Sometimes it can be fun to challenge your players by giving them an encounter that they can't (or at least, shouldn't) just cut their way through. A good example of this is someone with some kind of legal or inherited authority (usually, with witnesses), whether that's a squad of guards wearing the local lord's livery and collecting taxes, a spoiled noble, a well-connected employer, or the child of the royal family themselves. In all these cases, the PCS probably shouldn't just kill their opposition because it'll result in bounties levelled against them or warrants for their arrest.
Be cautious though, as these encounters can easily lead to Chaotic Stupid syndrome (or equally, Lawful Stupid syndrome) where someone decides to start fights for laughs and then derails your campaign as they're suddenly wanted for murdering the Crown Prince. Ideally, you want these encounters to be clearly nonlethal (guards brawling and using their spear butts rather than swords), and be able to lead to gathering some kind of evidence that could lead to their arrest or revocation of their legal authority, if they have crossed a moral line that the PCs just can't put up with (killing commoners, for example). I've talked previously about how important it is to be able to de-escalate situations that spiral out of control when you don't expect them, and the example was of a corrupt guard force trying to tax adventurers, after the adventurers had found evidence of children being mistreated in their city. The PCs spiralled very quickly to "we'll kill these guards in a fight, in plain view of the citizens" because they thought the guards were full-on Big-E Eeeevil, when it was intended to be an annoying encounter rubbing in just how lazy and uncaring (low-level small-e evil) they were. You could also include a non-combat 'out' like paying a bribe, persuading the other parties that the PCs' cause is important, and so on. Bearing this in mind, here are some examples of legal authorities you could use in your game:
I hope these examples give you some ideas you could work with! Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm Luke. He/him pronouns. Archives
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