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Originally Posted by Xplo
Other posters have commented on turning the capture into an advantage (by putting the prisoners into an otherwise secret or heavily-guarded area where they can foil the enemy plan/take out the enemy leader/learn the big secret/steal the artifact/whatever) and I think that's an excellent idea.
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QFT. I've had my players
plan for their PCs to get captured naked so that they could get close to the bad guys to spy, assassinate, etc. I allow this to work, if the PCs can defeat the obvious barriers to success.
This brings up an important point, though: Action heroes should generally be at least somewhat competent at picking locks, sneaking, escaping, etc., and at combat with bare hands, improvised weapons, and light weapons. The most vocal whining comes from players who create Mr. Action as a one-trick pony with all of his feats/points/dots in Big Sword or Huge Gun. You can blame the player, but I don't. I always tell my players from Day One that, really, an action hero without basic unarmed, stealth, and evasion skills isn't viable -- please redesign. I haven't seen a
GURPS PC without an unarmed combat skill and a Stealth skill in years, now.
I consider this obvious . . . but really, it isn't. In skill-intensive games such as
GURPS, especially, I can genuinely see how a player might not realize that stealth, evasion, and fighting unarmed are separate, trained fields that require an investment. The best way to set up fun and interesting capture and surprise scenarios is to make sure you subtly coach your players to design their PCs in such a way that they're not utterly useless if captured naked or forced to rely on subtlety instead of major force.
(I'll add that we can thank well-meaning but ultimately poorly conceived class systems for the common perception that only Thieves need stealth and Monks need unarmed combat, and that such things are beneath Warriors . . .)