Eva's been watching The Vampire Diaries with Jenn

[conuly]

And also some other shows, and I'm recently aware of something I ever noticed before or had totally forgotten: for at least the past 20 years, American media has been trying hard to sell the idea that torture works. It doesn't matter whether it's the good guys doing it "because the ends justify the means" or the bad guys for the same reason but also they're evil, or who it's being done to, if it isn't halted they get the results. People who don't know anything don't start lying in order to make the pain stop.

This is, of course, bullshit - and we've known it for hundreds of years.

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Comments

[dorchadas]

I think about this in tabletop RPGs, too--if the players want to torture someone, do I do the accurate thing and have the person just say what they think the PCs want to hear, do I play into their expectations, or do I stop the game and make sure we'll all on the same page about what kind of characters the PCs are?

This comes up more often in some games I like where you explicitly play terrible people (Vampire: the Masquerade, say) than others.

[conuly]

I think you take option two right off the table, and that if you do allow it, you make sure that other characters stop trusting torturers because nobody does.