Stringency

Basic Information

Stringency is a meta-concept within RPGs referring to the degree to which a given campaign setting enforces consequences to player actions - usually those concerned with anti-social behaviour.

In high stringency campaigns, law enforcement respond predictably, bad behaviour leads to bad reputations and, in general, actions have consequences. Lower stringency campaigns tend to be more plot driven - even cold blooded murder will be winked at as long as the NPC in question was a statted encounter and PCs will have considerable plot armour against most other things not directly related to adventuring.

Stringent campaigns will also tend to be more consequential in general - economic, social and material consequences will all need to be explored and even "monsters" are less likely to sit around staring into the middle distance until attacked.

Stringency is also frequently tested in the power gap between PCs and NPCs - lower stringency means that PCs will generally be massively more powerful than those around them and able to enter combat with anything except "boss monsters" relatively casually, whilst in a higher stringency game, combat is never casual and whilst skilled characters may be able to dispatch unskilled opponents with relative ease the outcome cannot be taken for granted. This can be a function of power curve within a specific game system.

Sources

Bibliography

1. full source reference

Game and Story Use

• High stringency campaigns are likely to put a lot more emphasis on social skills and trickery than combat - especially when combined with an appropriately realistic combat system¹.
• "Certain editions of certain RPGs" managed to popularise the concept of the "fifteen minute adventuring day" whereby the party stroll into the dungeon, exhaust their daily combat powers in a couple of carefully choreographed encounters, collect level appropriate loot and then retire to rest, repeating the next day until the dungeon is cleared. If this actually takes place in a functioning campaign, without the inhabitants of the dungeon taking any countermeasures, then the cause will fall somewhere between a lack of stringency and a complete failure of verisimilitude.
• Again, in high stringency campaigns, contacts are likely to be important - a black market doctor becomes a far more attractive character if your PC can't just stagger into A&E when he's shot. Likewise, where local vendors ask significant questions about the provenance of "treasure" that the PCs are trying to offload², it pays to know a fence.

Footnotes

1. Although even cinematic violence can be tolerated in, for example, a genre appropriate superheros game based on code era comics - characters can still fight, but those who kill or injure villains or who otherwise act in an "unheroic" manner will be penalised. You may also need vomit bags for your players unless they like that sort of thing.

2. Bear in mind, for example, that in most low stringency games the things the bandits/orcs/dragon stole and hoarded in their lair mysteriously become the property of the PCs after a little applied violence. In a high stringency campaign, large quantities of that loot will still be legally the property of the original owners or be claimed by the government. Selling it is still possible, but not necessarily legal.