Disposable Bandits

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[Y]ou can kill smugglers and bandits and other outlaws all you like. Outlaws have no rights. Plenty of adventurers make a living from killing and looting outlaws. —Arrille, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

Laconic: Bandits as disposable enemies with no direct connection to the main villains.

Groups of bandits are very popular picks for the lowest power human(oid) enemies in the Sorting Algorithm of Evil in fantasy and Post Apocalyptic fiction. Their motivation is straightforward and requires little explanation, they can come from anywhere, and, while armed combatants, bandits rarely have significant combat skill and generally only have actual training if they began as military deserters (in which case their training is generally still minimal) making them some the weakest willing combatants possible. Even more importantly is that, unless they style themselves as champions of the poor, bandits have absolutely no legal or social protection and the only people who have a problem with killing bandits are other bandits, so the heroes are free to slaughter them as they wish. These factors make bandits excellent Starter Villains and Random Encounters. Games focused on space flight often use Space Pirates in this role while those focused on naval operations use the normal kind of Pirate. This is especially frequent in trader simulator type games as they provide reason to include combat.

In video games it's almost always accepted for characters that slay these bandits to take possession of everything they had on them or stashed in their hideout, no matter how much of it is presumed stolen. The only exception is when they've explicitly been tasked with retrieving a specific item, and even then everything else is fair game.

If they're stupid enough to try attacking someone who winds up clearly overpowering them, they're Mugging the Monster. Despite the similar titles, will not necessarily have any Bandit Mooks.

Examples of Disposable Bandits include:

Anime and Manga

• All over the place in early and filler parts of Fist of the North Star. Virtually all of them are stupid enough to charge at the guy who just made their friends explode with a touch. They decrease in frequency as Kenshiro starts fighting the forces of the major villains instead, though the only real difference those new minions have is sometimes making their futile attack out of fear of/loyalty to their superiors rather than stupidity.

Tabletop Games

• Very common in low level Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder modules.
  • The entire first book of Kingmaker has the player characters slaughter loads of bandits, most of whom aren't given names with even their leader Only Known By Their Nickname "The Stag Lord" (he wears a deer themed helmet).
  • The third party Legendary Beginnings adventure series starts with The Bandit's Cave which, as the name implies, has the player characters tracking down the cave that some orc bandits are using as a base. The series is aimed at introducing new players to the medium and genre, and deliberately uses such a stereotypical beginner's quest as part of it.

Video Games

• Fights against bandits in early levels are a staple of most Fire Emblem games.
• Common in The Elder Scrolls. One of the first NPCs the player meets in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind even outright tells the player such criminals have no rights under Imperial law.
• Bandit parties in Mount & Blade are generally the weakest non-civilian party on the world map and, unlike civilians, nothing negative happens if you kill them. After the early game groups of "deserters" start spawning, which are functionally identical except for being stronger fighters.
• In Warcraft III, bandits are a common type of unaligned creep. They can "Shadowmeld" to turn invisible at night, and the stronger ones have some tricks, but generally are no match for a hero with decent backup.
• Raiders appear as random encounters in every Fallout game.