You can’t just go out shooting criminals and hauling them into sheriff’s offices, that’ll get you arrested, so hold your horses. To become a Bounty Hunter you’ll need to go to Rhodes and initiate a cutscene where a badass Bounty Hunter will bring in a wagon full of dead perps. She’s ruthless and offers you some professional advice, stay out of her way. Fortunately, she isn't like Harriet from the Naturalist Role.

The Sheriff will offer you a Bounty Hunter license for 15 gold. If you don’t have that kind of scratch just laying around, no matter, you can buy the license later at any bounty board in the game.

You can upgrade to a Prestigious Bounty license for an extra 15 gold. This will unlock legendary bounties, special missions with cutscenes and more rewards than standard bounties. Definitely worth the gold.

The most obvious answer to this is bounties. You’ll be able to go to any bounty board and choose some unlucky person or persons to bring in. On top of the usual cosmetic items and horses, you unlock a pretty useful PvP tool, the reinforced lasso. Players will find it much harder to break free of this, as will NPC bounties. You also unlock a bounty wagon that you can use to securely transport multiple bounties at a time.

Perhaps the best thing this Role unlocks is the advanced Eagle Eye that lets you track things while running and galloping. That’ll make stalking all your prey a lot faster, so this will really benefit every other Role. You also unlock the ability to spin your handguns, it’s a great way to just flex on other players.

This Role is honestly the simplest out of the current five. You just go and collect bounties, that’s it. The Role is only active when you choose it to be. Every town and many train stations have bounty boards, so you’ll never be short of targets to track down. The legendary bounties are all pretty fun, especially with a posse. You can also hunt other players who have a bounty above $20 once you’ve ranked up enough, so this Role adds a fun PvP element to the game too.

The variety of bounties on offer is pretty great. Some are alone, some are with a gang, and some will arrive a short time after you and flee if they spot you. Being stealthy is a good option, as it minimises the chance of a bounty escaping, which can happen.

The only way to earn money as a Bounty Hunter is by collecting bounties. Dead or alive, that’s your choice, but alive will always get you more money. Also, the longer you take, the more you earn, kind of counterintuitive but that’s how it works. For every three minutes the timer ticks down your gold and monetary reward will increase, so keep that in mind. The legendary bounties award the most money, but you can only do one of these per hour.

Difficulty and reward are noted by how many $s appear on the wanted poster. The more $$$, the more money. It’s worth bringing a posse along, as only the person who starts the hunt needs a license and everyone will earn some money. Posse members can help you with bounties that require multiple captures. Once you unlock the bounty wagon you can do these alone, however.

You can also capture players with high bounties once you reach a high enough rank. Capturing them will award you with whatever their bounty is worth, plain and simple.

Everything described above also yields experience. The legendary bounties award the most experience, but the ordinary ones earn you a decent amount as well.

An easy and reliable way to get decent XP gains is by completing the daily Bounty Hunter challenges. You start with one per day, then get another at rank five, and another at rank ten. These give 200 Bounty Hunter XP and 200 general XP, as well as some gold, so make sure to complete them.

This is the only Role that rewards you with gold for doing the standard missions, so that makes this a great first role as it will allow you to earn the gold necessary for other Roles.

The best way to maximise the amount of money, gold, and experience you get from this Role is simple and fun. Start off with a legendary bounty, as you can only do one every hour. Then just keep starting bounties from posters until you can do another legendary one. Most bounty missions end you in a town, so you can quickly start another.

This is also a great way to grind high or low honour. Bringing bounties in alive yields more cash and an honour increase, dead rewards less cash and lowered honour.

Since you’ll be killing a lot of people by doing this Role, you should try to make sure you unlock the Collector Role too as they synergise quite well. While you’re looting NPCs you can find collectibles on them which you can then sell. This allows the collector Role to become a bit more passive and much less time-consuming.