It happens, every GM runs into, at some point, the party of adventurers who exhibit a very concrete pathological psychosis in the way they deal with their goals and the people around them, using their riches to hire out henchmen and hirelings, NPC’s desperate enough to make money that they even agree to risk their lives fighting as part of the PC’s personal army, and then the PC’s just strip the bodies of the dead and take all their belongings and dump the bodies in a ditch and move on, or even kill the hirelings themselves when they have outlived their usefulness or the PC’s decide they don’t want to split the shares of the loot after all. How does a GM deal with this unconscionable but all too well-known behavior?

First, there will only be so many potential hirelings/henchman, period.

Although some would do it, I don’t think it would be super common for people to hire themselves out as private warriors when specifically knowing serious combat is almost certain, each time, and if they were that desperate or eager, they’d probably have enlisted in the watch, guard, garrison or other solid, stable military force where they get a definite set pay per day, meals, may never see combat, etc. Otherwise the PC’s had better be paying some serious money up-front or agree to a solid share of anything found, and for the NPC’s share, in the case of their death, to go to their loved ones, including all their gear – this prevents the PC’s from stripping an NPC naked, taking all his stuff and dumping him in a ditch with no further thought.

As NPC bodies pile up, their blood on PC’s hands, those who do choose to fall in with a motley band of vagabonds and suspicious, violence-prone drifters with lots of coin will tend to do so because of their own less-than-acceptable social behavior, likely being severe alcoholics, abusers, devious backstabbers, spies and other people who may prove quite unreliable at just the wrong moment, having gotten completely drunk right before a big battle, suddenly developing a case of nerves when told to “go ahead, open the door, we’re right here”, etc.

The PC’s reputation is not an abstract, vague thing, but a very concrete and visible thing in the game world, in the cast of NPC’s, hirelings or not. If the PC’s tend to accomplish goals beneficial for the people, they are generally tolerated, and though on occasion may be idolized, in most cases, will mostly be feared or eyed suspiciously by most people because of their strange, heedless, self-destructive willingness to risk their very lives in mortal battle unnecessarily with horrible enemies, rather than get real jobs – PC’s are like hired mercenaries, who may not have been hired by anybody, but going it alone, or worse, may be rogue – the NPC’s may wonder if they’re next on the PC’s agenda, especially if word of “disappeared” NPC hirelings spread. Road Wardens and Witch Hunters will likely hear of these kinds of questionable happenings and come to investigate, and if there’s two things you don’t want investigating you and your party, it’s Witch Hunters and Road Wardens, especially with specific royal or noble decrees JUST for you – there are DEFINITELY “safeties” in place for PC’s who forget and overestimate their place in the world and who makes and enforces the laws.

In our group, most of our chars are members of a player-founded town, and so the main ones are trusted and known and looked up to by most of the NPC townfolk, many of whom work for them in various capacities, but this also causes those PC’s to have less solid reasons for actually going adventuring, as they’re needed to run the town – but either way, the way we handle NPC hirelings and hangers-on is that after a certain amount of play and PC’s earning a certain amount of XP and gold and equipping themselves well enough, they become known and tend to need assistants, people to watch over their homes, work as laborers and servants, but there isn’t a lot of hiring out NPC’s as combat-oriented people – most have no interest in such a deadly role, even the town bullies and legbreakers who may be all blustery and ready to fistfight at a moment’s notice, have no reason to venture out of town and encounter actual threats to their lives (especially if they are known to exist nearby), when they can just stay in town and continue their lives as normal.

Tags:

This entry was posted by J P on Sunday, July 5th, 2009 at 9:34 am and is filed under General RPG. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.