TTRPGs and Anti-Hero Fail.

[Endovior]

Yes, social engineering is a thing. And you suck balls at it, Lago, because you are unwilling to concede that most of your audience is, at worst, only slightly less intelligent than you are, and anything which is immediately obvious as propaganda to you is also immediately obvious as propaganda to them, and they'll reject it because you told them it was a TTRPG and not a lecture.

This. My main problem with Lago is that he's holds obnoxious political opinions, and (like most people with obnoxious political opinions) he is completely immune to any discussion about it. This thread, in particular, is not about game design, it's about politics; he wants to know how to better inflict his political opinions on people through the medium of RPGs. Which is an abhorrent thing to want, and not particularly implementable, but he's too incompetent to actually implement it anyway, so it's not an especially relevant threat.

Not, of course, that his record on game design is much better; all told, I'd rate Lago as significantly less likely then Frank to either change his mind about a point of game design in response to a discussion about them, or to be right in his opinions period. Essentially, he is probably wrong in his position, and probably not likely to become less wrong after a discussion about it, so it's probably not worth discussing anything in particular with him. That said, I'm posting because I personally find it amusing to passively troll him by talking around him in his own thread.

[Chamomile]

Yeah, see, Lago, the issue isn't with your prose or whatever. I mean, for one thing, prose is only like ten percent of what helps a TTRPG send an effective point anyway and if you really want that done right you need to write adventure paths, not systems, because people will use your system to tell whatever story they want regardless of what your mechanics encourage. The D&D 3.5 mechanics don't really encourage games about the arbitrary and ultimately futile nature of war, nor about the inability to put aside petty regional squabbles leading to the ultimate downfall of all involved at the hands of a powerful invading force (something which, in retrospect, could've been a decent metaphor for Europeans against Native Americans), but I have run both of those games.

More importantly, every time I've seen you concept anything, most egregiously that D&D cartoon thread back when, you operated under the assumption that your audience was comprised purely of mouth-breathing idiots who can't possibly understand any nuance or subtlety even if you have a character on hand to spell it out explicitly for them, and that all issues must therefore be reduced to Autobots vs. Decepticons, where the Right Way is shown to have no drawbacks whatsoever and the Wrong Way is never given an even slightly credible supporting argument. Even if your product is the very first time your audience has ever encountered the issue, they will feel betrayed and lied to (and rightly so!) when they encounter supporters of the opposing side who turn out to be real human beings whose perspective is not cartoonishly evil or stupid.

This exact thing happens all the time with soccer moms pushing the evil of drugs by saying that all drugs including marijuana will kill you to pieces, and when it comes out that this is obviously false, fourteen-year old Jimmy ends up on heroin because if you fed him bogus statistics about pot, why should he believe you about any other drugs over his stoner friends who told him the truth about marijuana? Even if we assume that all drugs are ultimately unwise and thus the soccer mom's basic point of "don't do drugs" is a good one (because obviously you believe whatever point you intend to make is a good one even if you disagree with the soccer mom's drug campaign), pretending that the issue is completely black and white, cut and dry, with absolutely no room for nuance and ambiguity is ultimately only undermining your cause, because it is trivially easy to see that this is a lie.

I live in a university town in one of the most conservative places in America. If I run down to the local economics classes and pull out a random student, and he can expose your pro-socialist propaganda as an oversimplified lie in five minutes, you are doing it wrong. But making TTRPGs that are actually effective in sending messages would require you to admit that the people who disagree with you are not retarded, so that's obviously not happening.

[kzt]

Interesting. I hadn't heard that before. Sauce?

Developed over time. One interesting fact was that Rommel, fighting a long-range war in a theater with very limited resources, had absolutely no interest in logistics. That was for the staff to take care of. For a lot of the war the senior Africa Corps logistician was a Major. Not a Major General, a Major. There is an old truism, believed to be from from Omar Bradly, "Amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics."

Oddly enough, Rommel tended to run out of fuel at critical moments.

It's difficult to overstate how awful the senior Union Generals after Scott were. Scott was very old and infirm. Lee was very good, it's not for nothing that Scott offered him command of the Union armies before he joined the confederacy. But he made a lot of mistakes too.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

Lago: You've stated over and over, in this thread and on multiple game design issues, that your ideal is "socially engineer" people into liking the things you like.

Look, any and every game ever invented -- especially such open-ended games like TTRPGs -- is an attempt to social engineer the players. Lethal trap rules socially engineer players into caution and even paranoia. Anime artwork in the book socially engineers people to envision and create characters with improbably spiky hair and huge swords. Alignment rules or even the lack of them steer peoples' behavior in a certain directly. The fact that people introduce their D&D characters as 'He's a half-orc Barbarian/Fighter' is a clear and naked example of successful social engineering. People don't introduce their Mouseguard or Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu characters (thus influencing the GM, fellow players, and their own impressions) in the same way as they do for D&D. Such a little thing, and yet, just by Gygax and follow-up writers directing their players' perspective in such a way causes people to think and interact with the game in a way they wouldn't otherwise. Which is pretty much social engineering!

The idea that you can create any game without socially engineering people in some fashion is completely nonsensical. Unless someone is specifically trying to subvert the rules you put down... and even then they will almost always do so in a way parallel or reminiscent of the original rule. Even if you think that you can avoid having to do so by being silent on a rules area, emergent gameplay will make it so that your game socially engineers people to do certain things even if you never intended or anticipated that.

Bullshit.

The point of social engineering is to promote change on a sociological scale. When Gary Gygax wrote the Tomb of Horrors, he wasn't saying that traps and monsters are ubiquitous and instantly lethal (or that they even should be) anywhere outside the Flaness. The idea that players must or even should come away from games with a deeper understanding about real world mysteries of the universe is arrogant in the extreme, and this from a White Wolf player!

[hyzmarca]

deaddmwalking/hyzmarca: While knowing what makes a villain in a story work is an extremely important question -- and in my opinion, more important than this thread -- I'm more curious as to your thoughts on what makes a villain (or anti-hero) work while simultaneously not working so well that it sanitizes or glorifies their evil.

Like I said, I don't think the task is impossible. Gordon Gekko, for example, is pretty much recognized by all but a fringe of viewership of being charismatic and awesomeness and exciting but still evil and not someone you should copy -- his signature phrase of 'greed is good' is more often used ironically or specifically to criticize the concept. Vito Corleone on the other hand, not so much.

1) Gordon Gekko lost.

2) There was no one worse than him.

The latter is kind of important. If you want a 90s Anti-Hero (as opposed to the classic Greek Anti-Hero) to work then you need to have a setting that is entirely grey-on-grey at worst. It's easy to white-wash killing irredeemably evil bad guys or sacrificing a few innocents to stop the ravening hoard of ravening death.

More importantly, his solutions can't be consistently more effective and consistently lead to better outcomes compared to less extreme solutions. They can often be better than other solutions, but more traditional heroics need to at least be a valid in the settings.

If your villain has the best solution for saving the world then your villain is right and it shouldn't matter how sympathetic or unsympathetic he is. If there are other possibilities and the villain simply took the murderous path because it was easier, that's something else entirely.

[Username17]

People disagree that torture is ok even if it saves lives. The end does not justify the means.

Disagree strongly. There are always ends important enough to justify any means. Torture is kinda bad, sure... but death is worse. If it's absolutely necessary to torture someone to save lives, you torture them, and save the lives. Similarly, if it's absolutely necessary to nuke a city to save the world, you nuke the city, and you save the world. If you're the kind of person who draws lines in your mind that cannot be crossed ever under whatever circumstance, then there are bad things out there that you cannot prevent. That's not an example of laudable moral certainty, that's cowardice. Heroes are either better then that, making those hard choices regardless of what others think of them for it... or they fail to do so, and lament their weakness as people die, and the world burns around them.

It is exactly this perspective that 24 is espousing, and it's wrong. Torture isn't wrong because it's somehow a priori wrong, it's wrong because it does not work. 24 is a horrible show and a horrible piece of social engineering because it perpetuates the myth that torture is a regrettable, but fast and effective method of getting actionable intelligence. Instead of what it actually is, which is a fast method of getting people to spout random bullshit and/or tell you things they think you want to hear.

Torturing people you don't like isn't a tough moral choice that you have to be a tough man to tough it up to tough tough tough. It's a simplistic and ineffective method of attempting to get intelligence. Torturing people is the equivalent of attempting to "punch your way through" on any other complex problem. If your car doesn't start, hitting the engine with a stick is relatively unlike to solve your problem (though ironically: still more likely than torturing a foreigner is). If you are having trouble balancing your checkbook, punching it is not going to help.

Lashing out in frustration with physical violence against complicated and vexing problems is actually relatively rarely effective. And the only times it is effective are those wartime issues wherein "not enough of those guys are dead" is your actual problem. The only problem that is solved by waterboarding is the problem "that guy isn't in enough agony while drowning is simulated on him".

Ultimately, the purpose of torture is torture.

Now, RPGs are often used as escapism. And so reducing problems to ones that are inherently punchable is par for the course. Your problems aren't "producing a lasting approach to the distribution of water in the Akkha Valley" and instead you are presented with "not enough Orcs have been stabbed in the face". That's a simple problem that you can respond to with infantile solutions. And that's fine.

The part where it becomes not fine is precisely the 24 scenario: where you provide infantile and counterproductive solutions to real world problems and present them as effective in a fictional context. Because then you're in effect arguing for infantile and counterproductive methods to be employed in real world situations. Similarly presenting fiction in which educational standards are improved by punching students, the economic crisis is solved by punching poor people, or race relations are solved by punching Mexicans are all counterproductive.

And presenting a counterproductive solution to a currently debated real-world problem in allegorical format does in fact make you a propagandist for positions which are wrong. And that makes you wrong.

-Username17

[Endovior]

And now that we're talking methodology instead of morality, I agree; torture is usually not terribly useful (and hence, not absolutely necessary). If you genuinely do not know your enemy's plans, you can't tell if the responses you get when torturing one of their agents are the truth or just something they're telling you to stop the torture. Where it is actually useful is in the highly specific situation where you have non-credible information about your enemy's plans that you're trying to confirm... and are also short on time, and thus don't have the luxury of extracting the information via more instrumentally useful means. In this particularly narrow niche, torture is potentially a better option then trusting to questionable intelligence. Obviously, that usually isn't the case. The particular confluence of factors that actually make it a useful option just usually don't come into play; the slow approach to interrogation tends to produce far superior results, given time. My point, however, is that taking tools out of your toolbox will never make you more effective.

[Kaelik]

It's not even useful then.

If you start torturing some guy and asking him where Osama is you will get the following answers:

1) Some caves in Afganistan!
2) Pakistan!
3) Argentina!
4) US!
5) Germany!

And whereever you ask him to be more specific, he will suddenly get much more specific. He will start giving longitude and latitude numbers not even in fucking Pakistan when you ask him to be more specific about Pakistan, but he'll be trying to tell you where he is in Pakistan, because when you try to narrow within Pakistan, it's proof positive that you already thought he was in Pakistan, and so he knows to only give answers about Pakistan, because that's the only way you will stop.

[Username17]

Yeah, imagine for the moment that you have something you want to confirm. You now ask Tortured Guy some questions to confirm it. Now Tortured Guy hates you and also wants the torture to stop. This gives him two motivations with unknown (and likely varying on a moment by moment basis) priority:

• Give answers Tortured Guy thinks you want to hear, in order to make the torture stop.
• Give answers Tortured Guy thinks will fuck you over, in order to fuck you over because he hates you.

Neither of those involve giving "truthful" or "helpful" answers. So if you ask him to confirm something and he confirms it, it means one of two things:

• He thought you wanted to hear a confirmation and gave you one in order to stop the torture.
• He thought that confirming the information he was just asked to confirm would make you waste resources, because he hates you.

If he doesn't confirm it, it basically just means the same thing. Either he thought that you wanted to hear a rejection of that hypothesis and rejected it in order to alleviate his torture, or he thought that rejecting the hypothesis would fuck you over in your investigation because he hates you.

This all assuming that he's still rational at all, because if you actually torture him to the point of breaking, he's just going to babble whatever the last thing you said to him, and provide no new information at all. You're basically stuck with an end of game theory where there is no right question to ask.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

More importantly, every time I've seen you concept anything, most egregiously that D&D cartoon thread back when, you operated under the assumption that your audience was comprised purely of mouth-breathing idiots who can't possibly understand any nuance or subtlety even if you have a character on hand to spell it out explicitly for them,

I really don't know how to respond to your complaint. But, highlights:

[*] One, it's a bit baffling to me that you think that my pretentiousness and abrasiveness and condescension is someone a thing unique to me. This is TGD. Have you seen any thread on these boards -- especially MPSIMS subforum -- that puts up an opinion counter to the mainstream? TGD is extremely condescending and holier-than-thou. I don't know why, using your example, the friggin' D&D cartoon thread was the line in the sand. Do you even go to the Politics That Make You Laugh, Cry, or Both?

[*] Even so, I do admit to being extra inappropriately condescending and preach lately. Contemporary American politics and history leaves me really frustrated and I have a tendency to let my snark devolve into having a not-so-hidden axe to grind with society. I'll work on that, since I've been going above and beyond lately.

[*] All that said, I don't really know how to tell you this, but, you know, bland matter-of-fact statements that repeat something that's 'obvious' (even if it's not) really works in real life. It doesn't work so easily that you can just say an opinion, repeat it, and get people to believe what you want regardless of any presentation or context. But it's pretty close to how it actually works!

People like to think that they're immune from this form of public policy influence, including yours truly, but honestly they're not. Even if you think that my particular political viewpoints are full of shit, you should be strongly aware that human beings do respond to this base level of manipulation in semi-predictable fashions even if you tell them that they're being manipulated. And I don't even mean in a catastrophic sense like Manifest destiny. I'm talking very basic public opinion topics of interest like Bacon and Eggs being an All-American diet or recycling being THE way to save the planet or Transformers 2 not being a horrible piece of drek.

and that all issues must therefore be reduced to Autobots vs. Decepticons, where the Right Way is shown to have no drawbacks whatsoever and the Wrong Way is never given an even slightly credible supporting argument. Even if your product is the very first time your audience has ever encountered the issue, they will feel betrayed and lied to (and rightly so!) when they encounter supporters of the opposing side who turn out to be real human beings whose perspective is not cartoonishly evil or stupid.

What? You think that I'm not aware that handling a subject haphazardly and hamhandedly is worse for your message than not handling it at all? Here's the original quote: "How in the name of fuck do you have anti-heroes or even out-and-out villain protagonists in your setting -- let alone as PC characters -- without the fans creepily whitewashing the bastards or having to beat people over the head with the fact that these aren't by any stretch of the imagination nice people?"

I think it can be done. I even gave a list of anti-heroes where I feel this was done successfully. I still think that you're way underestimating how much fiction influences political framing and thus public policy. It does this so strongly that people have political opinions on things that don't exist. You could probably write volumes, for example, on how Star Trek: TNG has (very, very accidentally) set back human transhumanism. I didn't even think that this was a particularly controversial point, otherwise I would have opened a thread on that first, because otherwise you're not going to accept the premise of this thread.

Bullshit.

The point of social engineering is to promote change on a sociological scale. When Gary Gygax wrote the Tomb of Horrors, he wasn't saying that traps and monsters are ubiquitous and instantly lethal (or that they even should be) anywhere outside the Flaness. The idea that players must or even should come away from games with a deeper understanding about real world mysteries of the universe is arrogant in the extreme, and this from a White Wolf player!

I know social engineering isn't the right term of art and refers to a much nastier real world concept, but I can't think of a better word that describes 'intentionally framing your work to get people to subconsciously interact and experience your XXX in a certain way that's not implied from the base components'.

[Lago PARANOIA]

This. My main problem with Lago is that he's holds obnoxious political opinions, and (like most people with obnoxious political opinions) he is completely immune to any discussion about it.

That said, I'm posting because I personally find it amusing to passively troll him by talking around him in his own thread.

If you want to tell me why my particular political opinions are obnoxious, I'll be happy to open another thread for you. Or participate in the opening salvos of a thread you open. It seems your problem with me runs rather deep and this isn't the best place to resolve shit. That is, if you're not going to use the 'Lago doesn't change his opinions, hurr hurr' excuse to just continue to be a passive-aggressive prick looking to score some points.

Because, you know, regardless of the truth content of your rant with respect to my behavior it has no bearing on my overall point. My being a pretentious cock has nothing to do other people writing propaganda, intentionally or unintentionally, through the vector of anti-heroes and villains.

[deaddmwalking]

Since we're talking about torture more than social engineering...

Torture is a real thing that really happens to people, and that's bad. The point of torture is to be deliberately cruel to the person.

Nations have agreed that they don't want their citizens tortured, so they agree not to torture the citizens of other nations.

Unfortunately, some nations or organizations don't want to agree not to torture other people but still want their citizens or members to be free from torture.

In a system based on 'mutual agreement', if someone refuses agreement, it puts other nations in a tough situation. It should be clear that it is tough because they value their own citizens more than those of the other nation.

If they refrain from torturing citizens of a nation that does not agree to it, it puts no pressure on that nation to agree to stop torturing. From a strictly practical standpoint, they should use torture only for the sake of pressuring that nation to stop using torture. Isn't that fucked up?

Nations don't work like individuals. Now, what makes things really murky is the fact that in the case of the United States, they've abandoned the idea of 'going to war against a country' and are now going to war with ideas (Drugs, Terror, etc). Since organizations that participate in these things are usually not 'nations' they have no protection for their members from torture, or the ability to make a meaningful agreement to not use torture on behalf of 'members of their side'.

So, if a group that you disagree with is not using torture, you should not use torture yourself. To do so is just to encourage that group to begin using torture (or at least justify it). If your opposed group is already using torture, you can use it to win agreement that they won't do it anymore.

In this case, torture is used as a deterrent. Any other use of torture is both morally wrong and counterproductive. Using torture as a deterrent is still morally wrong, but it's productive. Some people don't mind doing something morally wrong for a 'greater reason'. For example, lots of people will go to war and shoot other nice people in the face (even if they recognize that as wrong) if they think the larger issues are more important.

[Username17]

In a system based on 'mutual agreement', if someone refuses agreement, it puts other nations in a tough situation. It should be clear that it is tough because they value their own citizens more than those of the other nation.

If they refrain from torturing citizens of a nation that does not agree to it, it puts no pressure on that nation to agree to stop torturing. From a strictly practical standpoint, they should use torture only for the sake of pressuring that nation to stop using torture. Isn't that fucked up?

It's also not true. While someone doing something you don't like does require reprisals of some kind, there is no particular reason why those reprisals should have to be reciprocal. Especially since if you are dealing with a nation or organization that embraces martyrdom as a recruiting tool torturing their people may be ineffective at an organizational level.

The key to getting other factions to do something you want is to give sticks and carrots that matter to the organization you are attempting to coerce. Maybe they care about antibiotics, and you can threaten to cut off their supplies if they don't behave. Maybe they really want supplies of pornography or booze, and you can put sanctions on that. Hell, maybe they just really don't want their cities bombed. Whatever.

The thing is that getting agreement from another faction to do or not do a specific action very rarely involves the threat that you'll not do or do the same exact action if they refuse.

-Username17

[Korgan0]

It's all well and good to say that torture is ineffective and doesn't actually work and that we should stop torturing because it doesn't do what people say it does, but that's not actually what's being asked some of these questions. The real question is that if a situation were to arise in which torture is the only option and would also be effective, what would be the right thing to do? Simply saying that torture doesn't work in practice doesn't answer that question at all, since the point of asking such questions is usually to figure out some set of general principles through which we can make ethical decisions, or at least to force people to examine their own principles. You can just as easily sub in dropping nuclear weapons or forced sterilization or something equally as disgusting instead of torture.

Now we're getting way the fuck off-topic, so I'll try and bring it back. A key part of having a successful anti-hero is, I think, having something that your players, specifically, can relate to. The God-Emperor of Mankind becomes a shit-ton more relatable if you include a little blurb from his perspective, talking about how he's trying to save the human race from these terrible things and blah blah blah. Gordon Gekko is a terrible person, yes, but he still loves his kids and is trying to achieve something and make a lot of money, which are desires a lot of us have. The same applies to Han Solo and many other anti-heroes, and having something to relate to is what makes Sauron and the Orcs or whoever villians, rather than sympathetic characters or anti-heroes.

[deaddmwalking]

The Geneva Convention is all about reciprocity - but it assumes that all the parties have the same interests.

I won't use torture if you won't use torture. Agreed.
I won't use chemical weapons if you don't use chemical weapons. Agreed.
I won't dress my soldiers in your uniforms if you don't dress your soliders in my uniforms. Agreed.

Etc.

But clearly that only works with groups that have both similar capabilities and similar interests. That's why only nations are signatories - and why it specifically says that a country that signs is only barred from those actions with other signatory countries.

[Kaelik]

It's all well and good to say that torture is ineffective and doesn't actually work and that we should stop torturing because it doesn't do what people say it does, but that's not actually what's being asked some of these questions. The real question is that if a situation were to arise in which torture is the only option and would also be effective, what would be the right thing to do?

The hypothetical "What if killing all the Jews did solve all the world's problems, would you do it?" is never asked by non nazis.

Likewise, the question "What if torture worked, then would you use it?" is never asked by people who know torture doesn't work, only by people who think it does and are looking for justification by removing the question of effectiveness from the table.

[Orion]

It seems to me that torture could conceivably be an effective way to get information if and only if the answer they give you are subject to immediate confirmation. If I am standing in front of a door with a padlock, saying "I am going to keep punching you until you tell me the code" is an approach I could at least imagine yielding results.

---

Lago, the D&D cartoon thread really was above and beyond the TGD standard. I was on board with a lot of your values, but you really did put propaganda ahead of writing there, vetoing all kinds of great plots because the audience might misunderstand them.

[K]

Likewise, the question "What if torture worked, then would you use it?" is never asked by people who know torture doesn't work, only by people who think it does and are looking for justification by removing the question of effectiveness from the table.

Yup.

[kzt]

Likewise, the question "What if torture worked, then would you use it?" is never asked by people who know torture doesn't work, only by people who think it does and are looking for justification by removing the question of effectiveness from the table.

The problem with this theory is that it does in fact work, as long as you are asking questions that the target can be reasonable be expected to know the answers to and you can verify at least some as correct. For example, it's largely how the urban guerrilla movements in South America got crushed.

Of course, the methods and scale used there had pretty serious short or long-term drawbacks for pretty much everyone concerned, but that is not really related to the question as to whether using torture as interrogation method works.

[Korgan0]

It's all well and good to say that torture is ineffective and doesn't actually work and that we should stop torturing because it doesn't do what people say it does, but that's not actually what's being asked some of these questions. The real question is that if a situation were to arise in which torture is the only option and would also be effective, what would be the right thing to do?

The hypothetical "What if killing all the Jews did solve all the world's problems, would you do it?" is never asked by non nazis.

Likewise, the question "What if torture worked, then would you use it?" is never asked by people who know torture doesn't work, only by people who think it does and are looking for justification by removing the question of effectiveness from the table.

Outside the ivory tower of academia, maybe, but it's a common argument in the philosophical study of ethics, in that philosophers will say "x situation leads to a contradictory/undesirable/whatever outcome if we subscribe to y theory, therefore theory y is wrong". In actual conversation, I don't see a profound difference between what I just described and "who would you rather fuck: your dad or creepy Michael Jackson?" insofar as they're both abstract scenarios that will never actually occur that we use to test the limits of decision-making and so on.

[hyzmarca]

Likewise, the question "What if torture worked, then would you use it?" is never asked by people who know torture doesn't work, only by people who think it does and are looking for justification by removing the question of effectiveness from the table.

The problem with this theory is that it does in fact work, as long as you are asking questions that the target can be reasonable be expected to know the answers to and you can verify at least some as correct. For example, it's largely how the urban guerrilla movements in South America got crushed.

Of course, the methods and scale used there had pretty serious short or long-term drawbacks for pretty much everyone concerned, but that is not really related to the question as to whether using torture as interrogation method works.

Yes, torture works. People who say that it flat out doesn't are mistaken. The problem is that it works less often and less well than other less violent techniques.

The thing most people forget is that humans are not rational actors. OPur basic emotional responses evolved over the millions of years that our ancestors lived tribal hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They're ultimately optimized to help us survive in a world where primitive tribes stabbed each other to death over a couple square miles of land and the other side of that hill might as well be the other side of the planet. Thus you've got these need little throw-backs like learned helplessness and capture-bonding.

Prisoners identifying with their captors is an actual thing that happens because we're wired to seek out friendship when we're in high stress situations. It's one of those things that works really well when you're alone in the wilderness miles from your own tribe and you meet these other guys who speak a slightly different dialect and aren't really sure if they want to stab you to death or not. Making fiends means that you're got a whole new tribe full of people who will help you survive. Not making fiends means you get stabbed to death.

And this is why good cop/bad cop is an actual thing that cops use that actually works.

Humans aren't rational actors and the amount of stress needed to make them give up useful information fall substantially below the threshold of torture most of the time.

[kzt]

Yes, torture works. People who say that it flat out doesn't are mistaken. The problem is that it works less often and less well than other less violent techniques.

These methods are substantially slower, and don't work against people who have trained themselves or were trained to resist those methods. I've talked to cops who said they can get most people to talk if they can get them to answer a few questions at the start. These include questions like "do you want a coke?"

These non-violent methods can also produce false confessions. For example:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005 ... x-case-dna

http://www.theagitator.com/2008/12/19/m ... nfessions/

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watc ... full.story

[FatR]

Yes, torture works.

Physical torture generally works when you have a highly specific question, with a short answer that obviously can be swiftly verified (like "where you've hidden your valuables?" or "where in the city is the hideout of coup leaders?"). Even then you might encounter a true believer in a cause who cannot be cracked (at least not swiftly) because he's willing to endure pain just to set a trap for you. Not so much when you need to extract anything more complex from your prisoner.

[Dominicius]

....and not particularly implementable...

Nope.

TTRPGs is one of the most effective way to condition someone, probably more so than television and radio. The reason for this is because whatever message you want to get across gets codified into a system which have internal consistency and logic and our brains love that shit because it is easy to internalize. Stereotypes work in a similar fashion because they systematically associate traits with with certain people without us needing to use our time and brain power to identify the actual traits of a person. It's really as simple as saying that all women get a -2 penalty to str or that assassins are always evil. It doesn't matter that this does not make sense in the context of the real world, as long as it makes sense within the mechanical framework you created it becomes much easier for our brains to go along with it.

The way that D&D mechanics have shaped the worldviews of people can still be seen in fiction today. So yea, it can be done but not that you would want to.

[Midnight_v]

In games... unless you have some explicit torture for answers "rules made out. Its far easier to know someone unconscious and use charm person (or whatever variant of invasive mind rape you have available at the time), so its a fucking non-starter in many cases. . .

Also Agree with the guy who says torture "Tell use where the safe is or we'll cut your daugters hand off" actually works.
Cause you can check it "Right then" and generally people don't want to see loved ones suffer. So you can totally pull shennaigans when you catch elven rangers at the treehouse etc. . .