Hijack Hijinx
October 10th, 2011
Hello everyone. It’s Bandit Week, which means that all week we’ll be talking about one of everyone’s favorite fantasy figures (especially in low-magic settings), the bandit. From Robin Hood and his band of merry men to Blackbeard and his pirate crew (because, really, what are pirates but bandits on the water?), and any number of low-life, leather-clad, shortbow-wielding highwaymen in between, bandits are a staple of the trade.
In most fantasy games, bandits serve a purpose similar to orcs or goblins (and, in fact, many of the orcs and goblins encountered in such games are bandits, or at least similar enough: slaying travelers in order to take their wealth); namely, they exist to be low-level threats for the heroes, who typically cut bloody swathes through them in very short order. Often, a little bit of comic relief at the bandits’ incompetence or cowardice can be thrown in along the way, but this is purely optional.
This, however, does not leave me with a whole lot to say about bandits for today’s article. I could tell you how to use bandits in your game…if this were Grave Plots, but since plot hooks are not generally my stock and trade (at least, in my articles), that’s not really an option. I could give DMing tips that were related to running bandit encounters, it’s true. Most of the advice I’d give would probably be things that I’ve already said about ensuring that they have varied and interesting stat-blocks. Certainly it might be worth mentioning that a good bandit encounter is typically an ambush, and should be designed with that in mind—though the common image is for the bandit leader to boldly stroll up and demand the passerby’s coin, the much safer and easier tactic is to kill everyone in a bloody ambush, and pick through their belongings later.
So, if I don’t have anything to say directly about bandits, perhaps I could find something to say that’s related to the general, overall theme of banditry, or robbery. How to tie theft into design? That’s almost too easy—it would have to be a matter of plagiarism. That sounds like an important topic. Perhaps I should do an article on plagiarism?
But what, precisely, would I say? After all, there’s a bit of a foregone conclusion in the topic: when it comes to plagiarism in game design, don’t do it. It’s bad, it makes you look bad, and you’ll probably get in trouble. Of course, there’s a fine line between actual plagiarism and drawing inspiration from other sources, and not only is it a good thing to draw on other sources for inspiration, it’s basically impossible not to. Still, I’m not prepared to claim that I’m an excellent arbiter of that murky line, and not sure I’d be the best person to be giving out advice on where tasteful borrowing ends and outright theft begins.
It is worth mentioning, I suppose, since this column also offers DM advice from time to time, that naturally DMs should not shy away at all from plagiarism. After all, your job is to provide the best story you possibly can for your group of close friends, and that’s a hard and also thankless job. You need all the help you can beg, borrow, or, in this case, steal. As long as you’re not, say, selling podcasts of your game, or something weird, you don’t really need to worry about anyone kicking down your door and bringing harsh and summary judgment on you for plagiarizing that episode of True Blood you saw the other night (or whatever happens to strike your fancy). You might want to ensure that you use at least a little discretion if your players also watch, read, or play whatever it is that you’re stealing from, lest they recognize it and the one other potential pitfall of plagiarism (it makes you look bad) could very realistically still get you, but otherwise, I think many DMs are more afraid of plagiarizing than they should be, and are making their job harder on themselves than it absolutely has to be, which isn’t really a good idea for a volunteer position highly prone to burnout.
This still doesn’t leave me any closer to picking a topic, however. That’s fine, I’m sure there’s lots of other ways to work banditry into the article. Not directly, at the game level, we’ve covered, and not via plagiarism. What other ways can I find to tie bandits in…?
It appears that today is Columbus Day. For our foreign readers (of which I’m assured we have a few), this is an American holiday that, in theory, celebrates Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the Americas. In actuality, however, most Americans are far too apathetic to really care that much about the holiday, so, in my experience, the holiday tends to be celebrated mostly by people who want to take the opportunity to point out all of the horrible things that Christopher Columbus (and many who came after him) did to the natives here: killing them and taking their most valuable possession (from a European viewpoint, at least): their land.
This conveniently raises a vaguely troubling question: why would we treat a bandit as a hero? Yes, yes, I know, Robin Hood is a bandit and he’s hailed as a hero, but Robin Hood is different. For one, he’s generally portrayed as non-violent, or at least opposed to killing his opponents (if he didn’t mind killing, and his aim with a bow was half what legend claims, Prince John and the Sherriff wouldn’t have lasted very long, I think), and, obviously, everyone knows that he donated his ill-gotten gains. Columbus, on the other hand, is supposed to have butchered hundreds of natives, and stripped them of their valuable metals and a good chunk of their land, and he gets a national holiday.
So can bandits, true bandits, who kill anyone that resists and are motivated purely by base greed, can they truly be heroes? I think that the answer is a resounding “yes,” and not just because “heroes” aren’t always necessarily “good guys,” if one takes a look at, for example, the heroes of Greek mythology.
It doesn’t take Greek mythology to demonstrate that bandits can certainly be fantasy heroes, however. Think about the classic, sword-and-sorcery adventuring party. What do they do? They go out into the wilds, beyond the reach of the law, break into other creature’s homes, kill them, and take their treasure. While oftentimes these creatures are mindless predators in their own right, sometimes they are just a tribe of orcs, or goblins, or some similar race cursed with a skin color that they don’t make band-aids in. Or it may just be a powerful wizard, or, occasionally, an eccentric noble. While there’s usually some thin excuse (such as the resident being declared evil by someone, somewhere, who, you know, is probably a good authority on that sort of thing, right?), sometimes it’s openly just a matter of wanting to raid the Vault of the Dwarven Lords, or what have you, in an open and brazen search for loot.
And as for being willing to kill people along the way, well, adventurers are pretty well known for their willingness to do that. Sometimes it’s more in-your-face than others, such as when they’re killing goblin women and children for their 2d4 copper, or what have you, but it’s generally always there: get between a hero and his goal, and you’re mincemeat. Talk about it? No time for talking, let’s get to the action!
Actually, there’s a lot of fun you could have with an adventure where the party is a group of cutthroat bandits rather than glorious heroes. The overall adventure structure would stay pretty similar, though they might be ambushed by highway patrols rather than highway robbers, and they’d likely be working for the evil baron against the benevolent king, rather than the other way around. But now we’re venturing into Grave Plots territory again, and that brings us full circle. Sorry folks: I’m just not sure there’s anything bandit-related I can write about today. Stick around for the rest of the week, though, for some real bandit-centric action.
Join me next week when I’ll be discussing introspection and retrospection. In the meantime, if you get attacked by bandits, consider just paying them and moving on: bandits have to eat too, you know.