source material in most, if not all, genres. It's rarely, if ever, been a problem in our games. But the imprisonment itself is boring, so it should not be the focus of gameplay.

 

The reverse issue should also be considered - if the PC's take a prisoner, how does that play out? Do the villains have those cyanide capsules in their molars, or self-destruct, or fight like crazed lemmings to either escape or die? Or does the GM play them as he would like the PC's to be played if captured by their enemies (within the constraints of their own personalities and objectives)?

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It can also make a difference if the "prison" the PCs are put into has the potential in itself for interesting adventures during incarceration: harsh environments or native life, other dangerous inmates, gangs or other factional alliances, and plenty of room for the PCs to explore. Precedents that various entertainments have used include walled or domed cities, pocket dimensions, or entire penitentiary planets.

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Do I, as a player, hate having my character captured? It depends--on the GM and the genre of the game.

 

My long-time gaming group in Virginia was very pulp-influenced, no matter the genre we played. And the heroes being captured was (and is) a staple of pulp adventures. They get captured, they discover important clues, and then they find a way to escape...usually bringing down the villain's lair in the process. In THAT campaign, we often got captured. And mostly we rolled with it. Oh, occasionally, if the GM had been leaning a little too heavily on that plot element, we players would all silently agree that it was time to pull out all the stops and refuse to give in no matter how daunting the odds. "Not this time!" was our rallying cry.

 

Sometimes actually managed to pull it out, and defeat (or at least escape) the bad guy's forces. Sometimes we didn't. But mostly we didn't mind. We knew the GM wasn't going to keep us imprisoned for long, wasn't going to unceremoniously kill off our characters (Pulp-style tropes work both ways), and that we'd get our chance for revenge and final victory before the adventure was over.

 

On the other hand, I've played with GMs who seemed to treat the game as a contest between GM and players, and I absolutely would not go along with being captured. Better to get your PC killed off, then pack your stuff and go home and do something that would actually be fun.

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The only time that I have had players who were gracious about being captured was when I was running Savage worlds Pulp game. One of the Genre Rules for that was that PC's get captured. So if the PC's allow themselves to be captured due to overwhelming odds. Then they would get a Bennie (AKA Heroic Action Point Equivalent). This really helped the younger players deal with the "we lost" negativity and be rewarded for actually following a genre convention.

Perhaps rewarding the PC's in a similar fashion could help reduce that negativity that capturing the PC's always engenders. Also not totally hosing the PC's everytime they are captured is also a good thing. You want to make the time in captivity a bit not fun to sweeten the victory of the escape, but you don't want to make captivity last long at all.

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Actually now come to think of it I did run an adventure where the hero team was captured.  An strange artifact suddenly showed up at a local park in the middle of the winter.  All around the artifact the snow had melted and grass was growing.

 

The police had put up a protective barrier.  The team went to investigate.  At some point one of them touched it and they were all transported across the galaxy to be 'observed during stress tests'.  The aliens that captured them treated them about the same as a human researcher would treat a rat or monkey (they needed to keep alive) to observe their reaction to 'stress'.  The players were quite annoyed.  It took them a while to 'escape' from their cell - think large 1950's house - only to find out the entire planet was a 'zoo' of sorts.

 

The heroes had to deal with other aliens who had also been captured and were mad.  They generally ended up fighting with those aliens.  And sometimes yelled at their captors.

 

Eventually the aliens that captured them declared humanity a minimal threat and returned the team back to earth.

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Bluesguy, that's the sort of getting captured scenario I would hate as a player.  You all get captured with no chance to escape or do anything about it and then after multiple "adventures" in the prison you don't even get to escape or take down your captors, they just let you go because you proved your entire species is to pathetic to worry about.  That sounds awful to me, and I don't mind getting captured in appropriate genres. 

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The aliens would appear as holograms to record observations as events occurred.  The aliens would make comments about the characters abilities and whether or not humanity was going to be capable of being a threat to anyone in the future.  I dropped references to movies such as the Day the Earth Stood Still. The "threat assessment" had more to do with "Will humanity become something like a plague in the galaxy once they get off their planet."  When the players figured that out things did change. The characters stopped trying to fight the other aliens and communicate with them the 'laboratory aliens' took notice.  Also when the characters came up with a way out of their enclosure and went to another enclosure the aliens became very interested.

 

This was a single adventure. 

 

The players/characters usually trounce most of the supervillains they run into.  This time they couldn't beat the 'bad guy' (the aliens were 'bad', no more so than we study rats in a maze).

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As a player I accept the fact that sometimes I am out matched and I lose, especially if I do something stupid on top of that.  Honest, strong adversity where the gm is creating a solid story is a good thing.  Now if the gm is some insecure idiot who just gets off on pummeling players, it's a different story.  Of course, I wouldn't sit at that table long anyway--only a fool would.  I expect players to be the same when I gm.  If they can't handle that, they should be sitting at a different table.  Being captured and losing happens.  Get over it.  More importantly, learn from it!

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I don't mind so much being a captive, its the failure, loss and misery of being captured that's frustrating and depressing.  Like a lot of players, I suspect, I play RPGs to be someone better than me, who doesn't have the awful parts of life I have to deal with, and who triumphs.  Being defeated and captured violates that sense of enjoyment for me.  

 

As a GM I try to keep that in mind, and if I have a scenario that requires the PCs be caught, I will tend to have the scenario start that way, with the capture happening "off screen."

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I don't mind so much being a captive, its the failure, loss and misery of being captured that's frustrating and depressing.  Like a lot of players, I suspect, I play RPGs to be someone better than me, who doesn't have the awful parts of life I have to deal with, and who triumphs.  Being defeated and captured violates that sense of enjoyment for me.  

 

As a GM I try to keep that in mind, and if I have a scenario that requires the PCs be caught, I will tend to have the scenario start that way, with the capture happening "off screen."

 

That won't necessarily make it any better. Some players hate that kind of deus ex machina, or "railroading" because they think they were unfairly denied a chance to fight being captured and (quite possibly) defeat the villain(s) or at least escape.

 

I mentioned upthread that I played for many years in a campaign where being captured and then escaping (wrecking the villain's lair, and often his plans) in the process was practically mandatory. It was a very pulp-oriented game, and we all knew that going in. And yet...sometimes we too got annoyed, and one or another of the players (or rarely all of us) would decide that, yes, THIS was the hill we were ready to die on. Sometimes we won (or the GM recognized our mood and changed his plans), sometimes we lost.

 

Basically, there's no guarantee that any particular approach is going to satisfy your players.

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I think a lot of the complaints about 'being captured' tend to stem from the feeling of being railroaded. I have been absolutely guilty of the sin of railroading myself in many forms over the years and it has taken me a long time to understand why it is so dreadful. I even ran a number of sessions in which I wanted to recreate something very similar to the earlier mentioned Island of Dr. Apocalypse Saker from the first half dozen issues of the Elementals and at the time I couldn't understand why my players were being so recalcitrant. I've got this great story idea. Go with it. It will be fun. I honestly did not see what the problem was.

 

Fast forward thirty years and it finally clicks (it takes me a while, but I'll get there).

 

What we do when we have a game session is that we collaboratively tell a story.; all of us. The GM, the dice, and the players are all part of that process. When a GM 'railroads' a storyline what they are doing is eliminating (or at least greatly reducing) their player's participation in that storyline. They take the player's ability to influence the actions of their characters and remove that from them in any meaningful way.

 

I've been captured because the GM has a storyline that requires me to be captured. Even though I trust my GM and know that I will not remain captured the truth of the matter is that with most storylines that start out this way there will be no real chance to escape until the pre-designated 'escape scene' in the story which will most likely involve a specific method that the GM has determined in advance. Some GMs are more flexible and won't have a pre-designated 'escape scene' with an approved escape method, but most GMs who are good enough to do that will also probably not railroad me into being captured in the first place. They will present a more reasonable scene and if I avoid be captured then we go off to do something else.

 

So in what is suppose to be a cooperative medium I am captured without any real input, I am held prisoner without any real influence on the storyline, and I escape because that's what the script has called for. I might as well just hand my sheet over to the GM and let him write up my exciting adventure so I can read how I was able to find the weakness in the prison and successfully escape. I don't really need to be here for any of this, do I?

 

Yes, I am overexagerrating a bit, but it is to illustrate the point. In a cooperative storytelling excercise there are probably few sins greater than removing the ability of your players to participate in the process. Unfortunately in the case of most 'Prisoner' scenarios that is done to an extreme degree, and I am not referring to the fact that as a prisoner a player has limited control over their actions. I am referring to the entire process, from being captured to being held to eventual escape.

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Giving a player a solo mission once (only player there so he gets to get all the glory), I set up the hero to appear to have committed a theft. He was taken by Stronghold and put in a cell. I let him try breaking out but he already knew what Stronghold is like. I mention he's there for about an hour and the door opens, with Esper there. She broke him out. All-in-all, he was probably captured for about 5 minutes real time. I play Esper a bit nicer in my campaign, but she told him he owed her a favor later, to which he agreed.

 

Many months later, he met Esper in a battle. She called on the favor and the group had to let her go.

 

Depending on how you pull off the capture (and how long), it could actually be quite fun.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'll admit, I learned early that my players would rather their characters die in battle than let themselves get captured.  Doesn't matter whether or not it's in genre.  They.  Just.  Won't.  Do.  It.  So I try to avoid capture scenarios like the plague, unless I clear it with the player first. 

 

That said, if a player does agree to play along, it usually works well.  I had one adventure where the PC was captured and replaced by Doppleganger.  I asked the player if he'd mind playing Doppelganger for a week, and that he was free to make as many verbal slips as he wanted to give the other players clues that something was wrong.  It took the other players for-freaking-ever to figure out that something was up, and that was with the player dropping nearly constant hints.  He was frustrated enough that, when the PCs finally attacked Doppleganger, he volunteered to keep running Doppleganger and then used every trick at his disposal to nearly take them out. 

 

I had a player who wanted to take a hiatus from the game after his first kid was born, but didn't want to lose his character.  So he was captured off-screen, and when he was ready to get back into the game months later, we ran his escape.

 

If I get in the mood to have the PCs deal with deathtraps, I generally work them into a base break-in, so they're only technically very briefly captured.

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I'll admit, I learned early that my players would rather their characters die in battle than let themselves get captured.  Doesn't matter whether or not it's in genre.  They.  Just.  Won't.  Do.  It.  So I try to avoid capture scenarios like the plague, unless I clear it with the player first. 

 

Funny, I was gonna say this too (and now I am).

 

I don't know what it is, but I've played with groups in three different regions of the USA (CA, MI and VA); everyone one of them, would fight to the death.  Not only wouldn't they allow capture, they don't even retreat.

 

Basically, I have to say as the GM, "You cannot win this fight" in order for the players to even behave half the time.  They tend to deal with authority as if it's an opportunity to piss them off.  "Meeting with the King?  Great, I can finally give him a piece of my mind!"  Sometimes, when it's obvious, like a Great Dragon in ED or SR (basically a non-stated being), they'll sometimes behave, sometimes...

 

I tend to agree, it's often because they are playing "larger than life" characters, I also think it's because they are living out their frustrations with the world at large (as adults, we seldom get to say what we really think to anyone in a place of power, due to political convention and the ramifications).  I think in this way it is Cathartic for them to act this way.

 

I have been able to capture the party a couple times, and the best way I know to do this, is actually with "good guys" doing it.  An NPC they respect, and assume they'll get out of it because it'll all get cleared up eventually.  Once, they still escaped, because it was obvious that it wasn't going well, and it was not going to get "cleared up".  And that went OK.

 

I will say, as a player, I too hate getting captured.  Now, I will also say I often play characters that are a little "edgier", and it isn't unusual for my character to escape (retreat) instead of getting captured, usually with the intention of coming back and helping the prisoners (party) escape later.

 

This hasn't really had anything to do with "trust" of the GM; it's simply been the way these players (including myself) play their characters.  I also think, it's because it's a game.  "What's the worse thing that could happen?  We lose, and have to make up new characters or start another game?  OK, I'm good with that."  I've had players actually say, when a character goes down, and it's starting to look like a TPK; "So, what are we playing next?", during the battle.

 

So, other than using a good guy to do the capture, the only way I could see this working for my games, as a player or GM, would be for the GM to tell us outright that either we give up, or we're all dead, AND he expected us to get captured, so we can escape or play through whatever happens.  I don't think that's an issue really, because otherwise, it wouldn't happen with any of my groups.

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