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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8287102" data-attributes="member: 18">Depends on the setting entirely. Anywhere from barely-interacting to constant issue.Historically legal systems tended to be enforced to incredibly varying degrees with wild levels of flexibility. Stuff which people take for granted often absolutely wasn't. For example, when the police were introduced in London, they were not greeted with open arms by any segment of society, not even the Establishment. People kept killing them (sometimes whilst they were trying to make arrests) and getting off with "justifiable homicide" (a total defense). Some societies had basically little-no temporally-bound enforcement mechanisms - they weren't built for dealing well with people "just passing through" who were heavily armed and armoured. Tax systems tend to strongly oriented towards land-usage or land-ownership, and to living in a specific place and having a specific profession. Booty/looting was often simply outside the scope of such systems. Where it wasn't, it tended to be still extremely hard to enforce and more like ensuring the ruler of the land got a big enough bit of loot that he wasn't inclined to look into it further. Laws themselves were often extremely flexible even when, on book, they were inflexible (you can see this basically wherever both a legal code and actual punishments are listed before the 1700s or so - often people will be getting penalties that are simply not what the law says). Except sometimes they aren't. The very notion of a "law-abiding citizen" is in many ways a pretty modern one.So it's all about the specifics. And specific places may have very specific laws, too. Which they may well be reluctant to attempt to actually enforce on the sort of people who are adventurers, but there is usually a limit. Anyway, re: specifics, if for example, you look at the Code of Hammurabi, you see it has an awful lot of laws which are clearly aimed at specific societal ills, or forcing prices to stay in a certain range for goods and services, or ensuring that laziness and greed didn't cause their agricultural system to collapse (they even basically invent squatting because it's more useful to them, as a society, than having a house or land go empty/unused).I mean, if you're playing CoC 1920s and in Chicago or something, laws will be a constant issue (as will organised crime and corrupt or just really violent police), but if you're playing D&D in a Dark Ages-ish setting, most of the laws societies will have aren't likely to interact with adventurers much, unless people are dumb enough to get in their way, and even those are generally likely to end up with "just pay a fine" (or the adventurers fleeing).</blockquote>

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