To the Courts! Not just a Basketball Reference

I’ve been working on figuring out research trees for the SKM Development now for the better part of a few weeks. It’s tougher than I expected because I have to like, balance out the changes against future stuff and make it worth it, and blah blah blah.

It is however something my players have universally requested.

My guilt over not getting that finished though has made me reticent to make other posts on my blog, and that also makes me feel guilty. Guilt seems to be flowing forward and back, and that, that’s ironically the topic for today.

There’s a lot of adventures that come up, dungeon crawls, sieges, hunts, and even the occasional murder mystery, but a surprisingly complicated thing for PCs to deal with, and one that typically requires the full diversity of their talents is ironically, one of the least utilized.

The Court Case.

The idea of pursuing legal proceedings has a tie in of both a mystery and a normal adventure. Like developing a mystery, it requires pretty spectacular work on the side of the DM, however, it has numerous advantages over the standard mystery.

The standard mystery story in a fantasy RPG often runs up against the fact that the players have access to supernatural means of determining guilt or innocence. This means that ‘which one of us is a doppleganger’ can be solved (or derailed depending on the opinion) by a spell of true seeing, a spellcraft roll, or a paladin being able to detect evil.

The issue that makes a court case differ from that, is that in a court case, you aren’t just trying to find out what happened, you have to find proof of what happened. And in that regard, most divination spells have a lovely, let us say, personal range of effect, which means that the witness is basically saying that magical faeries or the gods have made a declaration, which, well, isn’t always accepted.

This means our players might know who did something, but without proof, the innocent accused might end up still getting the chop.

Court cases also typically involve an aspect of intrigue that most intrigue based plots don’t grab onto, since there’s an element of force, manipulation, and legalese involved, just being able to bullshit effectively won’t always solve the problem. The case typically isn’t just solved by hanging around a room with fancy people. Investigation is necessary, which can lead to conflict, exploration, and the like. Forget not that Dr. Watson carried a pistol, and he used it pretty damn frequently.

There are some things that the DM has to address though before he starts bringing in Legal Intrigue plots.

I’ll try unpacking them in some other posts.