Admittedly, I can see how something like that can maintain inertia because everyone who's anyone is part of the big game... but otherwise, I don't understand how the contract got to exist in the first place. If I can't figure that out, the rest of the scenario falls apart.hyzmarca wrote:The contract already exists, but whether or not Mr. Bad is automatically a party to it depends strongly on his social status.
This seems feasible... but how's the party supposed to know that when Rothbart's begging for his life about how his father would pay anything to get him back that he's not just making it up so that they'll spare his life?Now, Rothbart's father is the Landgrave of Dorne, and is quite rich due to his position. Once you've discovered his son's nefarious deeds you can fight the boy to the death, or offer him a chance to surrender. Allowing him to means that you can random him back to the Landgrave for 500,000 GP. Killing him means that the Landgrave will instead give that 500,000 GP to the assassin's guild and you better not fail your sense motive check the next time you accept a drink from a stranger.
More realistically, we're still going to kill Rothbart, ransom the body back (because seriously, the Landgrave can afford to bring his stupid son back to life), and potentially murder the Landgrave when he drops off the money (and he probably sent assassins after us anyways, because I'm pretty sure that being a douche bag is genetic).
But this assumes a lot out of the players. I can set up the situation and nudge them into a direction, but I just can't help but feel that, nine times out of ten, my players are going to end up fighting the Assassin's guild.
There's more to it than just having someone going after you for revenge if you kill a bad guy. Look at it from the general populace's view. There's a chance every month that the BBEG is going to break out of jail (again) and cast cloudkill on everyone you know and love and nothing significant will ever be done about it.Mask De H wrote:Wait, suffering consequences for being a murderous fuckstick is grimdark now? Mindless slaughter should have consequences so people don't go around mindlessly slaughtering everyone. If you don't want to suffer those consequences, don't murder everything.
And he gets stopped every time by Team Good, but only after he's left behind a mountain of bodies. This happens Every Month because there's some sort of agreement between BBEG and Team Good about how they can't kill each other... but the rest of the populace is fair game.
That kind of sucks.