Tortures - are they a thing in your setting?

It's part of initiation into the orcish clergy. They believe pain and suffering brings them closer to god, and even grants divine power if extreme enough. Thus clergymen are often flayed, mutilated or otherwise heavily scarred.

Yes. They are accepted because pain generates negative energy, which can be used to fuel negative weapons.

Why don't you just ask if respiration is a part of our settings.

Yeah. Once I was super edgy and had my character do a torture thing, but to be fair it was 40k so at least thematically it worked. Made the party super uncomfortable though so I've toned my shit down over the years.

I used torture in interrogation once. In my defence, we needed the information urgently, a party member's life was at stake. It didn't really bother me then, but I know It would be hard to stomach doing that now. Particularly since persuasion, which I'm reasonably good at, offers me a good alternative.

And you decided to use the most BDSM-y magical realm picture for the topic?

Reminder that torture is not an effective means of gathering information.

>Demon/being that feeds or is strengthened by pain exists
>Instead of attacking or capturing people, and thus causing retaliation, it gains political power in a city
>Torture/other middle ages tier punishments are commonly used and accepted
>It gains all it's pain through this, and is otherwise a ruler liked by the majority

Would this work in a setting? What would your players do when they find this out?

Did your college professor tell you that? I don't want to get banned, so google a youtube video of russian soldiers whipping the shit out of a drug dealer. The dealer talks.

Not that guy but doesn't it tend to get "info" out of people who dont actually know shit as well? just to stop the torture?

>If it feels like bait and looks like bait...

well lets see
>are they a thing in your setting?
yes, along with shoes and being a dick to each other

>How do you justify them?
people are dicks to each other
>Are they just a criminal procedure act (like in inquisitorial system)?
yes tell me or i'll... is the idiots go to when they want to know something
>used as a part of religious rituals and ceremonies?
all the fucking time, did I mention people are dicks to each other
>Can anyone be subject to torture
yea, except ghaklarks, ghaklarks will rip your fucking arms off
>are there any social groups immune from them?
yea blachians can't feel pain so it's kinda pointless and elf's, of-course.

The issue with torture isn't that you won't eventually crack someone who knows something, it's that people who don't know anything will confess to whatever you're asking them in order to stop the torture. There's CIA investigations into this and shit.

I have a friend, worked in Army Intelligence. Torture does nothing for information gathering. Reading long ass boring reports and listening to radios and doing research gets information. Talking to people gets information, and is far more useful. All torture does is hurt people and make them say anything they think you want to hear, real or not.

My setting is Ancient Rome. Its needed for anyone who is a slave to give testimony.

The reason why the military typically doesn't employ torture strategies isn't ethical, it's practical. If we had any strong proof that waterboarding a terrorist got more accurate information out of him than any other interrogation style you'd bet your ass we would still largely be doing it (our governments care a lot less about ethics than results), but years and years of interrogation knowledge has informed us that it's the interrogation strategy you end up getting the most false positives with.

Torture is only good for when you can immediately verify the information you get from them due to the way humans (particularly human memory) responds to extreme stress, keep it up for too long and you end up in a situation where the guy being tortured will A) Break and start saying anything he thinks will get you to stop regardless of the truth, and B)He'll start honestly believing what he's telling you even if previously he knew to be incorrect

As a side effect it is good for extracting a confession regardless of guilt which is why most nations ban it's use in courts of law
If it was good for extracting information we'd do that shit all the time even to our own citizens

not him, but the reason we don't do it. Is because if you torture anyone long enough, they'll tell you whatever you want to hear.

Bribes, trickery, statical analysis, and hidden microphones work much better.

>If it was good for extracting information we'd do that shit all the time even to our own citizens

True. It's all fun and games until you start getting false confessions.

You should google the video I told you about. I'm watching it now. Video evidence will always blow away mainstream assumptions and official narratives.

Here's a vanilla video of Hitchens volunteering to be waterboarded. He doesn't last five seconds. How long do you think you can hold out during torture?

Watch Christopher Hitchens Get Waterboarded
youtube.com/watch?v=4LPubUCJv58

a period of time,
then I'd say everything, truth falsehood, so much nonsenses that I became a useless source.

how are you going to deal with that?

Yes, your one video of one journalist is more evidence than the actual studies carried out by actual intelligence agencies.

Hitchens would have told them anything they asked for, even if it wasn't true.

The most torture my players get up to is a Jack Bauer style thing where the slap a guy around and maybe break a bone or two while yelling at them to give them access codes or whatnot

>how are you going to deal with that?

Verify the information. Exactly what I'd do with all claims. Was that suppose to be a hard question? It wasn't.

>told them anything

Anything includes the truth. /debate.

The point is they did that and they found people just said whatever they needed to make it stop, and the had wasted their time with the prisoner and the resources needed to verify.

>mainstream assumptions and official narratives
You sound like a deranged conspiracy theorist. If you'd bothered reading any of the damn replies, you'd understand that the length of time it takes to crack someone has no relation to how effective torture is. Stop reading

>And you decided to use the most BDSM-y magical realm picture for the topic?
How else are people going to know to post lewds in this thread?

Anything also includes whatever lies you're asked for.

>/debate
I didn't think it was possible to be more of a chode than somebody who thinks they know more about interrogation than people who do it for a living, but you sure proved me wrong!

You sound like a brainwashed retard that still watches CNN instead of reading Wikileaks.

>Stop reading

No.

The stop reading was meant to be deleted, but yeah, you're definitely a conspiracy nutter. Ho'w's life over in looney land? Found any evidence of the moon landing set yet?

>that Metal Gear Solid-tier music

>they know more about interrogation than people who do it for a living

You mean your so called sources that you completely failed to link to or name? Or my video evidence of real soldiers performing real life torture, getting real information?

But user, the video you linked from the MSM? How can you trust it? (((They))) probably edited it to make you think torture is effective

>trusting a YouTube link
Might as well just lift up your tinfoil and let them read your mind.

well whilst you're wasting your time and resources verifying everything I say.

My guys are giving you's a cordial welcome, complete with cigarettes and a chat about mutual acquaintances.
perhaps a question or two about the landmarks
a request to fill in a card to be dispatched to their families at home
a bottle of wine and a conversation turned to public opinion.

we'll see who get's more useful info

No shit he talks. They all talk. They'll tell you whatever they think you want to hear to make the pain stop. Jesus dude, do some research. Historically torture has mostly been used to extract forced confessions, and that's still what it works best for, because there's no guarantee you'll get accurate information from the victim.

Yep. It's a high bronze age world.
Most people still think torture is a good way of getting accurate information, so it's used for interrogations, but the most common use is in war. Captured enemies are often tortured or sold into slavery as a show of power. War is quite the go big or go home affair, and the main political maneuver of the region is to win so hard hard in one war that no one wants to fight you.

>I'm a civilian but I think torture is completely ineffective at all times in every way even though it's just a tool in a toolbox
lol

As stated, torture actually works if you can verify things from another source or if you KNOW that said tortured individual knows something and will at some point say the truth. The signal to noise ratio sucks though and if you can verify it in other methods, chances are the other methods are better. And it's absolutely piss poor for finding guilt.

US army intelligence says torture doesn't produce reliable intelligence as well as other methods, which are basically a system for creating low-level stockholm syndrome in prisoners.

That's basically it. People will generally say anything to escape torture, which includes the truth but also a lot of other things. If you have an easy way to verify, or they at least sincerely believe you do torture can produce reliable intelligence.

>People will generally say anything to escape torture

People will say anything to escape interrogation. People will say anything to escape prison. The enemy will lie to you, torture or otherwise. What's your point? Do you even have one?

You have no magical ability to tell between lies and the truth when someone speaks, unless you can corroborate that with other methods of intelligence gathering. Witness testimony is bad evidence even when they are cooperating. If you can corroborate with other sources of intelligence, then use those sources instead.

The difference between you and I is that you care whether or not I believe you.

>If you can corroborate with other sources of intelligence, then use those sources instead

What kind of stupid argument is that? You can't verify info if you don't have the info to verify in the first place. What a stupid point you made. That is always the problem with you navel gazing pseudo intellectuals. You have no real world evidence. No historical examples. No common sense. All you can do is imagine hypothetical situations that are always ridiculous.

In the real world, torture works. It worked for thousands of years. It works now. It works on countless POWs all throughout history. It worked on John McCain. It's funny how barely literate, sandal wearing conscripts manage to solve all the problems you people can imagine.

Well gee it's almost like convincing someone you're on their side and possibly their sole ally against a huge military industrial complex works better for getting them to tell you accurate things than hitting them with a wrench.

Hanns Scharff is one of the best interrogators in history and he didn't torture people

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff

The brits did a similar thing with their nice house for important German POWs which they bugged the shit out of.

That said, torture works really well when you have some way to verify what they're saying quickly. Like getting a password from someone. Outside of that it's not great. There's a lot of situations like that though.

You shouldn't call people pseudo-intellectuals and then not post any historical examples or common sense yourself.

Lets see what the US army has to say on the matter:
>Torture is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear

>not post any historical examples

Stop lying. I just told you torture worked on John McCain. That's on top of videos of torture working. You lying sack of shit.

Not the guy youre responding to but...
>You have no real world evidence. No historical examples.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_CIA_torture#Findings
inb4 muh wikipedumb dont count

>In the real world, torture works.
No, it doesnt, it has been proven to be ineffective. And here's why: You prime someone about a subject and force them to talk about that subject while having no real idea where their actual knowledge begins or ends.

Priming a willing witness can make them say all kinds of dumb shit they think is true and thats before you employ torture to motivate them to think of more stuff.

So lets then set up the two best case scenarios:
1) You got the guy, and the intel, you just want to see if he will verify. He gives you a stressed out and desperate accounting of what you already know plus a bunch of noise that he likely made up in the heat of it. None of which you couldn't have gotten by other means from the same guy, with more reliability and less noise by say, bribing, or tricking him into talking.

2) You already know everything and just need his confession. Congratulations, you have the only situation wherein torture is reliable. Of course its only usefull as such in a vacuum because to anyone that such a confession would have mattered, it is now tainted by the torture and knowledge he would have confessed to literally anything anyway. And lets face it you dont need a confession if you already know so again, was there not a better way to do this?

>It worked for thousands of years. It works now. It works on countless POWs all throughout history.
Now you cite your sources, since you seem to have both numerous modern ones and ancient records too.

Now i get it, it looks really cool to see the heroes beat the intel out of a badguy just in the nick of time, or to really go at a guy who did something totally reprehensible. But that's all it is, catering to that vindictive feeling.

Nice posted evidence retard

He's not lying, he's pointing out you're misinterpreting that evidence you cite.

The short version is this: It might work, but it is inefficient, a waste of resources and time with plenty of better alternatives, especially in our modern era. And when it does work, it comes with caveats that make it less useful.

The fact that someone will tell you anything when you torture them is tainted by the fact that relevant is a very very small subset of anything.

>He's not lying, he's

He's a retard that doesn't know who John McCain is.

>It might work, but it is inefficient, a waste of resources
>caveats
>tainted

Then torture does work. You just claim it has a bunch of problems, caveats and taints that sandal wearing Vietnamese solved by beating McCain with bamboo.

You're the person who doesn't know who John McCain is, don't try to cover up your retardation.

>Over the next few days, he “lapsed from conscious to unconsciousness” while the North Vietnamese interrogated him, he said. “I refused to give them anything except my name, rank, serial number and date of birth,” McCain said in the U.S. News report. “I was in such a bad shape that when they hit me it would knock me unconscious,” he said.

Yeah John McCain's torture really shows how good it is for getting useful intel.

>McCain says his torture began in August of 1968. “For the next four days, I was beaten every two or three hours by different guards. My left arm was broken again and my ribs were cracked,” he said according to U.S. News. The North Vietnamese wanted a confession for crimes committed against the North Vietnamese people. After holding out for four days, McCain, at the point of suicide, agreed to write a confession. Looking back on his decision, McCain reflected “I felt just terrible about it… Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine,” he said, according to the report.

So they managed to extract a confession from him with torture, which no one was saying didn't work, it's just not useful like intel is.

You should make sure your example actually supports your point in the future.

Trump was really an asshole.

If it's a medieval setting, then torture is a vital part. You know, that's how people found the guilty in the past.
>Can anyone be subject to torture or are there any social groups immune from them?
In some european countries, nobility was protected from it

Yes, it is. When your mind is under extreme pain you're not going to lie. You doesn't have the will to invent a lie.
Of course, that only apply if the tortured knows something.

And why would you trust in "intelligence agencies"?
Damn, they're the ones that conducted brainwashing researches

In my most recent campaign, the players were deputized and made in to inquisitors. They were trusted to undertake whatever means necessary to get info related to crimes. They were only told to keep the well beng of the population and general moralle in mind while doing so.

One of the first things they did was torture some people that were recently arrested for banditry. It was actually pretty interesting, and the edgelord player actually got to take a front seat without being cringey, for once. He broke/cut off their fingers, and burned them with brands until they managed to give him info.

>When your mind is under extreme pain you're not going to lie. You doesn't have the will to invent a lie.
If a lie will make the pain stop, your mind damn well does

Having been (consensually) tortured, I tried all sorts of shit before my safe word. Each one gave me a tiny respite while the information was checked, so I kept trying various bullshit.

Is there an interesting story there?

>You doesn't have the will to invent a lie.
The idea is to put your brain under extreme stress that you can't rationalize very well.

>Having been (consensually) tortured,
That was the problem.
The idea of a safe word change everything

What's rational about lies, user? Lies are pretty specifically irrational.

>The idea of a safe word changes everything

Not really. I had information the "interrogator" wanted to get out of me (the chosen safeword, which the interrogator did not know, but her partner did.) She knew what she was looking for, but not exactly what it was.

I mean, it's a pretty standard BDSM story. [Spoiler] For my Domme's birthday, I was strung up from the rafters and beaten like a piñata. Still one of my fondest memories. Even though it was shit I liked, I broke in about half an hour. I can't even imagine the idea of these days of torture things POW's go through.

It is in GURPS though

I have personally been involved in situations involving torture for information.

Torture works when you want people to give you a specific answer, and you know what that answer is.

Torture does not work when you want to derive open-ended information from someone, because it is impossible to verify, and impossible to remove investigator bias from the situation.

I no longer personally employ torture, nor allowed it to be used in situations where I have a say in the matter, because it is laborious, pointless, and unless you are going to disappear your subject at the end, only hardens the hearts of anyone worth fighting.

Every agency in the world whose job it is to produce actual actionable information knows this. Multiple branches of the US military know this and have produced highly detailed information on that that goes into far more detail than my own experiences could.

Even the Spanish Inquisition was aware of the truth that torture produces first and foremost false confessions. The documentation of the period has rules for interrogators, as that they are only allowed to say 'confess' while torturing, and nothing more lest they taint those confessions.

The only reason torture is imagined to work is because people who have never used it imagine that it works because they think it is scary and are weak people, and lack the imagination to understand that you cannot confess a truth you do not know, and that a torturer can rarely know when he has received the truth.

The only reason that torture is used is because it generates a guaranteed answer every time, even if the result is almost certainly worthless, and that is satisfying to the human mind. It is also satisfying to those empty individuals who are so weak of spirit they must hate their enemy to battle them, because it lets them hurt people they hate. That is worth less than nothing, because you are expending your resources on enemies that cannot fight and depriving the battle of your efforts. It is craven.

In the sense of D&D torture is always an evil act. End's never justify the means. People who torture in my games are automatically moved down an alignment from good to neutral or neutral to evil and further still if they continue to torture.

Likewise since in reality torture doesn't get you any decent results, as people who are being tortured will just say anything to not be tortured anymore, players who torture npcs will just get garbled, relatively useless information and also will gain a notorious reputation as sadistic/torturers to anyone who finds out.

Likewise if captured by those they tortured, they'll either be tortured back if the things that were tortured are the vindictive sort or be punished for it.

Torture is and will remain very popular because none of what you said about its effectiveness actually matters to people. People prefer the perception of toughness over effectiveness, even as they mask that desire to indulge in sadistic impulses by claiming that they're doing it because it works. That's just a cover that people adopt so that they aren't doing the equivalent of waving their dick around in public. Reveling in the infliction of pain because it makes the person feel powerful, tough, strong, and in control isn't openly acceptable in polite company, so it's always hidden behind euphemisms. Like how some people back in the day didn't want to use the word pregnant, so they said things like "expecting" instead.

The lack of results isn't important, what they're looking for is simple gratification. You're writing off the fact that it lets a person indulge in hurting others as a worthless expenditure that diverts resources from the main objective when the infliction of pain IS the main objective. Consider the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the extermination of the local population. Some people say that it was a waste of time and resources and ultimately counter-productive to go around slaughtering civilians when there's a war to fight, but that misses the fact that the slaughter was the point of the war. Killing off the population of eastern Europe to make room for Germans was the entire reason they invaded in the first place. It wasn't a distraction that detracted from accomplishing a different end goal, it was the end goal.

Societies torture people because inflicting pain on specific people gives them satisfaction. Information is just the euphemism that we use in polite conversation to paper over the fact that people tend to be sadistic bastards toward people who are different from them.

>since in reality torture doesn't get you any decent results
Where do you fuckers live, in the fairy land? You don't want your subject to tell you about the meaning of life or where to find happiness. You mostly need to know “where it is” or “who it is”. You either consciously avoid real examples or are just pampered so much that you have lost the connection with reality.
Simple example, worked so fine that it became a meme: "where is the money?" - they ask you and leave a hot iron on your stomach. And - swoosh - here it is! Magic! Who could predict such a result?!
But, surely, you would give them sooo much false information that they will get absolutely confused and helpless, and have no other options but to release you and accept that torture doesn't work. Or, being by the other side of the barricades, you would definitely trick, bribe and befriend (all three together, because you are just so cool) your opponent to give you the true, reliable information in the mere seconds. Sucks to be just a human.

>Verify the information

Wow, you have no idea what you are talking about.

>Or my video evidence of real soldiers performing real life torture, getting real information?

Wow, that's what you call a video on YouTube? Were you schooled in the US?

Let's say you have a hammer and torture. The hammer does everything torture does but better. Why would you ever use torture?

Man, that's deep.

Give the little boy a gold star for finding a single, shitty reason to torture people.

Torture is always an evil act.

Be more like Batman. He threatens to kill criminals to extract information, but it's always a bluff.
That's how you do Chaotic Good.

> And - swoosh - here it is!
it's there I swear!
No it's there actually!
Oh no, actually it's THERE!
Please stop torturing me I don't actually know anything you mad sadist!

Poor puppy, how does it feel to be wrong?

>You doesn't have the will to invent a lie.

Have you never been in a high-pressure situation? Lying is easy. Super easy. Your brain has enough content to string together anything semi-coherent. It's even easier when you have people yelling at you what they want to hear.

Why would they lie about how effective torture is? If they release studies saying its super awesome then they can finally stop dealing w/ "ethics"

>Torture is and will remain very popular because none of what you said about its effectiveness actually matters to people.

All of that does matter to people, faggot. Not everyone has a garbage education system.

> Simple example, worked so fine that it became a meme: "where is the money?" - they ask you and leave a hot iron on your stomach.
And then you run into the standard problem of sifting through all the people who have fuck all for money or have no idea who the guy you're looking for is, but are going to say all kinds of shit to get you to stop hurting them, at which point you're wasting your time but don't know that you're wasting your time until it's already spent.

And on top of that, you've guaranteed that no one will treat you like a person worth an ounce of respect. Randomly torturing people looking to get money out of them is one of the reasons why people despise mercenaries and when they're slaughtered and their burned corpses hung from a bridge, people cheer.

>. You mostly need to know “where it is” or “who it is”

And you honestly believe that they know? Or that they will tell you in the time that you need it? You live in the fairy land, edgelord.

>Video evidence will always blow away mainstream assumptions and official narratives.
Oh god, the stupid, it hurts.
This is why mandatory education should have a lengthy intro to statistics. Otherwise idiots will think that anecdotes and youtube videos are better than large scale scientific studies.

Who needs statistics when some politicians assure us that it works?

>Dorkly

Hello there fellow redditor!

> “where it is” or “who it is”.

You have no way of verifying what they are saying is true because they are being tortured so will say anything to stop you torturing them.

If they don't know the information and tell you any random shit to tell you to stop you've wasted your time entirely as you have bad intel now.

If they do happen to know the information, they may still tell you random shit anyway because they are being tortured. Maybe they know who but not where, or where but not why. But tell you where who and why anyway. So now you have one true thing and two false things and no idea which is which.

Or they do know, but fuck you you're torturing them, so they don't tell you. Some people are able to suffer pain and often are trained to do so if they are in a situation like this.

You have no way still to verify if they're telling the truth. You gamble and therefore waste time, money and effort again.

All of which could have been avoided through methods of obtaining the information that were not torture.

I understand you, and I saw much of what you say. When I began, most of the people in the program were sadists, and some were true believers enough that they thought torture a proof of how far they were willing to go, a test of faith in a way. I was able to change their minds of the ideologues by demonstrating that the results were superior, but even so they were visibly reluctant to stop torturing. It is as though they thought that being willing to go so far in the pursuit of their goal proved them more faithful in its pursuit.

>And then you run into
>And you honestly believe
"I" won't do anything. I don't "believe" in anything. I don't torture people. It's just what humans usually do, historically, can you understand that? PEOPLE TORTURE PEOPLE TO GET INFORMATION. They tortured them yesterday. They torture them today. And they will torture them tomorrow. How can you deny the reality? It's either they are all stupid and you are our personal internet geniuses, or it just works.

>> One million anti-vaxxers can't be wrong!

They are stupid.

Yeah, people torture people. That doesn't mean it's actually a smart thing to do. People persist in all kinds of practices and beliefs that are ineffective, irrational, or just plain wrong.

>The idea is to put your brain under extreme stress that you can't rationalize very well.
If anything that would put you in more of a state to tell lies rather than truth. Bad lies perhaps, but either way whatever you babble isn't going to make much sense.