Why do we have bandit scenarios?

[TheAuldGrump]

This is largely true. The only time I have a problem with bandits is when they initiate an attack on the party. It just seems unreal to me, that these people, driven to violent means to make ends meet, would attack a group of multiple, well armed people. Seems like they'd prefer the weak and lonely, no? Still, bandits with alternative patrons make a good time. I've been using "bandits" to some effect in my game. They only pretend to be lawless, though. In truth these elven warriors are under the command of their government, to encroach on the human lands and act in the interest of "elfkind"(naturally, most elves want nothing to do with these radical extremists)

Yep - the raubritters would want to quash the PCs as rival powers, and a sizable band of brigands might attack the well armed adventurers for much the same reason.

Otherwise the PCs might have to go out hunting the bandits rather than just being waylaid by them, either trying to find the bandit camp or trying to disguise how they are equipped.

Also fun are the bandits that only charge a 'toll'. 'Ya wanna pass through our woods? That'll be one gold a leg, so six for you gents on 'orses, two for you friar, and you can go free miss - always nice to see a lady in these woods. And just one for you, sir Dwarf, yer kind 'as shared a cup wi' me more'n once. Let's call it twenty-three gold, altogether. Nar, make it twenty, keep the numbers even.' Give them a patter, you'd be amazed at how much this can confuse players.... Have them lower the price while summing up and the PCs will often end up paying.

The Auld Grump

 

[mmadsen]

The only time I have a problem with bandits is when they initiate an attack on the party. It just seems unreal to me, that these people, driven to violent means to make ends meet, would attack a group of multiple, well armed people. Seems like they'd prefer the weak and lonely, no?

This is a recurring problem in games (and in fiction). As a rule, no one is going to attack without a pretty good reason to think they'll win. Even dangerous predators -- lions, crocodiles, etc. -- won't attack just because they'll likely win; they don't want to risk injury.

Adventuring is a lot less fun when you're either (1) not attacked, or (2) attacked from ambush by an overwhelming force.

The good news is that a D&D party can easily be much, much tougher than they look -- although everyone knows to kill the guy in the pointy hat holding a staff, right?

Also fun are the bandits that only charge a 'toll'. 'Ya wanna pass through our woods? That'll be one gold a leg, so six for you gents on 'orses, two for you friar, and you can go free miss - always nice to see a lady in these woods. And just one for you, sir Dwarf, yer kind 'as shared a cup wi' me more'n once. Let's call it twenty-three gold, altogether. Nar, make it twenty, keep the numbers even.' Give them a patter, you'd be amazed at how much this can confuse players.... Have them lower the price while summing up and the PCs will often end up paying.

As you point out, the line between bandit and local authority is awfully fuzzy.

If you go back and read the earlier King Arthur stories, they're remarkably simple -- a bit like pro rasslin' plots, really -- and typically amount to a good knight getting stopped at a bridge by a bad knight, who demands to joust any passing knight and mistreats the losers. The only problem, it seems, is that the bad knight takes the whole thing a bit too far, not that he "owns" the bridge and challenges anyone who wants to cross it.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Adventuring is a lot less fun when you're either (1) not attacked, or (2) attacked from ambush by an overwhelming force.

The good news is that a D&D party can easily be much, much tougher than they look -- although everyone knows to kill the guy in the pointy hat holding a staff, right?

On the flip side is the party making that one crucial Spot/Listen/Perception roll that means the ambush doesn't go as the bad guys planned.

Makes for a happy party.

Another tactic are those 'bandits' that just harass the party - spend two or three rounds shooting at the team, then fading into the woods instead of coming to grips. If the party starts to avoid those woods then the bandits have won. They don't need to rob the party, they just need the party to go somewhere else!

And, with the mercs turned bandit, you can find entire towns under the control of heavily armed and armored bandits.... And not afraid to attack with what appears to be overwhelming numbers.... 'Wooh, look boys! Four adventurers... good thing there's twenty of, err, eighteen, fifteen? Run away! Run away!' D&D being D&D, numbers can be deceiving....

Another fun gambit is 'false numbers' - scarecrows done up to look like men hiding in the woods, adding a half dozen or so men to the apparent size of the threat. And any shots sent in their direction will be wasted.

The Auld Grump

 

[Eric Tolle]

To add a social context, bear in mind that bandits can't exist in isolation; they need someplace to trade their loot in and get supplies. They will have friends, lovers and families. So the odds are, the bandits probably come from a nearby town, perhaps the one they're "terrorizing". It may be a merchants vs. farmers conflict, or village vs. village. If it's a clan-based culture like that of the Vikingso, then power then perhaps the bandits are backed by a poor steading.

In other words, answering the question of what the bandits do when they're not robbing people will do a lot toward making them interesting.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

To add a social context, bear in mind that bandits can't exist in isolation; they need someplace to trade their loot in and get supplies. They will have friends, lovers and families. So the odds are, the bandits probably come from a nearby town, perhaps the one they're "terrorizing". It may be a merchants vs. farmers conflict, or village vs. village. If it's a clan-based culture like that of the Viking so, then power then perhaps the bandits are backed by a poor steading.

In other words, answering the question of what the bandits do when they're not robbing people will do a lot toward making them interesting.

Singing and dancing is always popular....

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJAfXaziIwM]Robin Hood[/ame]


The Auld Grump

 

[Balesir]

Well, a meaty thread I had overlooked completely...

Trying to address the OP, to restrict the length of my reply: I think the "ubiquitous bandit attack" grew out of the early development of D&D and sort of took hold as a trope.

My (personal) summary of the early development of D&D is that it started out as a wargame, which made it principally a contest (to win the battles against the monsters) but with a "realist" streak that came from the strong feeling in wargaming of that time that the "system" should be faithful to the (received wisdom about the) combat of the historical period being covered. Forgetting that the "period" was actually "fantasy", rather than "medieval europe", per se, the game took off on an assumed "truth" that the system had to model the game world in order to have any validity. This assumption seems to be pretty much alive and well to the present, in many quarters.

This all went swimmingly, until the presence of "characters" and such created a vogue for making "stories". The player characters, naturally, were expected to be the main protagonists, but this created a bit of a problem. RPGs were, by this time, a geek hobby (I say as a proud geek). Talking about character motivations and personality were therefore a taboo - you were naturally too clever to need to actually communicate about this stuff, so "we" weren't going to insult you be bringing it up...

Sadly, given that any story is created around a protagonist that has a dramatic need/motivation, this left a gap. The solution was to provide some easy/standard/no-brainer motivations as "placeholders" to get the game rolling until the players cottoned on to the setting and situation and created motivations of their own - at which point, we would finally have "game on"!

Caravans, missions involving trouble and encounters with bandits were all nice, easy tropes to coin in order to get this going. The PCs are skint? An employer needs a mission done and offers riches untold (yeah, right)! Don't know the other characters from Adam? No problem - you need to travel to this other place - you can get to know each other on the way. Hey - some Bad Men (TM) attacked you for no reason (well, to rob the guy you are travelling with, but, hey) - you must fight them!

Nice, easy motivations with no real thought required. Hopefully, by the end of these "prods", the players will have expressed some motivations for their characters - specific goals, or simply curiosity or outrage about the banditry hereabouts. If not - well, add more easy motives and (cattle) prods to action until they do; they must just be a bit thick to miss it, so far.

Am I being unfair or a bit lighthearted - yeah, sure. But I do think that is at least part of why the "bandit encounter" trope came about.

 

[The Shaman]

Bandits are just like anything else in the world: a part of the setting. I don't see them as "time to fight" (especially since my players have avoided fights with them before) nor do I see them as "filler" (nor do my players). I see bandits (or lack of bandits) as part of the setting, and their presence (or lack of presence) helps shape the setting.

Could someone please xp-bomb [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] for me, please?

Here's something I wrote about bandits awhile back.

For example, a randomly generated 'bandit' encounter becomes rebellious Huguenots in the Midi foraging for supplies for the duc de Rohan, or ragged, half-starved mercenaries returning from the Holy Roman Empire and resorting to brigandage in Picardy, or chauffeurs roaming the pays of Normandy looking for victims to capture and ransom. In this way there are no 'generic' random encounters; each is a reflection of the game-world where the adventurers are standing at the moment.

My ultimate limbo-stick is, does the game-world reflect the genre? If the genre is one in which bandits, frex, are an expected hazard, then not having bandits would take away from emulating that genre.

I put genre-emulation at the head of the list because this allows me to create a game-world ex nihilo, behind the veil of ignorance, without regard for the specific player characters in it.

I think this is the "encounters as making the experience seem real" that I mentioned upthread. It's a different approach from the Burning Wheel approach. It doesn't produce filler. From the point of view of the BW-aficionado, it probably will produce a lack of "structural integrity".

Yet another reason for me not to play Burning Wheel.

 

[Mark CMG]

Could someone please xp-bomb [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION] for me, please?

Done and done.

 

[frankthedm]

I don't know if Morrowind understands that (IMXP, most videogames are intractably stuck in the short-term model, without many nods to long-term management),

Reminds me how Oblivion's borked Enemies Level=Your level system would start Slapped Daedric Armor and Glass weapons on bandits.

but D&D pre-3e certainly did.

Actually 1E Bandit groups could get pretty big [20-200 ] , had a leader around 9th level and a few modest level fighters.

 

[pemerton]

Not every combat is an epic wager against the Great Red Dragon.

Some are just, "We met some trouble on the road." *two attack rolls* "We solved some trouble on the road."

Modern D&D editions have focused on the encounter being the center of the game, giving the impression that each combat needs to be a tremendous thing, but it really doesn't. Draining resources slowly is an important part of the game of D&D, to me.

I think there's basically two major sorts of er..."challenges" that a party faces. Some of them are quick 1-3 roll affairs that are pretty simple that one or two characters can do without having to involve the whole party for a huge time-sucking affair.

<snip>

There are also big challenges that the entire party are involved in

<snip>

But having all major challenges all the time is pointless.

At least as far as combat encounters are concerned, D&D has never really had a "quick 1-3 roll" method of resolving an encounter. I think it would be nice to have such a thing (skill challenges can be adapted to this at a pinch, but it's a bit haphazard and hand-wavey).

On the issue of "big challenges" and "epic wagers" - not every encounter needs to be epic in scope (although in my own experience it does no harm if many are), but I prefer every encounter to be significant in its implications - that it matter to the situation with which the players (via their PCs) are engaged.

I like this advice, from the Burning Wheel Adventure Burner (p 266):

It's easy to think that you should Say Yes to low-obstacle tests. This is not the case! You should Say Yes when there's nothing at stake, no conflict. You should call for [low DC checks] in situations of risk, even if it's small. These tests often produce beautiful, unexpected results.​

Because in D&D failure is sometimes mechanically impossible, the mechanical dynamics of low-DC checks are different from Burning Wheel. But where there is some genuine conflict with which the players are engaged, they can still make an interesting contribution. This example of a social skill challenge illustrates the point:

I run a quick skill challenge as Kryx convinces the guards to turn against Sosruko.

This was interesting. Kryx had a massive modifier - +13. He was rolling against the Will Defence of the guards - 14. That means he could only fail on a 1 if he said something that gave him a penalty.

Pointless exercise in dice rolling? No, as it turns out. Having to go through a number of checks meant that the guards made some demands of their own - that Kryx would be their new sheriff, that they would still keep their jobs, and that Kryx would "deal" with the bandits. Kryx gave them his word (part of the reason he was able to get such a high modifier), and as a dragonborn and a paladin that's a big deal.​

That sort of thing is not filler, but it's more than just "trouble on the road".