Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tantavalist" data-source="post: 8242745" data-attributes="member: 7030056">OK, so perhaps it was badly worded.Traveller was used as the example because PCs don't tend to become superhuman with experience. As in real life, they can absolutely evade the law. It's just that they have to use a combination of quick wits and good luck to do so. At no point do Traveller PCs become powerful enough that they can turn around and tell the Imperial Navy where to stick it.As in real life- maybe they can take down a lone patrol ship just as criminals can kill off a single car's worth of police. But that results in escalation that the criminals can't match forever.In D&D or Pathfinder? If law enforcement can take down a high level party then why the hell didn't they also take down every single threat that the PCs have dealt with throughout their adventuring career up until this point? There is no answer that doesn't just boil down to "Because this is how we want things to work, so that's how it does work."It's like in superhero settings where somehow anything that would change things from the real world are plot-hammered away. Why isn't the reaction of someone as powerful as Superman to being given demands by a government to reply with, "Or What?"That should in fact be something that all settings worry about. At any point the GM should have an answer to what happens if the PCs are told to obey the law and they respond with "Or What?" And more important, this answer should be consistent. It should also apply to NPCs. Why didn't the GM's answer to "Or What?" also apply to the bandit gangs, roaming monsters or evil wizards that the PCs have fought?I tend to play games where PCs are larger than life but not superhuman. Hence my original post in this thread. In those games, the PCs would inflict a lot of damage before they went down but could probably be handled by the authorities eventually. But said authorities also tend to consider just how badly they want to take the PCs down before doing so. In many pre-industrial settings the local lord is likely to start cltivating the PCs as an ally if he doesn't crush them as a potential threat.</blockquote>

Verification