Ever used the old "kidnapped princess gets corrupted/stockholm syndrome'd by kidnapper" trope in your games?

they cry rape?

In my campaign it's the opposite. The princess ran away from her empire and joined the villains for her own safety, which her stepmother spun into her getting kidnapped, and hiring the heroes to find her.

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>my retard brain doesn't like storytelling so any effort to shake things up makes me go into an autistic fit

You say that like the corrupted princess is the only way to shake up that situation.

in the end though the main reason I shy against running it is because it’s one of those tropes that I just don’t really like. It makes me feel bad when I set up a big surprise “the person you saved has turned evil” thing. I’d like in the end that if they set off to save the princess, they save her. Idk, it just doesn’t quite mesh with me.

>She ended up being captured and raped by the bbeg and his bestial minions until she liked it

How did your players feel about you using hentai plots for their adventures

What about the captured princess having bought into the BBEG's grand story about her being the chosen one and that she must sacrifice herself for the greater good?

She'd be reluctant to go with the PC's and act totally brainwashed by the BBEG but with a well constructed speech to appeal to her emotions and her doubts they could cause her to buckle and still rescue her?

I hope she killed the cult leader too when she revealed herself to be the mastermind behind the whole thing.

>What about the captured princess having bought into the BBEG's grand story about her being the chosen one and that she must sacrifice herself for the greater good?
Damn, I've got to do this
>Kingdom's vizier thinks he's got to sacrifice princess for greater good due to prophesy
>Her dad ain't having that shit
>She's willing to go through with it
>Vizier escapes with Princess in tow
>Sacrifice goes down properly
>Ancient evil escapes rather than being sealed
>Mocks vizier and begins summoning his minions
>Heartbroken vizier is easily convinced to an hero
>Kingdom down a member of the royal bloodline and everyone the vizier could convince to go along with his plan

Wow I ran pretty much what you described in one of my first campaigns. I did lay a whole world altering plotline on my players unknowingly with a brainwashed princess

>evil sorcerer of a competing country kidnaps country A's princess during a voyage
>first session is PCs rescuing princess from a fairly easy fortress
>story thread follows PCs as they escort her home
>two of the PCs notice she does weird shit all the time, like studying a knife she is given all the time, and talking in her sleep
>something's_up.jpg
>can't prove anything though and eventually get her home to the capital
>when she sets her eyes on her mother and father, the king and queen, she goes apeshit
>stabs them both to death before PCs eyes, who were initially held at distance from the king and queen for safety
>before killing herself the princess uses an enchanted stone to open a portal in the palace, letting in the armies of the enemy nation of Elves.
>Elven army ransacks the city and PCs put on the next campaign thread to try and stop the invasion.

A DM tried to use that on a group I was playing with a few years ago. The main sorcerer in the party imploded her head while she tried to go off on a monologue and the rest of us just shrugged and told the DM not to pull this shit again.

Games aren't novels. In my experience, players don't like feeling like retards. So yeah, it is a pretty shitty and lame thing to pull, to have them work so hard towards a goal only to take that goal away from them at the last minute. Personally, I really am very sick of people who think that their "twists" make for good storytelling. You aren't clever for being subversive. Everyone and their dog can take a cliche and turn it around. It's not hard, and it doesn't make that cliche into something interesting all on its own.

The REAL effort in storytelling comes from presentation and execution, in making your setting and characters feel alive and reactant, so that players will feel that they aren't just stage characters in some shitty play and will instead feel like they are actually having an impact on the world and the story. Which they should be. It can be a very interesting thing, to take this traditional situation of the kidnapped princess, the damsel in distress, and turn it on its head, BUT only if you tell it well, and give players a chance to catch on and do something about it. But if you think that being subversive somehow exempts you from putting in effort because of how oh-so clever you are, you're wrong. And 99% of the time, I see that people who like to be subversive are often pretty shitty storytellers, thinking that their stories are great because they trade one mold for another. But they don't break that mold, and that's where their stories fall just as flat as a boring, predictable tale about saving the princess and living happily ever after.

But honestly a generic, played completely straight campaign would be pretty goddamned refreshing right about now. And if it was told well and with depth, then all the better.

6/10 got me to type out a wall of text.

My black-skinned fellow.
See, it's not that "le mindbroken princess" is annoying, it's just the ol' Veeky Forums fact everyone knows about. Railroading pisses everyone off.
Now, if you have a chance of discovering this before it ends in tragedy, it's fine. Sneaky rogue barging in and spying the princess discovering the truth? Fine. A powerful seer breaking any magical barriers and scrying on her? Fine. Party face infiltrating? Fine. Bounty hunter capturing one of the minions and forcing him to confess? Fine.
Surprise "ahah xd the princess was mindcontrolled all along!"? I'll dislocate your jaw.

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Save that for CoC milord.

literally my magical realm

Actually, it's alleged in some studies that it makes you like somebody more, and vice versa.

How about when the princess is both more evil and more competent than her captor and is already in charge of the operation when you get there?

Yeah and she became a greater evil than her kidnapper.

In my experience it causes them to join snake cults and plot to kill their fathers.

What is the point? Whether the princess wants to be saved or not it's no concern of ours. The bad guy boss will die and if she gets in the way that's why you bring one of these babies.

So Berserk.

No, but one of our PCs came about from similar circumstances. She wasn't so much stockholmed into being a baddie, but her time in the hands of the baron what took her basically disillusioned the shit out of what she thought of pretty much everyone she'd known, shattered her innocence and made her doubt anything she'd learned growing up in castles and palaces had ever been true. She asked us to help her, so we burned a serving girl (she was dead before we got there) in her dress with her jewelry and faked her death and took the princess along to become one of us.

Storytelling is nice, but RPGs doesn't allow for much freedom without becoming boring

I'd say following everything to the letter makes things become boring even faster

>I have a massive, massive corruption fetish
Which kind?

What studies?

I mean if it was the core focus of the entire quest it would feel like a cheap shot, but if it isn't the core focus I wouldn't care as much. Its kind of like one of those games where you are fighting someone the entire game only to learn once you defeat them that they were trying to fight an even bigger evil.

However, if saving the princess was a sidequest or tangential quest I wouldn't care as much since it isn't the core focus of the story.

It's good to see so many well cultured people ITT. I dig this shit since i was 7 or so. I think, things like pic related and the folktales about various dragons/fiends/nomads kidnapping women, which i've read as a kid, are to blame. I remember having a really good book about shit like that, with pictures and everything. God, those chained up maidens with their hair all messed up, looking at the viewer with despair in their eyes! I still can see them.
Anyway, it's still not a cool move to pull in the game, if the players have no means to prevent this. The whole point of this situation, at least to me, is that you COULD have prevented this, but you FAILED and now you have to live with the consequences, and that's what makes the final reveal so meaningful. So, i say - give them all the chances to save the princess during the game they can possibly have. And the more of those you give to them, the better will be the final moment when the players will realize that all is lost.
Who am i kidding, no one will ever give a fuck about some kidnapped NPC. Well, at least, by doing so, you can have a little bit of pleasure for yourself, right?

Nah. There's nothing wrong with this if the princess was role played well during and after the rescue.

Is there a story where the maiden and her villainous/monstrous kidnapper fall in love and he's still kind of a dick but she keeps him from being a real bastard?

I mean it would be one thing if the princess did it out of nowhere. I feel like the DM should have at least drop vague hints about her true intentions before dropping that bomb on them.

Why does everyone critisizing the idea seem to think it must necessarily follow the line of corrupt princess pretends to be good->rescue princess->take princess back->tragedy?

What if the princess is just obviously evil when you get to her?

Yes what about him?

>raped until she liked it
Do your research and read less hentai. People who become sex slaves don't gradually turn into horny nymphomaniacs, they just turn depressed slaves and/or suicidal.

>give players a chance to catch on and do something about it
This is the only part I disagree with. You can give them a real chance to affect things, but then you run the risk of the entire campaign either being derailed or ending 1/4 of the way in. It's safer (and more difficult, and more rewarding as a DM) to make them think they have choice when in reality they have almost none. But doing so poorly and failing to fool them is basically the worst thing that can happen, so... good luck.

This works if they've never met the princess before, and have only heard tales about her.

If the players knew the princess directly, and didn't/couldn't pick up on the fact that she's actually rotten to the core, I call shenanigans unless she's also like a trained stage actor or something. People on the extreme ends of the alignment scale aren't normally able to hide it. Imagine the chivalrous paladin successfully posing as a serial rapist. Kind of a stretch don't you think?

If you can't adapt, you're a shit DM. End of story. A shit DM might be sufficient for a simple campaign where the players do little more than go where you point them, but that doesn't live up to the potential of these games. You might as well go play Fallout 4 or Skyrim or something. I HATE feeling like I have to outsmart the DM to force him to make my choices matter, and it's why I am largely reactive in the games I run myself. Granted, I have good players who don't try to take a mile for every inch. But no matter how slick you think you are, players will always suspect that you deliberately made their attempt to have initiative fail because you didn't want to deal with it, which isn't fun. Or even fair.

Storytiem, in that very screenshot, says that letting players direct the action is literally the height of immersion, when your goals align. And YOUR goal as a DM shouldn't be making your players suffer through some static script you wrote and are trying to "subtly" keep them beholden to. Your goal as DM should be having a good time and giving your players a good time. Your players' goal should be similar.

It's more fun, easier, and way more rewarding as a DM to see your players engaging with what you made, reacting to how you prompt them, and taking the story places you didn't think it would go so that you're experiencing the adventure just as much as they are.

Our GM tried it once but made the fatal error of springing it on us immediately after the rescue attempt rather than waiting until we'd returned her and left. I'm assuming he expected us to either kill her and earn the king's wrath or try to reform her over the journey back given his tendency to try and put us into ridged option A or B types of situations. Instead was ended up happening was us tying her up, dropping her at her father's doorstep, explaining the situation, and then getting paid extra after much haggling to find a way to either mindwipe her memories of the last few months or simply brainwash her. We opted for brainwashing since it was easier. Gm wasn't pleased, but credit to him for playing it out rather than just using GM Fiat to no-sell it.

>BAAAAAAAAW NO ONE WANTS TO TAKE PART IN MY SHITTY NTR-ESQUE FANTASY

Get fucked.

That's actually due to the rampant drug usage forced upon them.
Sexual assault victims can form weird complexes ranging from basic nympho mania to depression. The former is a coping mechanism to reduce the trauma by making it seem good as something you WANT to happen so they'll seek it out.
It's why daddies little diddles end up sluts in MS, HS, and college so often.

Correction. Forced upon sex slaves*

...

Or maybe you could read up the cases of sex slaves actually learning to love their owners, like Hürrem Sultan.

I fucking love that one story about a slavic queen who got married to a filthy turk to save her country, and, just when things had started to get better, she and her husband were imprisoned by mongols.
God bless the turks for their inestimable contribution to the history of mankind.