Would a typical D&D town allow adventurers to walk around?

Halivar said:

Adventure hook: "WANTED -- Adventurers to rid our town of adventurers we hired to get rid of some other adventurers. No bounty, but you can keep their stuff."

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I'm reminded of a plotline from Schlock Mercenary. The protagonists had a mission to extract some data from a computer system at a city library. When things went south, the authorities put out a bid for someone to come take care of the "terrorists" at the library. The main characters accepted the bid and sent down a second to to extract the first in the guise of capturing the first. The completed their primary mission and the addon succesfully and got paid twice.

... Now I want to try that as a D&D adventure.

Ruin Explorer said:

Treating rich-ass, superhumanly powerful adventurers as "vigilantes to be stopped" seems like cruising for a bruising to me...

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So, like in the most recent Batman films, then?

so I doubt that'd even be the official line.

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The thing is that if the society pretends to be governed by the rule of law then that really has to be the official line. Because while Batman might be well-meaning, he's pretty much poison to the running of a lawful society - he very publicly shows utter contempt for the local laws and those charged with enforcing them. He makes the GCPD a laughing-stock, meaning that they couldn't clean up the streets even if they wanted to. Plus, he's responsible for more crimes, and more destructive crimes, than just about any of the criminals he hunts down.

I suppose the exception is if the adventurers were persuaded to wear a badge and to uphold the law themselves. But that's not exactly common behaviour for PCs.

Ruin Explorer said:

The problem with demands that people present themselves to elders or the like is that adventurers are likely to be vastly more powerful than the town elders or the like. Immediately attempting to push the adventurers around and force them to conform to your demands, means you're sowing the seeds of hostility.

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That's really a player expectation problem than a world-building problem. Unless the players are specifically playing psychopathic amoral murderhobos, then they're going to recognize and respond to civil authority despite their own personal power. In general, it's been my experience that the higher level adventurers tend to travel incognito as much as possible, because by the time they are at the town-destroying stage they also have made some powerful enemies that they'd just as soon not be able to track their every movement.

I can't really give any advice if the players insist on playing psychopathic amoral murderhobos and react to any curb on their desires by thinking people into the cornfield. That way lies the madness of 20th level guards and every town having an Elminster clone simply for the purpose of dealing with psychopathic amoral murderhobos.

Magic does pose a problem to civil authority. In most worlds I've run, I generally use one of two approaches.

1. Most wizards don't bother with normal people. Once they get about fifth level or so, they go off in the wilderness and build their tower and stay there for the most part. Wizards that go a little power mad and screw with mortal society are usually the type of things that adventurers deal with by sticking them with swords until they stop moving.

2. The Wizard's Guild. A good idea of this sort of thing can be found in Lawrence Watt-Evans' Ethshar books, where wizards and spellcasters of various types can be found running shops and are treated like any other profession. And like any other profession, all wizards are members of the Wizard's Guild. You don't get a choice in that. Your master inducts you before you're released from his service. Country boys who somehow get trained are expected to join when they go into a town of any reasonable size for the first time. Wizards that do not join disappear, simple as that. The Guild knows the reputation of all wizards everywhere would suffer if wizards were to engage in mass unlawful activities, so the civil authorities simply trust the Guild to take care of problems before they become problems. The Guild, like all guilds, has the authority to try it's own members, etc, and the Guild considers all wizards, everywhere, to be 'members' whether they are or not.

They do have occasional problems, like with the Warlock of Vond (who was, for all practical purposes, Superman), but those are exceptions to the rule.

There isn't going to be one generic answer - it depends upon realities of the world, and the cultures involved. How large the village/town/city is matters - a smaller place is unlikely to have a workable defense, for example.

My original response in the other thread was concerning guards for merchants. In the real world, where there were bandits and thieves between towns, but no monsters, caravan guards and bodygaurds for merchants were pretty regular things around the world. If that same merchant has to deal with orcs and such, I don't see how you you can expect them to travel without protection. And asking them to walk around any sizable town (with its expected burden of thieves and muggers) without a bodyguard is going to make them think twice about doing business within your town - and can the elders really afford to have that happen? Rich and important people in our world have armed bodyguards. Why not in the fantasy world?

Moreover, do remember that a large chunk of the PC classes can be very dangerous people without wearing overt arms and armor. The party monk is just going to look like this guy. The bard can look just like any other musician. Going after the guys who are visibly in armor and weapons means leaving the people with fireball wandering around! In 5e, at least, where magic items are apparently not supposed to be central to a character's power, using detect magic as a way to ferret out dangerous people is failure prone. So, these ways of trying to keep the town safe would be "security theater" - for show, because when it matters, it isn't going to work against an intelligent foe.

The one thing I don't understand is the idea that people are forced to react positively because its D&D. Society doesn't necessarily work that way... and society wouldn't evolve to simply appease these powerful beings. Countermeasures would be devised over time. Customs would evolve to account for these powerful people.

As for countermeasures, either the town elders or officials would be powerful people on their own, or they would be operating under the protection of more powerful people. This would go a long way toward ensuring that murder hobos would be hunted down should they disrespect town customs or citizens.

Customs might evolve in various ways around such things...

Maybe everyone gets a little bit of weapons training, and every man, woman, and child carries a dagger in case of trouble. In the new edition a mob of dagger wielding townies is still a threat to a party of PCs even into mid levels.

Maybe every town has several rookeries and alarm bells that will warn not only the citizens to hide in their cellars but send word to all the other nearby towns that there is trouble (Right her in River City... and that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Player Characters!)

Or maybe customs are that magic users cannot enter towns without the consent of elders. And this has been negotiated by some powerful group of magic users that will hunt down anyone that breaks this custom.

Anyway... just some riffs on the concept.

You could use the analogy of the mafia or yakuza.

If a group of them were in my town what would happen?

Lalato said:

As for countermeasures, either the town elders or officials would be powerful people on their own, or they would be operating under the protection of more powerful people. This would go a long way toward ensuring that murder hobos would be hunted down should they disrespect town customs or citizens.

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Note that countermeasures require wealth. Why is a rural town official a powerful person? He has all the power of a murder hobo. Being a murder hobo pays pretty well, right? So, why is is a civil servant, getting payed diddly to protect a town?

There will be some few who do it for good reasons. But not many. We have ample evidence of what happens when the "protection" forces aren't really good people. Who watches the watchmen?

Maybe everyone gets a little bit of weapons training, and every man, woman, and child carries a dagger in case of trouble. In the new edition a mob of dagger wielding townies is still a threat to a party of PCs even into mid levels.

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Yeah, but how many of them are going to die in the process? Is that cost of life really worth the damage the murder hobos are going to do?

And, what damage is that, exactly? In a big city, they may rob rich people, sure. But those rich people can hire their own darned security. In a rural village, what, pray tell, is the murder hobo doing there? There's no darned gold to steal. No magic to find. There's just a bunch of farmers. There may be the occasional group of sociopaths in it for hurting people just 'cause, but by and large, murder hobos stay alive by being smart. Is it smart to mess up a fishing village just for giggles? No. So, will they frequently do so? Probably not.

This kind of feeds into an important point - security is developed in response to rare events tends to be *bad*. Expensive and ineffective, more for show that, "we are doing things to keep you safe" than to actually keep you safe. Thus the phrase "security theater".

We are not actually very good at creating proactive shields against normal, real-world harm. We usually work with retroactive security - if a bad guy does act, we catch 'em, and do something to 'em to teach them a lesson and provide a deterrent to others who might be tempted to try the same. I am unconvinced that the fictional world should somehow be better at security than we are.

delericho said:

The thing is that if the society pretends to be governed by the rule of law then that really has to be the official line.

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No, modern Western society does. Not "society" historically. Nor is the rule of law consistent. We constantly see people who are a raider/pirate one minute and an official lord the next. As much as we have one law for the rich/powerful, one law for the poor/weak, in the past it was vastly greater (and often LITERALLY the case).

delericho said:

Because while Batman might be well-meaning, he's pretty much poison to the running of a lawful society - he very publicly shows utter contempt for the local laws and those charged with enforcing them. He makes the GCPD a laughing-stock, meaning that they couldn't clean up the streets even if they wanted to. Plus, he's responsible for more crimes, and more destructive crimes, than just about any of the criminals he hunts down.

I suppose the exception is if the adventurers were persuaded to wear a badge and to uphold the law themselves. But that's not exactly common behaviour for PCs.

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None of this applies well to medieval/renaissance societies, particularly ones under constant threat. Medieval law enforcement was selective, biased and arbitrary in the extreme.

WayneLigon said:

That's really a player expectation problem than a world-building problem. Unless the players are specifically playing psychopathic amoral murderhobos, then they're going to recognize and respond to civil authority despite their own personal power. In general, it's been my experience that the higher level adventurers tend to travel incognito as much as possible, because by the time they are at the town-destroying stage they also have made some powerful enemies that they'd just as soon not be able to track their every movement.

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No idea where this murderhobo business is coming from. I'm talking about the realities of power imbalances and how powerful people who were outside the "official" power structure were treated historically.

WayneLigon said:

I can't really give any advice if the players insist on playing psychopathic amoral murderhobos and react to any curb on their desires by thinking people into the cornfield. That way lies the madness of 20th level guards and every town having an Elminster clone simply for the purpose of dealing with psychopathic amoral murderhobos.

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Nothing I've said has anything to do with that, so I guess you're talking to someone else at this point?

Celebrim said:

Yes, though I should first say that 'adventurer' is not a recognized profession in my world. The closest equivalent to adventurer as you use the word is 'mercenary' or 'sellsword'. Adventurer as D&D players use the word carries the connotation of hero or problem solver, and is positive in the way that the English word 'Knight' is (and not in the negative way that Ritter is in German). The word adventurer isn't in common parlance in my world. You'd never say, "We should hire adventurers."

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For what it's worth the modern connotation of adventurer as a positive thing is recent. Go back 120 years and the word meant something closer to bandit or maybe highwayman.

Celebrim said:

*snippy snip*
And if they were to leave and come back with about twice as many levels, it wouldn't be long before everybody was deferring to them out or respect or fear or both.

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I want to play in your game. Your world is better thought out and shows more historical nuance than most.

Historically, most noble houses got their start as basically bandits (or adventurers) that settled down and gave themselves airs. When it was less trouble for their neighbors to play along than to kick them out they succeeded and a noble house was born.

And attitudes and laws vary by place. In europe you has an unarmed (mostly, there's always flails and pitchforks) peasantry that was down trodden and a fairly brutal aristocracy. In the UK you had an armed yeomanry and the nobles either used a lighter hand or discovered that formenting a rebellion amoungst people who are required by law to practice the longbow is a bad plan.

Now where D&D departs from history is in the personal power of high level characters. In the modern era it's pretty easy to aquire weaponry equivilent to mid-level D&D magic, as a society we're still trying to work out exactly how to deal with that. A lot of places in the world have rather spectacularly failed to deal with the fact that with commonplace weaponry you can't crush your populace for very long. There are some exceptions, which mostly run as brutal police states which put most of their energy into crushing the populace while simultaneously telling them how good they have it. It's worth noting that if a band of 'adventurers' showed up in a police state they would very, very rapidly have to make a choice between working for the state, or trying to bring it down. Either way they'll probably be killed.

The point is, that you need to, as Celebrim has, think about your world and the people in it. How have they been shaped by their geopraphy, history and culture? What is the basis of the laws? (There are two basic systems: What is not permitted is forbidden, or What is not forbidden is permitted.) Are you using the medieval model where you sort of have a net of different power structures which police their own and get prickly about jurisdiction? (The craftsman was making a statue for the Bishop. Is his murder a guild matter, a church matter or a city matter?) What are the local monsters and how has their presence impacted society?

Suggested reading:
Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
The Night of Madness by Lawrence Watts-Evans
A medieval reader
The Judge Dee novels translated by Van Gulik

Ruin Explorer said:

None of this applies well to medieval/renaissance societies, particularly ones under constant threat.

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This stretches back to the question of the world, the culture, and the individual locale. What threats does the town face? What threats have they faced in living memory? Are murder hobos really an issue that's high on their list of priorities?