Coming in elemental form to say that Sunic is doing much, much better than usual. I'm actually enjoying one of endaire's discussion threads, though perhaps that's because I'm smart enough to stay away from PF. Carry on
Mostly because I only start smiting when people are being imbeciles. Since there's little of that here...
Elaboration: If your adventure is interesting, PCs will pursue it willingly. If it is not interesting, they will not. If you have to railroad, it's because you need a better adventure. As such, something that serves no purpose but railroading literally does nothing but promote bad DMing. As for the being captured itself, it's really very simple:
1: It is as difficult, or harder to take someone alive than it is to kill them. Most often harder.
2: It is considerably more difficult to keep someone as a living prisoner than to kill them and keep them dead.
3: The PCs, however will not be holding back.
Any group strong enough to defeat the PCs, despite these factors and capture them, and who now also has the advantage of stripping them of spells, magic items, etc is completely untouchable to the PCs. They are irrevocably fucked, assuming that the enemy is in any way competent. If they aren't, then the DM was just fucking with you for the lulz and wasting your time. So just tilt your camera around, as if this were a bad video game to find the massive hole in the wall that should be very obvious from the perspective of the character, and escape in 5 seconds. Either way, it's still a fate worse than death, as either way you have to delete and reroll to continue play. However while there is no question that you can delete and reroll a dead character, a bad DM, such as the type to necessitate such railroading, douchebagish measures in the first place is likely to force you to be stuck with an unplayable character. And if you did get thrown into the worst prison ever, so that you actually can escape from it that still means he's the type to fuck with you for the lulz, so in that case the solution becomes to get out of that campaign.
And the NPC consumable thing is complete and utter fail. Try again, this time getting it right.
NPCs need to use consumables like crazy just to be a threat at all. They also get three times as much wealth as typical encounters, so if they don't use consumables they give way too much treasure (in the form of vendor trash, but still). Such an NPC is very beatable, and it certainly isn't something you have no practical means of doing. Not even close. Try sucking less, as humanoid NPCs are the easiest opponents in the entire game.