Hostage Situations Part 2 - Negotiations
December 15th, 2010
Hello everyone and welcome back to Grave Plots, where we bring you new and exciting adventure ideas each and every week to get your creativity going. This week, as promised, is the second installment of a three-part series dealing with hostage situations. Since it’s been a while, let me refresh your memory. Last time we covered that there were three different kinds of hostage situations that make for good adventures: the Rescue, which we covered last time; the Negotiation, which will be today’s topic; and Captured, which will be covered immediately following Elf Week. So before I get too sidetracked, let’s get down to business discussing the negotiation, which I hope you find both fascinating and useful in your future adventures.
The Negotiation
While the rescue might be the most common form of hostage situation encountered in video games and comic books, the negotiation is a favorite of movies and television, and there’s no reason you can’t bring that kind of Hollywood-quality adventure to the roleplaying table. If by some chance you’re not familiar with the genre, I would recommend taking the time to see a good hostage negotiation film, or, if you really want to go the extra mile, read a book on the subject; depending on whether realism or drama is more important to you, choose a non-fiction or fiction book, respectively, just to help you get a good idea of the kind of tension that will turn the negotiation from a heated argument or gregarious exchange, into the truly magnificent high-stakes adventure the negotiation is meant to be.
What follows are just a few pointers to keep in mind when running the negotiation in order to ensure that you and yours get the most out of the adventure. Firstly, and most importantly, the negotiation adventure is all about roleplaying; if the conflict seems likely to be decided by a few skill rolls, then really the whole exercise is wasted. That’s not to say, of course, that social skills and even not-so-social ones won’t be useful, but you simply must resist the temptation to let everything hinge on something so random and insignificant as a die roll, or on something so predictable and absolute as an obscenely high skill modifier, in order for the adventure to meaningful and, even more importantly (rather, vastly more importantly), fun. The skill rolls just have to take a back seat to good old-fashioned roleplaying; if you don’t think your group is up for that, you might want to consider another option for running your hostage situation adventure.
Second, your hostage situation needs to be top-notch in order for the negotiation to have the desired effect. There is a whole list of things you can do in order to help ensure your situation is of the highest caliber, and we’ll get into that in a moment.
Third, there needs to be something for every character to do. While it’s all well and good to let your group’s talker have a day in the spotlight after weeks of hacking through monsters, it’s just not good form to let anyone sit out in the cold while the two of you have a one-on-one session, no matter how enrapturing the sounds of your respective voices might be. A good hostage negotiation has something for everyone to do: surveillance on the building where the hostages are being kept, demands that might need to be met, smokescreens to be created, breaches to be planned, contingencies to be made, circumstances to be changed, civilians to be kept at bay and any one of a million other little things.
Fourth, negotiations need to be artfully conducted. What this will look like will vary from group to group: it might consist of a lot of witty banter on behalf of the hostage takers and the chief negotiator, or the slow unraveling of the hostage takers’ dark melancholy and his personal problems, or it might be a realistic gritty situation with the hostage takers’ arrogance or religious zeal generating a strong sense of fear for the well-being of the hostages, no matter how the deal turns out. We’ll cover this section again a little bit later when we get to talking more about tip number two; just remember to execute the whole shebang in a relatively elegant fashion (that is to say, elegant for your group and your individual play-styles).
Fifth, when you’re running the adventure, remember that atmosphere is your friend. If your group usually plays music during your game sessions, you might consider electing a more high tension soundtrack, or even deciding to go without music in order to reflect the gravity of the situation. If lighting is your thing, go for dreary grey, or else lighting compatible to your location. Even just the way you speak to your players can have a dramatic effect on the mood of your game. You want to give your players the sense that hostage negotiations are only matched for memorable drama by climactic, apocalyptic, and truly desperate situations. It’s important to pull out all the stops to make this adventure something your players will be talking about for ages (or at least at the beginning of the next session, while everyone’s busy eating pizza and chatting before the real action starts).
Finally, remember not to limit yourselves to the traditional paradigm. Evil PCs often make the best hostage takers, and trust me, it can be real fun to be the negotiator for a change.
Now, as promised, it’s time to talk about maximizing your hostage situation for negotiation adventures. The first thing you need to look at is who your hostage takers are. Ask the critical questions: who are they? why are they doing this, and/or what do they want? and how are they doing it? Once you have answers to these basic questions, it’s time to go a little further into their motivations and appearance in your game. By the time you’re done, each hostage taker should have a backstory you’re familiar with, a personality reasonably distinct to him or her, and dreams and ambitions of his or her own. Next, the bad guys need plans; while the most typical real-life examples of hostage negotiations are acts of desperation after the police show up earlier than expected, and while this might make for a fun little side adventure, all the best hostage situations – the ones people remember, the ones they make movies about, the reason that people emotionally invest in drama about hostage situations – all have some common elements, and one of them is a brilliant cast of bad guys with a killer plan. That said, your hostage takers have to have a plan with which the PCs might be able to interact, having either some holes they can exploit, or a particularly interesting revelation, or by some other means.
Now you need hostages. The actual nature of the hostages is notably less important here than it was in the rescue, but they still need to be people the PCs (or the good guys, if you go the way of the evil PC kidnappers) don’t want to see dead. The only time it really matters who the hostages are is if the hostage takers implemented them in their plan in some way.
Then comes time for the negotiation itself. This needs to be artfully conducted; some common pitfalls to avoid in doing this include: using clichés your group is overly familiar with, making the adventure too easy or too hard, or doing things out of character for your bad guys in order to either play to or play against the PCs’ expectations. In order to make your negotiation shine, use whatever your grade-A roleplaying dialogue is. Make sure there’s a good reason the PCs can’t just go in, guns blazing, and smoke the baddies before their plan can come to some kind of fruition, and stick to the character for the hostage takers discussed earlier at all costs. A few other pointers include: make sure that your hostage situation is going down in a setting-appropriate fashion, adjust for the use of magic (particularly teleportation and divination spells), and ask yourself why the hostage takers are holding their victims where they are if they could move them to a demi-plane designed to hold them. Let your PCs use their skills (while still following the number one most important thing): a Diplomacy check might go a long way towards building a relationship with one of the hostages permitted to speak with the negotiators, Perception might notice critical details that aid in overall planning, Climb might let the fighter get into the perfect position to ambush the hostage takers when they finally come out, Stealth might do the same thing for the rogue, Appraise or relevant Knowledge might tell the PCs more about the hostage takers’ demands and reveal portions of their plan. Remember that the key to a good hostage negotiation is high tension, and seek to bring that feeling of worry and desperation to every aspect of the adventure.
In light of the fact that good hostage negotiations are all about the roleplaying and character development, I’m going to forgo the usual adventure idea in lieu of 1d10 potential hostage situations, as follows.
1 - An evil archlich is holding the PCs’ families hostage at his volcanic lair and is threatening to kill them unless they do what he says.
2 - A group of rebels have captured a royal princess and are keeping her at an undisclosed location until their demands are met.
3 - A trio of witches are holding all the male citizens of a village hostage by inducing them into a trance-like state; the village women have hired the PCs to deal with it, lest the witches as of yet unknown, but surely insidious, plans come to fruition.
4 - A dark cult has claimed responsibility for the abduction of the daughter of a priest and are threatening to execute her unless their brethren, already executed for their crimes, are released into their care.
5 - A group of skilled rogues is holding all the employees and patrons of the Great Hold Bank hostage, apparently so that they might escape the robbery without being caught, but is there more going on here?
6 - The chosen one of a new religious movement has been kidnapped by devils, who are making unreasonable demands and threatening to corrupt the child unless they are met.
7 - A powerful dragon is holding the entire town of New Ensburugh hostage, refusing to release them unless the PCs will speak with him.
8 - A madman is holding a church hostage, and unless the PCs can help him with an imagined problem, he will kill them all.
9 - A greedy assassin has poisoned the well in the town of Collins and will only give them the antidote if they will pay him 500,000 gp, a sum they simply don’t have.
10 - The PCs take someone hostage.
Well, there you have it for this week’s Grave Plots. Stay tuned for future adventures, and take heart that we will continue our spotlight on hostage situation immediately following Elf Week, which is next week. Until that time, I would like to wish you all the best in your gaming endeavors.