The Bandit Dilemma

[DiscipleofBob]

Recently I started with a new gaming group, playing a Pathfinder module where the premise is the party being conscripted to explore uncharted land, chart it, and clear out any threats, especially the various bandit camps that have taken up residence.

Now this sort of thing I've noticed comes up in a lot of early level games, I think as an unintended consequence of certain types of random enemy encounters.

Whenever we beat some bandits or monsters, the game suddenly grinds to a halt as all the players argue over what we want to do with the enemies.

Recently, as a random encounter, we fought some unabashedly evil man-eating goblin-wolf creatures that lure innocent travelers into ambushes. We had little trouble taking them down until one surrendered and the healer managed to stabilize another unconscious one. At this point, the party completely splits on how to handle this.

Keep in mind, we're in the middle of the wilderness on horseback. It will take days to reach the nearest settlement, a nearly deserted fort that has only recently gotten some guards.

We can't kill the creatures because the Good and Lawful characters in the party don't want to kill enemies that have surrendered.

We can't let the creatures go with a warning because the Good and Lawful characters don't want evil man-eating creatures around to ambush other explorers/travelers.

We can't reasonably bring these and every other bandit we find back to the fort. The fort lacks a secure prison and they'd be left in the care of NPC guards who can't even be bothered to post a night watch that stays awake while on duty.


- The CG fox-girl healer wants to try to rehabilitate the creatures.
- The LN half-orc monk refuses to kill or let be killed any enemy that surrenders.
- The rogue, a newer addition to the party, after his vote to kill the creatures gets shut down, starts to "accidentally trip" onto the creatures dagger first.
- The fighter wants to keep the evil sentient goblin-wolf as a pet.
- Me, the CN sorcerer, would choose between killing them or risk letting them free to spread word of my character's power and spread my notoriety. The last time I killed a bandit we'd taken prisoner (said bandit was a lieutenant and had terrorized our NPC friends and had almost killed me in combat) the healer refused to heal me for several sessions until my character proved himself. Now my character stays out of those moral dilemmas. I've tried to have IC conversations with the other characters about what we plan to do with future prisoners to avoid this kind of thing, but these sort of things tend to get glossed over in-game.

Maybe it's a matter of the players having too much OOC morals to resort to being typical PC murder-hobos, but I find that nearly every typical enemy encounter has some moral dilemma that leads PCs to a grinding halt when they have to decide what to do. Do we kill the bandits that have surrendered or do we go through the laborious possibly dangerous process of escorting them to the nearest garrison ourselves? Do we kill the wild wolves or other beasts or do we feed them magically flavored trail rations as to not unnecessarily kill off indigenous wildlife? Are those brain-eating zombies actually restless wandering souls that need to be purified and put to rest?

Does this sort of thing come up in your games? Where it's all fun and games until you have to decide what to do with the surrendered/captured prisoners? How do you decide what to do without going into an hour-long discussion about character morals and alignment?

[Lord Raziere]

I think this is a point where if the PC's can't decide themselves, then its up to the GM to keep the game going through convenient coincidence: suddenly a bunch of paladins or whatever ride and take the bandits off your hands for their own judgement. problem solved. the PC's only have the right to make decisions as long as they want to make a decision, if they can't then time to take control until they feel like making a decision again, then letting them play things out.

like y'know- an epilogue kind of thing:
"you are victorious over the bandits! since you can't decide what to do with them, a bunch of paladins suddenly rides in and take them off your hands real kindly for some proper justice, onto the next adventure!"

[Maglubiyet]

It depends on who conscripted you to clear the land of bandits and the exact wording of your contract. Whose jurisdiction are you in -- what is the law of the land? Are you deputized law enforcement or collecting bounties?

They must have given you some standing orders.

[Gritmonger]

Unless it's causing real conflict (as in OOC conflict) I assume the players want to play through such a theme, unless they tell me otherwise. I won't short circuit it if the players are using it as some moments to explore character development; only if it's one player who hijacks the rest.

These moments don't come up much if you're talking things like ochre jellies, giant spiders, and gibbering mouthers - the instinct to destroy destroy destroy is less restrained.

Once enemies become intelligent, and motivated, and capable of surrender - then you'll have these scenarios. If your players don't want this type of scenario (and have trouble with enemies that might want to surrender or retreat) you can keep most of the enemies of an unintelligent type that you can't really feel pity for, or seek justice for.

[zinycor]

As your group if they enjoy this sort of dilemma at the table, they might be very fond of it.

If not, then someone wil have to start deciding to change his character a bit, in order to work better wth the party.

for example, you could retire your character and bring another who has a set of morals that works with the group.

[BayardSPSR]

"You are victorious over the bandits! Since you can't decide what to do with them, a bunch of paladins suddenly rides in and take them off your hands real kindly for some proper justice. On to the next adventure!"

Actually, I think that might be the solution. Personally, I love in-character arguments, but if it's slowing down the game having someone else show up and demand jurisdiction changes the discussion to one one of what terms the prisoners are given up on, which is an in-character argument that is far less likely to produce ultimatums.

It's not "roleplay time's over, get a move on!" It's "this scene is going in circles, so let's change the circumstances."

[Lord Raziere]

Actually, I think that might be the solution. Personally, I love in-character arguments, but if it's slowing down the game having someone else show up and demand jurisdiction changes the discussion to one one of what terms the prisoners are given up on, which is an in-character argument that is far less likely to produce ultimatums.

It's not "roleplay time's over, get a move on!" It's "this scene is going in circles, so let's change the circumstances."

That works to. its the GM's job to make sure the game keeps moving if the players start stagnating and getting bogged down or if they clearly do not want to deal with the conflict presented to them. sometimes that means making the world be a little pro-active rather than just a static thing that reacts to them. also works if you get into paladin arguments- suddenly a whole pack of paladins showing up will make things more clear, as it changes things so that they have examples to compare the party's paladin against. of course, don't use it all the time- just when things get bogged down and slow on MORAL issues.

because ninjas suddenly appearing out of nowhere is for boredom in general. when your players are bogged down in moral issues a group of paladins showing up can actually simplify matters.

[illyrus]

I think talking to whoever hired you and asking for limited judicial powers is the way to go. Unless this is a super progressive settlement I imagine they'd just drag the creatures out back and hack off their heads.

By that token, it is uncharted land, the people you're working for have jurisdiction there the same way an invading army does, which is to say none past their swords.

As a GM it's been a rare thing, maybe I just have communities more racist than most other GMs but they're not going to hold a trial for a gnoll; if the party brought one back the guards would feather it with arrows before they got it through the gate. I'm not saying it is bad roleplay, but after the 2nd time I'd personally lose interest rehashing the exact same moral/alignment arguments.

As a player, I dunno, grab geas (or similar) and have them serve you as foot soldiers with the understanding that if they betray you they die. I imagine the GM will stop having any and everything surrender or else you will have a company worth of creatures under your command.

[Vitruviansquid]

Well, the "problem" is that you are playing DnD, which has the alignment system, which leads to players wanting to express their alignments. If you don't like this part of the system, you might switch systems or houserule it out, but if the rest of the table is playing DnD because they like DnD... well, tough.

But okay, let's say the other players at the table feel the same way. If I was the GM in a game where this Bandit Dilemma got out of hand, I'd probably try to give the players a norm, saying "in this area, it would probably be expected that you do X with the bandits" or "by the way, your questgiver would've told you to do X with the bandits in case this situation came up."

Alternately, you could just look around your table and say "look, guys... can we just... not?" Maybe have a compromise like everyone roll a d20 and the highest roll gets to decide what to do with the bandits. Most players who aren't sociopaths put the group's fun above roleplaying their character's imaginary morals.

[Kane0]

In our kingmaker game we had a similar problem. For the ones that didn't get sent to the Worldwound we gave a 'trial by wilds'.

Take all their stuff except the clothes on their backs, hand them a dagger and release them one by one. Tell them if they survive the wilderness they are essentially free to go.

We only saw one after that, she was a productive member of society once again in one of the little towns we established.

[hifidelity2]

We had this in one adventure. As we had been employed by the local lord we decided we had the judicial authority. We made the Paladin the judge, had a trial, found them guilty and then executed them – all in accordance with the law

The fact that my character enjoyed killing them was “by the by”

[Storm_Of_Snow]

Along the lines of "paladins show up and take care of it", have the PCs patron establish communications with the PCs (Sending for example), and arrange to send a regular patrol to pick up any prisoners, if the PCs escort them to a certain location on the edge of the uncharted lands - maybe a guard tower or something.

Which of course means you can have adventures where the PCs are fighting off the prisoners associates who're trying to rescue them.

After a while, have the patron send a small group to build a settlement somewhere, with civilians who can support the PCs in various things (a smith, a trader to allow them to sell off loot, an innkeeper etc), and enough guards to ensure the settlement's security and that of the immediate area, but not enough to take over from the PCs, or assist them.

Maybe the PCs discover some abandoned buildings that could be a ready-made settlement.

[Lapsed Pacifist]

If this is Kingmaker the lawful characters should want to kill the bandits: the contract you are given says that you are the law enforcement and the punishment for unrepentant banditry is death by sword or rope. Our party killed the leader of the first bandits we met and put him in a gibbet, then a couple of the other bandits offered to lead us to their camp, so we let them off.

[Lord Torath]

The Wandering Paladins is not a bad idea. If it were my campaign, they would encounter the PCs' group, find out the situation (including the deputization of the party), and tell them that, according to their employment contract with the local authorities, they are fully authorized to try and execute the prisoners themselves, what with Banditry being a capitol crime in most medieval societies, and all. If the PCs had a hard time with that, I might even have the paladins execute the prisoners, then follow up with Lay On Hands on any wounded party members to show "see, we didn't fall!"

[goto124]

This dilemma could be extended to many/all conflicts of RP. It's not even limited to alignment. When two or more characters/players in a group disagree on which action to take, we run into this problem.

And there's no simple way to resolve it, apparentally.

[Joe the Rat]

Recently I started with a new gaming group, playing a Pathfinder module where the premise is the party being conscripted to explore uncharted land, chart it, and clear out any threats, especially the various bandit camps that have taken up residence.

If this is Kingmaker the lawful characters should want to kill the bandits: the contract you are given says that you are the law enforcement and the punishment for unrepentant banditry is death by sword or rope. Our party killed the leader of the first bandits we met and put him in a gibbet, then a couple of the other bandits offered to lead us to their camp, so we let them off.

It's these little details that help speed things along: If dispensing justice is part of your job, the ethics are somewhat clear.

But let's play with the situation a bit. travel by horse over rough terrain is not all that much faster than travel by foot - the main advantage is that the rider is a bit less tired at the end of it. So you will be slowed down with prisoners - and they will be pretty much exhausted by the time you stop somewhere unless you get mounts for the human-types. It's actually not a bad idea to have spare horses anyway.

Bandits and travelers mean there has to be someplace people are going to/from. When you finally reach those forts/settlements/hidden dwarf kingdoms, they are the local authority. And will likely kill them anyways, since they are not equipped to handle long-term detainment of dangerous beings.

Weregild and Corporal Punishment are things. A person in jail is a drain on resources. Either they pay a fine, take punishment (from stocks to beatings to some sort of permanent marker - branding, ear-nailing, hand/finger removal, etc.), or sentenced to death, depending on the nature of the crimes, and the resources of the accused. Indentured servitude is also an option: They are working for you as scut hirelings as part of their lawful punishment. Attempting to reform the miscreants during this period is a reasonable plan - increased responsibility and freedom for good behavior, etc.


For my group, roleplay is a big part of what they're in for, so the handling of prisoners live foes is not "slowing down the game." They've also developed a wonderful system for those still alive: They hire them. If you're a badlands bandit, or a grubby goblin, you're probably not in it for the sightseeing and all the wonderful people you get to meet. You're in it for the money (or food). So pay them. Well. My players have are close to being outnumbered by their collected ex-enemies, but they also treat them fairly, and pay them well above standard. (The cleric also threatens to steal the souls of those who would betray the party, but that's mostly to keep the humanoids in line). You've demonstrated you're stronger, and you can buy their loyalty. Leverage that. There's also great opportunities for roleplay in dealing with reforming the bad habits of your man-eating dogsbody (friends, not food), and I suspect most GMs would relish the opportunity to have their own "Slurpy the Goblin" type to voice (annoyingly) and mutter about plotting escape and/or killing the characters in their sleep (constantly) while still acting the loyal lackey.

Eventually your GM will start getting sick of the extra bodies, and start making enemies more fanatic so they don't surrender, or supernaturally evil or monstrous (example: undead) so there is no point in attempting redemption. Or they will start using large armies or enemies with area effect attacks or absolute grinders of encounters to whittle down the number of add-ons. Which has nothing to do with the lake-troll encounter my players may or may not have while sailing to their next objective.

[Frozen_Feet]

If this has happened more than once, they really ought to have established a protocol or flowchart for this kind of thing. That's roughly how my players typically solve this. They have the discussion once, and then just rinse and repeat whatever they decided on.

[Lorsa]

Moral dilemmas can be very interesting in roleplaying games. So can in-character discussions. If I was a GM I would simply let the characters decide by themselves what to do (including the hour of discussion), and then take the consequences of that decision. These sort of discussions means that your players are highly immersed in their characters, which is always a good thing in my book.

[Segev]

Yeah, your best bet, if the only impediment to keeping them around is that you don't know what to do with them, is to make them your hirelings. Don't leave them unattended until you're sure you can trust them, but put them to work doing camp services. Pay them better than they could get from pillaging, and treat them with more dignity than they would get from their typical evil humanoid boss. Never show weakness to them.

This will give your foxgirl a chance to try to redeem those who can be, your fighter his minions, and give you, if needs be, cannon fodder (especially should they try anything shifty or treacherous).

[Mr.Moron]

Does this sort of thing come up in your games? Where it's all fun and games until you have to decide what to do with the surrendered/captured prisoners? How do you decide what to do without going into an hour-long discussion about character morals and alignment?

There is usually a pre-game outline about the tone of the game and how we expect things to go in terms of theme and level of grittiness/brutality. I also ask players to create characters together and come up concepts that have worldviews with at least some overlap. So I generally won't generally have a paladin in the same game as CN kill-and-be-done with it.

The second way I handle this is by controlling the circumstances under which enemies surrender. In case like yours, evil goblin-wolves in the middle of nowhere, I probably just wouldn't have had them surrender. They'd fight to the bitter last and if captured they'd violently try to escape capture, yanking on their chains like a rapid animal to the point of hurting themselves. I wouldn't give them anything in the way of a personality or sense of self preservation.

If it's humans or human-like enemies, unless I'm really looking to cast them as scum of the earth they'll be pretty receptive to fair treatment. That is to say if they're given some food and a solid-browbeating a good-aligned character stands to good chance of getting an apology and genuine pledge for improvement out the captive bandit or the like.

The whole "kill them"/"save them" argument winds up being pretty easy once the defeated ruffians turn out to mostly be OK guys, just driven to desperation by driven by harsh circumstances, an threatening overlord or just pretty stupidity.

[Flickerdart]

I think this is a point where if the PC's can't decide themselves, then its up to the GM to keep the game going through convenient coincidence: suddenly a bunch of paladins or whatever ride and take the bandits off your hands for their own judgement. problem solved. the PC's only have the right to make decisions as long as they want to make a decision, if they can't then time to take control until they feel like making a decision again, then letting them play things out.

Any excuse to introduce a recurring NPC ally for the PCs is a good excuse - especially when the paladins can then come back with a request of their own when this quest is done. "Hey, remember how we helped you with those monsters, well now we're going after these other monsters and you are clearly men of virtue that we can count on for this dangerous and unpaid task."

[Sith_Happens]

How much enchanting of your captives could you potentially do? That could help a lot in the short term.

[Akal Saris]

I've had this issue derail my groups (I am the usual DM) in 2 campaigns I can think of off the top of my head.

More recently, in Kingmaker (presumably the same module you are playing), the party was split between the rogue's utilitarian view that most criminals can be rehabilitated, and the rest of the party, which wanted to execute them as the law. The end solution was the rogue creating many helms of opposite alignment, so that the kingdom is now served by LG winter wolves (with adorable doggie hoodies), gargoyles, etc. Two of the bandits came over to the PCs' service: one has become a reformed member of society and part of the council, while the other is the rogue's "dirty work" henchman.

Many years back, we ran into this issue when the PCs defeated a band of gnolls, leaving only the women and children. As you could expect, the moral argument ensued, and because of OOC conflicts, it nearly derailed the campaign entirely. On the other hand, one player told me later he thought it was 1 of the best parts of the campaign, since everyone stayed in-character and it showed a lot about how each of them approached the situation.

[CombatBunny]

My players are of this kind and they love to discuss moral conflicts.

That’s ok, but once it’s turning no longer funny and they can’t decide what to do, the solution is easy as pie. The PCs with the best arguments roll Diplomacy or Charisma or Convince or the like, and the highest result manage to convince the others. The other PCs must role-play that they somehow got convinced and we move on. There are no penalties or punishments due to alignments, because it's assumed that they were kind of brainwashed and they’ll truly believe that what they did was the best for all.

[LibraryOgre]

Another option, that not a lot of players take, is hostages and parole.

1) Hostages. "We're leaving, but we're taking Bob here prisoner. We'll feed him and treat him well, but if you attack again, Bob dies, first thing. We'll let Bob go when we're out of your territory." It's helpful if Bob is someone important; children are commonly used. They're not harmed, you're simply taking insurance that the people you beat will behave.

2) Parole. With a lot of folks, especially neutralish or lawfulish humanoids, you can simply give them parole. "Look, we would prefer not to kill you, but we also don't want to be dead. You can either swear right now to (name of a couple deities) that you won't attack us again, or we'll kill you. If you break your oath, we'll kill you without quarter, and the gods will curse your families for oathbreakers."

Both solutions let the opponents loose, and protect you from reprisals. In both cases, there's clear consequences for continuing to attack you.

[Keltest]

My solution would be to give the party an allotted amount of real time to figure out what theyre going to do, whatever that might end up being, before something in game happens to move things along. It might be a marauding wyvern attack that gets all the prisoners killed. It might be the aforementioned patrol of paladins. Maybe your prisoner tries to make a break for it while youre all bickering over what to do with him.

As long as you give them time to think while making it clear that the world is still moving around them, they should more than likely get their butts in gear. If not this time, then in the future.

[veti]

Whoever hired you, they should have answered this question already.

They didn't answer it in this precise form, maybe. They won't have said "make sure any prisoners are humanely treated". But they will have given you orders that shut down many of the options.

You were told to "clear the land of bandits"? - well, that takes "letting them go" off the table right there. That's no longer an option for anyone Lawful enough to be taking their orders seriously. It also, if you think about it properly, rules out "taking them back to civilisation for structured trial and punishment", because that would take too long, and in that time their niche would probably be taken by another bunch of bandits, so you'd have made zero net progress.

The only way you could let them go would be if you point them in a direction you want them to go, and put enough fear into them to be confident that they will in fact go that way and keep going. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you probably blew your chance to ever make that kind of impression on these guys, when you spent three hours arguing about this in front of them.

That leaves "kill them" or "rehabilitate them". (Or, I guess, "cripple them", but somehow I don't see the squeamish members going for that either.) Rehabilitating could work, if you (e.g.) put them to work building you some kind of fortified base, and maybe turn them into the basis of a new posse to back you up in your further excursions in the area. I'm sure your mission has lots of scope for "finding more work than you personally have time to do" - well, if you can channel your prisoners' efforts into getting those things done, then that's win-win.

[Hypername]

Well you can have them work for you, as POW. Not the most ethical thing but the lesser evil. Ball-and-chain works most of the time. This could help establishing your kingdom.
After you establish your kingdom (I assume it's Kingmaker) you can set up laws, prisons and all that.

[DiscipleofBob]

We do have the legal authority to kill bandits and similar threats, as lined out by the charter we were hired under. However, this bit seems to be ignored by the half of the party who want to spare everyone possible. To them it seems less about the law of the land and more about the CG character's morals and the LN character's personal code and everyone else's personal sense of survival.

There really aren't any other settlements other than the small wooden fort that had two people running it when we arrived, and now near the end of the first part of the adventure, has a few incompetent NPC guards. How incompetent? Literally every time we've arrived back from exploring the wilderness in the middle of the night, the night watch was asleep. Beyond the fort I suppose we could try to send prisoners via caravan, but the only people we have contact with are semi-regular merchants. It does beg the question of how exactly these bandits make careers as bandits, but that's how the module was written, or so I can gather.

If I were GM there are probably a few things I would do to try to keep this sort of thing from taking too much time. But I'm a player. It doesn't seem to be something that any of the players find to be fun. Theoretically my character should be the best negotiator, with maxed social skills and a Charisma of 21, but the debate seems to be less debating and more other characters saying 'no' to everyone else in the party without offering an alternative.

[Sith_Happens]

Put it to a vote? The three options that are actually remotely practical seem to be:

1. Kill them.

2. Drag them around in chains forever.

3. Conscript them into your service and keep them in line by whatever means you (collectively) see fit.