Why do we have bandit scenarios?

[TheAuldGrump]

I think that the real solution is to have the encounters be interesting, even if it is just bandits.

A line of archers along the top of a talus slope (for difficult terrain), swords and spears at the bottom. Give them some teamwork feats, if you use them.

Bandits with a planned escape route for when the engagement goes all pear shaped. (One favorite, borrowed from a source that I no longer remember, is some air filled barrels floating under muddy water, kept from rising to the surface by ropes and open on the bottom. A place for the surviving bandits to hide after diving into the river, good for maybe an hour or so.)

Encounters where the bandits are already engaged in battle, or are pillaging a caravan.

An encounter with bandits that are already in battle with somebody/something that outclasses them - letting the PCs engage a critter/foe that is already injured. (Or, in a robber encounter, the party 'rescuing' a disguised lich. One that is then favorably inclined toward the PCs if they tried to help 'her'.)

Encounters with a band of brigands that are battling in an internal dispute - only to unite if the PCs engage them while they are fighting.

I will admit, I have used more than my share of robber/bandit/highwayman encounters.

The Auld Grump

 

[delericho]

Bandits typically fit in the "minor challenge" department. They're minions. They're a few rolls, then out.

Yep. In 4e, of course, this can be modelled directly - just make the bandits literal minions. You might well want to re-fluff the damage they take, so that when they take that 1 hit point of damage they're not dead, they're just out of the fight - and then have the bulk of the bandits run away when they realise they're overmatched.

(In pre-4e, simulating minions is also easy - just give them minimum hit points for their hit dice. Almost exactly the same effect, for minimal work.)

 

[delericho]

One of the great things about bandits is that they are so versatile.

Want a quick encounter to highlight the danger of the Points-of-Light world? Bandits will do nicely - go heavy on the minions.

Want a nice, quick hack-and-slash adventure for a night's play? Have the PCs dispatched to deal with bandits, and model the lair as a five-room dungeon.

But from there you can ramp up the complexity further. Perhaps the bandits by and large aren't bad men, just driven to extremity by circumstances. But then, that might not mean that the local lord is corrupt either. This could just be a case of a global lack of resources causing bigger problems - can the PCs mediate a solution, or perhaps even fix the underlying problem?

And even that doesn't need to be as deep as the rabbit hole goes. Just because the local lord is an upright sort, and the bandit chief is basically a decent fellow, doesn't mean that things can be resolved. In both camps, there are likely to be multiple factions, with their own rivalries and fueds.

Perhaps the bandit chief's camp includes a notorious murderer - a genuinely bad sort who needs a good hanging. Problem is, the desperation of his situation meant that the bandit chief couldn't turn him away, and he now feels his honour won't let him betray an ally.

Perhaps the local lord's forces contain an enforcer who is that bit too over-zealous. He's been rounding up the wives and children of some of the bandits and threatening them. Had the lord known, he would have stopped it, but he didn't. Making any sort of a peace is going to be difficult with the enforcer still in place, though.

And on and on it goes. Basically, there's no limit to the detail that can be added to the scenario, to suit whatever tastes the group have. Whereas with orcs, say, this isn't really true to the same extent - rightly or wrongly, PCs are seldom going to have the same qualms about mowing down monsters as they do when the enemy has a human face.

 

[I'm A Banana]

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.

Before the invention of CR and Monster Level, there was only XP. Which meant that if you encountered some enemies that didn't give you much XP (4 kobolds for a level 4 party or something), those were the quick 1-3 roll encounters. Things that the Fighter could handle pretty much independently. An encounter with 20 Orcs or something could get huge, but with low monster (and PC!) HP, and few effective choices of action, even those combats likely took less time on average than the 45 minutes we spend today on them.

It's still possible for a 3e or 4e party to encounter a handful of low-level critters, but the design emphasizes meeting critters of around your level. In 3e, those can still be swingy two-roll affairs (largely thanks to Save-or-Die at higher levels), but in 4e, they almost never are.

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.

In early D&D, the significance of these 1-3 roll encounters wasn't that they would kill you right then and there, but that they would kill you through slow attrition over time, or at least that they would drain your party's resources for when the major combat (or whatever) happened. These resources included HP that came back agonizingly slowly, carefully rationed spells, and even consumable magic items that one relied on luck (or a beneficent DM) to drop. By the time 3e rolled around, healing was functionally easier, invalidating a lot of this style of play (though preserving it in some instances, such as when a DM kept Wands of Cure Wounds away from the group). 4e invalidates it even further with the "extended rest takes care of everything" mechanic.

D&D has lost this "long-term resource management" aspect over time. Thus, encounters with a few bandits or a minor trap are seen as pointless speedbumps. Despite their legacy in the game, they have no reason to exist in a game with little or no long term resource management. If everything's OK after an extended rest, you must put all the challenge the party will face in the adventure between the extended rests. You can't stretch it out with minor 1-3 roll encounters, since the effects are largely pointless after a night's rest.

Yep. In 4e, of course, this can be modelled directly - just make the bandits literal minions. You might well want to re-fluff the damage they take, so that when they take that 1 hit point of damage they're not dead, they're just out of the fight - and then have the bulk of the bandits run away when they realise they're overmatched.

(In pre-4e, simulating minions is also easy - just give them minimum hit points for their hit dice. Almost exactly the same effect, for minimal work.)

Well, that makes the combat quick, but that doesn't preserve the LTRM aspect. For THAT, you need to do something like reduce the rate at which healing surges come back, or something similar. In that case, if the handful of bandits force the players to spend a few surges, it's weakening them for later.

Of course, the effect is slightly reduced when you can't even usually spend all your surges in a single combat, anyway, and so a reduction in healing surges isn't always felt in a given encounter the way less HP or fewer spells is felt.

And all of this is a symptom of a tight focus on the encounter -- to the exclusion of the focus on the broader adventure. Resources return quickly so that you can have more encounters, rather than being hard to recover so that you can have a more challenging adventure.

 

[The Shaman]

I think that the real solution is to have the encounters be interesting, even if it is just bandits.

Good examples, [MENTION=6957]TheAuldGrump[/MENTION].

Around half of my random encounters are events occurring in media res, like the Grump's bandits attacking a caravan or settling an internal dispute. These encounters often represent an opportunity for the adventurers to make a choice which carries consequences: will the adventurers take a side? if so, what happens next? if not, what happens next?

 

[pemerton]

In early D&D, the significance of these 1-3 roll encounters wasn't that they would kill you right then and there, but that they would kill you through slow attrition over time, or at least that they would drain your party's resources for when the major combat (or whatever) happened.

<snip>

D&D has lost this "long-term resource management" aspect over time.

Even back in the day when I played and GMed Basic and AD&D, this sort of resource management was never a huge part of what I enjoyed about the game. So I'm personally not sorry that it has been deemphasised.

 

[wingsandsword]

Here's why I like and use bandit-type encounters in the games I run:

Mechanically they are much the same as orcs/goblins/kobolds: basic humanoids with no special powers unless they get them from a character class. It's a simple fight without a lot of special rules that lets the PC's shine because they can probably hit harder and use flashy magic that they have no immunities or special defenses to.

In low-level games, IME, PC's will sometimes loot the mundane weapons and armor to re-sell them back in town. A dozen shortswords and sets of leather armor sold back at half of standard price is not an inconsiderable sum to a 1st level party.

They help reenforce to players that humans/dwarves/elves/halflings/gnomes aren't always "good guys" just because they are PC races and show the world isn't quite black & white.

I like it because it lets me also show and lay out the elements of the setting without player preconceptions of monstrous races in the way. I don't have to worry about PC's always thinking that orcs are two-dimensional villains if they run across brigands that they could bribe or talk their way past, but will probably have to fight. If they talk, they could find out why they do what they do: forced to a life of crime by high taxes, refugees from a war that have been denied sanctuary and have to steal to survive, remnants of the previous regime or of a routed invading army, just plain greedy thugs who figure it's easier to steal someone elses money than earn their own.

 

[Desdichado]

Probably. But if you're doing that, I would suggest just dropping XP-for-combat entirely. There's not really any need for it, and it just gives the DM much more freedom in his pacing.

I strongly dislike the advancement being dependent on combat angle of D&D and have for years for a variety of reasons. It's an easy change to make, and there's a variety of ways to implement it. Normally, I just do away with XP altogether and tell the PCs when they're good to level up, but other times, a flat XP by session attended method or something works fine. You're also absolutely right in that it creates meaningful incentives to do things other than combat, both as a player and as a scenario designer and/or GM, which is one of its greatest benefits.

See, it's difficult to comment on that without knowing what "something significant" means. If the key conflict in the encounter comes about due to interactions with the various NPCs in the caravan, than those "days of journey" aren't filler - they're needed so that the rest of the module makes sense. (The PCs have to get to know the NPCs, or the rest of the story falls flat.)

On the other hand, if the adventure is really about some external threat to the caravan, then those "days of journey" are indeed filler. In which case, the thing to do is probably just drop them. But that's just bad adventure design. (Which, of course, I'm not going to defend!)

Well, not necessarily. Sometimes those kinds of activities are fun for their own sake, so even if they don't "further the story" or whatever, they're still nice to do. That's one of the key differences between gaming and writing a novel or screenplay, IMO, and a great example of why it's important to be careful about making too many parallels between gaming and works of fiction that may inspire them.

Yep. I recall running the first adventure in the "Savage Tide" adventure path, and being struck with the fact that there's a huge thieves camp (or were they bandtis/pirates?) that, frankly, just isn't very interesting - just room after room of filler encounters.

It was okay with that group, since we were playing weekly for six hours at a time. However, with my current group we play mostly fortnightly, for three hours a session. In that environment, my tolerance for filler is minimal. Indeed, I don't use pregen adventures with this group at all, as the assumed pacing just doesn't work for us.

No matter what the purpose, though, that's bad adventure design. If the encounters are boring, tedious or repetitive, and the only thing that they offer is XP, then they're still badly designed. We should expect our XP to be fun to acquire, shouldn't we? I think the boring, tedious and repetitive charge can be labeled fairly at a lot of moduels I've played, and I would guess that the reason that they're included is, as inferred here, to give the players more XP. But that's really not a good excuse, though, even so.

(At the same time, I don't agree with a "drop all filler" policy - sometimes it's good to remind the players that there are other things going on in the world than their current struggles against the BBEG.)

In which case, arguably, it's not filler, as it does serve another purpose, i.e., to flesh out the setting and create a sense of verisimilitude.

But I think this line of reasoning also leads to the "My Precious Encounters" school of design.

Heh. Love that label.

I think a source of what people perceive as filler is more a problem with pacing the adventure as it plays. Encounters on the way to a destination, even if not particularly meaningful or important, give the DM tools to inject action when relatively mundane things are going on, like travel. But too many of them in an adventure site leads to too much combat grind, which also disrupts the pacing. This would be true whether the encounters are relatively mundane (bandit after bandit after bandit) or "meaningful".

Right; that's part of what I was trying to get at earlier, but which I think you said very well. Even meaningful combats can be tedious if poorly designed. There's more to exciting pacing than combat after combat unless you're the most gamist group of people who play D&D like a game of WarhammerQuest group of folks I've ever seen.

That said, the opposite is also often a problem, where the PCs are floundering around trying to figure out what needs doing, and are starting to feel restless or frustrated, and bandit encounters are a good fantasy/medieval analog of the Raymond Chandler rule; "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand."

In the end, bandit encounters offer games a number of benefits. On the road, they give characters with outdoorsey powers or longer ranges with powers or weapons a chance to shine in ways they don't in dungeons or ruins. If used judiciously, they give characters information about the surrounding area - law enforcement is difficult, travel dangerous, legitimate economy depressed, and the bandits usually have good local knowledge if interrogated. Trick, as with anything in adventure design, is to not overuse them.

On the contrary, bandits can be the core of an entire campaign. There's tons of source material to read about organized crime and rural organized crime, highwaymen, Robin Hood, The Swamp Fox, and I don't know how many real life inspirations. You just have to make sure that bandits don't become boring and tedious.

 

[The Shaman]

In which case, arguably, it's not filler, as it does serve another purpose, i.e., to flesh out the setting and create a sense of verisimilitude.

This.

On the contrary, bandits can be the core of an entire campaign. There's tons of source material to read about organized crime and rural organized crime, highwaymen, Robin Hood, The Swamp Fox, and I don't know how many real life inspirations. You just have to make sure that bandits don't become boring and tedious.

And this.

Sometimes those kinds of activities are fun for their own sake, so even if they don't "further the story" or whatever, they're still nice to do. That's one of the key differences between gaming and writing a novel or screenplay, IMO, and a great example of why it's important to be careful about making too many parallels between gaming and works of fiction that may inspire them.

But most especially this.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Even back in the day when I played and GMed Basic and AD&D, this sort of resource management was never a huge part of what I enjoyed about the game. So I'm personally not sorry that it has been deemphasised.

IMO, the resource management wasn't done the most elegantly before, and could certainly stand to be improved, but to dismiss it entirely is to miss the forest for the trees -- or the adventure for the encounter, in this case.

"Survival Horror" is a genre of game arranged around hoarding scarce resources. Every bullet. Every medpack. Every bit of food. It provokes a very visceral form of tension. You need everything you have in order to make it out alive. It is a game designed around scarcity, with strategy shown in how one makes use of those scarce resources.

Early D&D arguably had, in some instances, a "dungeon survival" element of challenge, with scarce resources that needed to be used intelligently for victory. Fights took place in a broader game of managing the scarce hit points and healing spells the party had. Sending the wizard to kill the goblins wasn't just a bad idea, it was potentially the last idea you'd have. Fighters showed their worth by being the biggest, toughest, hardest-hitting bucket of resources around.

This mirrors a narrative arc: as resources diminish, tension rises, and threats escalate, until the biggest threat you meet is met with your resources nearly gone and takes all of your luck and strategy to endure. Rising action-to-climax right there in the mechanics.

Now, dungeon survival isn't necessarily for everyone, or for every mode of play. But part of the reason we have the bandit scenario is that it fit very comfortably in that mode of play. Whatever else it did narratively or to simulate the world, in gameplay, it was an element that raised the stakes by consuming limited resources. In fact, Bandits could raise the stakes in interesting ways, since they were theoretically after wealth, and not lives. If you could spare the scarce resources, you could escape without a fight. It was a choice between spending some HP or spending some GP (or even some unique treasures).

Bandits are a great encounter in a game that puts encounters in a greater context. They do loose quite a bit of their oomph when removed from that context, however, as do many classic D&D tropes.