D&D 5E Ideas for a smart City Watch

[Ath'kethin]

Inquisitors casting detect thoughts through crowds would be an effective and terrifying means of keeping the peace.

I could also see it leading to a sort of arms race, as the criminal underbelly things of ingenious ways to defeat the spell (utilizing creatures of very low (3 or less) Intelligence, for example.

 

[Eltab]

3e Waterdeep: City of Splendors is an entire book dedicated to the stuff you can do in a city.

The book discusses the City Watch and their typical tactics.
Besides the basic police, Waterdeep keeps a platoon of SWAT-like squads on hand, with their tactics.
Waterdeep also has/had some powerful golems that were tough as rock and able to quell most any adventurer group that got out of hand.
Plus the noble houses have private armies (more like private battalions), which the city can call on at need.
Plus the City can call for aid from any Temple or Wizard School inside city limits. Such aid includes but is not limited to one Archmage ( /Chosen of Mystra and future Open Lord of Waterdeep) who took two pages of small print to list out fully - and her equally-powerful husband, fully statted out in some other book.

Given what lives in the sewers (and beneath even that), all that firepower may be needed some day.

 

[Eltab]

Inquisitors casting detect thoughts through crowds would be an effective and terrifying means of keeping the peace.

Depending on how it works. Do you get a radar-screen like 'ping' and know who goes with which thoughts? Or do you know only that somebody in the cone off to my right is planning to stab the Duke - and therefore we should arrest everybody in that half the room, to sort it out further?

Put a Zone of Truth under a rug, to quickly screen out the Huddled Masses from the really dangerous people.

I can easily see an LE police force making use of Detect Thoughts, for purposes both noble and nefarious (and both simultaneously)...

 

[Staccat0]

This stuff is part of the reason (the other part being cynicism) the major cities in my settings usually tend to be theocracies. It’s easier for me to imagine a functioning magical metropolis if each squad of guards has a low level cleric or paladin.

 

[Krachek]

Smart guard call for backup!

 

[aco175]

Look at the typical day for a watch member. It ranges from checking in on old people, telling directions and bringing messages around. Checking doors to make sure they are locked. Other non-dangerous things are most likely 90%- 99% of their time. Lawless, frontier areas maybe less so, but the average danger that the low level watch would encounter may be some street thieves and drunks. When they encounter adventurers and mages they call back up and special units for these.

 

[Ath'kethin]

Depending on how it works. Do you get a radar-screen like 'ping' and know who goes with which thoughts? Or do you know only that somebody in the cone off to my right is planning to stab the Duke - and therefore we should arrest everybody in that half the room, to sort it out further?

Put a Zone of Truth under a rug, to quickly screen out the Huddled Masses from the really dangerous people.

I can easily see an LE police force making use of Detect Thoughts, for purposes both noble and nefarious (and both simultaneously)...

The spell basically works two ways; you can focus on an individual and digestive deeper and deeper into their surface thoughts or you can just do an area blanket and figure out who in that area is capable of thinking. Of the two, the first would.pilely be most useful for law enforcement (the PH even recommends it's use in interrogations).

And you can enter your improbably large number of humanoid intelligence species that there would be some rampant racism (speciesism?) going down on a jear-constant basis, too.