On Loot and the Law

Killing things and taking their stuff has been a staple of the RPG genre since it first coalesced. Depending on party, players, game system, and genre, this is more or less of a problem. Some players will delight in hauling a cartful of tattered chain coats, rusted axes, unwashed bedding, assorted crockery, tables, doors, and whatnot back to town and insist that the local costermongers purchase all of it. Others find stripping fallen foes of their arms and armour detracts from their sense of heroism.

Designers and GMS have also wrestled with the problem of escalating loot. The advent of magic, or supertech, plus the scaling of many level-based games, makes this particularly tricky. Opponents must achieve certain numbers to present a threat, leading to every bandit from here to breakfast wearing a +2 breastplate and carrying a +1 flaming crossbow. These are worth a lot of money - enough that it's hard to imagine why these people are bandits, since they could theoretically live out most of their lives from the sale of these items.

Providing they were content with entirely mundane possessions and didn't need anyone to cast a minor healing spell on them, or a magical doormat that wipes your feet, since the gap between mundane and even slightly magical is incredibly expensive - which would be all well and good and plausible, magic being a rare luxury confined to the military and the wealthy, if not for the fact that you can't bloody move for +2 breastplates.

Part of the solution is generally that a vast proportion of potential adversaries use no equipment of any kind. This makes perfect sense when low-level PCs are fighting angry boars or the shambling undead. It makes less sense when they're fighting intelligent magical beings in possession of large hoards of treasure, since dragons should be perfectly aware of the benefits of actually donning some of those magic rings or whatnot. It makes no sense whatsoever when the opponents are broadly humanoid creatures. I don't care how tough your demon-analogues supposedly are, armour is strictly superior to no armour (especially when it's magical unencumbering armour with an array of enchanted properties) and weapons are strictly superior to no weapons (especially when they let you fell opponents at range, or have the power to overcome special resistances, or give you +3 to hit and damage). Leaving mechanics aside, people use weapons for reasons such as "not breaking my own fingers", "keeping my face at a greater distance from my opponent's serrated claws", and "parrying". Many games choose not to implement these factors, leaving fewer reasons to use armour or weaponry; D&D analogues follow up by adding arbitrary numbers so the unarmed and unarmoured foes are just as dangerous as their more plausible countrparts, and top things off by pretending that "unarmed and unarmoured warrior who punches things in the face several times a second" is a generic character archetype entirely suited to fight against plate-wearing knights.

*clears throat* I may have gone off on a tangent there.

Regardless: if the PCs fight people who have things - especially valuable or powerful things - there is a strong incentive to take them.

For the GM, this introduces a couple of dilemmas. One is the concept of properly balancing character wealth, which requires carefully tracking how much stuff the PCs have acquired (unless, unlike me, your players will actually do this) and adjusting the equipment future foes carry accordingly, potentially requiring a series of battles against furious elks or a trouple of murderous actors who use weapons created only by their own imaginations.

Another is that any time you find a cool or useful item for an NPC - say, something that will protect them against a particular spell the PCs keep overusing, or allow them to take the PCs by surprise, or overcome a defence that the PCs have grown too comfortable with, or to escape the PCs - you must bear in mind that the PCs will acquire it. If you're giving NPCs items that cover a range of different situations and deal with different problems, the PCs thus acquire items that do the same, increasing the breadth of their capabilities at every step.

Dwarven bandit captain has magical wings so they can deal with the PCs' inevitable ability to fly? Now the PCs have magical wings.

Guild leader has a ring of reflecting magic, so they can survive the Round 1 Disintegrate the PCs inevitably unleash on what is obviously the most important NPC while ignoring the alleged bodyguards who are narratively much more threatening but mechanically cannot actually protect their boss in any meaningful way? Now the PCs have a ring of reflecting magic, so using magic against them is much less effective.

And so on.

And exactly how did you acquire these items, sonny Jim?

One possible solution that occurs to me is legal claim. Now, this is going to be controversial, because it calls for the PCs - and worse, the players - to acknowledge any form of external authority whatsoever. Adventurers are worse than many other PCs, but in general, players do not like the existence of laws. They do not like the existence of constraints on their actions that are not self-imposed. They do not care for taxes, or legal duties (unless it's a military campaign), or being required to go and see the duke right now, or not being allowed to carry the fantasy equivalent of a BAR and impregnable plate armour inside a city full of civilians, or restrictions on the kind of magic you can use in public places. I am sceptical whether one could actually pull this off, even if - as the idea requires - you baked it into the campaign premise. But here it is, anyway.

In general, authorities frown on you stealing things from dead people. Even if you killed them yourself. Perhaps especially if you killed them yourself.

It would not be unreasonable to say that self-described "adventurers" do not, in fact, have any legal claim to whatever items they haul away from the lair of a group of bandits. Apart from anything else, those bandits didn't have any legal claim to the items. They were, if they are in fact bandits, very likely stolen, and belong to somebody else.

If the PCs march into town with a cartload of goods they took from Al Baboon and the Forty Legitimate Businessapes, it is entirely fair that either the guards at the gate, or whichever merchant they try to flog it all to, immediately summons the watch to question them about their paperwork. "Exactly how did you come into ownership of these magical breastplates, which I cannot help but notice are embossed with the symbol of the Legion of Cadrachal Pass and were reported missing from quartermaster's stores a year ago? And these fine silks, in crates belonging to the Inbruzzia merchant family - I see, sir, it was bandits wot slaughtered them all, and you are law-abiding individuals, you killed the bandits, well, I should probably take your word for that."

We can, and probably should, extend this to the gear the PCs are wearing. Not least because any remotely sensible settlement should, as in history and in most countries today, have strict rules about not going around armed and armoured. Whether the rules are "the Law of Peace forbids the carrying of any weapon or the wearing of armour within the boundaries of any settlement, save for the appointed guards" or "there's no reason anyone who isn't intent on violence would be wearing armour in town, and it only encourages escalation, so I, the sheriff, get to say you either deposit it in my office right now or leave town right now, punk", or even "we'm don't care for folks as carries armour and blades, so you'd best be gone, we baint servin' you'm nothing".

If we set up a campaign with the assumption that things do work like that, PCs have a lot less incentive to loot everything in sight, because they either don't get to keep it, or only do so with considerable effort and the approval of the authorities. Rather than loot, if it's really necessary for them to continuously get more stuff, they acquire it through rewards.

This doesn't necessarily mean not retrieving things. Retrieving stolen goods and arranging for their return - via guilds, authorities, families, temples, etc. - is a helpful act and one that's likely to be rewarded. The duke isn't going to let you simply keep that ring of reflecting magic, which is worth several small agricultural towns, but he will certainly be impressed and gratified to receive it, and he might let you borrow it when you need to face off against a sorcerous cult next month. You may not get the specific magical items you took off the person you murdered heroically battled to the death, but you end up with mechanically-appropriate wealth in compensation.

I think this ties into a broader goal, which is the idea that the PCs have to fit into the rest of the world, not ignore society as they see fit. The "wandering hero with no law but my own conscience" is a myth from the Westerns, in a setting of constant colonial violence, but even then, the real-world versions faced actual legal consequences on the relatively rare occasions they fought people (see the Gunfight at the OK Corral, for starters). Authorities are incredibly averse to people existing in a parallel system of law and power, particularly when that derives from violence that isn't controlled by said authorities. It's a problem for superheroes, and it's a problem for the dungeon fantasy tropes that are functionally superheroes at high levels.

Another part of the problem here is that dungeon fantasy worlds never seem to be built with power structures that can meaningfully constrain powerful heroes, or systems where anyone acquiring a certain measure of power gets the choice to either join the heirarchy and acknowledge authority or be exiled/imprisoned well before they become a serious threat that would require large-scale military action to suppress. But that's getting into wider issues.