Discussion Main / MoreCriminalsThanTargets

I don't know if there is a polar opposite trope about "more guards/soldiers/policeman than civilians", but The elder Scrolls are just as guilty of this, as you can lill all civilians NP Cs and they wont come back, but yhe city guards defenetely will.

Similar case in assassin's creed, where guards seem to pop indefenitly if you go on a killing spree...although civilians probably come back just as much as the guards do.

The first thing I think of is Fallout 3. There are SO many raiders ALL OVER THE FUCKING PLACE but then you have basically 2 main "cities", Megaton and Rivet city, both with a population of 20-30. You have lots of "caravans" moving back and forth Megaton and Rivet city and so on and some dead cities/villages with about 8 people in it. How anyone affords anything is strange, not to mention, in a place with no agriculture or production, trade will eventually stop because economy is not zero sum. Food is consumed, and things break. Raiders need to prey on trade, trade needs to happen between geographical locations where one side has something the other side wants and vice versa. You can say, this city has technology, the other village has... bottlecaps (lol wtf) or food or something, but considering there's no attempt at producing anything, you're shown nota world where food can serve as produced goods and weapons/technology are seen as rare commodities with the price of even a simple pistol going up as time goes on and fewer usable weapons exist, which would be somewhat believable. We're told that the old high-tech stuff is slowly being lost to time, and that's why the Brotherhood of Steel is losing power and control and so on, but this is not shown in the actual game at all. You still come across a billion spanking new plasma/laser rifles everywhere you look. At least in fallout 2 you see farms, with animals, and some plans being grown or attempted to be grown, which occasionally don't try to kill you, but in FO 3 the world is very very badly populated and sorted out. It's like the junk we have now will remain useful and undepleted even after nuclear war and decades of scavenging. Yeah right.

What about situations and settings where the criminals kill each other, steal from each other, and abuse each other? In these places, a robber needs to act fast, or another robber will intervene and make off with the money he jsut stole.

Does Shadowrun really fit this? If the Seattle Metroplex has 6 million people it means that approximately 1 in 4000 is a 'runner and even if 90% of the population is either too poor or insignificant to have anything to do with them the average shadowrunner team would still have some 2000 victims each year for them alone, not to mention runner vs. runner situations. If all runner activity is approximated as monetary losses the corp professionals and gang/mob members lose on the average one day's income per year which doesn't seem unsustainable. The numbers are rough but the orders of magnitude should be pretty accurate.