Thats how the west was.. gun bandits would sit behind rocks waiting for an unsuspecting traveler to walk by and mug them.
The law was a lot slower then with limited range on a horse.
There wasnt any CSI of the West.... hmmm that would have been an interesting idea for a TV show to pitch.. anyway.
Everyone had weapons as it was the code... go packin or hand it over. Thats why it cracks me up when people post in their profile "I had no gun/melee weapon equiped and you attacked a defenseless adventuer/worker... blah blah" thats honestly the way it really happened. Maybe not every single day... but there were bandits and x-soliders who took advantage of situations.
History shows that our civilization has come a long way since the lawless western days.
"The West" wasn't nearly as lawless as you seem to be portraying it here. When gunfights happened, it was news and something that would show up in the regional newspapers of the era combined with cries from the citizens that "something should be done" about what was going on... particularly when a serial bandit was running around.
There were legal officers who did perform investigations and check out crimes that happened. I've read the reports from several of these investigations and as a matter of fact some of these gunfight investigations became a part of the congressional record. If you want to read about some real gunfights, here is an interesting e-book to read:
http://www.archive.org/details/messageofpreside00unitrich
It is very dry as it is the official reports written by generally cavalry officers who were patrolling the migration trails in the mid 19th Century so don't expect any excellent writing here, but I find it even more interesting as it is the words of the people of this era in their own pen.
There are many other similar documents that I could come up with including newspaper reports.... many of which can be found in historical archives that are online as well. Newspaper editors of the era.... well their main point was to sell newspapers and tended to exaggerate the details from time to time and stir up controversy even if none existed, but my point here is that such gunfights tended to be rare and exceptional things rather than being typical.
Yes, on the major migration routes there was a tendency for banditry and thievery. If they got too successful there tended to be a group of outraged citizenry that would pick up their guns and start to go after these guys. It also should be worth noting that a vast majority of the men in the western USA were also veterans of both the Mexican and U.S. Civil Wars. If somebody had fought at Bull Run, Gettysburg, and Shiloh do you really think they are going to back down because of a couple of stupid idiots are taking pot shots at their neighbors?
Where I live (I happen to live in the middle of the Rocky Mountains), the last major community action to take out a threat wasn't even a bandit.... it was a 10 foot tall grizzly bear that was eating sheep and scaring some of the women (the excuse given at the time for why there was concern) who would be passing through and seeing the carcasses of these sheep on the side of the road as they traveled through a mountain pass. About 300 folks in town grabbed their guns and set up a hunting party where they were more likely to shoot themselves, but they did end up tracking down this bear and killing the poor creature. The skull of this unfortunate creature ended up getting sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, where about a century later it was finally cleaned up and sent to Utah State University where it is now on display.
That is how people dealt with banditry in the west, either by sending in soldiers or volunteering to be a "soldier" or "deputy" to take out the idiots. In fact in a town nearby there was a bear that went and killed a teenager who was camping in a national forest campground with his family, and sure enough a group of guys with guns crawled over the hills until the bear was found..... this was just a couple of years ago too. The spirit of the west is still alive in that sense, even if you now have cell phones and can dial 911 for help.
If you started shooting at somebody or worse yet killing somebody, expect that the kin folk of that person is going to try and hunt you down and likely that if you started causing mayhem that you would have the countryside crawling with nearly every citizen in the county or state after your behind. In some cases, the bandits created so many problems that they had to flee the country altogether.
The one possible exception here was the classic duel. This was a very formalized concept that actually has its roots in early Anglo-Saxon/Germanic culture where it was in reality a legal contest. In early Germanic cultures if you accused somebody of a crime you had several options in terms of how to deal with the individual including taking the charges to a judge. Instead of a trial by jury, one of the options was a trial by combat instead. Before firearms, this usually took on the form of a swordfight in a public area, where the theory went that "the gods" would favor the correct person and help them to win the battle thus proving who the wronged party really was. Yes it was "barbaric" in the most literal sense as it was the "Barbarians" of central Europe who came up with this concept including the early ancestors of the English.
By the 19th Century dueling had been formally declared illegal by most jurisdiction in America, but it was still a fairly common practice that was generally tolerated by the citizenry. If somebody got themselves into a classic duel with firearms, the "winner" was generally given a free pass even if they ended up killing their opponent (not always, but usually). This is because it was a formal trial by combat. Perhaps the most famous duel of all time in America was between two founders of the American Republic: Aaron Burr vs. Alexander Hamilton. They got into heated exchanged during a session of Congress which in turn spilled out into hallways afterward and then they challenged each other to a duel... something that many of their respective friends strongly tried to convince them to both avoid. None the less, the duel happened. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burr–Hamilton_duel
If you want to portray dueling, this is the proper way to express it, or set up some way to get the citizens of a town to go after duelers and put them in their place. This idea that some bully is going to be running around the countryside terrorizing workers and be allowed to do that with impunity is something that isn't realistic, historically accurate, or something that is necessarily good game play. It is a sort of interesting fantasy environment after a fashion, but if you are going to throw in elements of fantasy to the situation you need to at least offer a way to fight back that is also sort of fantastic.
I don't think using an historical excuse for why duelers should be able to take pot shots at passing strangers is either accurate or even a reasonable expectation. Duels, as such as it was, were a very formal affair where one party certainly could decline or demand that it go to a trial by jury instead if justice was demanded. On this point, I think the original point raised by
Mole Whacker is square on target where much of what happens in this game isn't a duel but rather pure banditry.
If you want to portray the situation better in terms of the game, it would be more akin to a dueler that when attacking a worker would then in turn have to face the entire town in a gunfight, simultaneously with all of their best weapons in play. If you don't think that would be "fair".... that is the point. It wasn't fair. It was to take out the bandit.
If you want to realistically portray how it really was done in the west, that is the best portrayal that I can think of. Either that or if you engage in a duel it would be a very formal affair where both would indeed have their best dueling gear on and the person who is being challenged would have the opportunity to decline the challenge. Dueling, as it happened in the west, was indeed a very formal affair.
