Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
I have a hard time imagining an inquisition hiring a sheriff, who already has a job with a wage, to help them. Or to be more precise, I can't imagine a sheriff (the medieval kind) keeping their position after doing so. Skipping work to do something else is fine when you're self employed or don't technically have a job, but when you're a bailiff or a knight or similar failing to perform your duties without a damn good reason is a big deal.

And while I'm not an expert on the issues Britain suffered in India, I'm pretty sure the snakes weren't actually a problem before the bounty, or at least not one that needed a bounty to try and solve it. Barring unusual circumstances like the Beast of Gevedaun or Paris in 1420, people who live in an area are usually able to deal with the animals that they live near, or they haven't have been living there for long.

As for settlements not dying immediately, I don't consider a settlement lasting ten years before dying instead of three a win, in the circumstances in which I'd find such a village I'd probably tell them to go back to a proper town and move on rather than enable their self destructive desire to strike out. In most contexts I might actually consider the settlement dying to be the win. There's very few situations I can think of where a bunch of people travelling beyond the nominal borders of their realm and building new settlements in lands already occupied is a good thing. In the OPs context of goblins, the idea is clearly that the goblins are attacking lands that have established human settlements, and which should be protected by the same infrastructure used to resist invasions or deal with rebellions or brigands, in a 'fringes of civilisation' context it basically means the villagers are encroaching on the goblins rather than the other way around, and in such a context the village is the bad guys.
I mean, I'm not going to tell you what you find believable, but the historical precedent is there. Both for governments putting out bounties on problems they aren't equipped to solve (without the entire country collapsing), and for individuals doing whatever jobs needed doing, without settling on one trade skill. A knight who kills 10 goblins isn't "failing in his duties" just because there are 100 goblins this month. And it isn't blasphemous to temporarily hire some people to deal with the rush.

As for the goblins, I don't think your average medieval town was equipped to stop all of the bandits who harassed them. The fact that banditry was common in medieval Europe, (and consequently in DnD) kinda hints at the fact that they just didn't have the infrastructure to resist invasions or deal with brigands.

I think foxes in the American Southwest are a perfect analogy for goblins. The local governments tried really hard to drive them to extinction using whatever means necessary, because foxes kill livestock. They never succeeded though, because foxes adapted to live on the outskirts of the cities, and because they have some mechanism to reproduce more quickly if their numbers drop. This effort lasted quite a long time (around a century if I remember correctly). It mirrors how most fantasy settings treat goblins too, a pest that kills people and damages property, but is too persistent to wipe out completely.