How many flavors of “bandit encounter” are there?

[gbaji]

Bandits but they understand that you don't have enough valuables to be worth the risk of fighting you.

Or are just way too dangerous looking to be a valid target.

There's a story about this with some first time d&d players expecting bandits to be crazed suicide goblins like in Skyrim. So when they found a bunch of sketchy cuthroats by the side of the road surrounded by crates of loot they didn't put two and two together, sat down with them and asked if they saw any bandits. How the story ends depends on who's telling it, but my favorite is that the bandits very obviously direct them to a rope bridge over a nearby chasm saying "yeah, they went that way" they follow to see them on their way then cut the rope. Because obviously that's what they do.

Another ending had it so the party wanders off saying "well they didn't see anything and we have no leads. what are we supposed to do?" as the DM tries to lay it on thicker and thicker that the guys they just spoke to ARE in fact the bandits that they are looking for and aren't getting the hint.

Yeah. I've seen some pretty hillarious player actions/choices when GMs actually play bandits (pretty much any "enemy NPCs") as real people instead of cardboard cutouts. Some players (especially those newer to RPGs, or who have played CRPGs mostly) just seem to expect that NPCs will have some kind of obvious flag or banner hanging over their heads telling the players who/what they are. And they can become incredibly confused when this isn't present. They expect that if they encounter bandits, the bandits will automatically/suicidally attack them and try to steal their stuff "cause they're bandits!". So, yeah, encountering them, hanging out but otherwise acting like normal NPCs, with some stuff on them (stolen stuff, but unless that's also labeled in some way, how would they know?), but with no immediate intention of just blindliy attacking the party doesn't provide the party with the direct clues they need.

And this can be difficult to even frustrating as a GM as you do try to point out the clues that are there, while trying to avoid the "suicidal/stupid NPCs" trap. When I run a campaign, I always like to start it out with some "in town" stuff, just to get a feel for the PCs capabilities, but also to help potential new players up their own skills in terms of understanding that NPCs will act like real people, and that they'll need to use their own noggins to figure out who is doing what, using methods other than waiting for the NPCS to announce themselves in some obvious way.


I think this can be perpetuated a bit by GMs who also view bandits (again, any enemy NPCs) merely through the lens of the intended encounter, but not actually considering what the bandits are doing, and why. Bandits want to steal stuff and get away with it. If you were a bandit, and you had a choice of different targets travelling along a stretch of road, and one was a couple of wagons, seemingly full of valuables, with a merchant riding up front and a few rent-a-guards walking along *or* a group of 4-6 people, no wagons in sight, most carrying large and/or exotic weapons, some wearing expensive/fancy armor, some fancy looking robes and/or floppy hats and/or carrying intimidating looking staves with mystifcal symbols carved on them, possibly with exotic wild animals walking along with them, which would you attack?

Not really much of a contest, right? Yet... shockingly, many adventuring parties will literally walk along, making no attempt to disquise themselves to look like anything other than a powerful adventuring party, and then expect bandits to just come out of the woodwork and attack them. And yeah, unfortunately, many GMs will support this by actually having bandits attack such a group.

Now, if this is less "bandits" and more "raiders attacking the kings guards in preparation for a larger attack" or something similar, then we might be able to rationalize such attacks. They maybe want to take out that group of adventurers who are perhaps traveling in the direction of their own bosses, and hope to use surprise to harm/kill/capture them. But there has to be some similar type of motivation for this. If it's just "make money via theft", then a group of PCs is the last type of group that would be hit.

I think the funniest "bandit encounter" we ran into in a campaign ages ago, was one in which we never actually encountered the bandits at all. There were bandits in some hills we were traveling through. These bandits had set up a series of traps on the small road we were walking along. There was a pit trap in one spot, and another was a trip line with logs that would roll down the hillsides. These were designed to block up wagons and disrupt defenders, so the bandits could attack. Of course, our highly powerful party spotted and disabled these traps (and then nullified them so they wouldn't be a hazards to the next folks coming along), so quickly and effectively, that the bandits just kinda sat back and let us walk right on by. They literally wanted nothing to do with our group. The GM actually just told us later on, well past this point in the adventure, that "remember those traps you guys ran into on the road? Well....".

It was a great way to build the environment, and show that there are things in the world, but not all of them are threats to the PCs, and many of those things are simply going to avoid dealing with the PCs for that exact reason. And did so in a way that took very little actual table time.