One of the most constant presences in any campaign is the guard. They stand watch over the civilization and can define how many encounters and situations play out. For the GM, they can be a useful tool; a guard showing up at just the right moment can create a really fun scene. Conversely, the presence of crime can play similar roles. A crime-ridden city feels different from a heavily-policed one, and adding criminals to your story can create very engaging moments. So how do we define the variables--what are guards like, and what is crime like?
Answering those questions requires considering a number of factors. This guide will help you to address several ideas that will allow you to give questions of crime their best portrayal of your game.
What do you imagine crime and policing to be like in your world at large? Let's start by considering guard presence. One easy way to think about these ideas is begin with, "How hard should it be to get away with a crime in this world?" Then, you might also have worldbuilding reasons to answer these questions in a certain way--perhaps your world is ruled by a cruel dictator who is likely to have a strong force of controlling agents across the countryside (if not outright troops stationed everywhere). Or you're running a utopian civilization, and you want there to be no crime as a result of positive social changes--these things tell us a lot about how our civilization should look. Some details to consider in particular:
Government - Crime and policing is likely to be at least a little different in some settlements from the norm based on the way government is run. More repressive governments are likely to have both more police and more crime (at least by way of resistance). Corrupt governments might have corrupt guards. Small governments might have fewer guards than a city of a similar size. All of these factors can of course be subverted for a more interesting setting, but these ideas are consistent with normal logic.
Settlement Size - The size of a settlement is likely to have an impact on the way that crime functions and is policed. Smaller settlements are likely to only be able to afford a single law officer at most, where bigger cities might have entire companies of guards at their service. This of course can be varied; a small town which has been raided several times by bandits might have a heavy armed guard force to protect themselves, whereas a larger city with little crime might have very little policing.
Crime - The extent to which crime exists might be a major factor in how it is policed. When I DMed Listen Check, the game was set in a city known for having a great criminal presence. This was in part because I wanted the players to be members of a gang--making crime common made them able to roam the city without constant threat amongst other criminals. But for dramatic reasons, I wanted them to be capable of fearing the guards, so I made the guard force significantly organized and intimidating in order to create that effect. Knowing how many guards will exist in your world can be as easy as considering the crime.
Player Challenge - One thing that guards can often present is a challenge. They can also be a help, but most campaigns don't go that route. For parties who commit either crimes or dangerous antics, guards can be a dramatic answer to their behavior. If your dynamic with your players is that they want you to stymy them and present difficulties like guard appearances, go for it--fill the world with guards. But if you feel like you would restrict your players too much by surrounding them with guards, take a step back and keep them on the periphery.
But then, we've only considered guard presence as a guiding principle and not crime. What if you need to start the other way around--how do we determine crime as the guide of this process? We'll do the same thing--consider some ideas related to crime--and build around it.
Your Campaign's Attitude Toward Crime - Perhaps the most defining feature of crime in your world should be how your game will feel about it. Some good-aligned campaigns will view crime as a plague and potentially seek to eliminate it. Chaotic-aligned campaigns might use illegal behavior as part and parcel of their behavior. Evil-aligned campaigns might make serious crimes a regular part of their operations. Your portrayal of crime should be matched to this. If characters are good, then crime should probably either be low or very high as a part of the story. If characters are chaotic, encounters with criminals might be the most engaging part of the game, but it might also overwhelm them with threats. If characters are evil, then the tone of the campaign depends on crime; in a high crime world, they are rebelling against a corrupt society with hatred, but in a low crime world, they are the true evil of the world. These ideas should help guide what kind of crime exists in your world.
Government and Settlement Size - As these factors impacted the guard presence, they also affect crime. Repressive governments are likely to be rife with crime, whereas a beloved government is unlikely to see much criminal activity. Settlement size matters too; big cities tend to have higher crime rates in real life, and smaller towns tend to have lower rates (many say because crime in small towns is more personal). These ideas can of course be subverted for interest--a small town with beloved leaders rife with crime and a big city with hated leaders with low crime are both interesting places to explore.
Dissatisfaction in the Public - It is pretty widely accepted in real life that crime rises in times of turmoil, and that matters in the game as well. A settlement with a very low quality of life is likely to have high rates of crime. If people have to steal to survive, there's going to be a lot of stealing. Conversely, if a settlement were to have a uniformly high standard of living, then it would be likely to see a lower crime rate. Importantly, you can use crime as a marker of public dissatisfaction narratively; when entering a settlement, a scene of someone committing a crime and going unchallenged gives a very powerful portrait of life in that settlement.
Life Outside of Settlements - Much of this guide has addressed crime in cities, but let's not forget the handy bandit, who is defined as much by their aggressiveness as they are by their existence outside of society. What is life like on the frontier? That's the life that bandits live. Knowing the conditions of bandit life can help us to understand the type of people who choose to live that way, and importantly, why they do. If people are living hard in the wild, bandits are likely to be relatively few and very fierce, whereas if frontier life is easy, bandits are likely to be populous and relatively less hardy. Just as a good criminal encounter in a town can spice up the narrative, so too can bandits out of town, so know what your players will be facing before they get there.
I want to stress again that these are questions that we should answer both about the world as a whole (so that we have a baseline in improvising situations) and about each settlement individually (so that there's variation and customization to the given situation). For instance, in my homebrew setting, Evanoch, there's a general average of fairly few guards--just enough to to respond to legal matters and keep people safe most of the time--and relatively low crime--a bit here and there for narrative's sake, but a generally happy, peaceful place. That was always my goal with Evanoch: to create a place where anything was possible. I did so by creating diverse places and peoples to create many different places which could sustain many different types of story. And because I'm used to DMing comical antics campaigns, I wanted a place that could hold that. It's a happy enough place to goof around in. But you can still have trouble in paradise, so darker stories are still possible (and arguably more dramatic that way). It's the best of both worlds, where having an upbeat "goof around" kind of campaign in a grimdark world is less easy to do.
But this isn't the case everywhere. I've played campaigns in two of my ten major cities: Talon Gorge and Torga. Talon Gorge had exceptionally low crime, but was worried about an assassination attempt against the king and beefed up security with a large guard force. This served the story in the the players became members of the guard while also being tasked with assassinating people. On the other hand, Torga was a city that had a massive criminal element, which precipitated a massive guard force. This was because the players were criminals, as discussed above. And when I played in the Eastweald, a location I designed as a campaign map with 18 unique settlements, we played in 6 of them--each of the 6 we played in had unique crime and policing profiles, from idyllic Feirmor to the sanctified Blackleaf Falls to the busy Woodhearth. My point here is that the answers to the questions above should help you decide what's best for your story, and that means considering the players' experiences as well as details that help keep your world consistent.
That's all for now. Coming soon: a guide to tattoos by D&D culture, a profile on the island nation of Dalton in my homebrew setting, and a one-shot based on the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Until next time, happy gaming!
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