"Are there any obvious problems with a wording like: 'Travel passes are no longer required for travel throughout Cheliax'? And how much are they helping against bandits right now anyway? My understanding is that it's pretty easy for bandits to dodge checkpoints, it's not like there's a guards all along the perimeter of every archduchy like there are around the Worldwound. Travel passes matter more for people who are less armed and less familiar with the terrain, but it's not like bandits are well-known for for only staying on major roads." 

She... almost doesn't want to discuss how to catch bandits better - she's had a pretty mixed bag of experiences with them, under the infernal regime, but overall more good than bad. They appreciated the channels and clean water, see, and mostly wouldn't be inclined to try to try to report her to anyone and were even less worried about her reporting them, either. But probably they should do better things now that obeying the law is more good than evil. 

"My guess would be that there could be more work catching them on the trade side, rather than the travel side: bandits are making money by stealing things from merchants, usually, and then they need to be reselling it. Or stealing coin directly, but people try to carry as little of that as they can. Again, I'm not sure how much travel passes help here: usually bandits are in areas where at least some of bandits have permission to be, and those are the bandits arranging all the resale or buying supplies for the rest of the bandits who make themselves scarce whenever someone would be checking papers. If we can find a way to keep stolen goods from being resold, or maybe ask for more documentation for certain kinds of purchases, that seems to get the bandits where the money is." 

"I like that! Might be a good angle on pirates too."

"Large bandit gangs cannot generally travel unnoticed around checkpoints, only small ones without significant plunder, and so must steal" or buy secondhand "travel passes to get their goods to fences and escape the search area from the local guards."

"How large of gangs are you thinking? Ten, twenty people can get around checkpoints with little difficulty if there's forests or hills, even with plunder. Little difficulty from the checkpoints, at least, more problems from monsters. I know less about bandit problems in the middle of the Heartlands where it's all flat and farms."

"The bands caught with fake papers were usually roughly that size, from ten to twenty." And if some of those papers were real but bought illegitimately nobody was being paid to admit that.

She thinks he might be lying, getting caught at checkpoints just seems dumb, but maybe there are just a lot of stupid bandits and she was just dealing with the cleverer ones, when she had reason to deal with them at all? Hard to say. It's not like she dealt with bandits everywhere she went. She'll push a bit further but she's not confident enough that she knows what she's talking about to call him a liar.  

"This is in the Heartlands? Or in the hills? And under infernal rule, or since the war? I think staffing on checkpoints has gotten worse since the war but I've also been doing less travel" and less of the kind of travel that was trying to avoid checkpoints even if she did have papers, sometimes people she was helping out didn't, "so I don't know as well as I would if I knew I was going to be trying to answer this question here." 

"I suppose it probably happens some of the time, but I'd wager against it being the main way they get caught. Does anyone know whether there's anyone at the convention we can ask about questions like 'how often are bandits caught due to not having the right travel passes versus being caught in the act or having their camp raided tracked down or someone noticing them reselling stolen goods?'"

"Western Longmarch, while there was a government. I'm sure petty bandits without any ambition but stealing bread can survive dodging roads but all the ones which are serious dangers to prepared caravans either had significant magic or illicit passes or both. You can't carry fenceable luxuries or herd stolen livestock, enough to fund a dozen men, through the backwoods, especially not if you want to get close enough to a town to sell them. Not even if it's the relatively tame forest near Corentyn."

She's seen some pretty ridiculous things carried through the woods in her day, but not the time for that conversation now. 

"So it sounds like - requiring travel passes just for those traveling with substantial luxuries or livestock would work for catching out the type of bandit that they're currently useful for while not hindering everyone else?"

"If everyone gets stopped and had cargos inspected that might work, but it's going to slow things down significantly relative to just checking passes."

"How is checking everyone faster than checking a few people?"

"Checking everyone for passes is faster than checking everyone for passes or cargo that needs passes. If everyone has passes anyway I suppose it's no slower."

"Isn't it obvious if somebody's walking around with a flock of geese? I guess 'luxuries' includes stuff that doesn't walk around and might be small."

"The central thing that intelligent bandits want to steal, other than goods that move themselves, is things that are small - in weight and volume - but expensive. Much like a merchant looking for longer routes or teleport trade, and for the same reasons; more value per trip."

"But the people who have the kind of cargo that needs a check are - obvious? Because we're trying to check people who have the kinds of things that they can't just carry off the road. We don't need to search cargo to tell whether it's the kind of thing that you could carry off the road, you can tell that just by looking. If bandits are carrying small luxuries then they can just dodge the road to go around the checkpoints like I was saying earlier." 

This conversation is making her feel unpleasantly turned around and she does not like it.

"So if we abolish travel passes and then institute cargo passes, we don't need to check all of the cargo, we just check the person with the cargo for a cargo pass the same way we would check them for a travel pass." 

"What would be the cost of having cargo passes? All those inspection stations costs large amounts of money. If we could remove them, we'd save a bunch! That might be more than what we lose to bandits."

"Oh, so much the better, I keep hearing people talk about how the government doesn't have enough money."

"Is that an agreement with me that the cargo inspection would be cheaper than travel pass inspection, or suggesting that we go further and get rid of inspections altogether to save money? I would if anything prefer getting rid of them altogether, I was only suggesting cargo inspection as a compromise position to not lose the limited benefits of the current setup at a lower cost."

"I'd be fine with doing away with them altogether."

"In order to prevent banditry cargo checks would be needed on everyone with a wagon, and scarcely cheaper than the old system, if at all; depending on fees for passes, possibly significantly more expensive net of revenue. The cost of banditry is high enough as it is and would be much higher without any such checks."

"Would it? Like - walk me through how a check shortens a bandit hunt. Are they often just trying to walk right through a checkpoint like they don't know it's there?"

"Bandits have to fight a visible battle to get through a checkpoint," he says very slowly and condescendingly, "so if they have not fought a visible battle, they are either in the last area they attacked, or they have abandoned everything they stole."

Gods save him from idiot children who think they're qualified to talk about laws.

"Nope, that was a bad explanation and I'm not going to vote with you about it, do you want to try again with more steps in there or something?"

"What do you think a bandit hunt looks like, if that isn't adequate to explain why hunting bandits is vastly easier if you know they haven't passed checkpoints?"

"I have spent more time on land since the convention started than I did in the twenty years before that. If for some reason hunting land bandits were my job I'd probably do something wacky like ask a druid if the birds have seen any sketchy characters lately because a druid might talk to a Gozrehn. It sounds like you're saying that if you're looking at some bandits you can tell how far they came to get to where you and the bandits both are. But in that situation you're looking at the bandits. How did you get to be looking at the bandits? That seems like the important thing."

"Then perhaps you should abstain from everything affecting life on land, which is virtually all our business, and hand the committee to someone else who is qualified."