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atelier morgan posted:No, it's the current beta. FWIW, this is the whole point of a beta. You catch mistakes and fix them.
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Jun 8, 2019 22:16
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I feel like the correct way to deal with a torture-happy TTRPG group is to tell them 'hey, torture doesn't work and is not something I want at this table, so don't.' The sort of 'play elaborate information shell games' approach is just going to make players decide torture is a puzzle they can solve, I suspect.
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Jun 8, 2019 22:30
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Joe Slowboat posted:I feel like the correct way to deal with a torture-happy TTRPG group is to tell them 'hey, torture doesn't work and is not something I want at this table, so don't.' Yeah, it's this tbh.
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Jun 8, 2019 22:35
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That does remind me of a question I have, which is sort of related: how do people feel about the 'risk everything to rescue a member of the rebellion, who's going to be interrogated/tortured' plot? It immediately jumps to mind for something like Spire, and fear of interrogation and thus letting slip important info, has always been part of guerilla warfare against vile regimes. But... torture doesn't actually work, so, should that fear of exposure be understood at misplaced? Or is there just an asymmetry where a regime that's willing to arrest and execute any number of innocents will in fact benefit from vile methods, because it helps them cast a wide net? Or does using that plot beat indirectly affirm the idea that torture works, and thus a responsible writer/GM should avoid it in something like Spire?
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Jun 8, 2019 22:40
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Joe Slowboat posted:That does remind me of a question I have, which is sort of related: how do people feel about the 'risk everything to rescue a member of the rebellion, who's going to be interrogated/tortured' plot? It immediately jumps to mind for something like Spire, and fear of interrogation and thus letting slip important info, has always been part of guerilla warfare against vile regimes. But... torture doesn't actually work, so, should that fear of exposure be understood at misplaced? Or is there just an asymmetry where a regime that's willing to arrest and execute any number of innocents will in fact benefit from vile methods, because it helps them cast a wide net? Well, no, because it's worth risking everything to rescue them from torture because you're the good guys and don't want your friends to get tortured.
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Jun 8, 2019 22:50
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Joe Slowboat posted:That does remind me of a question I have, which is sort of related: how do people feel about the 'risk everything to rescue a member of the rebellion, who's going to be interrogated/tortured' plot? It immediately jumps to mind for something like Spire, and fear of interrogation and thus letting slip important info, has always been part of guerilla warfare against vile regimes. But... torture doesn't actually work, so, should that fear of exposure be understood at misplaced? Or is there just an asymmetry where a regime that's willing to arrest and execute any number of innocents will in fact benefit from vile methods, because it helps them cast a wide net? I don't think it's a plot beat that needs to be excised per se, that torture is a completely ineffective method of garnering useful information doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of compelling reasons to want to go and rescue a member of your local rebel alliance from the evil empire, and that's even before you take into account "well they have special magic/truth serums/force powers that will eventually give them the intel they want unless you go and rescue them."
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Jun 8, 2019 22:50
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Joe Slowboat posted:I feel like the correct way to deal with a torture-happy TTRPG group is to tell them 'hey, torture doesn't work and is not something I want at this table, so don't.' When I do the x card spiel I bring up torture as a specific example of a thing that's probably never happened to anyone present but is far enough outside my own comfort zone as a thing to roleplay that i'd be tapping the x card if it came up. E: I generally give a whole bunch of slack to stuff that the bad guys are doing off camera. They're the bad guys and we can acknowledge that they do bad guy stuff without roleplaying through it or even describing it in detail. But isn't that rescue plot better if the bad guys are smart enough to use interrogation tactics that reliably work? Doesn't torture really just highlight "they're cruel and stupid"? Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 23:06 on Jun 8, 2019 |
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Jun 8, 2019 23:00
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Booley posted:Well, no, because it's worth risking everything to rescue them from torture because you're the good guys and don't want your friends to get tortured. Sure, but 'we're risking all our lives to save one person' isn't always genre-appropriate without an operational necessity - Spire is about playing insurgents who get their hands extremely dirty fighting the regime. It's also the question of, do you leave people who get captured and mourn them, or does it turn into 'our spy network might be compromised.'
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Jun 8, 2019 23:01
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Joe Slowboat posted:That does remind me of a question I have, which is sort of related: how do people feel about the 'risk everything to rescue a member of the rebellion, who's going to be interrogated/tortured' plot? It immediately jumps to mind for something like Spire, and fear of interrogation and thus letting slip important info, has always been part of guerilla warfare against vile regimes. But... torture doesn't actually work, so, should that fear of exposure be understood at misplaced? Or is there just an asymmetry where a regime that's willing to arrest and execute any number of innocents will in fact benefit from vile methods, because it helps them cast a wide net? There are a number of cases of people being tortured and as a result revealing information to their captors. The case against torture is not that this never happens, but that it is on average so unreliable and inefficient at accomplishing this that torture ends up having no or even negative practical value in addition to the negative moral value. But there's still a small risk that the victim will reveal some critical information, and that the oppressive regime will act on this. Furthermore, even if it's certain that torture will not work, a regular friendly interrogation might, and you want to make sure the member of the rebellion is in a position where they can be made to reveal for as short a time as possible.
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Jun 8, 2019 23:02
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Joe Slowboat posted:Sure, but 'we're risking all our lives to save one person' isn't always genre-appropriate without an operational necessity - Spire is about playing insurgents who get their hands extremely dirty fighting the regime. It's also the question of, do you leave people who get captured and mourn them, or does it turn into 'our spy network might be compromised.' I think in the case of Spire specifically it's a thing you probably want to establish from the outset, the Ministry's attitude towards captured agents, whether it's "we'll say a brief prayer for you, don't forget your cyanide capsules" or "go and find them before high elf bullshit magic compromises us, and in the event that you can't extract them ensure that they can't divulge any secrets by any means necessary." Also as LatwPIAT says, there are other means besides torture to try and extract information from someone, and "the evil empire has captured one of our members" doesn't necessarily mean that the evil empire is going to engage in fruitless interrogation methods. Again, to use Spire for an example, it isn't outside the realm of consideration that a captured drow insurgent might, instead of being chained up in a dungeon and tortured with elaborate instruments of pain, be promised a substantial amount of money/medical treatment for their loved ones/whatever else might seriously compromise whatever loyalties they have to the Ministry, and you don't necessarily know how devoted they are to the cause.
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Jun 8, 2019 23:07
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atelier morgan posted:No, it's the current beta. Which they are changing before it goes to print but was a wide release to their kickstarter backers and their itch.io. Until the print version is done it is the Lancer everyone is playing. So they weren't using the beta to solicit feedback?
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Jun 9, 2019 02:38
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I hate the narrative torture doesn’t work. It does - it just doesn’t work for gathering information, and gathering information is never the actual goal. For its actual purpose torture works extremely well. Torture is a tool of systemic violence and oppression used to create fear and terrorise (predominantly civilian) enemy populations and subalterns. The post-9/11 obsession with it as information-based misses the real thrust of why it’s used and why we should abhor it.
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Jun 9, 2019 04:07
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Loomer posted:I hate the narrative torture doesn’t work. It does - it just doesn’t work for gathering information, and gathering information is never the actual goal. For its actual purpose torture works extremely well. Torture is a tool of systemic violence and oppression used to create fear and terrorise (predominantly civilian) enemy populations and subalterns. The post-9/11 obsession with it as information-based misses the real thrust of why it’s used and why we should abhor it. Oh, certainly. My point was more asking how people square the circle of 'rebel groups fear information being extracted by interrogation, and torture is part of how that fear is understood, but we also know torture doesn't work to get information' - I'm thinking of some ANC biographies I've read, albeit not deeply. And since I both believe torture doesn't extract information well, it just terrorizes, and also believe that like... these rebel groups knew their poo poo, I was hoping for some help aligning those elements. In particular, if I want to run Spire as 'fighting elfpartheid' torture is probably not actually going to come up, but on an ideological level I want to have a sense what the Ministry should think about these things. And LatwPIAT and other responses really covered that for me, I appreciate it. E: you know what? No reason to bring up various books with better or worse takes on torture! That's off topic and just not really something that valuable to discuss. So I've removed that bit. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Jun 9, 2019 |
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Jun 9, 2019 04:35
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Joe Slowboat posted:Oh, certainly. My point was more asking how people square the circle of 'rebel groups fear information being extracted by interrogation, and torture is part of how that fear is understood, but we also know torture doesn't work to get information' - I'm thinking of some ANC biographies I've read, albeit not deeply. And since I both believe torture doesn't extract information well, it just terrorizes, and also believe that like... these rebel groups knew their poo poo, I was hoping for some help aligning those elements. In particular, if I want to run Spire as 'fighting elfpartheid' torture is probably not actually going to come up, but on an ideological level I want to have a sense what the Ministry should think about these things. In fairness and going against my earlier post (which is really more about the politics of torture), torture does actually get information. So there's a legitimate reason to fear your colleague will spill the beans and you either have to intercept them or change everything they could feasibly hand over - hence the rule both ways of '24/48/72 hours' (if you're being tortured, resist just that long and then break - we forgive you, no one is unbreakable, and if you last, you have done your duty, etc. If you're torturing, it's a ticking clock until the rebel has no useful information left because it's already been replaced. The longer it goes on, the more likely you'll plain forget or be incapable of speaking what they want to know, too, even if you decide to tell them what they want to know - torture has very significant diminishing returns, which is why any claim of 'we had to torture the bad man for a straight year because He Might Know Something' must be met with immediate and extreme skepticism) The reason it doesn't work is less that you can't make someone talk (often you can, but less often than you'd think) but that it's either too little too late, they had no useful information, or you don't have an adequate filter between bullshit they're making up either to mislead (especially during those first 48 hours - if they're dumb enough to stop and investigate a false lead it buys you an hour's respite and an hour more that your colleagues have as a lead to scramble), just to make the pain stop, or because they've become unmoored from reality and have turned your suggestions into seemingly genuine knowledge, and those adequate filters are basically impossible to create without the kind of intelligence apparatus that renders the issue of torture effectively moot. Couple this with deskilling - intelligence services that torture usually see a degradation in morale and a collapse in their ability to interrogate effectively without torture - and you get to the coda that it doesn't work, really, even though it does. But again, an undue emphasis on information extraction clouds the real reason regimes torture, which is to provoke fear. So it doesn't really matter if it works or not to get information - whether the answer is 'yes, but no' or 'no, but yes' - because that, ultimately, is a secondary concern even if it's raised as the first priority. This is the bigger reason your rebels should swear to recover any captured comrade: Because they will not allow comrades (or enemies, for that matter) to suffer so terribly so needlessly. I know you've snipped the books but I'll still venture mine - Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy is the book on this issue.
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Jun 9, 2019 05:09
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Loomer posted:I hate the narrative torture doesn’t work. It does - it just doesn’t work for gathering information, and gathering information is never the actual goal. For its actual purpose torture works extremely well. Torture is a tool of systemic violence and oppression used to create fear and terrorise (predominantly civilian) enemy populations and subalterns. The post-9/11 obsession with it as information-based misses the real thrust of why it’s used and why we should abhor it. The US needed some excuse to tell itself as to why they're "allowed" to torture people and still not be the absolute obvious bad guys. "We're doing it for information" was what they landed on. See also: the entirety of the depressingly popular TV show 24. I doubt most authoritarian shitheads actually buy it in the slightest, but this at least denies them their excuse.
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Jun 9, 2019 08:44
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ALso, it's only just now, we're realizing that it doesn't really work for gathering reliable information. In the middle ages, and by extension most RPG settings, everybody was sure it worked, which is why it's still a very good motivation for people to go and rescue somebody. Torture in an RPG setting might also include spells, demons, nanotech and/or horrible brain parasites which may actually work really well while completely destroying the victim.
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Jun 9, 2019 08:59
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ProfessorCirno posted:See also: the entirety of the depressingly popular TV show 24. I think they buy it. I think they buy it for the same reason people write shows like 24 and for the same reason people believe conspiracy theories about vaccines and the flat earth—for a certain kind of thought process, “Everyone knows [X], but what if [opposite of X]?” is irresistible. Everyone knows torture is bad, so what if I wrote a show... where torture is actually good? Genius! Makes you think!
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Jun 9, 2019 09:33
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Dr Hemulen posted:ALso, it's only just now, we're realizing that it doesn't really work for gathering reliable information. In the middle ages, and by extension most RPG settings, everybody was sure it worked, which is why it's still a very good motivation for people to go and rescue somebody. This is false. It has been known for a very long time that torture is essentially unreliable - see Rejali, 454-455 in addition to a bunch of other spots. The use of torture was rarely about producing information, it was about producing confessions - which it excels at, by the way - regardless of their veracity, humiliating enemies, or creating that same imposed fear of horrific violence in your enemies to lower their resolve against you. ProfessorCirno posted:The US needed some excuse to tell itself as to why they're "allowed" to torture people and still not be the absolute obvious bad guys. "We're doing it for information" was what they landed on. It's more than just an excuse, unfortunately, though that's part of it. It cuts to a fundamental issue in democratic societies and one that's basically where the fascist issue comes from as well: The idea that democracy, human rights, all that poo poo makes us weak and robs us of real men capable of making tough decisions. We needed a tough decision to have real men with again, in the eyes of the people in power at the time we began our present shift away from the genuine Western Liberal tradition (flawed as it may be, speaking as an anarchist, it's certainly a lot more open than what the fascist fucknuggets who claim to be defending it argue for) and it provided a convenient pivot point on which to focus the ideology on this. This is why 24 was popular, almost word for word: Real man who makes the hard calls to save America where democratic weaklings cannot! The same fear compels us to torture as compels the fascists to scream about feminists. EDIT: Also I'm aware this is both a sensitive subject and a dull one to people not invested, so if I'm getting on anyone's nerves feel free to pipe up. It's an area of particular longstanding fascination and revulsion to me and I recognize this biases me as to its appropriateness for discussion.
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Jun 9, 2019 11:47
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Dr Hemulen posted:ALso, it's only just now, we're realizing that it doesn't really work for gathering reliable information. Napoleon Bonaparte, 1798 posted:“The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know”.
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Jun 9, 2019 11:52
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Even before that, apparently: https://books.google.de/books?id=dx...torture&f=false e: If that's wrong could someone let me know? I know there's people reading this thread who know way way more about that era than I ever will. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 12:05 on Jun 9, 2019 |
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Jun 9, 2019 11:59
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Loomer posted:But again, an undue emphasis on information extraction clouds the real reason regimes torture, which is to provoke fear. So it doesn't really matter if it works or not to get information - whether the answer is 'yes, but no' or 'no, but yes' - because that, ultimately, is a secondary concern even if it's raised as the first priority. This is the bigger reason your rebels should swear to recover any captured comrade: Because they will not allow comrades (or enemies, for that matter) to suffer so terribly so needlessly. I know you've snipped the books but I'll still venture mine - Darius Rejali's Torture and Democracy is the book on this issue. Rejali's chapter in that book on torture that produced actionable information in the Algerian War is a pretty fascinating read because it outlines numerous ways in which torture was probably the least good option even in the conflict where torture is generally regarded to have "worked" the "best" and why, specifically, the ways it failed to be an efficient means of extracting actionable information are intrinsic to the process itself. (Notably, even provoking fear didn't work in Algeria, because it provoked resentment instead, legitimizing the anti-French revolutionaries' cause.)
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Jun 9, 2019 12:04
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The idea is that a "ticking time bomb situation" absolves one of moral obligations, allowing you to do the wrong thing because the alternative is impractical or worse. So Jack Bauer can break your fingers until you tell him where the bomb is, because there isn't time to properly interrogate you (ie: win your trust, examine your story, analyze flaws, etc). It's also why America's right wing authoritarians have been increasingly catastrophizing their agenda. This is no time to be rational! Saddam has WMD, there's a War on Christmas, FEMA is planning deathcamps st Walmart, abortion is a genocide of babies, MS-13 is Mexican al Qaeda, Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a secret Muslim (who created ISIS), the Deep State has stolen the country from Trump, and now Jews will replace you and whites will be extinct in a decade. None of that is even slightly true, but it all sets the stage for "tough decisions," ie: eroding other people's rights because of the situation's "urgency." It's all that same time-bomb loophole. People inherently understand that it's bullshit, but it absolves them of responsibility and frees them up to indulge their worst urges because there's "no alternative."
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Jun 9, 2019 12:04
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Earlier still. Ulpian wrote against it even while he condoned it for certain uses. Every society and organization that attempts to use torture to gather information inevitably comes to the conclusion that as a method it is deeply flawed. It will, of course, produce information - and if you can filter and cross reference that information, some of it will in fact be good information! But this in turn requires the kind of apparatus that renders the torture part somewhat unhelpful - e.g., if you have to check the list of heretic's names produced under torture against a list of suspects you already had... Well, chances are you could have investigated that list without torturing anyone. Why, then, does torture persist? Because it's still an incredibly useful tool for every totalitarian regime. The threat of unimaginable pain inflicted on you, your friends, or your loved ones for your participation in activities against the regime (whether it be religion, the State, a criminal organization...) is a means of social control. The manufacturing of confessions is another, and a display of the ultimate power: The power to force you to betray your beliefs, to speak publicly against them, to decry them, and to willingly walk to the headman's block afterwards. It is the most potent manifestation of the power to break, to irredeemably destroy, another human being that any regime can bring to muster. This, in turn, is about as good as it gets at keeping dissent down (at least until something pushes it too far and it topples in the other direction). This is the light Trump's remarks about torture must be considered in, too - he may or may not believe it genuinely creates good intelligence, but he knows that promising 'even worse than Guantanamo' is a way to threaten any who'd strike against him, and like the idiot he is, he grabs for that tainted implement of state power in the media, to project the idea that dissent will be met with brutality beyond all human endurance. That idea itself is a more potent tool than any intelligence gained through the process.
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Jun 9, 2019 12:07
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It's funny that ticking timebomb situations are actually the worst scenarios for torture because the subject knows they just need to hold out for a certain amount of time and then nothing matters after that.
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Jun 9, 2019 12:07
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LatwPIAT posted:Rejali's chapter in that book on torture that produced actionable information in the Algerian War is a pretty fascinating read because it outlines numerous ways in which torture was probably the least good option even in the conflict where torture is generally regarded to have "worked" the "best" and why, specifically, the ways it failed to be an efficient means of extracting actionable information are intrinsic to the process itself. (Notably, even provoking fear didn't work in Algeria, because it provoked resentment instead, legitimizing the anti-French revolutionaries' cause.) Yeah. Rejali's work on the whole is a drat masterpiece but that's the chapter that really solidifed it in my mind. Every bit of bullshit propaganda about it might be true - and Algeria is where it was closest to true - but it's still a loving terrible method of getting intelligence.
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Jun 9, 2019 12:08
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What do people think about "interrogations" over "torture"? I'm running a system that uses interrogation as a rollable skill, and I just imagine a high roll is the player character using verbal judo on a guy to get the guy to slip up or trick him. But do interrogations work in real life? Am I being unrealistic when I allow an expert interrogator to get information out of a person, or should I remove this skill entirely? ProfessorCirno posted:
It's not just 24. There's an episode of American Dad that is literally all about giving the CIA back their torture budget. A terrorist plants a bomb in the building they are in and the episode is all about raising enough money to refill the torture budget. By the end of the episode they do, torture him for a couple of minutes, then disarm the bomb. I know it's just a Seth McFarlane comedy but it was weird, American Dad is often about how crazy conservative policies don't work, like the episodes on illegal immigration and gun control. Just pointing out a weird instance of "Torture works!" from pop culture.
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Jun 9, 2019 12:26
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Interrogations are a reliable means of producing intelligence where they aren't coercive or use psychological coercion in a limited way in conjunction with a policy of good treatment. The big issue for a drama is that interrogation like that is usually a relatively slow process - several days to weeks - but so are plenty of the things we handwave in tabletop gaming. The most notoriously effective interrogators of various organizations - e.g. the Luftwaffe - usually rolled in this way: One, act like a reasonable human being to the prisoner. Two, reward good behaviour and form a bond. Three, show a genuine interest in the prisoner's language and culture. Four, make them think you already know but just want confirmation by telling them things you genuinely do know to be true first, either openly or as part of an 'easing in' questioning. Do it well and they come out having told you a lot more than they expected, without anyone having tortured anyone and with weird friendships forming. There was a USMC interrogator in WW2 who went on to be a pen pal for several of his prisoners after the War because they found they genuinely quite liked each other beyond their uniforms, which is pretty remarkable!
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Jun 9, 2019 12:33
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Loomer posted:Interrogations are a reliable means of producing intelligence where they aren't coercive or use psychological coercion in a limited way in conjunction with a policy of good treatment. The big issue for a drama is that interrogation like that is usually a relatively slow process - several days to weeks - but so are plenty of the things we handwave in tabletop gaming. This is really useful stuff. In my particular system a skill check can take anywhere from one second to entire weeks in game so upping the timescale won't at all be a problem. Thank you so much!
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Jun 9, 2019 12:35
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PinheadSlim posted:What do people think about "interrogations" over "torture"? I'm running a system that uses interrogation as a rollable skill, and I just imagine a high roll is the player character using verbal judo on a guy to get the guy to slip up or trick him. Bear in mind actual intelligence operations draw information from hundreds of different sources and observations. A high roll might be verbal judo, or it might be cross-referencing insignia on the man's shoulder patches with comments from a frontline commander last week to identify which enemy unit is operating in this sector and their likely equipment. You may not hear about any ticking bombs, but you could hear that the Sneaky Explosives Division have rolled into town and stolen the prisoner's girlfriend. Which is already a more fun series of hooks if you can rely on your players to engage with them. PinheadSlim posted:Just pointing out a weird instance of "Torture works!" from pop culture. Torture is extremely good at making the torturers feel cool and badass and powerful, and reinforcing any propaganda narrative that the enemy are pathetic, treacherous swine. ("Look at him, he betrayed his buddies and can't even walk! All we had to do was cut his feet off! And he's filth-encrusted and starving too...", etc etc.
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Jun 9, 2019 12:44
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Depending on how the system goes you might still need to implement penalties based on certain people being very difficult to crack - some people just plain won't reveal anything at all even within that model, even if it means losing all privileges and being put in solitary (which is, of course, torture - it's one of the exceptions to torture not working for intelligence gathering when you use it in extremely limited psychological forms and when it still hinges on having built a rapport between interrogator and prisoner. This flies out the window when it goes from relatively humane solitary into close confinement etc, however. It turns out it mostly only works when you say, 'look, I can't keep asking for you to be made this comfortable if you don't give me anything at all' rather than 'gently caress you, get back in the box until you're ready to talk', and even there just a drop back to the standard is probably sufficient rather than a punitive model), which is where the temptation to torture enters in.
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Jun 9, 2019 12:45
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PinheadSlim posted:What do people think about "interrogations" over "torture"? I'm running a system that uses interrogation as a rollable skill, and I just imagine a high roll is the player character using verbal judo on a guy to get the guy to slip up or trick him. Broadly, yes. Examples of someone eliciting useful information through friendly talks, bargains, and building a report are all plentiful and fairly well documented. However, it is generally very difficult to determine whether what someone is lying when they're revealing something during an interrogation. Maybe they're speaking the truth, maybe they're lying, maybe you get truths mixed with lies, maybe they think they're telling the truth but are mistaken, maybe they communicated poorly, maybe you misunderstood them, maybe they don't know but want the diet coke and cigarette you're offering them really badly so they make something up...
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Jun 9, 2019 12:49
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And therein comes the value of a good intelligence apparatus. The most useful resource is public cooperation or informants, since they give you something to cross-reference against. If you've got no time pressures you can establish the truthfulness or lack of of each subject as well, and check them against other interrogations. In this respect it's quite a lot like torture, but with a generally higher success rate and much lower social cost. No one worth listening to is going to be outraged that you're treating an enemy with kindness in order to 'trick them' into informing on their side - least of all the enemy's families (and in counter-insurgency, stemming the cycle of recruitment is vital. Knowing they tortured your uncle is often enough to push people to collaborate with or outright join an insurgency, whereas discovering that no, he's doing great actually - look, they even fixed his teeth, you know the ones he couldn't get a dentist for? It sucks being in prison but they're decent to him and letting him write home - doesn't. It may not hold people back where there are other factors, but it doesn't dump a whole lot of petrol on the fire.)
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Jun 9, 2019 12:57
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Loomer posted:Depending on how the system goes you might still need to implement penalties based on certain people being very difficult to crack - some people just plain won't reveal anything at all even within that model This will also be easy to simulate. All NPCs derive their personalities from a deck of playing cards. Draw two cards, the higher numbered card is their primary trait and the lower is their secondary. The suit of the card determines the type of personality and the value determines how much this person is motivated by that trait. In that system any NPC with a royal card for a primary motivation probably isn't going to crack at all, unless plied by extreme circumstances specific to their motivations. For example, by gaining the trust of a King of Diamonds (Greedy) by first building trust over several weeks of good treatment and honest dealings (Several interrogation checks over the course of a month probably) then offer him a very real pile of money for information. Loxbourne posted:Bear in mind actual intelligence operations draw information from hundreds of different sources and observations. A high roll might be verbal judo, or it might be cross-referencing insignia on the man's shoulder patches with comments from a frontline commander last week to identify which enemy unit is operating in this sector and their likely equipment. You may not hear about any ticking bombs, but you could hear that the Sneaky Explosives Division have rolled into town and stolen the prisoner's girlfriend. Which is already a more fun series of hooks if you can rely on your players to engage with them. This will also help a lot not only in the game I'm currently running here on SA but all future sessions of this system. LatwPIAT posted:Broadly, yes. Examples of someone eliciting useful information through friendly talks, bargains, and building a report are all plentiful and fairly well documented. However, it is generally very difficult to determine whether what someone is lying when they're revealing something during an interrogation. Maybe they're speaking the truth, maybe they're lying, maybe you get truths mixed with lies, maybe they think they're telling the truth but are mistaken, maybe they communicated poorly, maybe you misunderstood them, maybe they don't know but want the diet coke and cigarette you're offering them really badly so they make something up... This is also really good stuff and I think I'll combine it with Loxbournes suggestions. Perhaps a particularly high interrogation roll can reveal to the player contradictions in the captives story, or something they know for sure to be untrue. NPCs with low motivation scores will probably reveal real information with the fake while more motivated NPCs will be even more withholding. Only particularly honest and stupid NPCs will reliably deliver information they believe to be true. Loomer posted:And therein comes the value of a good intelligence apparatus. The most useful resource is public cooperation or informants, since they give you something to cross-reference against. If you've got no time pressures you can establish the truthfulness or lack of of each subject as well, and check them against other interrogations. In this respect it's quite a lot like torture, but with a generally higher success rate and much lower social cost. No one worth listening to is going to be outraged that you're treating an enemy with kindness in order to 'trick them' into informing on their side - least of all the enemy's families (and in counter-insurgency, stemming the cycle of recruitment is vital. Knowing they tortured your uncle is often enough to push people to collaborate with or outright join an insurgency, whereas discovering that no, he's doing great actually - look, they even fixed his teeth, you know the ones he couldn't get a dentist for? It sucks being in prison but they're decent to him and letting him write home - doesn't. It may not hold people back where there are other factors, but it doesn't dump a whole lot of petrol on the fire.) And this will be the true secret to reliable information in my games. Multiple, happy sources.
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Jun 9, 2019 13:06
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I'm wondering, do people also ban certain spells? Like fireball, cloudkill, phantasmal killer/weird, incendiary cloud, etc? Are PCs made to always use non-lethal violence? I mean the central conceit of DnD (which the article was about) is running around murdering stuff to increase in power while looting whatever your enemies had. Like I understand if you're gaming with Ted Bundy or something and he's going into loving detail about how he captures someone/something and starts slicing pieces off, but I guess I'm not seeing the big controversy of "someone drop a zone of truth, I'll make an intimidate roll". Like I think most people who play DnD understand it's a game and a lot of things that are allowed there would not be good in reality. I'm genuinely trying to understand the mindstate where this is an issue for people, because I don't think I've ever encountered anything similar in any of the games I've ran/participated in.
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Jun 9, 2019 14:02
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If you have a zone of truth, you don't need to torture. Any PC that goes 'okay, pop a zone of truth while I threaten to knock this guy into next week' is either stupid or played by someone looking for an excuse to get Jack Bauer. I also don't think we've discussed banning the issue of torture, but rather confronting its poisonous nature as a degrader of good intelligence practices, its unreliability as a means of information gathering, and its use as a tool of state oppression. The closest analogue then is not banning fireball, but also remembering that holy poo poo you just threw a ball of napalm at people and napalm is a horrible way to die where appropriate. Maybe we accept that any way to die is just fine, maybe we question it - that call comes from the themes and style of the game. Players can still choose to torture, if it's appropriate to the game - but that doesn't require, unless it's part of a particularly odd narrative game where things are predetermined by reference to myths or pop culture (e.g. if the character is under a fate binding with an episode of 24 for some reason?), that the torture be portrayed as effective. Likewise, now and then when my players Do A War Crime, I point it out with the consequences of their actions - if they fire that cloudkill spell into a village, I mention the dead children and cripples. This may be inappropriate for some games and groups, but in those games and groups I don't think torture has a place either - the same way you might use sexual violence motifs in a Vampire game with consenting, informed players who want to try and understand that dimension of things, but not in a random pickup game of Tales from the Loop. EDIT: But more than this, the issue of torture's place in a democracy cuts to the issue of fascist ideology and identity more than other forms of violence do. "At the moment, there is a myth in circulation, a fable that goes something like this: Radical terrorists will take advantage of our fussy legality, so we may have to suspend it to beat them. Radical terrorists mock our namby-pamby prisons, so we must make them tougher. Radical terrorists are nasty, so to defeat them we have to be nastier." Simply swap out the term 'radical terrorists' with 'leftists', 'feminists', 'socialists', 'antifa' - the meaning remains the same. The fascist shares the same disgust for the apparent weakness of democracy, for the liberal values of our society, that the advocate for torture does. The enemy must be both cowardly and frightening; omnipotent and impotent - we must be impossibly strong to defeat them, and to do so, we must kill our weakness. This weakness, of course, is democracy - and this belief is the very heart of fascism. Loomer fucked around with this message at 14:17 on Jun 9, 2019 |
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Jun 9, 2019 14:10
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alansmithee posted:I'm wondering, do people also ban certain spells? Like fireball, cloudkill, phantasmal killer/weird, incendiary cloud, etc? Are PCs made to always use non-lethal violence? I mean the central conceit of DnD (which the article was about) is running around murdering stuff to increase in power while looting whatever your enemies had. Like I understand if you're gaming with Ted Bundy or something and he's going into loving detail about how he captures someone/something and starts slicing pieces off, but I guess I'm not seeing the big controversy of "someone drop a zone of truth, I'll make an intimidate roll". Like I think most people who play DnD understand it's a game and a lot of things that are allowed there would not be good in reality. I'm genuinely trying to understand the mindstate where this is an issue for people, because I don't think I've ever encountered anything similar in any of the games I've ran/participated in. The group I play in has an “x card” policy where if anything makes you uncomfortable for any reason you can x card it and it’s removed from the game. No reason or explanation needed, aside from some honest misunderstandings leading to unnecessary x carding this system works well. Theres also a lot of LGBQ+ in the group and we’ve been there done that poo poo in regards to toxic, cringe inducing play. So it almost never comes up anyway, new players get this explained to them before play starts and if they want to be edgelords they are politely shown the door. As far violence goes I guess that in order to play these games you accept that at least in the fantasy violence and death are possible if not inevitable. Such things are not petty. It’s also one thing to narrate out “you stab the goblin and he rolls down the stairs tripping up his fellows...” and “you stab the goblin who spends the next five minutes bleeding out, trying to stuff his intestines back in while calling for his mother...”. One thing is ok and the other is just awful.
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Jun 9, 2019 15:50
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PinheadSlim posted:
While The Wire might take some dramatic license with a few things, its interrogation and questioning scenes are really, really good, and demonstrate the difference betwen overeaching when you don't know and are fishing, and when you already know and are just trying to get the suspect to confess. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN7pkFNEg5c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-L5dhs4J8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DY_5KP9cHRI There's more, but these three really stand out.
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Jun 9, 2019 16:37
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Loomer posted:This is false. It has been known for a very long time that torture is essentially unreliable - see Rejali, 454-455 in addition to a bunch of other spots. The use of torture was rarely about producing information, it was about producing confessions - which it excels at, by the way - regardless of their veracity, humiliating enemies, or creating that same imposed fear of horrific violence in your enemies to lower their resolve against you. Wow, I didn't know that. Thanks.
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Jun 9, 2019 17:21
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alansmithee posted:I'm wondering, do people also ban certain spells? Like fireball, cloudkill, phantasmal killer/weird, incendiary cloud, etc? Are PCs made to always use non-lethal violence? I mean the central conceit of DnD (which the article was about) is running around murdering stuff to increase in power while looting whatever your enemies had. Like I understand if you're gaming with Ted Bundy or something and he's going into loving detail about how he captures someone/something and starts slicing pieces off, but I guess I'm not seeing the big controversy of "someone drop a zone of truth, I'll make an intimidate roll". Like I think most people who play DnD understand it's a game and a lot of things that are allowed there would not be good in reality. I'm genuinely trying to understand the mindstate where this is an issue for people, because I don't think I've ever encountered anything similar in any of the games I've ran/participated in. (Let's see how short I can compress this effort post while still expressing the point.) In RPGs, you play from two perspectives, bot of which are important to the game. The pragmatic gameplay perspectice: You want your playing piece, your character to survive and succeed at the game. And the story perspective: You want your character to be a hero.* If you view the game mostly through the story lens you feel bad when your character does evil things, because they are supposed to be acting heroically. From this perspective torture is right out, because it is morally wrong. If you view the game mostly through the gameplay lens you do whatever is pragmatic for your success. I don't feel bad when Mario stomps a goomba, it doesn't make sense to, it's just a game. From this perspective torture is right out, because it doesn't loving work. *This mostly applies to modern D&D, real early D&D editions were about playing entertaining sociopaths. Both because that was what the pulp/picaresque genre was about, and because Gary was a libertarian, right?
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Jun 9, 2019 19:00
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Torture also has a much thinner buffer from the real world, in that it happens a lot more than anyone thinks. Magical lighting and cloudkill? Not as much. You still have chemical weapons IRL, but it's nowhere nearly as prevalent.
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Jun 9, 2019 19:10
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