Interrogation
We’ve all been there. The battle is won, the party is victorious, and all the baddies are either dead or fled. Sucks to be you though, because the mayor’s daughter is still missing and you don’t have any leads. But hey, would you look at that? One of the cultists is still alive after all. He’s beaten up pretty bad, but a splash of cold water should have him awake and talking in no time. Why not tie him to the chair while he’s still out? Why not ask him a few questions when he wakes up?
Well I’ll tell you why. You might not realize it, but you’re teetering on the precipice of another boring alignment argument. No one’s going to object to a little Intimidation, but the minute that skill check fails somebody else is going to bring up those neat third party rules. You know the ones. They’ve got DCs set for things like “Deep Hurting” and “Erode Willpower.” And now Bob, who decided it would be a swell idea to play a paladin this time around, has to stand between you and Evil Henchman #41. And you’ve got to remind Bob of all the horrors doubtless being visited upon the poor innocent mayor’s daughter. And now Bob has to draw his sword all dramatic like and make some ultimatum. He’s going to talk about the good man he thought you were, the lines you just can’t cross, and in general make a big obnoxious stink about it when you only wanted to figure out where the crap you’re supposed to go for the next encounter.
So you know what? F that noise. Just kill the cultist while he’s unconscious and save yourself the trouble.
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That’s what Speak with Dead is for.
“I find that extremely insulting. Vampires are undead. Blah! Blah! Check my subtype!”
“Give me a couple seconds, and Speak with Dead will work juuuust fine…”
“Violence? Ha! Good luck interrogating my gaseous form. Blah!”
That’s fine we know where your coffin is at we can wait.
That’s what Zone of Truth is for.
“I think you will find that I am immune to mind-affecting spells. Blah! Blah! Foolish mortals.”
Hah, man, I think I might have actually offended people OOC in my game.
So, some past history: I was playing a Kobold Gunslinger named Halitrad. He was a paranoid little Chaotic Neutral mercenary bastard. Another player was playing an Aasimar ratfolk who had just found out that one of her descendants had been kidnapped in the city we were in.
After some digging, we discovered that the city actually had a thriving literal underworld – as the city built upwards, the older city sank, and ruins under the city were housing kobolds kidnapping the surfacers and selling them into slavery through auction, which is presumably where the Aasimarat’s grand-daughter was headed.
Since we needed stealthy and tricky, my kobold and the Aasimarat went in while the rest of the party (A gnoll inquisitor and orc barbarian,) acted as ‘bodyguards.’
My kobold had not made it known beforehand that he intended to capture at least one of the kobolds alive – he had a mission from the guild he had joined, and he had a personal vendetta because this clan in the ruins was the clan that had been taken over by a dragon and had killed his whole clan.
So, we look around and say, ‘…Nah, we don’t want to fight this.’ So we found the descendant on the auction block, and just outright purchased her back. She was pretty by ratfolk standards… Because she was another Aasimarat. So, tl;dr because this story is dragging, as we’re leaving, my kobold switches to draconic, which nobody else in the party knew, and offers two dumb-looking guards ‘first shot’ at his new slave to ‘break her in’ because she was destined for a life of prostitution.
The guards took the bait, walked into a nearby room, stripped out of their armor and weapons.
Then the orc came in and just choked them both unconscious.
We carried the two of them out of the ruins by dressing them in slave rags and making it look like we’d bought them too.
Back on our ship, my kobold started the interrogation by the simple method of saying, ‘Tell us what you know.’ And when the first captive kobold said ‘Never!’ he just shot him in the head and turned to the next kobold, who was now much more willing to speak about their plans to attack the surface city soon, and my kobold spent the rest of the interrogation sulking that he didn’t get to kill this one too.
Funny story; the gnoll inquisitor took Leadership soon after, and the interrogated kobold became his cohort after converting to the gnoll’s religion.
I think I’m familiar with your methods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPRlHwwVIug
Always capture two enemies if your purpose is interrogation. It’s a lot harder to say ‘I will not talk’ after watching what happened to the other guy for saying it.
Better take three, in case the second one is smart enough to realize that you can’t kill him because you have no spare source of information left.
If a smart prisoner has the monopoly on information, they control the market.
POKE HIM WITH THE SOFT CUSHIONS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf_Y4MbUCLY#t=05m59s
Now that you mention it, his chair does look rather comfy.
I was GMing Warhammer, and the party was searching for a missing baron. Following clues, they found skaven patrol, and managed to capture 4 of them alive. But the party did not know how to interrogate them, because there is no such thing as rodents of unusual size. I was going to give them easy intimidate check, but the party didn’t go for it. They first try to get information in exchange for food, but the rats resisted this temptation. Then someone, believing that rats can’t talk human language, tried to find a way to communicate with pictures, which also didn’t work. Finally, our inquisitor knew hypnosis, so he hypnotized one of the prisoners into answering all questions. They still didn’t find any info on baron, because this rat never saw him, but he pointed a location of their lair.
And then the party was too afraid to go right into rats’ nest and waited for reinforcement, so they were too late and found the baron already dead. He would be dead no matter what, because I’m a scumbag GM, but my guys didn’t know that.
A new story about Galaxy-Brain, this time when he was DMing. One of the players was playing an evil character (though he hadn’t mentioned that to the DM), and decided to test Galaxy-Brain’s limits. So… without going into detail, he didn’t find them, and the paladin didn’t get dinged for leaving the prisoner to the torture.
This isn’t a fun GB story, sorry.