Hostage Crisis
You may laugh, but Inquisitor’s hostage negotiation policy is true to life. Is it story time? Does a druid crap in the woods?
So no shit there they were, stuck in a hostage situation. It had been an exciting afternoon of attempted poisoning, someone-in-this-room-is-a-murderer style mystery, and a convoluted series of dominated catspaws. But once all the j’accuses were j’accused, the local assassin still managed to grab his target by the throat. It was the surprise round, and the local disinherited duchess was in the cruel grip of a murderous mercenary.
“Now here’s what’s going to happen,” said this dastardly duelist. “Her ladyship and I are walking out of here nice and durr [sic].”
There was a look of confusion around the table.
“What did you cast on him?”
“I’m glad you asked,” said the smug wizard with the high initiative. “It’s just a little number I like to call feeblemind.”
We all took a moment to read the spell.
“So wait a minute. Is there anything in there that prevents him from stabbing his human shield, just like he threatened?”
The wizard frowned down at his spellbook. “Technically no,” he said.
And then the bad guy stabbed the hostage. All hell broke lose as her ladyship and her one remaining hit point scrambled for cover. She’d been lucky that the damage roll was low. Meanwhile the rest of the party and the local constabulary set about beating the ever-loving Gygax out of the feebleminded assassin.
When the smoke cleared, the duchess demanded an explanation. “What in the hells is the matter with you? I could have been killed!”
“Meh,” said the wizard. “We’ve got breath of life as backup. You wouldn’t have been killed for long.”
Regular readers will realize that all of the above relates back to our recent conversation concerning hit points. It’s awfully hard to make the human shield trope work when the worst a baddie can do is deduct a few hp. And that’s not even taking easy access to resurrection into account. In other words, it’s hard to make deadly force a serious threat.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we bat around a few ideas for hostage scenarios? How do you make a good old-fashioned knife-to-the-throat actually threatening? Do you have to invent elaborate scenarios involving trap doors, readied actions, and spheres of annihilation? Or can you make the mundane version work? And just as important, how do you impress upon trigger-happy players that calling the bad guy’s bluff might not be the best idea? Sound off with your best hostage crises and Waterdhavian standoffs down in the comments!
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I have a question: what is Inquisitor’s alignment? ^^;
The mouse-over text says that she’s neutral, though it also implies this is kind of a case of neutral-spiteful.
Wait a minute… There’s mouse-over text!? Great. Now I have to re-read the whole thing.
In my defence, I mostly read this webcomic on my phone…
It doesn’t really pay to be a royal in Handbook-world, does it…?
The Princess, at least, seems to receive very little respect.
Nobles are the bully-magnets of D&D.
I don’t think this is really a problem. Hostages who aren’t important NPCs (or PCs) aren’t likely to have many hit points to begin with. On top of that, seriously threatening NPCs should be able to deal a pretty devastating amount of damage to a noncombatant in a single action. In the typical evil-vizier-versus-helpless-princess scenario, instant death really is on the line.
Besides, the GM can always just say, right after the villain makes his speech, “… and you guys are pretty sure, being experienced in this sort of thing, that he can pull it off – that hostage looks pretty helpless, and that knife is sharp.” The GM is obliged to allow the rulebook to protect the PCs from instant death, but no such obligation is extended to NPCs. Just make sure that the players understand this, so that they aren’t relying on a mechanic that isn’t in play in this scene.
If the hostage isn’t a helpless innocent, then yeah, instant hostage killing situations don’t work. I’m fine with that. If you have class levels or a challenge rating greater than 1, you are pretty much by definition no longer a damsel in distress, and shouldn’t be treated as one.
Straight out of the NPC codex:
Princess: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/npc-s/npcs-cr-6/princess-human-aristocrat-8/
Pirate King: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/npc-s/npcs-cr-14/pirate-king-half-elf-fighter-15/
A readied attack from that 15th level NPC fighter is dealing 3d6 + 10. Even missing a few of her hp from an attempted poisoning, that’s not enough to KO your standard princess.
In my case, I couldn’t fudge it either because this princess needed enough hp to survive an escort quest, so the 6 hp extra wouldn’t work.
You’re right of course: we could ignore all the rules and go with GM fiat to make the trope work, and there’s every chance that’s the correct call if you’re trying to make this moment work. Let’s not pretend it isn’t a problem though.
In that case, I’d argue that a Challenge Rating 6 Princess shouldn’t be subject to casual hostage situations at all. This “damsel in distress” is more powerful than a Large elemental or a bearded devil. The fact that she can’t be dispatched instantly, even by a CR14 Pirate King, is, in my opinion, the system working correctly, not a problem at all. Helpless hostage situations are really only appropriate for characters without that sort of power.
I think there’s a reason this one comes right on the heels of the abstract hp comic.
You can imagine eldritch creatures like you mention shrugging off a knife wound. It’s hard to imagine that mess working with a human, even if she’s a competent battle-princess.
Still, I think you may be right. This was an “oh no my plots are foiled, I’ll make a desperate gamble” kind of hostage situation. Grabbing a ‘competent battle-princess’ isn’t the best idea. In that sense, this whole scenario may be one more case of GM assumptions working against the system’s assumptions.
In this situation the princess is helpless (pinned) and thus vulnerable to a coup de grace
Naw man. She’s grappled. Plus you can’t ready a coup de grace. WHY WON’T THE RULES LET ME DO THE THING I WANT TO DO!?
Why make the killer roll for damage? As DM I’d just give them an automatic critical damage roll. If the hostage is still OK after that, thry were clearly a bad person to enhostage (totally a word now!) in the first place!
This was a Pathfinder game, and coup de grace don’t work like that:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/Gamemastering/combat/#coup-de-grace
A hastily grappled hostage is not a helpless hostage. But as with HopeFox up above, the GM fiat can indeed work here. It raises eyebrows among rules-conscious players though.
But sneak attack and a properly low hit die to dice ratio can ensure the outcome you want.
If I’m being honest, I had to force the situation in the first place. Assuming our dude grapples in the surprise round, he still has to win initiative to ready an action to stab his victim. And that’s assuming a suspected assassin even gets a surprise round when someone points a finger at him and says, “J’accuse!”
I wound up giving the dude grapple + ready in the surprise round to enable the moment. If I’m already bending rules, it really shouldn’t be too much of a problem to say “he’s got a custom feat” if an execution needs to happen.
The biggest problem with this is that royals and nobles probably have rules about how resurrection affects inheritance.
Solid solution! I’d be curious to know if that’s a thing in Golarion (where the incident in my game took place).
Make all life extension (ressurection included) illegal for nobles. (idea inspired by the Girl Genius webcomic)
Think about it. From the practical standpoint, when you’re an “ambitious” heir to the throne, the last thing you want is for dear old daddy to have reincarnate casted on him at the end of his rein. Let alone to recover from that fatal accident you arranged for him. The passing on of power among nobles relies on them being mortal. So, it’s not inconceivable that the aristocrats would get around the problem by declaring life extension to be the hight of dishonorable behavior. After all, the nobles’ right to ~~oppress~~ wisely rule their subjects is supposed to be bestowed upon them by the gods themselves. If the gods wished that person to keep living (and ruling), they wouldn’t allow them to die in the first place. With this setup, resurrecting the duchess would likely simply fail on account of her refusing to come back. After all, if she did, she would be disowned, anathemized, and likely outright hunted by her own house, eager to remove the stain on their family honor with her blood.
Yeah, the Girl Genius solution was my first thought reading this… dead is still dead and out of the line of succession, even if you get better later.
Of course, if there’s no way to detect illicit resurrections, nobles will try to cheat the system — which means that assassins would be paid to prevent that coverup, by making sure the death is public enough that witnesses can’t feasibly be silenced. An interesting complication is that you want them definitely dead, but you want a body that’s readily identifiable so they can’t weasel out of it post-resurrection by claiming it was a decoy or imposter.
You can discern if someone was ressurected with Commune. I imagine some more powerhungry nobles might regularly hire powerful priests and oracles and have them test all of the noble’s rivals (and allies – having extra leverage never hurts) for illicit lifespan extension.
And we’re down the rabbit hole, lol.
If you go with the Girl Genius solution — it’s not actually illegal to science/magic the princess back to life, but she forfeits her titles and place in line for the throne — then I can imagine a royal who actually WANTS to abdicate, but can’t do so without scandal, suddenly becoming oddly accident-prone.
“HA! I LIVE AGAIN! Shame my little brother will get the throne now, but hey, them’s the breaks.”
“You didn’t die, Jasmine. You sneezed. It wasn’t even a convincing sneeze.”
“Yeah, but when you sneeze, you’re technically dead for a fraction of a second. Bye; I’m off to forge my own way in the world.”
“That’s an urban legend. Now get back to posing for your coronation portrait.”
“Sorry, can’t hear you over the screams of the damned.”
Keep in mind that the context of this entire discussion is making a “RandomAritocraticLady taken hostage by GoonNo8” work in a setting where magical ressurection is readily available to anyone with enough coin. As such, pure “Girl Genius” solution is not sufficient – the PCs might decide that RandomAritocraticLady loosing her titles and inheritance isn’t so bad and let her die anyway. On the other hand if for both ideological (“ressurection is wrong!”) and practical (“I’ll just get killed again and it would ruin my house’s reputation”) reasons it’s pretty clear that should the RandomAritocraticLady meet an untimely demise, she’ll stay dead, then the “just pay the nice man in the temple 5k gp to bring her back” option is off the table and the stakes remain high.
One thing about the Girl genius solution is that it only really works because the nobles, while influential, aren’t the group with the real power in that setting. That’d be the sparks. (Also it only works to a limited extent, notice that it’s a setting element that the rule is broken all the time and people try to keep it a secret).
It’s like primogeniture that way, before the kings started losing their power successions involved an actual power struggle, no matter who the laws said was the “rightful” heir, and raised or not the groups of powerful folks that benefit from the prior ruler remaining in charge instead of the heir taking over (and vise versa) are the same when the prior ruler died as when they lived. All in all the tradition of inter-familial civil wars over who should have the throne is in no risk of going extinct.
I guess in the worse case if you’re taking hostage of someone with the money to have the local temple’s resurrectionist on contingency, you may have to up your threatening game to ‘trap the soul’ spell scrolls. It’s only 3000 or so plus the gem and while it cuts into the profits, it’s a lot easier to disguise and transport the hostage.
Soul shenanigans are fun, and the scroll is cheap enough be plausible.
I mean, they figured permadeath out but good in Galt…
https://aonprd.com/MagicArtifactsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Final%20Blade
…But that’s a slightly inconvenient hostage-taking weapon.
It would however make a magnificent mount: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/a/animate-objects
Or an even better PC: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/p/possess-object/
Resurrection(s) and it’s ilk is one of those things that I feel was added to the game for the sake of players, but it goes weird places if you try to apply it to the general population. AKA “works fine in a story, has issues in a game”.
Even something like Revivify is a little odd because it’s the kind of thing you feel compelled to prepare “just in case” but you hope to never have to actually use it, unlike every other spell. To a lesser degree it’s kind of like how do you set up a plague or famine scenario in your setting when all the clerics in the land can just cast Cure Disease or Summon Snacks a whole bunch? (and don’t even get me started on reusable, repurposed magic-items)
The simplest resolution is to keep magic rare, but obviously not everyone wants to build their world like that. If you want magic to be both common (like I do) and not snap your gameworld into pieces like a dried twig, you need to consider other sorts of limitations on this kind of thing. Maybe, for instance, Resurrection requires you to take a life in exchange for restoring a life. That’s not insurmountable- the good guys could agree to only use convicted criminals for instance, but it still complicates the matter in an interesting way (IMO).
I could keep ranting on this topic, but I’m equally interested in another, less-immediate impact of today’s comic: how things work out in the long run? Presumably elf-princess has family (maybe not though, fantasy-world is big on orphans) or at least retainers/allies who wouldn’t be happy with this. The argument of “she agreed to pay for her own Resurrection after I stabbed her so you can’t be mad at me!” doesn’t seem like it would hold a whole lot of water outside the lawful-stupid segments of the gameworld. As soon as she [Inquisitor] goes to collect her fee, the obvious comeback seems like it would be “Ok, well YOU’RE about to agree to pay for several Resurrections of your own right now.”
Oh I dunno. Feather fall and other situational spells seem to fall into the same category. I think it’s why 3.X gave clerics spontaneous cure spells so that you could at least do something with that otherwise-dead slot.
Make me wonder if you could create spells in Yu-Gi-Oh style, where you can cast in either “attack” or “defense” position. One is generally useful, the other has a narrow utility effect. Feather fall + gust of wind for example. Or fireball + campfire wall.
Regarding Spontaneous spells….
I was under the impression it was because WotC thought that every party needed a healbot, but no one wanted to play a healbot, so they effectively made a class that could healbot while not giving up it’s ability to do literally anything else the player could want either. Anyway, 5thE seems to have resolved the debate by just making every encounter a nuke-race and made out-of-combat healing significantly easier/better. A sort of gordian-knot solution, if you will.
As far as tying less-broadly applicable effects to more-frequently used ones, that’s sort of what I think the Binder in 3.5 ToM was going for. Rather than preparing Burning Hands and Flame Shield and Summon Ember-Spirit, you just prepare “Fire Magic” and get a suite of abilities tied around a core theme. I don’t want to call it the best or worst attempt, like all the ToM stuff there are some quirks that could use a lot of polish, but off the 3 systems in the book I think it’s the one that saw the most use before 3.5 got it’s turn on the chopping block.
Random idea, but regarding all plagues being wiped out by low-level Clerics with “Remove Disease”, here’s a possible limitation – Remove Disease doesn’t give you immunity to the disease. It snatches the microbes out of your body without creating antibodies to fight it. So anyone cured of the plague is immediately at risk of getting it again, especially if the society does not have a good understanding of germ theory. That turns epidemic control into a giant, expensive game of wack-a-mole, especially since more people get the disease than there are available Cleric spell slots. And, of course, there is the matter of asymptomatic carriers. This even fits with the RAW mechanics, since disease-curing spells usually state that the target can absolutely be affected by the disease again upon a later exposure.
The relatively common presence of healing magic can explain some more “modern” societal aspects of many TTRPG fantasy worlds, as childbirth is far less dangerous and infant/childhood mortality is not through the roof.
Fun explanation in “7 days to the grave.” A pandemic simply spreads too quickly for clerics’ daily uses of “remove disease.” It quite literally overwhelms the healthcare system, and only the very rich can afford treatment.
The short version is, we don’t. The party simply laughs uproariously every time an NPC thinks we would let something as petty as “good judgement” get in the way of our desired violence. The party sorcerer in particular is something of a wild card.
There was one time that an NPC of a… less than moral persuasion smugly informed us that she felt perfectly safe in our presence because she was useful to us, and she knew we needed her help. In response, the sorcerer and the cleric (ie me) simply looked at each other for a moment and smirked for a moment, and i said “she clearly hasn’t met Lush”. 5 minutes later, the table finally stops laughing enough to actually react to that in character. The poor hag who thought she was in control certainly didn’t know how to react to that.
It was a similar story in my game when a dragon kidnapped a PC and stole all of her magic items. He thought to use the items’ secret location as a guarantee of his safety. The party promptly killed the dragon, then spent the rest of the session bitching about the lost items. I wound up handing them the solution to the location of the dragon’s hoard so that the campaign could move on.
No lessons were learned by anyone.
“Live and don’t learn, that’s out motto.”
– Hobbes
Inquisitor is the only graduate of professor Alucard’s ‘Negotiation’ course at Hellsing U.
Must be where she got the hat.
Hah, yeah! I hadn’t even considered (t)hat.
Once again this is a scenario where I think 5E could benefit from a “Coup de grace” rule, but rather than it being something you can cheese like in 3X, (L1 Wizard casts Sleep, and now you’re all susceptible) it’d be entirely at the DM’s discretion when it could be used, and almost never in-initiative, except in special circumstances such as the baddie actively has a knife to their throat.
NPC statblocks like Commoner and Noble usually have low enough HP that said hostage scenarios do work though.
If DM’s discretion is the answer, then uncertainty is something you’ve got to contend with. In 5e at the moment, you’re running with this bit from Player’s Basic pg 76:
If you’re in a “DM’s discretion” kind of system, I feel like it’s on the DM to specify which rules are in effect in a given scenario so that players don’t make bad mechanical assumptions.
If you have someone in a situation like this, my rule is that once they stop struggling they have voluntarily made themselves helpless. Which means the attack against them is now a CdG.
That seems reasonable. But then again, you run into the situation where a CdG is a full round action, and you can’t ready a full round action. At that point, you’re right back to GM fiat as the solution.
I suppose you could make a subsystem that specifically handles this situation, but that seems like overkill.
“Hostage Taker” seems like a suitably villainous feat that could specifically allow this interaction, but that’s awfully narrow.
“convoluted series of dominated catspaws”
Welp, what I assumed to be a typo of cat spawn or cats paws lead to me learning a new word. Not before producing an amusing mental image of dominated kittens, though.
Magus is aghast.
Note: Magus is not a ghast: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/monster-listings/undead/ghoul/ghoul-ghast/
I missed my chance to comment on the HP thing, but especially with NPCs I think it’s perfectly fine to disregard HP in favor of an “execute” action.
Have the throat-cut knock out the majority of the HP and apply a bleed effect that will exsanguinate to the point of uncosciousness within a round and death within three more. The exact implementation would of course depend on version. In 5e, I’d probably run it that every death save is an automatic fail, no roll.
If it’s a PC that might be a little harsh, naturally depending on the type of game you’re running, but if you wanna go easy on the players make it an auto-crit-attack instead (since your carotids are arguably rather critical), inflicting them with disadvantage on everything until they’ve healed at least one HP. That might introduce weirdnesses with things like Fighter’s Second Wind, but the PCs are special anyways, so who cares.
The PC threatening to execute the BBEG’s only remaining clone cares an awful lot about how this mechanic works.
I meant with respect to the PCs being able to avoid Instant Death by Carotidal Exsanguination simply because PCs are special by definition.
For PCs holding an NPC hostage, I’d argue that, barring any special magic protection, a throat-cut is going to be a pretty much instant death, as described above. A BBEG would of course be a different caliber, but more in the range of having an actual chance to survive this, because destiny/fate favors anything that makes for a dramatic story.
Imagine that, cutting his throat, leaving him to bleed out, only for him to reappear at some inopportune moment with one hell of a scar across his throat, a telepathically bound minion doing the talking for him, and a grudge so deep that it all but literally transcends death.
PCs are special and use different rules.
PCs want to know how the rules work.
“You just kill them, don’t worry about it” is a perfectly viable answer. But it drives the game designer in my nuts.
Another quick note, are you aware your “Random” feature seems to be broken? Right now, no matter how often I click it or which comic I start out on, it seems to always redirect me to https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/christmas-spirits.
I have alerted my webmaster.
“Shit,” she says. “I’ll take a look at it again.”
We updated WordPress recently. Apologies for any bugs.
I mean, theoretically, that’s potentially still random.
I think it works pretty well as is. Yes, you can resurrect the hostage after the bad guy killed it.
But now you’re short an expensive diamond, and the hostage is pissed and/or traumatized, because dying and being resurrected sucks. Sure, it’s common for adventurers. But adventurers aren’t exactly normal people.
I’ve seen this tropes a couple of times recently. Where is it coming from? It makes good story sense, but I’m not seeing much about resurrection trauma baked into any systems.
Taken straight from Roll20’s 5th Edition Raise Dead page:
Seems pretty clear to me.
“Taken straight from Roll20’s 5th Edition”
Older editions concur. Losing a level after a resurrection (with the low-tier spells, anyway) is a clear indication you didn’t come back unscathed.
Another missing point in the discussion: the “patient” has a say. He/she perfectly knows who is doing the resurrection and can reject the offer. I would say, being stabbed to death and then asked to come back by my murderers… I may hesitate.
That being said, the “shoot the hostage” solution is a time-honored one.
That seems to indicate a physically weakened condition. Wesley coming back as an invalid to rescue Princess Buttercup. He had all his mental faculties though.
Still, I don’t think it’s a stretch to RP negative levels or other mechanical penalties as a mental strain.
I mean, if you want to discourage players from calling the baddie’s bluff then part of that comes down to establishing early on in your campaign that there are consequences for such tomfoolery, preferably with lower stakes such as a withheld monetary reward. Admittedly what your wizard did at first was fair game, a good idea on paper even, but I think its rather what he SAID afterwards where the real problem lies.
What do you see as appropriate consequences for a blase attitude towards a VIP’s safety?
Perhaps a smearing of the player or party’s reputation in said VIP’s faction? A lack of help in some future event with ties to the offended group would prove most inconvenient. Imagine if it’s discovered later on that the VIP’s faction has been infiltrated by forces of the BBEG. If the party had been a bit more considerate toward their charge then maybe they would have felt inclined to use their connections to suss out a handful of members who are trustworthy or not, making the party’s manhunt easier.
Today’s comic is basically a fantasy version of the beginning of Hellsing Ultimate Abridged (and probably regular Hellsing Ultimate too, IDK.)
“I’m sure you’ll find it deep within your heart, which is currently all over that tree, to forgive me.”
Vampires? In my fantasy? How dare you!
That… does not look like the head of a halberd. Inquisitor must have a fancy one that’s got a blade on the butt end, too — that should make the Polearm Master feat extra fun to use.
I agree, it looks more like a spear. A long-bladed one.
A halberd is basically a combination axe blade, spike and hook (or mace). A Swiss army weapon, in other words.
You may be amused to hear that, when I blasted this comic out on the socials yesterday, it appeared with the following comment.
“On the one hand, I acknowledge that’s not a halberd. On the other hand, shut up.”
Nobles and their assailants would presumably be dealing with stuff beyond mere HP and resurrections. Soul jars to take hostages, and means of inflicting true death (that is, death that can’t be resurrected from), would seem more likely.
And that’s assuming you’re playing D&D or Pathfinder, or some other setting where resurrection is a thing.
This was an “oh no my plots are foiled, I’ll make a desperate gamble” kind of hostage situation. The plot had involved powerful poison and dominate person to actual deliver said poison.
Your comment makes me think that a proper assassin’s guild campaign could be interesting. Letting players do a sort of arms race with their victims (poison! resurrection! perma-death dagger! miracle!) could produce some interesting play.
In Godbound the Murder word has, by default, the quality to prevent their victims to resurrect. Not even other godbound, nor the ones with the Death or Health words, can revive them, they are deader than dead. Which makes the situation more interesting since the evil guy can’t use the hostage as shields if they are dead and can’t be revived either. Then is moment to use that Murder gifts on him. Depending on the bad guy stats i would recommend several course of action. Outright kill him Kira style, poison him by touching him, or flying him with a rusty spoon from as far as 200 feet. Or another possibility with extra ironic points is to just let the hostage kill him. Murder word is great*!!! 😀
*Or at least it’s if you want to kill things. For other than murder and infiltrating is not that useful 🙁
Forgive me if I’m being obtuse, but why wouldn’t the threat of using Murder Word allow a hostage scenario?
No, no, no. What i mean is that Murder allows you in a hostage situation. As i said, the word allows you to make sure that whatever you kill stays dead. Under that condition, that not even other words or magic allows to resurrect the hostage, the menace of death is much more complicated. For example, had Witch the Murder word and should she slays Elf Princess the situation would be much worse. If Inquisitor killed Witch then she couldn’t release her hold over EP death and therefor any person or being wouldn’t be able to resurrect her. In fact i think she wouldn’t even need the word. Using the Artifice word a godbound can create artifacts based on any word and their gifts. So an Artifice bounded could create Eternal Murder Knives 🙂
Under this circunstancies killing the hostage as a threat is much more serious matter 🙂
Eternal Murder Knife is the name of my new band.
Wasn’t it “Weaponized Murder”? 😉
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/mean-girls-part-1-3 🙂
We broke up due to creative differences. EMK is forever though!
EMK rocks, we want “Sympathy for the devil”!!! 😀
Losing my Religion or Paint it Black are also acceptable 😛
Well now I want to sing karaoke with you.
I bet Elf Princess is REALLY missing Horsepower right about now. (Though her anger at finding out that Inquisitor cheaped out and used Reincarnate instead of the good stuff might be reduced when she learns the, uh, benefits of being a horseperson.)
I do hope there is a hostage scenario in the upcoming police-themed AP “Agents of Edgewatch”, so that my crossbow sniper PC may resolve it with crossbow sniping. Though that kind of thing often falls into the reverse of the “hostage has too much HP” thing, where the hostage-taker has too much HP to be taken out in one shot. At that point, your only option is to do what my 2e party’s Barbarian did when faced with a halfling using a goblin shield – run up to the hostage-taker and use the Shove action to knock them off the balcony they are standing next to. Then jump after him, because Barbarian. (I guess Disarm attempts work too.)
In Pathfinder 1e, I would think it would be reasonable to rule that the hostage-taker can use the coup de grace action on the hostage, as the hostage is effectively pinned. This makes a much more dangerous situation (auto-crit plus FORT save based on the damage dealt or die), especially if the hostage-taker has a 3x or 4x crit weapon like a starknife. A really serious version would be a readied action coup de grace (technically not allowed by the regular rules [can’t ready full-round actions], but where there’s a DM, there’s a way), which might force the PCs to get very creative to avoid triggering the readied action. It all really depends on what the GM wants to happen, though – is the hostage-taker meant to escape, or is defeating them intended as just another puzzle for the players to overcome?
I actually ran a hostage situation scenario once, but instead of a knife to the throat it was a bomb in the abdomen with the good ol’ Implant Bomb feat. And if the hostage was moved (already difficult, as she was nailed to a table), the bomb would go off. The party didn’t actually defuse the bomb – they stabilized the victim, surgically cut her open, removed the bomb very carefully, healed the hostage and moved her away, after which they detonated the bomb remotely. Which was a surprisingly realistic bomb-defusing plan from them. Though detonating the bomb did set the church on fire. Again.
This comic does overlap a bit with the “emergency heals” thing I mentioned a few days ago, where you should be able to at least stabilize mortally wounded NPCs (including hostages) with a good ol’ Cure Light Wounds. This was used in the bomb implantation scenario explained above, but also in a recent session I played where the party stopped a public execution. The government chained up the victim and the executioner axed them in the stomach for a slow, gruesome death. After a Hideous Laughter to disable the executioner (which immediately caused chaos in the crowd and allowed one PC to draw the guards away by pretending to be the spellcaster), we used several quick CLWs to make sure all of the victim’s guts were in the right place before we made him invisible and carried him away. The GM still treated him as pretty disabled from pain even after those heals, which I thought was fair. And yes, technically we could have done all of that before he got hit by the axe the first time, but when you are improvising a rescue plan on the spot, hindsight is not something you are allowed.
(I guess it is worth mentioning that none of the scenarios I mentioned come at a level where resurrection magic is easily accessible [Level 5 for the bomb and Level 6 for the execution], which is probably a key factor.)
I’ll take “THINGS THAT WILL NEVER HAPPEN ON THE HANDBOOK OF EROTIC FANTASY” for $4,000, Alex!
It’s weird how I’ll write these things a few weeks apart and wind up doubling-up on my themes. I didn’t think these two were super-closely connected until I saw them side-by-side.
If you think that’s crazy, the last three comics have all featured a character impaled by a spear!
Ugh. They should get a new writer. This shit is getting repetitive! 😛
Personally, I just dumped resurrection. Revivify is magic CPR that keeps you at 0.1HP until the Cleric drops concentration or you get actual healing, and other than that your choices are ‘undead’ or ‘be Gandalf levels of necessary to the gods’ schemes’. Admittedly, that doesn’t help if the hostage-taker needs more than 1d6+DEX to drop their hostage, but at least the hostage will stay dropped.
Is revivify too good?
There is an important distinction between whether the hostage is someone you’ve kidnapped previously, or something that you’re making up on the fly. If the hostage has already been taken, then roughing ’em up before the encounter with the heroes is good, so that you can kill them in one shot. If you have to take a hostage on-the-go, then your best bet is to grab someone with low HP, such as a commoner; if someone has too many health to be brought down in one readied attack, then that’s just a case of picking on someone too tough to be brought down easily.
Same answer I gave to HopeFox up above: I think you naile dit.
This was an “oh no my plots are foiled, I’ll make a desperate gamble” kind of hostage situation. Grabbing a competent battle-princess isn’t the best idea in that scenario. In that sense, this whole encounter may be one more case of GM assumptions working against the system’s assumptions.
While healing and resurrection magic may foil actual killing, a hostage taker could have some other means of disposing of their hostage. Disintegration or perhaps teleportation or even plane shifting. Who says your villanous NPC doesn’t have a one use dagger of “planeshift stabbed victim to the plane of air”? Good luck getting raising that body PCs!
That is a really cool plot device. It allows resurrection, but requires a trip to the planes. In 5e, it also has the neat side effect of foiling revivify.
So can anyone in the anti-party rez Fiend Warlock, or is she operating under similar rules to Fighter? Oathbreaker Paladin probably won’t be there in a minute to cast Revivify.
All deaths a temporary. Except for Thaumaturge’s. That dude is gone for good.
Hey, that is three strips featuring impalement in a row… is that becoming some kind of fetish?
Well hey, the next five comics all feature guest characters. So… Yeah. Some of the themes are intentional!
Wait, Inquisitor said that’s a halberd, but where’s its axe-blade? I call SHENANIGANS, sir! SHENANIGANS, I SAY!
It’s still lodged in the skull of the LAST guy who tried to intimidate Inquisitor.
You may be amused to hear that, when I blasted this comic out on the socials the other day, it appeared with the following comment:
“On the one hand, I acknowledge that’s not a halberd. On the other hand, shut up.”
Sometimes the issue is less about the effectiveness of the stabbing than the result. Cultists who just need the hostage’s blood to wake a demon or god up from a long slumber are plenty threatening even if they couldn’t possibly off the hostage in one round.
Poisons are a nice alternative if the villain would normally have a poisoned sheath for their weapon. Find something in world that a well funded villain could use to add a solid amount of damage to reduce that princess to 0 HP.
I just remembered the way they handled it in the Glass Canon Podcast. Spoilers I guess, but a PC sees his adopted son about to be executed by orcs. The orcs get a one-liner and then kill the kid, no opportunity for a reaction.
It was certainly dramatic.
This is where the chunky salsa rule comes in handy.
Chunky salsa is for massive damage. What you’re proposing is a corollary: if it makes narrative sense for a thing to die, that thing dies. That works well when you’re taking a humanoid hostage. But imagine scaling things up and threatening to cut an ogre’s throat. Or a dragon’s. Or a PC’s.
Common sense and logic get a little fuzzy in those cases.
Well, this prompted me to make an entire essay on the economic impact of resurrection magic in RPG worlds, and the likelihood of it engendering an insurance industry (very high, with affordable rates of about 1 gold per month per person). I’ll probably make a post on EnWorld later.
Given that that implies a world where basically everyone above the poverty line can afford to be resurrected for accidental deaths (not counting decapitation, and assuming normal death rates, not plagues or wars), and that the rich can likely afford higher tier offerings, this definitely shifts certain things in how the world works.
Assassinations and killing in war almost certainly will go for decapitation as a standard practice. The neck becomes a favored target even on the battlefield just because of the psychology of fighting, and gorgets and such become popular defensive items. Probably generates a large business for magical protection against decapitation for high profile targets — for example, magical amulets for proof against decapitation. The princess almost certainly has one.
Thus assassinations and hostage situations will target that in particular. The princess, when first taken hostage, would not be worried due to the protection she has. However if the assassin has the means to neutralize common magical amulets that nobility might wear (Antimagic Field being a particularly irritating way of achieving that), and removes it, suddenly the threat becomes much more significant for the princess. When she no longer has that assurance that she can just be raised if she happened to be killed, she becomes frightened and panicky in ways that may disrupt an ordinary scenario. (She may be able to afford the higher tiers, which don’t have the limitation that Raise Dead has, but the costs in both money and time, and likely reputation and personal power, will likely make that a significant negative.)
Now, how to make it a concern for the PCs? The problem with that question is that it is basically trying to force a conflict that exists in our world, but doesn’t exist in their world. It’s like the problem of trying to keep players in the dark when most have darkvision, and most mages have magical light. It just doesn’t work if you approach it from the real world perspective.
You should instead introduce the concept that resurrection is common. The bartender who got killed in the big bar fight last week? He’s back serving them drinks, grumbling about higher insurance premiums. Make resurrection for almost everyone normal. Then, when you get the PCs invested in the NPCs they meet, and then take that safety net away (eg: magical diseases, dismemberments, disintegrations, raised as undead, etc) it has much greater impact.
As for the actual mechanics of it? I’d say that a helpless individual (such as a hostage with a knife at her throat) doesn’t benefit from level-based HP, and only has as much as one would have at level 1. This is because HP represents a whole lot of things (luck, skill, battle awareness, training, etc), and ‘meat’ is only a very small portion of that. And the exposed neck is a very small portion of the ‘meat’. In 5E, the princess would have an effective 8 HP (maxed d8 hit die, +0 due to a 10 Con), which would be trivial to surpass. Would probably want to do double that damage to ensure she’s decapitated, though.
This should help you get started: http://geekandsundry.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Clerical-Form.jpg
Thinking this over a bit I think the real problem preventing hostage scenes where the bad guy holds someone capture, monologues for a bit and then get away on threat of killing their hostage from working isn’t the rules.
The real problem is that most players don’t want those kinds of scenes.
They don’t want to feel powerless and unable to act for fear of the consequences.
Players in general want to be badasses shooting the hostage taker in the head James Bond style so that the hostage is released. If that’s not on the table they would often prefer just shooting the villain anyway and choose not to care about the consequences rather than sit through a long scene of being frustrated and unable to act.
This isn’t universal by all means, but it only takes one player in the group to decide to shoot for the scene to go in that direction.
This also means that I think a lot of the proposed mechanical solutions will go over like a lead ballon, because while the DM could invent a host of rules/special feats/magic items or so on, that’s just going to read as them using fiat to try to force the players into an unfun situation that they don’t want to be in.
Particularily since it’s a set of rules that will only ever be harmful to the players and helpful to enemy npcs and never in the other direction.
Don’t want the PC’s to start winning combats against the bigbad instantly by grabbing him and holding a knife to his throat after all.
That is indeed my concern. But there notion that “rules work differently for PCs” seems to be more or less popular depending on table.
I can get behind this insight. However, I do think that threats should have some kind of mechanical teeth. If the villain says, “If you don’t do X I will do Y,” there should at least be a chance that Y will happen. Cutting Gordian knots is all well and good, and players should certainly have the chance to get out of the binary decision. I just don’t want the BAD STUFF to have zero chance of happening.
It’s like the permadeath discussion all over again. Do consequences make a game better, or do we want to approach the problem from a collaborative storytelling standpoint?
My players tried to execute a prisoner about halfway through our campaign, but didn’t pass the outsider’s DR/Good, so the crossbow bolt that was meant to be an execution bounced off her forehead and clattered to the floor. The outsider (A Pairaka, for reference, fiends involving lust and pestilence) looked at them, then the bolt on the floor, and just remarked. “Wow, you can’t even do THAT right.” before the inquisitor cut her head off.
So far, they’ve avoided having to deal with this end of hostage situations, but considering their current plan to assault one of the most well-guarded cities on the inner sea head-on, that might not last forever…
*Lust, pestilence, and sassiness.
That Weapon is not a Halberd. It seems to be some sort of Polearm, but a Halberd has an Axe Head.
Ha! You think we wouldn’t notice did you?
You may be amused to hear that, when I blasted this comic out on the socials the other day, it appeared with the following comment.
“On the one hand, I acknowledge that’s not a halberd. On the other hand, shut up.”
I think it’s OK. If they are low level, they are now forced to spend some serious dosh to resurrect the captive. If they are at high level, Mr Evil Lich Bad McBaddison captured 20 princesses in case he was going to be defeated and is threatening to capture their souls or scatter them on astral winds with his death. You just gotta remember that enemies grow stronger as PCs do, and the stakes are higher
Any consequences for letting the captives die? I’ve heard resurrection can be something of an ordeal….
This is part of the reason I prefer games that do not have resurrection mechanics. L5R, Warhammer games, Exalted and so on.
My gaming group is willing to accept that, if you’ve got a deathgrip on the duchess and a blade to her throat, slitting her throat is lethal. Hit points are for targets that can defend their arteries.
DM fiat is the most lethal of weapons.
I haven’t come across this particular problem before, but that’s because i removed it preemptively by banning all resurrection magic in my world. Nobody there, including high level clerics, knows what happens after you die.
Sounds deadly.
(Puts on glasses)
Perma-deadly.