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Originally Posted by Anders
How do I keep the party's wizard/bard from mentally dominating all the merchants they come across?
1. Magic Resistance (either natural or via items).
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That will seem highly contrived: "
Another merchant with Magic Resistance! That's the 15th one this week! What are the odds?" Such things tend to feel so "meta" that they ruin the setting for the players. I'd avoid it for that reason alone.
Beyond that, merchants are wealthy and important in most fantasy settings, and customarily own and use many magic items – especially items that ensure their safety, and continued wealth and importance, in a world full of slaying-and-looting adventurers. Entire classes of items won't work well for those who have MR: "Hah, a merchant! Well, we know
he won't have a Missile Shield brooch!" This gets
especially silly for sellers of magic items.
A partial exception might be a magic-resistant race that's also drawn to wealth. An entire people with Magic Resistance and Greed might, in the absence of being able to use magic to get rich, chase wealth by trying to corner the merchant business. Unless you want a weird economy controlled by a single race – who would probably become the rulers in short order, as they have money and can't be magically curbed – that's best kept to a single settlement or isolated region, or to beings so rare that there might be only one or two per large city.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anders
2. Wards of some kind.
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. . . which will either end up in the hands of PCs, rendering
them immune and spoiling lots of adventures, or be contrived not to work for the PCs (bound to specific NPCs, only work within city limits, only work for Merchants' Guild members, etc.), which will seem no better than "all merchants have Magic Resistance." My GMing experience with various NPCs-only defenses (not specifically against mind control, but as a class of things) is that those two outcomes are usual.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anders
3. Laws that make it illegal to influence citizens with mind magic
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This is by far the best option!
In a world where magic is so widespread that mind-controllers casually use spells to commit petty crime, every town big enough to have a bazaar is likely to have a town watch or town guard that includes a wizard who can cast Reconstruct Spell to confirm use of mind control, and Seeker to find the person who cast the revealed spell. They might also know Restore Memory to unearth wiped memories of magical assaults. And yes, using mental-influence spells is sure to be seen as every bit the assault that using Fireball and Deathtouch is; the whole "it's subtle and nobody got hurt" defense is specious.
Big cities might have a large, immovable magical map that flashes at any location where a spell is cast. It might be tunable or limited to specific colleges, or even to a few spells on a watch list. It can surely be "rewound" to show past castings. The flashes certainly count as enough of a subject to cast Seeker, Trace, etc. upon.
The penalty for being caught by this legal apparatus could be Drain Magery. Maybe not every time . . . but who can say? It's up to a magistrate. Just the
risk of that sentence would deter many would-be magical criminals.
All of this is probably backed by the might of the Wizards' Guild. They would have a vested interest in wizards being seen in a good light (not as crooks), and would stand to lose a lot of money on magic-item sales if anybody with a few spells could steal from merchants. Also, they tend to be wealthy and influential, and implicated in law and politics. Of course, the Guild's masters doubtless use mind control on the political plane, but high-level corruption near the top of the social pyramid has nothing to do with street-level or mid-level crime targeting merchants . . . you can hide one mind-controlled prince, but having your economy in ruins and your merchants up in arms won't end well.
That's not nearly as contrived as #1 or #2, because it's a sensible,
in-world reaction to magical crime. It's no sillier than the real-world practices of installing alarms, cameras, and bright lights in key areas; training detectives in criminalistics, profiling, and interrogation; deploying sniffer dogs, luminol, crime-scene reconstruction, lab forensics, etc.; setting up a 911 service that summons police patrols; and occasionally falling back on polygraphs. Replace all that tech and science with magic. In place of real-world swindlers, scammers, and people who use intimidation to commit crimes, insert mind-controllers.