Punishment#
Ideas from On Crime and Punishment; a fantasy perspective
But tweaking. (NOT MUCH YET EXCEPT AT THE END).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice can be a good source.
Jail is bad#
From a gaming perspective, it is. If your players commit a crime, locking their characters up for a long period of time is the most boring way of possibly handling it. Meanwhile from a society perspective, jail is expensive. You have to use taxpayer money to pay for their food, space, clothes, etc., not to mention the cost of all the guards and gaolers involved.
While the idea of tossing people in a cell for a short amount of time, such as while waiting for trial or giving a drunk time to sober up, are ancient, only very very recent societies have had the abundance of resources necessary to keep criminals in jail. The americans here can vouch for how expensive such a system can be, with only very high magic or technologically advanced societies even having the resources to spare for such an enterprise.
But it can get much worse. In Brazil for instance, several of the largest criminal organizations were formed when terrorists/revolutionaries were put in the same cells as common criminals. Tossing people in jail is not only expensive, but also risky.
Historically speaking jail was mostly kept for political prisoners. They are too dangerous to be left loose, while simultaneously being too potentially valuable to kill; thus being worth the cost of long term imprisonment.
Counterpoint; a case for incarceration
Corporal punishment#
Simple, cheap, time tested, varied, various degrees of humiliation thrown in.
Many good examples in Code of Hammurabi.
- whipping to a time in the pillory
- maiming; e.g. chop off the hands of a son who strikes his father
- forcibly shaving slanderers; temporarily marking liars
Fines#
Restitutive/Restorative justice. Fast, effective, makes sense for a state.
- best for light offenses
- but with clerics present; cost for resurrection diamonds
- proportionally heftier fines if you are wealthy?
Death#
Cool because D&D resurrection makes it harder to become resurrected again.
Decapitation works, hanging does not. Ritual sacrifice also. Sacrifices to a lich in return for water.
Committing crimes pushes you higher up the sacrifice list.
Exile#
serious punishment
- forfeiture of all your property
- loss of citizenship
- exile
- often as about as bad as death sentence (often interchangable)
lighter form: ostracism (kicked out of the country for a predetermined amount of time).
In a fantasy scenario, consider exiling people from a plane. You tried raising an undead army? Get Plane Shifted into the Shadowfel and we'll see how you like dealing with undead 24/7.
Outlawing#
Another punishment comparable to death
- the law no longer protects you
- people with grudges can kill/torture/rob them freely
Can have groups of outlaws present in cities being paranoid.
This is, i think, one of the most interesting punishments to run in a game. How do your players react when they find out that asshole NPC is legally killable? What if they find out a nice NPC was outlawed over some BS charge or something he did while drunk 20 years ago? What if a player angers a noble and is declared an outlaw, how does that affect the way he interacts with NPCs going forward?
Excommunication#
AKA religious exile. Not really a criminal punishment unless your country is a theocracy, but if it is an excommunication could be worse than death. Nobody will hire you, sell you food, or deal with you in any way. When you die you will not go to that religion's afterlife, providing an extra layer of uncertainty and psychological torture. Very horrible, very situational.
Conscription#
Have you ever seen a movie where a bunch of young men get drunk, then wake up on a ship? This is it, sort of. In several countries all over the world, as late as the early 20th century, conscripting someone into the navy was a possible punishment for loitering. It has to be the navy of course, because being on a ship makes the whole running away thing much harder to do.
In fantasy however, we often see cases such as the Night's Watch in Game of Thrones or Grey Wardens in Dragon Age, which are organizations that take on criminals as a form of "alternative punishment". The criminal gets to avoid a harsher sentence, the organization gets another member, everyone is happy. While joining is not an official sentence, it amounts to the same when people join specifically in order to avoid such a sentence. In the case where Eddard Stark agreed to head to the Wall by Cersei's suggestion, conscription was to be used as an alternative form of exile.
In real life the French Foreign Legion served a similar purpose by allowing people to join without any documentation or any questions asked, effectively giving anyone a fresh start... as long as they sign on for life. There are even recorded cases of former nazis that joined it in order to escape the post-war trials.
As we can see, forced conscription can range from a penalty for small crimes (loitering) to an effective punishment for treason or war crimes.
Conscription quest#
This one has no historical backing that i've heard of, but i'll consider it a form of temporary forceful conscription. Despite not really happening IRL, this trope is noteworthy enough to be listed as a potential punishment.
The "criminal quest" can be as common or as rare as you'd like, being a law that only only appears in ancient tales and has not been used for centuries, or as something innkeepers routinely use to kill the rats in their basement.
Forced labor#
"Oh u/Isphus, but i really really REALLY want to run a prison break, so i neeeeeed a jail" - someone, probably.
Alright, i gotcha fam. Just run forced labor instead. It's like jail, except the prisoners pay for themselves by pulling oars, digging tunnels or mining coal. As a wise lady once said, they're just prisoners with jobs.
This makes your precious prison break even better, by adding more tools to play with, more variables, etc.
As for the age thing, forced labor can be made to work much like a fine. The criminal works until his debt to society is paid, not until some arbitrary amount of time has passed.
Further ideas#
Supernatural punishments#
You could be sentenced to an effect like Bestow Curse for X amount of time.
Geas could make you take 5d10 psychic damage should you break the law again (it's even on the spell list of Oath of the Crown). Hell, it could be used to enforce ANY effect.
You may have a fingernail or lock of hair collected so that, if you run, Scrying will find you.
A branding iron would also work, but magic can be a more humane way to put "THIEF" on your forehead.
Instead of "normal" incarceration, you could be sentenced to petrification or Sequestering, either as a temporary sentence or indefinetly if death is not prefferable. This could also work on the PCs, they fucked up and get sentenced to a decade in stone, now they have to deal with the aftermath of the time skip.
Petrification/sequestering...
Planeshift to Carceri. The literal plane of prisons.
Polymorphing someone for example into a donkey or ox and let him work.
(Drow drider polymorph is a good example)