D&D Handling Consequences 

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I get the impression that persistent murder hobos would often see all the resistance as encouragement rather than a deterrent unless they absolutely cannot win in anyway.

Just want to mention that I like the change of announcing the section titles. There have been a few times when I've tabbed out when listening to one of your videos, but then it takes me a bit to register the few seconds of silence and I tab back over and rewind to see the context of what the new section is about.

Player says, "I'm just playing my character." Your response, "Don't play that character." That sums it up right there. People don't have to be jerks.

The DM put a 250,000 pp reward on our evil characters head, it prompted our own good characters to collect!

Miyamoto Musashi once said something to the effect that his greatest defeat was at at the hands of a farmer with a staff. "Peasants" in distant areas are tough and resourceful people....they ,by necessity, cannot depend on the law or etc to protect them. Think along the lines of the American frontier days. Anyhow, the point I'm trying to make is this: People in tough areas are rarely helpless and with a means to protect themselves.

In the wise words of Ron White, "...I backed down from the fight, cause I don't know how many of them it would have taken to whip my ass, but I knew how many they were going to use. That's a handy little piece of information, right there." I've used a variant of that quote a few times in-game as my players gained the animosity of the local powers that be and were asked to leave town...

Player, after killing an innocent ship keep, "that's what my character would do!" DM, "Fair enough. Now roll up a character who wouldn't do that, because this one is now an NPC"

Sage advise, thanks for the video! I like your idea of having the PCs come across an adventuring party that's bullying a town. Might make a great opening adventure for a new campaign.

As a new GM, I'm deeply grateful for the videos you post. I'm putting together my first campaign, and I'm using your ideas to fix some of the problems I didn't even know were a problem before.

I have never run a sandbox, but this sounds very interesting and i can usit even in my adventure paths to follow. Thx for the video!

Well, I totally agree that this is players and their behavior not character behavior. We GM the players we have, not necessarily the players we wish we had. It's sometimes easier to start at the dungeon entrance and end play with the dungeon exit and not deal with the world outside the dungeon. Some players just want to kill everything and take stuff. If as GM you want to impose consequences on character behavior I have a thought not mentioned in the video. The deities of our setting take an active interest in events through magic. It seems logical that displeasing the gods may not be a great thing for the PCs. Rumble, rumble - the volcano god is angry!

Wanted posters would be a great deterrent. If the PCs are causing trouble then next time they come to town, you could have the guards looking through wanted posters and checking them against the various ones, possibly mistaking them for one of the "wanted".

I was thinking of consequences as a different definition. The version I was thinking of is fun for both DM and players. Example: PCs raid a thieves den. A couple weeks later in game, those same thieves or their allies come after them for revenge! Less about punishing the players but keeping their game choices at the forefront of their experience. Really fun and the PCs are ready! “Oh it’s those guys again? Let’s get ‘em!”

I think that to avoid this type of problems it is advisable to do a session 0 in which to establish the theme and expectations about the campaign. If you make it clear from the first moment that you don't want murderhobos, it's easier for players not to go down that path. If someone does it anyway, you have the precedent of having made clear what is and is not allowed and you can act accordingly.

I never had a group of murder hobos, who killed or bullied town folk as such. However, back in the 1980s, we more and more tended towards the not-so-nice alignments le, ne, ce and cn, which lead to cheating and killing each other. That was fun at first, but we never achieved anything anymore. Since then, I have banned those alignments as DM, because I don't want to prepare a module for weeks only to see my players kill each other. Younger players asked me recently if they can play those alignments. When I ever let them play evil, I see to it that their master or employer, who will be evil too, will play them against each other so he need not to pay them. 😅

A farmer may be 0-level, but the city guard or city watch will have 1 in 5 with at least a level. I use that 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th level character in charge of the ones below them. For the city watch, that’s Corporal, sergeant, lieutenant, captain and commander. The commander will have four captains under him. The captain will have 4 lieutenants under him. A lieutenant will have 4 sergeants or corporals beneath him. The city watch with have 4 non-leveled for every leveled NPC. The City guard are soldiers, so there will be 9 for every one with a level. I use the same organization in goblin tribes, orc tribes and the like. If the alarm is raised, the PCs have to make the call whether to run or fight, because they are soon going to be outnumbered in any sort of real settlement.

Session Zero and out of game conversations have always been my choice for dealing with players dragging the mood for everyone else down. It can happen when meeting new players for sure. Beyond that, I think measured consequences that are honest can work. If players are harassing a village, how likely would the village be to put their lives on the line standing up to a fully armed and armored party? If the players are causing trouble in a bigger town or a major city, they might have to contend with more honest consequences like town guards, soldiers or well paid bounty hunters. I think people playing chaotic stupid murder hobos don't always realize they're limiting the amount of content they could engage with if they were on better terms with the NPC's they terrorize. (Having said that I have done evil groups before, but they only lasted because the theme was evil vs evil.)

It's interesting to think that if you party turns to banditry, you could end up designing towns like dungeons, and dungeons like safe havens. allies become other bandits groups, corrupt lords and ambitious wizards become your patrons.

The alignment change conversation can be a good way to bring this up. Sometimes, the murder hobo still thinks he's Chaotic Good, but . . .

I'm at a point in a campaign where I have no idea what to expect in terms of consequences, because my character (who is basically part of a Witcher like organization) came across a town plagued by troubles. We killed a succubus lairing in the nearby woods that was causing the issues, only to return to town (after being warned something was wrong) and find that the townspeople had accused 4 innocent's of being witches and cursing the land and were about to burn them at the stake. A high Inquisitor had come to town (we knew he was in the area and we were trying to get to the town and this mission before he got there and handled things his way). We tried to explain that these 4 people were innocent, we knew three of them (one player character, who was doing investigation in town while we were off demon hunting, and two NPCs who accompany us, as well as an innocent townswoman) and we found and dealt with the actual threat The Inquisitor would hear of none of it, and then lit the fire to burn the witches, something snapped in my character, and the townspeople learned to fear the wrath of a holy man. I cut my way through the crowd to get to the "witches" being burnt at the stake, while the rest of the party fought the high Inquisitor. I was able to free the innocents, but killed a lot of villagers in the process before helping the party finish off the Inquisitor. So I kinda expect that to have consequences, but then in literally the next session I saved another town from a famine while the rest of the party was off socializing with nobles (we do private sessions between games sometimes), and am being hailed as a hero. (Which is more in line with how my character normally behaves). So I have no clue what my reputation is going to look like in this duchy.

_“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."_ -- Malcolm S. Forbes _"Character is how you treat others who can do nothing for you."_ -- Martin Luther King Jr. _"I don’t trust anyone who’s nice to me but rude to the waiter. Because they would treat me the same way if I were in that position."_ -- Muhammad Ali If you have murder hobos, killing 0-livel peasants, the only real cure for that kind of "character," is to get some better players.

Consequence is too often thought of as a bad thing. In reality, this is just the natural reactions of the world to what the characters are doing within it. Good actions = usually good consequences, Bad actions = you know... How about a Lack of action? Could be good or bad consequences. I have had to have those uncomfortable discussions over the many years I have GMed. The most success I have had is reminding the player that the other players are not going to trust him, won't cooperate and may even go to lengths to sabotage his efforts. Why then would the party allow him to participate with them? I have only had to ask 2 players in 40+ years to leave the group.

Alignment is good at keeping players inline in my experience. But yes talk to the player. Having said that I have not had murder hobo players since I was 10 in 1982 and I was fine with that since I was an immature kid too 😅

100% agree, most of the time just having a conversation out of game is the way to go. My setting/the game we're all playing does have decent built-in tolerance for criminal behavior. It's a post apocalyptic setting, and most law enforcement outside of settlements is handled by one motley crew of bounty hunters or another. Those encounters can be really fun, tbh - I usually make the hunters have 2d6 screws loose. Sometimes, the party takes on a bounty hunting job...other times, one gets taken out on them. The circle of life. It's a sandbox campaign, for context.

07:55 This is where it's useful to have some sort of Reputation mechanic in relation to various regions or Factions in the game.

One of my PCs murdered an innocent NPC. So I made the NPCs husband set up a bounty hunting group. They tracked down the PCs character and cut his hand off. (Meant that my PC can only use weapons with D6 damage). He did agree that this was fair all things considered haha I also told them after the session, that they need to buck their ideas up otherwise it's not going to be fun for anyone if they keep murdering. They argreed and a session later we had a really good session with no senseless murdering!

One of the things I always found stops people from doing a bad thing is, (1) Ask them are they sure they want to do that, (2) Ask them are they really REALLY sure they want to do that, (3) have them sign a note (preformed) saying that they did such and such and they will be HAPPY with the consequences that follow (and have others sign in contract form) - because that signing the note really puts it in stone; they can not deny they did it (like i had happen when i started), and this puts a sword over their head that they know will fall - and knowing this they very quickly change play if they know you are taking notice of their actions i only do this if their actions start get out of hand . like threatening the bar keep for free drinks or the Shop owner for free gear or a stupidly low price on an object they want and intend to go through with it - because i under stand it may be in character but like in Skyrim it will have consequences , and they have to know and remember that

Thanks for the video! I use the corruption point system from Deathbringer RPG, in that an evil act gives the PC a corruption point, and at 10 points the character becomes essentially a monster, who I as the DM take control of. But they can do something really good to take away a point.😮

In my campaigns, characters aren't allowed to enter towns with weapons. They have to give them to the guards to put in lock up. When they leave, they pay some tax to get their weapons back. This tracks with the way medieval towns actually worked. It was inviting trouble to walk around armed with more than a dagger. Magic users are all registered, and after the last inquisition they take complaints against rogue members very seriously, so a team of mage hunters will be coming for them with orders to bring them in to stand trial or kill them if they resist. It usually takes about a month in game for the repercussion to show up, but it will. I let the players do what they want, if they want to be psychopaths, sure, but i let them know the campaign is probably now going to be about how they end up in prison or dead. It can be fun playing that cat and mouse game, since I don't just instantly kill them. They get the chance to play outlaws for as long as they can stay on the run. If it's just a village, the village militia would probably request the weapons as well, but the poor guys aren't that strong or numerous, so if a strong adventurer party says no, they'll probably just complain to their lord and he'll send soldiers, but a Marquise doesn't have the strongest or most numerous soldiers, so it'll probably be a small element. Consequently, murder hobos get away with a lot more in villages and hamlets.

Many Icelandic Sagas are about the consequences of killing. There was no executive power that could imprison or execute someone in Iceland at the time. As a result there were two main forms of punishment, fines and outlawry. Fines, called wergeld, were calculated depending upon the social standing of the person killed. Once the fine was paid the matter was closed, legally at least. There were two forms of outlawry. Lesser Outlawry meant banishment from that part of Iceland for 3 years. Greater Outlawry was permanent. An outlaw could be killed with impunity and others were forbidden from aiding them. These ideas could work well in a fantasy setting. Especially if the characters have access to magic. Unless the town guard includes Magic-Users, they might find it difficult to keep a Wizard in a cell.

What a good topic! A way to handle it is treat them like they are the bandits raiding the town. Next time they show up, shops close down, and maybe the town hired 7 old adventurers to take care of them!

My players have a spirit in an amulet that gives any who swear to be their friend, a powerful spell to use once per adventure. But if those who promised to be buddies start fighting, the spirit gets upset and they need to make a Save. If they fail, they get knocked out for 1d4 hours. But what constitutes a fight changes, because they're able to talk to the spirit, who initially knocked two characters for just arguing lol. Now it's fisticuffs, but later, it might be serious weapons out combat

"A Riot is an Ugly Thing." 😆

I'm so glad you just come out and say it: "Is this the kind of game you want to play?" Because in this time and age, you can find the players that you want (and players can find the group they want), and this is not like back in the 80s and 90s: we don't have to settle because of dysfunctional players and bullies, you know? I ran Edge of the Empire when it first came out, and had two players run their characters in appalling fashion throughout the whole thing. It was not Star Wars at all, but a lame version to play out murder hobo stuff in the star wars setting. I told them that they were ruining Star Wars for me, and ended the game. My friend took up the GM's spot, and we ran it at his house, and I had so much more fun once everyone (only four of us left) understood we were playing Star Wars and not Star Murder hobos (lol). Thanks again for all this advice on how to deal with this situation!

I do believe that handling "consequences" should be twofold. Yes, a conversation out of game is ideal to manage bad/unfun player behavior but also I believe that my job as a GM is to create consistent consequences for player actions and responses to situations. Sometimes it's not about bad players it's about them getting overzealous, starting fights, or causing accidents with their magicks and artefacts and hirelings and gold. The people impacted from that should react. Maybe "Paladin hit squad" is not the first choice but as stated in the video "Temples refusing to heal those who harm their flock" or "Stores refuse to sell to them" etc are perfectly valid ways to communicate to players that they've screwed up and gold's a paperweight if it can't be spent. If they go around the region and rile up town after town maybe then the local lord will hear about it and send armed knights to round up these adventurous criminals or maybe they'll contract rival adventurers.

06:05 Yep. This can escalate quickly with certain players. At that point I draw the curtains on the campaign.

Very good, very measured discussion. I definitely default to "let's talk out of game" rather than default to in-game consequences as a first resort. Though I think it's better to first talk with the problematic player one-on-one and explain why their behaviour in-game is a problem; in my experience having it as a group discussion can get messy and can become a blame game. But if multiple players engage in this kind of in-game behaviour (rare in my experience), then it's time for a group chat to decide what are everyone's expectations.

Never had this kind of problem -- they'd much rather try to make friends with monsters than enemies with villagers.

Absolutely agree! We have a standing rule - no evil pcs. Includes stealing from merchants etc. I mean there might be exceptions from time to time but as a general rule. Works really well.

I actually like timers on the table, or behind the screen, for various reasons. But this is discussed in session zero and new players get leeway. Declaring “the type of game” like you said is great advice

I think one needs to know their group. I was running a game my daughter and her friends. One of the players decided to threaten a guard, so I decided to put him in jail. This became its own adventure as they now had to bribe the warden to let him go before he was executed. Anyway it cost them 1500 gold bail which was what they earned from their last adventure. After that, I had a talk with everyone about the kind of campaign I want to run and they straightened out.

Good takes.

Its worth noting that murder hobos were a thing historically. Samurai, knights, bandits, pirates, native tribes all give us examples of such individuals/bands.

I'm a player in my friend's dnd campaign, where 3 other players are murderhobos. DM doesn't mind murderhobos, constantly enables them yet somehow is always surprised that even his "good aligned" campaigns derail into that. But those players always get rewarded for their crimes, with loot or skipped encounters so maybe in-game consequences shouldn't be brushed away. Again, he doesn't mind them but he's constantly perplexed why this keeps happening to his games

This is a tricky one. The only Real way to balance Murder Hobos is to remove them from the game & find new players. I had some of these for years. They're the same type of player that cause problems between players as well. It didn't stop until they were gone.

I highly agree that the type of game you want to run should be set in session 0. This is a hard thing to deal with when you first encounter it, because the players characters are supposed to be the ones handling problems, not creating them.

Well that seems like a good idea. I'd actually say both. I'll just let the dice decide how people react. Like I don't think an angry mob would form in a couple hours. I think an angry mob would form in a couple of days (people deliberating and working the courage). And they'd more likely try killing the party while they slept if they thought they were powerful, People might try to feed them poisoned food. Then hunt them in the woods for a couple of days. Then maybe months go by and now there's bounty hunters. But only the once, lets assume bounty hunters are expensive so poor village peasants scrambled what funds they could - if news arrives that the bounty hunters died they'd most likely lose all hope on revenge. If your party somehow killed royalty maybe this would have more drastic and dire consequences.

I always tell my players- don’t be a jerk to your real friends because of what your imaginary friend ‘would’ or ‘wouldn’t’ do. Roleplay is the goal, but if you have to chose between rationalizing actions that don’t make sense, or making things uncomfortable or not fun for the other players and the gm- just don’t be a jerk. It’s a game about imagination. I’m sure you can come up with a reason that your character wasn’t a jerk 😂

My parents prepared me for this

I love working consequences into the campaign, not only for party/character action but also inaction. I have had characters run out of towns or at least feel unwelcome, have service denied, have tarrifs and taxes imposed. I have also had villages be razed becaue the party decided to not bite at a quest hook. A dragon ignored, is still a dragon. Bandits left unchecked only grow more brazen and bold. In a Cyberpunk game, I finally had to arrest and imprison a character due to constant flarently, illegal activites and reckless endangerment of high profile public ppopulations (firing off high caliber weapons in a space colony). That was extreme and resulted in the player retiring the character until he eventually gave me a good reason to lbring the character back.

A minor note on the point of turns taking too long and timers on the table. I have never had to bring out the timer, but I have the timer ready to go. In my neighborhood group there are a couple of repeat "offenders" who suffer from cripple indecision and a lack of ability to plan their next move. There have been many respectful verbal encouragements to decide their actions in a reasonable amount of time. A non-RPG example is that many people with ADD use timers to keep themselves on track. Some people aren't able to change their behavior through having a conversation. They need either a boundary or an external aid. Just my experience with it.

If a character at my table does something like stealing when not necessary or an innocent who doesn't deserved it, I'll consider changing the PC's alignment to Evil. A selfish behavior his an evil one. A person who doesn't care for the wellbeing of another person is an evil one. You can ignore the troubles of another person's if you're neutral or even good, but if you put yourself and your needs before another person, then you're evil... To put it simply: a bully is evil. I know this may sound extreme, it doesen't relate 100% with your reasoning, and I'm talking of alignment that is a thing only in D&D, but I put forward this concept in the session 0: the evil alignment for the PCs, is equal to being selfish. This concept blocks all of my players from doing such evil acts. Maybe I'm only lucky, 'cause I play with people who don't like being evil. PS: sorry for my english, it's not my language.

two possibilities: aak yourself how would a certain society react to such deeds of evil unjust violence? devise a plan to deal with the troublemakers according to this societies ressources and customs. second: well, there could be people, who would hire and "help" those pc... and those "helpers" would become progressively darker, entangling the pc in a thighter and thighter web of evil... maybe at some point players would start feeling uncomfortable, and would like to find a way out of this. heroic self-sacrifice for example could be a good way to redeem oneself (like darth vade throwing down palpatine)

I've never liked the notion of passive aggressive behavior or actions on the part of the GM to deal with problem players. We're all adults (in most cases), if you can't have an honest, adult conversation with a player or players about problems, then you probably just need to play with someone else. Granted, I'm in a place where I play with friends and friends of friends all the time, but my belief is: We're adults, it's a game, let's talk about this thing that is disruptive to that as such.

Read a Louis Lamour novel and you’ll see what happens to evil characters

Sometimes high level adventurers become town guards after they take an arrow in the knee.. 🤗

Imagine this: Characters do a good deed for a poor town. With no way to repay them, the townsfolk turn to banditry to acquire items to sell off to both enrich their town and to give to the players in payment for this good deed. Moral quandary.

Act like an Orc, expect to be treated like one.

[Innkeeper says] "I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee..."

A session zero is a very helpful approach.

I'm wondering if this is topical because of the 44 rules list that went viral. the book series "Critical Failure" available Amazon kindle subscription is a great saga of what happens to characters who are truly despicable at the table. Hilarious book series.

I do agree with the important points, so I won't comment on those, but here's a minor one, just for the sake of conversation. I never liked the idea of all the town people being very low level. For example, if professional town guards exist, I assume they are generally well-trained in fighting, because it's literally their job. It's no different than bouncers in the modern day: chances are they're good martial artists. The shopkeeper being a 5lvl ranger? Of course, they travelled a lot as part of their job and they learned how to defend themselves from bandits and wolves. Nobody carrying a sword? At some time, some towns in Europe even _required_ all men to own one. (Also, everyone carried a dagger or a big knife.) In general, I like to consider the PCs a bit better than the average, but not necessarily better than everyone, and certainly not so much they can't be outnumbered if they look for trouble.

I think the reason people aren't willing to address player character and player behavior is because there are DM's that are conflict adverse and will passively stand by, fearful of not running "the best game" if they start setting boundaries that they should have set from the outset.

Setting faction and reaction to player choices is absolutely the key element of older style open world play. I tend to think Murderhoboism tends to be the result of either players who want to play around with the morality of being a bad dude (which is fine - and then the referee has to basically run a mafia/crime syndicate game - which is a pretty standard kind of story with it's own complexities and consequences) or, and more common, they are testing to see if there are rails and fences forcing them to be good. Also there's the sort of anti-social twit who thinks its cool to make things unpleasant for everyone else at the table - but he's rare. This effects consequences as well - I personally don't mind sending a posse after murder hobos - but those consequences have to be coherent, as you mention, the weak won't be able to confront the PCs directly, but they may be able to hire seven samurai or appeal to the local lord etc. It simply becomes part of the faction intrigue in the setting. Usually the line stepping type of murderhobo will stop since things make sense and they know they can make their own choices.

This may not be a topic your channel covers but in my game my players voted for me to run an oppression based storyline, would you be able to make some videos off of this to help us understand it better?

Henchmen and hirelings: nobody decent wants to help them. There are other features you can warp to hinder them and after a session they might start wanting someone to actually like them. As well you can just say the town alchemist or whatever only helps good/lawful characters.

Cannot remember ever having such issues. But then I do not run D&D or similar games, but usually horror or intrigue, which ca both be rather lethal and thus players rarely think they could get away with such nonsense. I mean if any monster can kill them, hell, even some random towns person could poison them if they get fed up, then it would poor insanity to antagonise people, and this goes even more in societies that are built on honour, like in Legend of the Five Rings. I think that is the other aspects, player characters are usually not some free adventures, but are tied into some organisations, like a clan, a business, or what have you, and thus they cannot simply roam the land and be a menace. Like in SLA Industries, when they damage the reputation of the company, then they lose their privileges.

Life hack. You don't have to roll up civilians for combat. Where there is a village or town there is a lord/lady and king/queen. Meaning they javelin their own military and gards. All you have to do is roll up the lowest ranking gard/Solder Footmen all the way to the most elite like Knights. And then split them up into groups A squad all the way up to a battalion. And treat them more like a swarm. And if that is still to much for them to handle remember you're the DM You have God's. And on top of that you might not even have to fight your player's. Just close the city / town gates. Deny service. But at the same time you need to check yourself too. If most of your NPCs are A-holes Are you really surprised your player's are going murder hobo? Consequences works both ways to. Make A-hole NPCs they Goleta killed. But if that isn't the case lay down the law. And remember punishment should fit the crime. Another thing you can do is not give xp for the villagers I mean why would they have xp they're farmers and shop owners. The closest thing that a villager is going to be a combatant is little kids playing with wooden swords. And send out a bounty on them. Alive at first if they get really bad Then dead or alive. They're is many ways to handle this without violence. Keeping them out of town/ villages /Cities is a good way to starve them out. They'll run out of supplies and run out of food so they will have to hunt on their own. If they even find anything

Consequences - good and bad - should be there from day one of the campaign. Don't wait until the players are 6th level and powerful enough to be bullies to show them that there are negative consequences to this. Just as much, have the out of game conversation before you even start. Having the entire table on the same page is key to a successful game.

I outright setup the game I want to run by spelling it out in my house rules. Players cannot do PvP unless it's game directed. They also cannot attack peaceful NPCs because there's no reason for it. I simply never allow it to start and everyone knows that when they join.

It becomes harder to police character behavior in the more 'power fantasy' games. In BECMI the mob of locals is still s threat :)

I recently watched a video recently in defense of murder hoboing since players often live lives of having to obey their strict boss and maybe work with a team that is very annoying and restricting. So when players mistreat ordinary NPCs they are fantasizing all the annoying people in their lives. I don't think you should lean into allowing your PCs to murder ordinary citizens but maybe as the GM you should have more of the NPCs your players meet be annoying people that they can take out some aggression on.

I have never wanted to play a "bully the peasants game". I have a few times delt with a player who, for whatever reason, basically demands anything from free services to just compliments at sword point. I have to stop the game and just ask the player, "what are you doing?" The never have an answer, but the behavior stops. It does dampen the mood at the table though.

I had a player once who killed an NPC who was sleeping in his house long story short I believe that heroes killed monsters so when he found out that the NPC was a ghoul of a vampire in a town of vampires he cut the crap once he escaped with his life

How to deal with murder hobos? I think the solution is to talk to your players about it, and the conversation is going to go "this is not what I like about this hobby" and "if this is how you want to play, that's fine, but I'm not interested in running this kind of game and I'm not going to." At the onset, my invitation to people to join my game will blatantly be "I am running a game for heroic or good player characters" and character creation will include a reminder. I don't even like neutral charters because they're generally unlikeable people to me because of a lack of heroism or a lack of a good nature.

Who is Hank Bobby?

i uh just assume most of environs have similarly leveled and experienced npcs. because the players should as in real life be weary of whom they insult and interact with negatively. there are no reasons the barkeep isnt a 5th level fighter who decided he was just tired of traveling. had 0 issues lol

I haven't run D&D for a while, but I do know that 1E or 2E had a rule for collective grappling where a group of otherwise weak individuals could very easily dogpile an individual foe; at which point it would be pretty easy to lay them out with repeated smacks from a pole or bar room stool. All of that said, I don't know if I think the premise of the video is really sound; if the players are bullies, then what are they doing adventuring? Is your campaign just them trying to rob everyone (powerful enough to own gold that is still worth XP presumably) in sight and building a keep to protect their loot? It doesn't sound particularly sustainable to me. What is motivating them to quest? Is it just nothing but vanilla mega dungeons with loot as the only carrot? I guess that's fine, but I would think that most adult players would tire of that very quickly. The suggested solutions, like having super powerful NPCs beat them down seems like a solution that doesn't really resolve the larger existential problem of what you can do with the campaign to make it fun or interesting with PCs like that.

The idea that every NPC in those old modules was a retired something level adventurer never worked for me. I thought it was ridiculous. It's way too much of a thing in the mix.

Does your t-shirt read Presto or Albert?

Or...switch to Warhammer Fantasy and let them try to be bullies!

Do you have any recommendations for a GM who is looking for inspiration after a break?

This is a DnD problem. In Rolemaster or Runequest punishes these play styles are punished on a system level.

1:10 not realistic. Realistically there are highly capable people at all social levels. Of course realistically, the PCs wouldn't be so special.

I'd love a video on evil campaigns and your gripes with them, if that's something you'd like to make. I've always wanted to run one but I have a sense of the ways it could go wrong, interested in your thoughts.

I suppose this is where an aspect of the Domain level comes into play: the followers of the lord may determine the makeup of the town/city watch or village militia/wilderness patrol. And means, for good or for ill, they have now begun to interact with a Regional power.

Just tell your players from the start heroic campaign only. Any player who crosses the line gets thrown out of the game group. As P.D.M. said “Put the master in dungeon master” You can always find new players. It’s DMs that are in short supply.