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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8812641" data-attributes="member: 18">Back on Waterdeep, I dug out City of Splendors, and I'm looking through the STAGGERINGLY DETAILED* multi-page breakdown of the legal system and criminal offenses (potentially against four different categories with wildly varying sentencing), and I'm not seeing anything at all which suggests that you automatically get punished for killing a citizen under all circumstances. It's funny because I thought I'd read that too - maybe it's in a 3E book or something - but in City of Splendors, that's not right.It absolutely does allow you to get away with killing someone in self-defense, BUT and here's the big BUT, it's entirely with the discretion of the magister (judge) who you're brought before. If they want to, they can dismiss the charge, charge you with a lesser offence, and most pertinently to this whole discussion, can "set any lesser sentence they consider fitting (or none at all)" and it says they do the latter if the crime was "justified", which would presumably normally include reasonable self-defence, so [USER=22779]@Hussar[/USER] in fact Waterdeep is not, as we had thought, a city where you always get punished for murder. At least it wasn't as of City of Splendors back in 1994.The legal system is clearly horrific, because there are no juries (which are very old concept, I note - in the UK they're recorded well since the 1100s but were considered "ancient" at that time), no lawyers allowed (they have the concept - they're banned, intentionally), no bail, little in the way of due procedure, little evidence that the magisters do anything but maybe ask a few questions and then make a quick decision, and it's basically 100% on which magister and what mood they're in. You can only appeal if you can convince a citizen of Waterdeep to ask for the appeal, and they suggest paying one off is the best way to achieve this! Then you go in front of the Lords of Waterdeep, which I gotta feel is usually going to be a bad idea, and they can do whatever the hell they like to your sentence. The Lords can also intervene at any point to just set whether you're guilty or not and the punishment they like. Don't piss off the corrupt oligarchs, I guess!* = 7 pages on the system, 2 further pages of law enforcement NPCs - they don't make 'em like that anymore!</blockquote>

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