How should interrogations be handled whenever the PCs have captured a prisoner?

I never got to play the sequel to the new series. Did they also have an interrogation mechanic?

I read this as you completely disregarding the roleplaying. No wonder your players all but murder their victims if nothing happens until they pass a dice threshold.

Ehh. Our last party sort of had a morality spiral into the darker side of the alignment table, because whenever we tried to be good the DM pissed on us from a great height. By the end of the campaign we were essentially fantasy CIA except even more malicious.

Interrogations were performed over fairly long timescales. The HQ had an anechoic chamber that we would put prisoners in. Once they completely broke down, we'd go about inducing learned helplessness and rebuilding them from the ground up to be indoctrinated devotees of the organisation, extract the necessary information, and then we'd use them in place of interns, carrying things from place to place, passing messages along, all that jazz. We... Didn't really mistreat them after the conditioning. In fact, they had a pretty good quality of life compared to the vast majority of the setting, which sort of made it even more unsettling.

Campaign ended when we all realised that we had essentially become the Ministry of Love and got spooked.

In my current campaign we have literally built a three step program with the first step being keeping prisoners in isolation with daily interrogations of simple questions: "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" Etc.

After that they either cooperate, and go to phase 2 in which they are monitored, taught to co-exist with one another, and given "tests of morality" (e.g a nearby guard forgets his lunch. What do?) they either fail, and are discarded, or advance to the last phase: reintegration.

They are allowed to live with a tribe of allied goblins who are largely psionic. At this stage it is made clear if they've been bullshitting, and as part of their last test they are given a pet to raise, and later given the choice to kill said pet to renter society, or don't and be exiled (the wilderness in this setting is unforgiving). Should they refuse they are considered reformed, and allowed to enter. Should they agree they are mind-fucked into leaping out the nearest window onto the fluffy pillows waiting below.

I die greased a bit. Point being that interrogation is done over a long period of time, with simple punishment/reward rather than torture that leads to them spouting whatever they think will make you stop.

I haven't been in any group that didn't use enchantment magic to take care of the interrogations. It tends to be more effective, the only time you get false information is when it was purposefully seeded and the low-level operatives actually believe it.

Nope, only thing you can do is abduct Dark VIPs or kill them on the spot

Interpret it as however you wish but interrogation and torture are touchy subjects to me, so I deliberately run it in a simplified manner to not hand out any bonuses for committing Nazi torture atrocities on their captives so I don't further encourage that sort of thing. So what the players do to extract information is just window dressing and thus a reflection on what their characters are like.

So as previous posters pointed out, they seem to often go for the easy power trip.

>you triggered me, shitlord!

There are no good guys. Anyone with power over other people (e.g. prisoners) and a guarantee of no legal retribution will abuse their prisoners, just because they can.
Or at least that was the defence I gave at my trial, can't believe I was still imprisoned.

I once had a player whose character was a habitual rapist, and I really didn't want that in the game but it made sense in the context of the game. Eventually I just told him that we're going to assume he does the deed every time they razed a village and whatever else they were up to and not to mention or try to RP it again. It was still there, still had an impact but it wasn't seen or heard except when people were trying to murder him for it.
In your case I'd just ask your players to make the rolls and keep the pretend inside of their heads.
Not like there isn't room for uncomfortable feelings in roleplaying but there is really no reason for you or your players to insist on doing and saying things that actually, honestly upsets someone in the group. Draw your lines and define them. If you game with others I will assume that you are on friendly terms with them at the very least, if they can't respect you and each other to the very low standard of "don't intentionally step on their toes" there is reason to change group.

...

I laughed.

A lot of people talk immediately, or they put up a token effort and talk after the first few broken bits. Mooks generally fall into this category, except when they're total fanatics.

There are other kinds of people too, but they don't matter because players aren't going to get any true information out of them. I've never seen them use an interrogation technique more advanced than "cause more pain", and that simply doesn't work.

This is how it's fucking done

fukken saved

For the poor souls who haven't heard the song, youtube.com/watch?v=UNAr5tzZxdk

>Torturing a suspect and laughing about it
>Yanking out his teeth and letting blood drip down
>Yanking him out of his clothes
>But he needs to keep his tighty whiteys on or else it can't be shown
American and Jap sexuality are so fucked up.

Have the captive say whatever to get them to stop, because torture is worthless. You will confess to anything, follow whatever leading questions they give you, make up entire organizations if it gets them to stop

How we do it usually:

Capture the prisoner. Give him a bed, with a blanket, a soft pillow, a warm meal, etc.
Then begin interrogation. Ask strongly for the questions, say that we will release him and pay him if he gives informations, threaten to do violence if he doesn't. If no information is given, we take away one of the good things. The blanket, the pillow, etc.

We then repeat the process, add real violence into the mix, and we graduate. Everytime he gives us an info, we check out if it's true or not. If it's false, he's toast. If it's true, we give him a reward.

We begin by info we know are true, to test him, then we try to get the good stuf.

It's a bit slow, but it's working nicely

>I once had a player whose character was a habitual rapist, and I really didn't want that in the game but it made sense in the context of the game.
what

Our party just hands the suspect off to our Interrogator handler, Interrogator hands the suspect off to the friendly men in the red pointy hoods he employs for this exact thing, the GM plays the Howie Long scream, we get a nice sanitary dossier telling us what they got out of the guy and whether he survived questioning.

I usually prefer not to torture because of the sheer ineffectiveness of that method.

Evil party, sea raiders. It was of course a given that it'd happen I just never reflected on it before they went to town for the first time.

I have always run it like it is in Red Hand of Doom.

I once made a character who was a former servant of a sadistic fuck and got a talent and a drive for inflicting pain as well as receiving it. Also was the group's healer.

Isn't psycology a wonderful thing.

>Point at party Berserker/psychopath/Bard/Chef
This guy/girl/robot has some naaasty ideas on what to do with you. You talk, we tell 'em to take a hike. You don't, WE take a hike and leave them in here with you.
You got half a minute.

Tell me about it, those two fucks always put the crews in me.

Regarding the topic, I'd use blackmailing first, sleep deprivation mixed with sensorial abuse after, negotiation at last.

...

>logs on to Veeky Forums of her own free will
>gets this rustled over a /k/ torture joke
>thinks its her place to tell someone else what is and isn't funny

Really Femanon?

Context? Did somebody show him one of his videos?
Saved.

Torture is pleb-tier interrogation that almost never works and is only employed by 1) people who have no idea what they're doing and 2) people who just want to torture people and are using "interrogation" as an excuse. Most players fall into category number one. They fall back to torture because they have no idea what else they could do to get information out of an uncooperative person. If you want interrogation to be a thing and not completely abstracted into a die roll and two sentences of exposition, you're either going to need players who know what the Hell they're doing or a subsystem thorough enough to give them an idea. The first are rare and the second would be a whole Hell of a lot of work, so I usually fall back on the one die roll and then exposition thing.

In my group it has always gone one way: Craig starts describing the inventive and at least partially out-of-character methods he will use to violently torture the victim, and the victim will begin protesting that they really are not at all that committed to their employer, and will give up any information they can to avoid the creepy dwarf-type guy.

The reason to torture someone is to make the other guy willingly confess. The first guy's info is useless but the guy who see how far you will go and be much willing to cooperate since you are going to kill him.

The point of torture is make the other guy not lie when his turn is coming

>tfw you're so old you start realizing there are young folks who haven't heard that song

Man, being 27 is tough.

>As much as I enjoy a good torture session it's a method with many flaws. Only amateurs jump to torture as a first resort.
>Most importantly, do we know that they know what we want to know? Otherwise we've kidnapped someone for no good reason, and they'll tell us anything to make it stop.
>Do they have something we can leverage against them? An affair, financial troubles, unsolved crimes? Blackmail's excellent for long-term information gathering, a personal favorite of mine on a practical and entertainment level.
>As much as this job has its rushes sometimes simple and boring bribery will do the trick. The more exotic the target's tastes the better. We usually end up in this line of work for the fun of it, but that's usually not what we're paid to do.
>They may be the type to take notes. Technological literacy is not as common as you might think. You'd be surprised how many people fall for the 'password inspector' routine. One time all I had to do was trade chocolate for it.
>Some folks, however, know that paper records can't be hacked. It's a wise solution, if not as perfect as a good memory. However, I find no security layout is harder to break in to than a human mind.
>Because of all this, I haven't had to break out my tools in a long time, and I hope it never comes to that again. Even with all my experience, I've never liked the failure rates of torture, and it's such a straightforward method that it doesn't really hold much for me anymore.

This is funny because my friends are very squeamish and stuff like teeth being pulled, broken limbs with the bone sticking out, nails torn off fingers etc. will probably never happen as a result. One of them got captured and tortured and it was just the bad guy using various tools to mess with a shoulder wound of his.

this, don't you know how the mafia works?

Some will say that torture does not work, that they will say anything to make the pain stop. I find that the old ways are always best. Thumb screws, dunking, the rack. You want to find what causes the loudest, most distressed screams, the ones that are clearly causing the most anguish. Then continue. When they seem closest to passing out or even dying, you begin asking your questions. Punctuate it by pointing out that giving up true answers is the only way to get you to stop torturing their loved ones in front of them.

To be fair that can be torture without anesthetic.

Definitely, but none of us enjoy it and seek it out like the user said, even completely avoiding the most grueling stuff.

I'm still puzzling out how the guy doesn't lie, or accidentally gives a false impression on what happens. How many people can remember something in detail without being calm, or answer complex questions well under pressure?

>Punctuate it by pointing out that giving up true answers is the only way to get you to stop torturing their loved ones in front of them.
I thought the whole point was to find out information. If you know which answers are the true ones, what's the point of asking questions?

>But, I got a blowtorch and everything.

Get over yourself m8. Either reward them for Rp or admit youre triggered by what theyre doing and fess up to the torture being a die roll-off. The reason theyre evicerating people is because youre ignoring the rp so they are just going right for the stuff that works. If they break a hand lower the fucking threshold for the roll, if they just start maming somebody let it happe and have their victim die, then its on them for being monsters, but the way it is now it's totally on your shoulders.

Here, you can have this one too.

...

A while back I was playing in a homebrew modern day mafia campaign. We had a prisoner from a rival gang in our car and instead of bringing him back to base we decided to stop for dinner at an Applebee's.

We got a booth and made him on the inner side. When the waitress took our orders we intimidatingly glared at him and asked him what he wanted. He sheepishly picked something off the menu, to which I immediately said to the waitress "Actually, he'll have the buffalo wings".

While we ate we somehow got what little information he had. We ended up all slipping away, leaving the prisoner at the table with the check. We all thought the whole thing was hilarious including the GM, who had actually been keeping track of what we ate and how much would be on the check, not expecting us to ditch.

And as far as I know that's all of 'em!

find out the target's worst fear, then prestidigitation/minor or major illusion yourself into said fear.

pic related, we found an NPC who was terrified of going back to working for a baker who made his life hell before he became a bandit so i pulled some shit to make my character's head into a pie and screamed at the top of my lungs "I WILL MAKE YOU ROLL DOUGH UNTIL YOUR GODDAMN FINGERS BLEED!!!" he became quite chatty after that.

By gathering everyone next to them and letting them bicker for a few hours on what to do to them right in front of them.

Well, tracking this down to some shitty weeb guro fetish deviantart site sure does explain a lot about the image quality.

I'm more sad there isn't an anime about QT American paramilitary forces in Iraq falling in love with their targets and committing war crimes.

I am sad more people don't know who this is.

I don't fully understand why it happens, but It's a new player thing. They usually stop doing it after the first few times

>The reason to torture someone is to make the other guy willingly confess.

This doesn't work either, for the same reason plain old torture doesn't work: 90% of the time you have no way of immediately verifying information anyway, including verifying whether or not they even know what you're trying to get out of them, and someone who's telling you random bullshit out of fear is exactly as useless as someone telling you random bullshit out of pain.

>I don't fully understand why it happens
For the same reason real life torture still happens: it's the easiest way to make someone who refuses to talk spill the beans. For new players it's the obvious solution until they learn about this little thing called "roleplay". And some keep doing it after that because their character has no moral qualms about torture.

Hell, by Gygaxian standards Lawful Good characters are entirely justified in torturing enemy goons for information.

>implying your average pc isnt a murderhobo in the company of murderhobos

By not running a fucking interrogation simulation. An interrogation serves a certain function in the plot, no more, no less.

>Bard

What's he going to do? Sing in the wrong key?

>gygaxian standards

Don't get fooled by gygax lies. He's the devil.

Can you give an example, mate?

Look at this newfag getting triggered by a simple yandere joke.
Look and laugh

Because you mix in questions that you know the answer to with ones you don't to gauge how truthful they're being

When they give you an answer you like you ease up, when they give you answer you don't like they get hurt

When they give you enough answers that you like they get to sleep in a nice comfy cage after a hot meal, and the next time you interrogate them you won't start hurting them until they fail the truth test

When they start lying or fail to cooperate then you threaten to send them to bed either in a standing cage with little barbs on the inside so they must stand ramrod straight (The Chokey), or the pillory in the middle of your camp, whichever will inspire more fear

This is a long process though, and you can't just jump right into it, but starting off by shaving and stripping your prisoner (lice are no joke, and it establishs your control) and then leaving them in their cage for a couple of days (or longer), preferably in the dark, with no human contact except for a meal being brought each day, and maybe the shaving being redone is needed (the guards shouldn't talk to them during this process). You could, and probably should also use sleep deprivation, long periods of forced bondage/stress positions and complete darkness for days

After the prisoner is suitably alone, tired, scared and has had the point illustrated that your in charge interrogate them, and ask them simple questions that you know the answer to, if they answer them all correctly then return them to their cell, give them a present, like clothes, give them a bigger better meal, and don't inflict any of the above annoyances on them. let them stew in the better condition for a couple day, and once they're obviously comfortable start mixing in questions you don't know to be true, make sure to add new questions you know each time. When they start lying its straight to the Chokey, and back to naked sleepless nights, dark exhausting days and one sloppy meal a day

That bitch got style

Let me list all the classics:

- One-man "good cop, bad cop" routine: hilarious if done for comedy, teriffying if pulled off as a crazy maniac.

- Two-men "bad cop, even worse cop" routine: think Sam and Max. Both of them are likely to do something comedically horrible and cruel that you will remember for all your life without actually torturing you. It's just that one of them is really enthusiastic about torture too.

- "Concerned samaritan" routine: gentle, compassionate and manipulative son of a bitch. Works really well with people who think it's all others' fault.

- Waterboarding: self-explanatory. Simple torture that doesn't incur long-term damage on the target and is very effective. For a more cruel (and effective) version, use sandboarding.

- Locking up a person in a dark empty room without food, water or human contact: also very effective at breaking people, but wastes a lot of time. Not good at getting the results quickly.

How exactly did you go about inducing learned helplessness and rebuilding them from the ground up - I find it hard to believe any random gaming group could give even a semi-plausible description of how they'd do that.

>but the way it is now it's totally on your shoulders.

Sorry, I gotta disagree. Like I said: I give no bonuses or penalties to how exactly they interrogated their prisoners. So they could have elected to not lay a single finger on their captive and merely threatened them, and they would have gotten the same amount of information depending on the die roll. And I don't alter the threshold because they opted to yank teeth and hook a battery up to somebody's testicles - no bonuses or penalties. With this in mind it should be obvious that it would be a lot faster and efficient just to exchange a few words and threatening gestures to get information out of a captive and to actually come up with creative tortures to a prisoner actually takes more time and effort - yet the players I've encountered usually opt for that in spite of how I run interrogation checks.

So, were I seriously triggered by torture, I would actually make torture increase the threshold for success. Ergo: It doesn't bother me as much as you think. Yet certain players I game with seem to delight in the power trip of pretend torture despite it not affecting the outcome of the die rolls. Ergo: It's not on my shoulders. So you're wrong and something about the way I choose to run my game is making you massively triggered. Sounds like you're the one that needs to get over yourself, m8.

>TGWTG saying something isn't funny
Pot, meet Kettle.

Get them into the station.
Talk to them.
Mostly listen. Ask the right questions.
Break them down in your head.
Down to the conscious.
Find out what it is they exactly want.
Find.
Out.
What.
They.
Want.
>Then deny it from them.

The Bard in question had a choker that would keep him from getting fatigued or muscle injuries from prolonged singing/playing, as well as a feather cap that let him go without food or sleep for up to a month.
The Bard also would sing and play Hamsterdance when he wanted to annoy people.
2 + 2 = Make it stop.

It's from his review on "Earnest Scared Stupid". Basically, someone made a gif of it for use as a reaction image.
I've seen that image posted multiple times in response to black comedy. Apparently the poster hates that kind of thing.

Has the guy lost his nose?

Destroy individuality as much as possible, and then completely ignore them. Don't respond to any attempts to communicate, shut down any attempts to rebel without acknowledging them. Subject them to torment/reward completely at random to remove any sense of control.

Then suddenly move forwards, and provide them with attention and a better standard of living, but only in such a manner as to encourage their servitude and obedience.

GM ruled that it took anywhere from 5-8 weeks in total.

Here you go, OP, in case you haven't read it yet.

So, essentially pic related

Plan for ways to learn more about the subject being interrogated. What weaknesses do they have? What do they value?

If the prisoner is just an average mook, he'd likely know very little. If you still want to run it, add a photo of his family or a letter from his wife in his pocket or something.

Son of a bitch, I wondered where he it from

As a GM I allow my players as much latitude as everyone agrees to. However I try to make it very clear that outright torture, regardless of how far they go, doesn't yield effective results.

As a player the closest I get to torture is very vaguely threatening that it may happen if the subject does not cooperate.
>However my standard procedure is take in subject and grill them.
>Don't get physical, keep it professional. We ask questions about things we want info for and prod to see what the subject values.
>After that the subject is sent to a cell with a simple bed/mat and left alone after being checked for diseases etc and head shaved.
>Next day the subject is left alone in the room as we try to verify any and everything the subject told us keeping meticulous records of every exchange between interrogators and subject.
> As soon as the sun goes down the Prisoner is dragged out of his cell and questioned again.
> Questioning isn't hostile or confrontational, it is completely detached and professional, says it wants to verify everything the subject previously told us.
> After all the same questions have been asked subject is returned to Cell.
> Next Day Subject is dragged in twice during the day for same procedure
> Afterwards begin sleep deprivation and continue routine.
>After every exchange subjects answers are compared and correlated to see if he changes anything, meanwhile field team collects intel on subject's family/etc.
> Finally after significant sleep deprivation you confront subject with your findings. Specifically that you've held him/her for more than a week now and no rescue has come. You have caught him/her lying multiple times. You have info on his/her valuable relations and will act if not satisfied. You want to help him/her only if he her helps you.
> It's not so much breaking down a person but breaking down their idea that you are a monster/enemy. It's better to show that you are human & it's subject's best interest to cooperate

>this level of psychological torture
Please, I'll behave, no more.

In one game I played, we ended up doing a good cop bad cop routine where the bad cop didn't even say anything or interact with the prisoner at all. Bad cop was playing a not!Jacket from Hotline Miami in a fantasy setting.

We had him tied in the cellar of a tavern owned by a friend of the party that we helped out a couple of times. While the party face did typical good cop things (Are you feeling comfortable? Need anything?) bad cop just sat in the corner punching the wall. Over and over. Sometimes he would make a loud grunting noise and the punching would get faster and louder, but he just kept punching the wall the entire time. At first the prisoner wouldn't cooperate so we just left him in the room with bad cop, who continued to punch the wall. The player made it a point to detail that his hands were raw and he even started bleeding, but the guy just kept punching that fucking wall, occasionally shooting a glare at the prisoner before punching the wall again.

The guy was so freaked out that when we started talking about "harsher measures", he lost his shit and spilled the location we were looking for.

Anticipation is the best killer imo

My favorite dirty trick to get this behavior to stop is to have the tortured mook give inaccurate information (because he doesn't actually know anything) or lead the PCs into a trap hoping that his side can rescue him while they are away.

Your players are shit and you need to stop enabling them.
Torture is a tool to be used in the conditioning of a subject, not as a means of interrogation.

Using Stockholm Syndrome to your advantage is stage two interrogation. Still basic, but reasonably effective. You make it clear you have control over someone without antagonizing them (you can still induce Stockholm Syndrome if you hurt them, but it'll take a little longer, so no point in wasting time unless you just really want to smack the fucker around a little and nothing's urgent). You do not need an elaborate caging and shaving and isolation regime for this. You seriously just need to keep them in a prison for like a day. Then you give them small favors and strike up casual conversation with them. Before long, they will probably become open and cooperative enough to let slip all kinds of information without realizing they're letting it go, just by talking about what they've been up to lately. That topic is likely to be dominated by "fighting this war we're having" and will probably include lots of details they don't realize you're eager to find out, like troop positions, how often they're marching, how they do their scouting, etc. This is especially effective against officers, whose day-to-day routines can reveal quite a bit, and especially if you strike up rapport with them as having a similar rank in a similarly structured army. You're not so different from him, and you just start talking about what you have in common and keep good mental notes of every stray fact he lets slip.

Want to get the results of a week's worth of inducing learned helplessness in about 45 minutes? Use one of Hanns Scharff's favorite techniques and walk in with a bunch of questions you already know the answers to. A /whole/ bunch. Explain to the interogatee that your spies have already discovered literally everything you're about to ask him, but your boss has this thing where he doesn't think it's credible until it's confirmed by interrogation. Generals are crazy. So you ask him a question. If he lies or hesitates, you tell him the real answer, and ask him to not drag this out, because you already know everything. If he says he doesn't know, tell him the answer and ask him to repeat it to you. Offer him some small favor if he just gets this dumb shit over with so you can tell your boss that you did the fucking interrogation and can we please move forward with our plans now. After you've got him in the habit of answering questions automatically, start introducing questions whose answers you don't know.

Trigger warning: brutal torture

A tactic used frequently by police interrogators to get confessions is the good cop/good cop routine. You and possibly another interrogator sit down and establish rapport with the guy, telling him that you understand why a guy would do what he did and say you would've done it, too. You promise (possibly knowing in advance you'll break the promise) things will go a lot easier on him if he just owns up to it, since it's pretty understandable anyway. The trouble is that this has a pretty high rate of success on people who didn't actually do anything, especially if you claim to have evidence linking them to the crime (even if you don't), but if your goal is to get a confession rather than catch the culprit, its success rate even against people who are innocent is a testament to its effectiveness.

Some people are tight-lipped enough that these techniques won't work, and for these people more elaborate and cruel techniques might be required. However, breaking someone's will like this requires far more time, so it's inefficient to use it as a first resort. Plus, breaking someone's will is, if anything, easier if you attempt a nice approach first, as the feeling of betrayal will cause a more rapid breakdown, and the knowledge that you can be much more civilized to cooperative prisoners makes them more willing to cooperate, since they have more than the word of a torturing psychopath that good things come to those who obey. You've already demonstrated a willingness to treat them decently, and only got nasty when they insisted on being difficult.

>For the same reason real life torture still happens: it's the easiest way to make someone who refuses to talk spill the beans.
More like they think it'll work like in their action movies or they just want the answers they want for some preconceived goal and the truth is secondary.
It's easy to get them to spill whatever beans they think you wanna hear or if they're trained for it then even purposefully false info that could lead you into a trap or waste of your time, not so easy to get actual reliable actionable info.

A reputation for nastiness under *any* circumstances has another unfortunate side effect, however: People are that much more likely to fight to the death. If the enemy force is at all competent in compartmentalization of information, the more valuable information an enemy has access to, the more they'll have been vetted for being the sort of the person who will fight to the death rather than submit to capture. This will be true no matter what you do, but having a reputation for kindness to prisoners helps tilt things in your favor amongst all enemy soldiers. Indeed, a starving or outmatched enemy army may mutiny and deliver you a much less costly victory if they feel confident they'll be well-fed and decently treated if they surrender. Sun Tzu calls a position from which you cannot flee "deadly ground" and states that on this ground, soldiers will fight to the death. Placing your soldiers on deadly ground is gambling the total destruction of your army on their ability to win if you boost their morale score to "yes," and denying the enemy that gambit by accepting surrenders is almost always wiser than the alternative. It means you can press your enemy into a corner with near impunity. It will almost never be the case that one and only one man has the information you need (and even more rarely will you have a solid idea of who has what information in the first place), so a better solution to tight-lipped prisoners is probably just to capture more prisoners until you find one who opens up after the second bottle of whiskey.

So, how do you fold all this into a subsystem? Well, mostly I'm just establishing that it's a whole Hell of a lot of work. The one or two lines of exposition can be to just sum up one of these techniques. The "pretend your idiot boss just wants stuff you already know confirmed by interrogation" trick usually makes players feel smart, particularly if you offer it to them as an option and they make the choice to actually do it.