Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeff Wilder" data-source="post: 3299185" data-attributes="member: 5122">First, some background facts.(1) In real life, I'm a lawyer with a strong understanding of constitutional law.(2) I'm playing a LN half-ogre mercenary in a four-session old Age of Worms campaign.(3) In a handout provided by the DM, we've been informed that law enforcement in Diamond Lake -- the initial setting for Age of Worms -- is corrupt and untrustworthy.(4) Investigating a grave-robbing, our group found a severed arm bearing a tattoo we recognized.  (An owlbear had apparently interrupted the grave-robbing and eaten the arm's owner.)  Further investigation revealed that one member of a group that bears that tattoo had gone mysteriously missing.(5) We attempted to speak to the leader of the group -- guy named Cullen -- but he put us off.Okay, so my character basically suggested that we wait 'til Cullen and his followers were good and liquored up, then storm their resting places, take them prisoner, and question them.  After quite a bit of argument, we did so.  After quite a bit of questioning, during which my character threatened -- very convincingly -- to dismember Cullen, Cullen confessed to the grave-robbing.  We subsequently turned him and his cronies over to the temple of Wee Jas.I wasn't aware of it at the time, but my DM feels that our behavior was anything but "lawful," in both the legal and D&D senses of the word.I'm a little bit at a loss, because I've found myself arguing a position that I'm personally very strongly against -- basically, "if they turn out to be guilty, they can't claim violated rights" -- but which is almost certainly the letter of the law in a primitive society, especially in a frontier town like Diamond Lake.  The alternative seems to be a modern-day liberal Fourth Amendment-based legal system ... e.g., my DM believes that only actual proof before the fact would justify the actions we did as "lawful."This hurts my head.As late as 1950s America, the law of the land was often that someone subject to this kind of action could only claim the protections of the Bill of Rights if, in fact, he or she turned out to be otherwise innocent.  (A few justices on the Supreme Court still argue this position.)  Am I really supposed to believe that the legal system of Diamond Lake is more sophisticated that that of '50s America?(For the lawyers out there, BTW, ignore the "state action" element of all this.  Since the "lawfulness" is not just technically of legality, but also of D&D alignment, it's more a matter of philosophy than real legal distinctions.)What should I do here?  My DM truly doesn't understand the "what we did was lawful because of how it turned out" argument, which is understandable, because it's pretty foreign to modern concepts of law.  But it's a very real legal philosophy, and I'm afraid that having it shot down is going to destroy my suspension of disbelief ... among other things, a legal system that protects the individual over the group -- as the Bill of Rights is, under modern understanding, intended to do -- makes vigilantism -- like, say, almost all adventuring -- pretty much across-the-board illegal and impossible.Do I just suck it up and shut up?Do I go true Neutral and not worry about it anymore?Or do I continue to try to explain that D&D "lawful" is about the group over the individual, and thus most legal systems in D&D will be built on that?Even if that's the case, is Diamond Lake an odd exception?</blockquote>

Verification