How, let's call it thorough, should you let your players get with interrogation?

How, let's call it thorough, should you let your players get with interrogation?

Do you go with a simple "I interrogate him," or do you let your players go full chinese bamboo torture?

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m.liveleak.com/view?i=969_1263249923
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I'd let "I interrogate him" pass if they tell me roughly what angle they're going for. I like to know if they're trying to brandish muscles, or actually cut on the guy, or try and appeal to him, etc.

If they want to tell me more that's great, but frankly I'd rather avoid edgyshit, and just have them give me the angle.

>chinese bamboo torture
user, please.
There are much more effective methods of torture that don't leave long-lasting consequences.

Drugs and truth serums, waterboarding, "good cop, bad cop" routines, locking a person in a dark empty room with literally nothing in it except for water slowly dripping from the ceiling - imagination is the limit.

Actual physical torture is for plebeians and amateurs.

Also, video somewhat related.
youtube.com/watch?v=C-CG5w4YwOI

My group usually does fade to black for torture. Not that we torture that often.

Why is there so much torture in our hobby?

Because our hobby IS torture.

Because sadly, as a group we seem to be really imaginative when it comes to worldbuilding and characterization and plot lines. And really unclear on how to extract information from someone without going all murderhobo on them.

Yeah, you're right.

My players once put a hired thug's head in the mouth of the ranger's crocodile. Effectively intimidating role-play I usually reward with a slightly lower DC, but I usually don't allow things that would be time consuming like putting an enemy on the rack or nailing their fingernails.

I don't give a shit at all. Like, at all.
If a player wanna go full Manson on how he cuts up a mook, good for him. Might make him far more (or far less) credible to the eyes of his partners.
If a player just say "I torture him", I'll ask how but don't need more details than necessary, and won't ask them to indulge in that kind of stuff if it's not their thing.

Anything goes in my games. You can do whatever, you can be the victim of whatever.

Assault, rape, torture, murder, drugs, alcohol, sex, whatever.

We're not kids, or teens anymore, so nobody misuses this freedom, nor would ever think that those freedoms might ever lead to weird/cringy shit.

In practice, here's things that have happened with me as a DM, without problems : murder of innocents, murder of player-characters, assault and intimidation on the innocent, gangrape by bandits on NPC and on PC, torture on and by PC. Murders in fights tend to be gruesomely described. Cold murders get a line "you cut his throat, he jerks around and slowly stops living while trying to breath like a fish out of water" or something. Rape gets "they rape you and NPC, as in, about six guys take turn using your body, and you also get beat the shit out of you. They leave you in a ditch when they're done, save vs poison."

Also, here are usual answers.

>But it's deprotagonizing!
I run games, not stories. They ain't no protagonists.

>But some people are sensible about it!
Then they tell me "hey, I'm not comfortable with X or Y, can you not put that in your game please?" which happened not with rape, murder or whatever, but with spiders. Yup, got an arachnophobic player, he let me know in advance, I re-wrote all the spidery stuff I had prepared to not make him have a bad time.

>Games should be about/not about...
No. This is a kid's way of thinking. People in the hobby need to stop behaving and thinking like kids just because we're playing Advanced Pretend. I DM for adults in a gritty world and terrible stuff can happen to anyone and that's the way we like it. When I DM for my kids group, that is, for elementary schoolers, of course I won't traumatize them with that kind of things, but I'll still let them know what they're doing if they wanna murder or steal shit (murder and stealing are kinda essential in D&D, but those kids, strangely, seem to have a very potent moral fibre)

Be careful to not cut yourself on all that edge.

Just in case,

Get the fuck out, Ribs.

Torture doesn't work. It makes the victim tell you anything. For reliable information you have to establish a relationship.

If PC resort to torture for information they get whatever they were looking for, but it isn't true.

To get the real information they have to turn the target. There are many ways to approach this like undercover infiltration, blackmail, and full on Mission Impossible (TV) mind games.

Depends on the game and players. In my current Dark Heresy 2e game we all go for full detailed descriptions. And PCs often brutally interrogate captured criminals and heretics to quickly get information. Torture subjects survival is usually not a concern, warband has high Subtlety, and to achieve that they don't leave any witnesses alive.
Everyone is completely fine with it.
In less grim and serious games it rarely comes up and brief descriptions are usually enough.

>giving actual practical advice about methods that don't leave long-lasting harm on the person you're torturing
>edge
Okay, buddy, whatever you say.

If they want to be edgy faggots about it, I immediately take it as a challenge to my status as the edgiest faggot around and read off the transcript of the tool box murderers tape recording of a 16 year old girl. Without changing any names. While playing this on my phone.

> m.liveleak.com/view?i=969_1263249923

For that screaming sound.

Everyone is usually pretty okay with fading to black after that, although I sometimes will sarcastically ask if they need to break for some torture porn.

user. You can totally use torture to build a relationship, and quickly at that.

Besides, you leave the person alive so that if they do turn out to have lied then it's torture time all the time until their heart gives out, which is pretty fucking good incentive to not lie.

"Torture is unproductive" is a myth, the CIA is just bad at it.

Of all the fetish threads I see on Veeky Forums, this one makes me mad the most.

Whenever torture has come up in our games, we've used a simple points allocation system to get an idea of what sort of interrogation method we're trying.

Essentially you split points between Speed, Viciousness and Efficiency and the outcome lets us get an idea of what sort of technique we might be trying.

So how do you know they're not lying to you when they say 'I don't know'?

Read some research on the matter some time. There's excellent documentation from WW2.

Torture is a terror instrument which signals to the population, not the tortured. And you can see how well discouragement through draconian punishments works in the US where violent crime has been practically eliminated thanks to gang rape prisons and the death penalty. Oh, wait-

In what way is that edgy?

You know, you come off as a huge ass, but i kind of envy you.

There are a time of things I'd like to explore, but my players won't let me touch. Rape (both of our female players were raped by father figures), Murder (another player had their father shot in the head right in front of them), anything bad happening to children.

I wish my players would play or do something with a little more grit. Instead, I'm stuck running light- hearted, NobleBright games where no one does or even seriously gets injured.

I once had a PC accidentally kill a father-figure-like npc. The girls cried, we had to take a month long break from gaming, and when we came back, they wanted to start a new game because it was too intense.

Yeah, that's what happen when I go "here's how I DO THINGS", sorry about that.

It should be important to note that it's not "just me". I'm betting if my players were like yours, I'd be far more accomodating, because in the very end, I want everyone to have a good time, I'm just lucky me and my players see eye-to-eye on what's fun, really.

>Rape (both of our female players were raped by father figures), Murder (another player had their father shot in the head right in front of them), anything bad happening to children.

That I have trouble understanding, but I won't be an asshole to people who go down this path. I don't think it's healthy tho. My mother was a psycho, I suffered through terrible shit, I know of people who went to war, I know a war refugee who spent his *childhood* in the middle-east in a country being fucked up, and my ex has also known child abuse. And it's the last reason we could think of for "censoring" this kind of stuff. Again, we're not playing for escapism. It's ok to talk about terrible stuff. It's ok to play a game in which terrible stuff happens to characters. I don't know shit about psychology so I won't state that as a fact but merely an opinion : as far as I'm concerned, and my friends are concerned, allowing real-life issues to come up in the game did more good than harm.

Just my two cents, I hope you guys find a middle point tho.

Since the dawn of waterboarding almost all intterogation scenes end successfully for my players.

Waterboarding can have very long-lasting effects. Including brain damage.

That's historically inaccurate though.

I as DM dont have balls, so i prefer not RP-ing interogations and just decide with roll on intimidation/persuasion.

As player, i justs let other players to take care of that.

I enjoy my players' "interrogations". Our party's face is a real bastard and likes to use mind games and environmental objects as tools to extract information.

I feel it's rewarding for me as a GM because it lets me fill out the world with information that my players are interested in knowing. I can throw in flavor as well.