I think for a fantasy game with a medieval vibe, brutal responses to petty crimes do make a certain sense. Public humiliations are also fit for a game with such a setting. But imprisonment, while still a pretty modern thing, does provide a lot of narrative opportunities to develop stories. I think they should do it more like old westerns, where a small town has maybe a sheriff and a deputy, with maybe like one cell for holding someone awaiting "trial." But done more frontier style like that, so the PC has opportunities to do the jail break stuff, or high tailing it. I think I see my friends coming, Riding many a mile. That sort of thing.
They have the cages and such like for Sazza, and in the Gobbo camp, I'm sure they could come up with a way to make that work for the PCs too. Other more mundane penalties might include fines or whatever. But the cool thing about having a jail, is that then you can also have like gangs and posses or corrupt officials and do it up that way too.
In BG1 and BG2 most times the guards would just merc you on sight, even for simple lock popping. Imprisonment was kind of reserved just for plot points, but it might be fun if they created a more generic system to handle crimes around town. Higher crimes might put some kind of wizard detective on the case. I can imagine a lot of places they could take it.
But yeah maybe some more guards with quarter staffs instead of swords would be novel. Since we're all so used to wildly disproportionate violence in these games lol
Last edited by Black_Elk; 03/08/21 02:46 AM.
