/tg/, how tough do you make your average city watch or equivalent be? I'm in a bit of a stiff place.
>be GM
>Party is moderately leveled
>guards built as fighters with ranks in perception, is not being enough
>3 fighters, 1 cleric, 1 paladin gone dark
>unstoppable
>Literally nothing in the world could feasibly kill them all, save GM fiat
>open complaints about boring session unless party is knee-deep in corpses
>one of the fighters actually killed another PC because he refused to enter melee combat
>tried to reason with them between sessions, they played the opressive GM card
Half of the group wants to start a new session with a low level cap, the other part doesn't want their progress shot down. This is quickly turning unpleasant and gaming groups are far and few between around here.
What do you think, /tg/?
>>43810729
This has nothing to do with town guards.
>>43810802
This, seriously. Your group is completely dysfunctional and filled to the brim with shitheads.
Town guards are the least of your concerns.
>>43810802
I may or may not have completely breezed off, but what is meant to ask is: how strong should they be so my party can't begin a fucking black crusade on the world? Is it a dick move to do so?
>>43810839
This >>43810802
>>43810820
I would have ditched them a long time ago if there was another available group in a 25km radius.
Seriously, that's how hard it sucks.
>characters kill a town
>characters go to a second town
>a horf florf hey you stop give that back you're under arrest
or
>characters kill a town
>characters go to a second town
>shit shit shit shit shit it's the apocalyptic threat they're here fire the cannon that the kingdom spent all of its money on after learning of their horseshit
However, you are just a fucking pushover dealing with shitheads, so that's the real problem.
>>43810892
I'm not sure you understand the choice here.
No game > bad game. If you have a bad game, you're spending hours of your time being miserable, which is quantifiably worse than spending hours of your time just being bored.
"But then I won't get to game at all" YOU'RE NOT GAMING NOW. You're enduring some shitheads for 4 hours every weekend and pretending it's gaming. This degree of rationalization in any other hobby would be insane. "Yeah my boat's got holes in it and my fishing rod's broke so mostly I just gotta sit on the dock holding the hook with my fingertips, but otherwise I wouldn't get to fish at all!"
Find an online group or find a new hobby for a while, but DON'T stick with a bad group just because it's the 'only thing in town.' You're accomplishing nothing but enabling hooting dickholes.
>>43810729
This has nothing to do with town guards. It's far beyond that. This is the point where elite teams of knights should be sent after the party.
Make a party of NPC characters and throw it at them. They could be knights as I mentioned before, or royal agents, or a school of wizards, or a team of assassins. But forget about the guards.
I usually think of town guards as being about 1/2 the power of a level 1 martial character with some elite guards that are worth 3x as much. Then some high-caliber kind of royal/noble guard that are equal to level 3-4 martial.
I need like, a baseline assumption to give a useful answer.
Assuming that at level 1 the party is just barely better than a commoner, then I normally make the foot soldiers like level 1-2 Fighters.
Every person of a rank higher than that is just a higher level, so a captain might be level 3, and an officer might be five.
If te players want to take on the city watch, then overwhelm them with numbers, brutally executed formations and plans of attack, and have the watch use their fortifications and defenses intelligently.
I dont know what youre playing, but this wont work for a game like 5e, where first level players could wipe out a village.
If a town guard is travelling with the party for an adventure, make them like 2 levels lower than the party.
None of this helps you because this doesn't seem to be your problem
Firstly, a Paladin "gone dark"?
Why does your party want to just kill and maim everyone?
How are they moderately levelled, yet unkillable? Have you looked intoApocalypse Stone?
Why didn't you explain that looking for non-combat solutions is good and killing other PCs is a sin?
Seems to me like this is a group new to RPGs, as they often have a lot of violence to get out of their system for the first few days.
If the Cleric is acting like a psychotic killer, just have their gods send angels and champions to strike them down. Or the god of any other player if they have one.
Why didn't the Paladin just fall and lose his powers? That would wake them up.
>>43810944
>hooting dickholes
This fucking slayed me
But seriously, the old words are true.
No game is better than a bad game.
>>43810981
That's what I meant by "gone dark". The paladin fell a long time ago. I am going to keep this in mind whenever another group comes up with horseshit, however, I give it to
>>43810944
>>43810968
>>43810932
Seeing through anon's eyes, I think it's time to GTFO.
>>43810729
Give the Town Guard a captain of higher level, preferably something with benefits to tactically command or inspire their troops.
If you were playing 5e, Guards could remain a credible threat for quite a while. If you were playing 4e, have them statted out normal ly and then turn them into higher level minions once they out scale them.
The addition of a Warlord or someone with the Leader feat in 5e will make them a force to be reckoned with.
That said, I doubt you're playing either of those. The problem itself isn't that the guard isn't strong enough. Its that the players have been doing enough crime to justify a mass response from the town guard.
If you can't diauadde their behavior, make the reactions actually start to get reasonable. They fight off the Town Guard? Most of the villagers run for the hills. Eventually they'll either get bored of the empty landscape, or they'll track down any refugees to the capital, where you can easily have the King's Royal Guard and Court Wizard mop the floor with them.
Before that though, just talk to them and ask why they insist on pillaging villages or whatever they did. If they want to play an evil game, work off of that, and make things a challenge rather than just sending waves of guards at them.
>>43811153
Thanks, man. I'll keep this in mind.
OP, you have totally failed as a GM. The problem is not the exact stats of your town guards.
>>43810968
You cap your games at lvl 5 or what?
>>43810729
>far and few between
>>43810729
I'll just respond to the city guard part of the question for now.
I usually make my city guards relatively weak compared to a fighter character. They're the equivalent of level 1 to 3 fighters with good equipment and average (so low compared to PC's) ability scores. Elite forces and champions might be different, but guards are mostly like this.
I have to specify though that my setting is very, very low magic and it's more like "Feudal age Europe with a bunch of mages and maybe monsters in the woods" than typical D&D's "We have more pyromancers than bakers in this town" situations. So city guards have to deal with very mundane situations and something like a party of powerful adventurers is not one of such.
But if you're playing a typical D&D-type setting, things get much different. There's mages everywhere and EVERYONE knows it. Spells are well-known and there's adventurers wielding magic thunderswords +2 everywere, going murderhobo every now and then. In such setting a city isn't well watched if its guards can't respond to a fireballing wizard.
Depending on the city's wealth, it wouldn't be unreasonable to have patrols with experienced fighters and spellcasters, or anti-spellcaster gear.
>>43810839
Level 1 Fighter guards are enough.
Level 20 NPC Paladins with Holy Avengers and their group of like-minded NPC adventurers, on the other hand..
>>43811228
No, it's just that town guards are built to handle low level stuff. They are like police. If three armed men break into your house you get the police. If fifty foreign soldiers with light machine guns, RPGs, and a tank detonate your neighbor's house and start eyeing yours you might call the police but they can't do much. Likewise, once a party gets past level seven (in D&D, other games are different) I think the guards will be insignificant cannon fodder.
>>43810729
they want a bloodbath, give them a bloodbath ;)
>the kings of the realms, desperate to stop the massacre of a group of "murderous bandits" call upon the aid of varying bounty hunters, assassins, and retired heroes to end their needless onslaught.
>Party is unaware of this conspiracy until its too late to stop it.
>party is now fighting / running for their lives.
>nowhere is safe.
>they are constantly attacked at night and hunted like animals.
>they cannot stay in towns or buy supplies because of the bounty on their heads and blood on their hands.
>the bounty is too high for them to just bribe off the assailants (plus the heroes would not accept any bribe).
>If the party somehow kills all of them, the kings will become desperate enough to call upon the aid of a powerful fiend / celestial / demigod.
>the party is now fighting an army of fiends / angels while the BB-G/E-G watches them struggle and prepareds to enter the frey to end the party once and for all.
>end campaign with them killing the Leader and the kings and basically taking over the world if they manage to bullshit their way through all of that fighting.
I remember when this happened to me a while back. They were in a town ~400 miles from the capital.
The fantasy equivalent of the special forces game. One of the guards in the town got to the second stone in the main barracks and sent a warning off to the capital. From there groups are waiting on standby. First thing is done is the person who did the sending is scry'd.
After this they see if there are any enemies in the area, if there are they pull together a extermination team. If not they pull together a forward investigation team.
An extermination team is 1 lvl 12 wizard, 4 level 10 teamwork feat based fighters, 1 level 10 alchemist, and 1 level 10 cleric. The capital has 10 of these teams at this level (The metropolis is population ~140k).
If the first extermination team gets taken down they teleport a construct covered in delayed blast fireballs in to the enemy location, then 5 more extermination teams along with undead/construct back up. Basically it's riot constructs with feats to take blows for the extermination team, and heavy lifter undead.
My players got really made that the capital doesn't like anyone fucking with their people within fourteen hundred miles of the capital (the wizard has CL bonuses to make their teleports farther).
Town guards should always be only about as tough as you think Phil at the Convenience store would be if you gave him a thick leather jacket and a community use club and/or spear.
I don't have a specific rule of thumb for how tough guards are, it's usually just whatever seems reasonable for the size and importance of the town, but even that's not too concrete as there could be any number of reasons why a little hamlet in the middle of nowhere could have some ex-soldiers in their militia.
>>43811549
This would be an example of how not to do it.
>>43812187
Nah, that's precisely the way it would make sense in a world crowded with mages, magic items and lolrandomly powerful adventurers such as D&D's settings
>>43812245
Then there's no reason to have villages at all since food and water could all be provided with magic, meaning you don't need farmers. Everyone should just live in a super heavily fortified citadel that is constantly on alert in case some commando team of mages tries to get tactical on them.
>>43812346
You don't have enough casters to produce that much food. Trust me, I've crunched the numbers. You have enough to have extermination teams in big cities, but not enough to provide the population with calories. That and magic creates shitty food.
>>43812595
For reference create food and drink is really inefficient. Stone to flesh produces FAR more calories.
>>43812595
But of course there are enough high level wizards, fighters, alchemists, clerics, robo-tanks, and unholy undead abominations for your fucking retarded idea, right?
>>43810729
Make them fight other adventurer groups, preferably 2 levels higher than them and outgearing them.
>>43812785
The retard idea only requires ~50 high level indivudals. Feeding a population is next to impossible.
I'm going by 3E's population statistics.
>>43812346
All your point would prove is that D&D settings are bullshit, since with the power and diffusion of magic they have, they should be at an entirely different level of civilization.
>>43813035
Megacities fed by magic, food coming from demiplanes and parties of fully geared-out hunters tracking the great beasts in the magical wilds outside for sport, fame and loot.
>>43810729
The town guard is not even the main concern here
>>43810839
Why the fuck haven't other adventurers started descending upon them? Where are the paladins? The clerics? The legendary knightly orders dedicated to vanquishing powerful enemies of the kingdom?
You are clearly not adapting to their playstyle. If every session is just a mindless slog of combat with no narrative or development for the players to take an interest in, then you have failed as a GM.
On the other fucking hand, your players sound like obnoxious shitbirds who have decided to go full murderhobo for the lolz, and are now never going to have a chance to explore any interesting storylines because they will just kill everything.
Your players are shit, you are shit, your group is shit. Step the FUCK up.
>>43811613
Pants on head retarded
Well, town guards shouldn't be super tough.
A city would have elites though, knights, contracted adventurers and 'problem solvers'.
Third parties such as good aligned organizations or adventurer bands can also be effective adversaries.
It sounds like you just have a player problem.
Also, a 'paladin gone dark'? His old order would definitely be looking to punish that heretic.
