As a GM, I'm always of two minds on this point. On the one hand, I'd like for my players to head down into the dungeon du jour without having to worry about their horses and baggage. On the other hand, coming back to a butchered campsite is such an easy quest hook that it can be hard to resist.
I therefore come to you with this question: When your players put hirelings in charge of guarding camp, how do you handle it? Is it better to handwave NPCs' low combat prowess and just assume that the horses and luggage and fancy carriage are ready and waiting when the party returns, or are they fair game for random monster attacks?
Random encounters are fine... they come back, one NPC guard is dead (probably the Rogue), camp is messed up, and there's an owlbear roasting on the fire as the NPC Bard sings a sad song. The carriage is fine, the loot safe, but there is actually still a world out there even when the party closes their eyes.
In Kingmaker, you have to put A LOT of faith in your NPC's to their jobs in the background. As a party, you can do a lot, but it's just not possible to guard an entire kingdom by yourself.
But, to answer the question posed in the title... neither ultra competent, nor instantly dead. Generally, the NPC's readily available to help the party serve a purpose... like Trapfinding or Tracking or something like Bardic Knowledge. They are generally set up to be helpful in a team environment, and thusly, should work well when left together without the party present. Without running the actual scenario, you can imagine lots of Aid Another, clever cat and mouse games, and an overall smart/safe fighting style from NPC's.
VoodistMonk's random encounter idea is how i would generally go.
If i can't pre-run the battle because i lack the time or it caught me off-guard, i would just roll a few dice to see how the battle go, adjusting with how powerful the encounter is very the NPCs and try to be fair. Otherwise, if the PCs just let their horses and luggages alone, i would just roll to see if they gets stolen.
They competence would depend on who they actually are and how much the PCs paid for them compared to what are they trying to fight off. A guard with a 1 gold piece per day salary would likely not attempt to fight off a dragon trying to steal the party stuff.
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Honestly, I'm confused by the premise.
Now admittedly, my group doesn't really ever talk about what we're doing when we're setting up camp or breaking down, but we just assume everyone carries their belongings and if you can't carry it then it get's left behind. Else, get a bag of holding.
There's no carriage or stuff left behind. Maybe some horses, if some players rode non-animal companion horses and we don't have a way to teleport yet, and for some reason we didn't walk.
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Stuff like this comes up in my games all the time because my PC's like the whole "caravan" thing, and I like doing random encounters for scenarios like this. I pick two PC's at random and say "gimme a number", they say "5" and "7", so then I roll a % die, and anything 50-59 would generate a beneficial encounter (traveling monks or clerics purify your food/water, a hireling gets bored, wanders, and finds the remains of a battle and found Bracers of Armor +1 and a strangely glowing jewel (story hook!)) and 7, 17, 27, 37, 47, 67, 77, 87, or 97 would generate a bad encounter of some kind. This could be thieves sneak up and steal something, or a bandit raid, a pack of krenshar tries to snag a horse for lunch, w/e.
As far as whether the hirelings are successful or not, I usually GM hand-waive this and make it "part of the encounter" due to the 50-59 or 7's % roll. So if Krenshars showed up, I might say two hirelings were injured during the attack and the horse was saved, but the wagon has a broken wheel. Or w/e.
I don't really do random encounters unless it's a truly classic "let's walk around in the wilderness a lot" sort of LotR-homage type game.
And when it is that sort of game, I don't really do hirelings, either. With time restraints and people who are either sensibly terrified at the prospect of adventuring or are busy with their own tasks/journeys, it's never felt like much of a problem.
Horses, wagons, equipment and provisions often need to be replaced after a jaunt through the Spider Forest or whatever. I've only ever had two players who were seriously worried about their "loot" and being appropriately outfitted for their level, but I assured them that I still check the WBL guidelines and make sure they have some opportunity to earn back what was lost.
This isn't pertinent to the conversation, but I would like to thank DRD1812 for introducing me to the Handbook of Heroes. It's a funny comic and I enjoy it a lot. Also, I recently got a commission done from the artist of one of my characters and it was beautiful.
It seems to me that if you want to run "your camp got looted" as a plotline, you probably want to take some steps so it doesn't feel unfair. Maybe the PCs get back and their stuff is gone, but one or two of the NPCs got away from the fracas, and can show them which way the thieves went. So it can seem more like a plotline rather than an arbitrary punishment.
I think my way is pretty fair. There's an 81% chance of nothing happening, a 10% chance of something good happening, and a 9% chance of something bad happening.
And if the PC's set up "measurable defenses" to hide/defend their caravan, like Alarm spells, place the wagons in defensive positions (like circle the wagons) and hide them with various branches and foliage, using high ground, traps, and/or set up a Watch schedule for the Hirelings at nighttime, etc., then I would factor this into alleviating whatever "bad" thing might happen.
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In a ttrpg players are extremely vulnerable and I think most are aware of that, at least subconsciously. The player has very limited control of the game. They control only their own character. If their character is carrying something, they have some sense of control and safety for that item. As soon as they put it down, they are relinquishing that control to the GM, and hoping they don't get f@#ed with.
If PCs were actual people, going through the constant conflict, trauma, and struggle for survival they do, they'd be seriously messed up psychologically. They'd all suffer from ptsd, be prone to paranoia, and so on. To an extent, this does come through in the game. We players have our pcs be constantly on alert, looking for danger, eyeing everyone we meet with suspicion, sleeping in their armor with weapons nearby, and so on.
As a GM, killing off the players' npcs is a confirmation of that paranoia and affirming that they can only rely on themselves. Media (movies/tv/books) doesn't help the matter as minor characters frequently exist solely to be kidnapped or killed by the villains. So players are already predisposed to expect that happening. In my experience players are extremely unwilling to relinquish anything they consider truly valuable to the hands of an npc.
So if the players do leave themselves vulnerable in this regard, I would think long and hard before attacking that vulnerability. Ask myself what am I adding to the game/experience by doing this. In terms of verisimilitude, ask yourself how do normal non-adventurers survive in your world? Do they never venture out into the wilderness because anyone who does has a 1 in 6 chance each day of being eaten by bears? In reality a camp full of people and horses is safe even if none of the people are skilled warriors, bears will give such a group a wide berth.
In a game a few weeks ago, we were traveling from one city we had been adventuring in back to my estates. My pc in that game is a Duchess, and so we had a retinue of 30 of my knights, plus my aides, maid, and camp followers. The GM rolled random encounters and had us be attacked by a dire tiger and some other encounters with predator type monsters like that. It made no sense, it broke verisimilitude for me really hard. It doesn't matter if a dire tiger is cr 8 and those knights are cr 1/2, a predator like that would never attack a group that size. It knows that would be extremely dangerous and probably end in its death. Look at your random encounter tables, 90% of the encounters on there would probably just avoid a camp full of npcs.
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Look at your random encounter tables, 90% of the encounters on there would probably just avoid a camp full of npcs.
This is a sore spot for me. People ought to run an animal encounter like it was an actual animal. Normal wolves don't charge into combat and fight to the death. You could throw rocks and maybe even take a couple jabs at a bear before it really became dedicated to mauling you dead.
That's why I don't feel bad about, say, sending a pack of 14 dire wolves at a party of three lvl5 characters. The wolves are cautious. Hesitant. If the players are careful and don't do anything dumb, they can fend off the pack.
Stuff like this comes up in my games all the time because my PC's like the whole "caravan" thing
Well now you've got me curious. As someone that actually runs caravans, do you ever implement (or adapt) the actual caravan rules from Jade Regent?
Well now you've got me curious. As someone that actually runs caravans, do you ever implement (or adapt) the actual caravan rules from Jade Regent?
Stuff like this comes up in my games all the time because my PC's like the whole "caravan" thing
No, I've never used them. I looked at them, read a few other DM's reviews on it, and then decided not to. Apparently, this is one of the easiest ways to TPK your group because of how "caravan combat" works. If your caravan loses in combat, then all your hirelings and equipment gets destroyed/killed/pilfered, and the PC's are assumed to have "run away" (yeah right). But now they're stranded out in the middle of nowhere with no food/water other than whatever rations and canteens they have. And may the gods be with you if you're 100 miles in the desert or the arctic when that happens.
Anywho, the whole thing sounded like a mess so I didn't bother.
Generally, I figure if the PCs take some reasonable precautions and treat their hirelings reasonably, things work out well for them. The game isn't "micromanage your hirelings", after all.
I might have the PCs do some Sense Motive checks when hiring, and some Diplomacy checks to make sure the hireling is on board, but it shouldn't be too difficult unless the PCs ask something exceptionally dangerous or the area is very risky (either of which a competent hireling will know, since they all have Lore: Professional Hireling, which covers stuff like that.) It can be fun to have a couple of extra voices around to interact with and advise the PCs, or to get them into extra trouble if it looks like the PCs aren't going to find enough on their own, or just to bring down the Hammer of Consequence if the PCs act stupidly.
Hirelings are also a nice channel to let the PCs know common stuff about the world, suggest courses of action, and things like that. I generally ask the PCs what sort of support they're looking for (teamsters, guards, accountants, etc.), and then whip up a couple personalities on the fly (roll a d8, 1 means they're untrustworthy and 8 means they're the opposite; ditto for competence). One can often improvise a lot off a quick random die roll and 1-2 character traits.
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No, I've never used them. I looked at them, read a few other DM's reviews on it, and then decided not to. Apparently, this is one of the easiest ways to TPK your group because of how "caravan combat" works.
Well now you've got me curious. As someone that actually runs caravans, do you ever implement (or adapt) the actual caravan rules from Jade Regent?
I'm in a Jade Regent game which is on Covid-related hiatus, and we tried a random caravan encounter just to see how it worked. We found that (a) the numbers were off - a supposedly easy encounter nearly wiped us out with average rolls on both sides and (b) it was a dice roll-off with no real options for tactics. We junked that part of the rules and used the caravan as background, apart from one session where we got to play the named NPCs instead of our own characters defending the caravan against marauders. that was fun.