Shattered Kingdoms

I'd put it this way. There's not a lot of sense in "Look at that city over there. Its soldiers follow orders just like ours do, and for the same basic reason. They even have similar races and classes. Let's destroy that abomination / capture these rebels / etc."

It certainly doesn't prevent war if cities are more similar, but it's not as satisfying from a story perspective. And story is what brings players with no great PK interest into the wars.

So a lot depends on what you mean by template. There's nothing wrong with HP and armor caps or somesuch. I have no quarrel with tamping down guards that are so physically powerful or tank-like that they distort gameplay. But to go further and say guards can't have significantly different abilities ... that's losing a lot of color just to make balance somewhat tighter. I see it as a bad trade.

With the changes made to RP enforcement a year or two ago, your observation is both easy to understand and easy to fix as far as SK logic goes:

Why not? This pretty much happens all the time in and outside of SK. Pretty much exactly this.

What we mean by "template" is what Finney spelled out. Tribunals would have their guard NPCs standardized so that Tribunal A doesn't have an energy hide bad [REDACTED] NPC if Tribunal B does not also have a similar type of guard NPC.

Such standardization is already something that the KDs could do if they worked together.

Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised in the near future.

I would like it if we discussed only real possibilities. The KDs working together in any kind of real, intelligible way doesn't seem likely unless we are talking about some kind of fantasy scenario.