frankieleon from Maffle Ath, Belgium, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Torture is evil. As a disclaimer, you do not have to allow it in your games. It is not inherent to Dungeons and Dragons, and you can shut down players who attempt torture any time you want. This table does not attempt to fix any of that. Instead, for those who wish to allow it to some degree, it provides a simple resolution mechanic to help run those scenarios. Personally, I'd rather not have full-on bloody descriptions of the act at the table, and I'd rather get to the "good" bit: consequences.

This table was directly inspired by Luka Rejec's Witchburner, which has its own more specialized 8-ball. I cannot recommend this module enough, and I may write a sort of experience/review on it eventually. Its specialization makes it a little hard to rip it out and run at the table, hence this post. It's also directly inspired by Jacob Geller's video on torture in Call of Duty.

You can either let this be a one roll rules all sort of thing, or have multiple rolls for multiple questions. I would personally advise not allowing too many rolls on one question, as it sort of defeats the point.

A half-truth can be anywhere on the spectrum of truth and a lie. Perhaps the victim gives the correct location of a dungeon up, but doesn't mention the giant ogre whom lives just within its doors or the spiked pit traps surrounding the entrance. You can always substitute these with mostly lies, just as long as they lead to something of interest, whether for positive or negative reasons.

Complications are the lifeblood of the table's thesis. Writing the table, I assumed interrogational torture and the questions I had in mind would pretty much always pertain to something the party wants. This should hopefully give plenty of space to allow for interesting dynamics. When in doubt, roll up a particularly scary random encounter and put it wherever feasible.

Minor complications should be narrative road bumps. They aren't necessarily very deadly, but they should be annoying enough to be significant. These can include walking past a scout, finding the wrong side of a location, not knowing the specific location of the McGuffin or any number of other minor occurrences.

Major complications stop the flow of the adventure. They are often deadly or lead to further bad consequences down the line. My personal favorite is placing an ambush in the path of the party. You could also make some sort of trigger for a later event: for example, maybe the children of the victim find out about the torture and start a blood feud.

You'll notice that there are not very many good outcomes. This serves two goals of the table: simulating the actual effectiveness of torture while also punishing liberal use of morally abhorrent tactics.

On one hand, torture just doesn't work. I'll just link an easy to read Nature article here. I'm absolutely no expert on this myself in any way, but the arguments for its ineffectiveness seem as true to me as my own understanding of how physics works, more than enough to use it in a ruling.

On the other hand, that doesn't matter much. Torture is also just bad and an action that should have some consequence, even if you have to reach towards karmic justice to make it make sense. We do this all the time in tabletop games: players are punished for killing civilians and doing evil shit. Paladins and Clerics can literally lose their powers for doing evil shit. I personally think it's fine to extend that outwards.

So, torture doesn't work out too well with this resolution method. What's next? It's simple.

Reward alternative methods. Communication and collaboration go a long way. Perhaps the party could treat their prisoner of war well. Perhaps letting them go will mean that their home faction is more friendly to the party. Perhaps they work with the captee to overthrow the evil dungeon boss. Honestly, I'd probably even allow a Naruto-like morality lecture to convince the captee of a 'better way'.

What matters at the end of the day is that the party has choices. Torture is alluring because it also seems like a simple and easy transaction: I don't torture you, you give me what I want. It's so alluring that more 'murder-hobo' type parties can often gravitate towards it. If other options are around, hopefully they'll choose those instead.

As a final disclaimer: this will not fix meta-problems. If you just don't want torture in your games, speak to your players. It's okay. Torture is evil.