Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7735630" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, fine, I'll fisk.Personally, I would have stopped right here and listed every single example of a historical judicial system.  As a bonus, you might pay careful note to how each different system might fit into a D&D setting and where you might fit such a system into D&D's simplified 9 alignment philosophical system.  Actually, no, a court doesn't require infrastructure.  This is the sort of statement in error you might have avoided if you'd done the first thing and listed out all sorts of historical judicial systems.  One example might be the wandering judge or wise man who is paid to listen to and decide cases as a neutral arbiter.  That judge could be a recognized profession with entry requirements other than appointment by some recognized civic authority.  There are a lot of examples of this, but the institution of judges in pre-Monarchy Judea would be a more familiar example.  You could get into the profession by civic appointment, public reputation, by religious office, or by apprenticeship or any other common mode, but it doesn't require infrastructure.Similar, a council of elders doesn't require any sort of special infrastructure to hear civil or criminal complaints within a community.  They can just meet wherever is convenient.  The actual infrastructure is something that tends to evolve over time as a special set apart space, sacred in some sense even if not overtly religious.   But that happens only to the extent it is convenient and solves some problem (like needing a neutral site to meet at).  And even then, it's not guaranteed that they have a building or infrastructure in the traditional since in order to have a judicial tradition.  In medieval Iceland, when they wanted to resolve a civic or criminal dispute, they just all met at the big rock.Maybe, but what are all the alternatives here.  Even though courts might be explicitly secular, there is a vast range between exclusively secular and actually religious where the court even if secular still draws its authority from religious tradition and conducts its office as blessed by some religious sovereign.   It's unlikely that if an active observable God of Justice exists, that any court, however 'secular' in the modern sense conducts its business entirely without the blessing or hope of blessing by that deity. For one thing, they don't want to get smited for violating his notions of Justice.Again, these aren't mutually exclusive.  In addition to missing the opportunity to list out all the sorts of judicial punishments and procedures for determining guilt that have existed, you neglect the fact that "eye-for-an-eye" typically establishes the maximum judicial penalty and not a hard and fast rule.  In other words, "eye for an eye" is maximum applied penalty, in the same way that maximum incarceration terms are a maximum applied penalty in a modern familiar system.   Almost invariably ancient systems encouraged injured parties to negotiate the sentencing.  "Eye for an eye" prohibited any party - including the state - seeking a penalty that was greater than the crime involved and established some sort of scale for judging how bad a crime was.  It didn't prohibit using restitution or blood payments.   It just prevented things like cutting off hands if someone stole a loaf of bread, or killing someone for killing a chicken. A very interesting question worthy of its own essay.  Unfortunately you don't really answer it beyond suggesting exile.  However, it turns out that ancient confinement techniques actually work really well at confining most D&D magic-users.  While a modern jail cell with its limited freedom in order to not be overtly cruel or inflict 'unusual punishment' doesn't constrain a magic-user very much, pillories, stocks and other binding methods actually do because they prevent the use of components.   And equally, rather than inflicting a lesser penalty on a dangerous magic-user, a society may well decide that the rational thing to do faced with a magic-using criminal is to inflict harsher penalties - kill them just to be sure. Actually, no, that's not true.  The two things are independent of each other.  You can have both, neither, or one or the other.   If you tried to list out all the historical situations you might have noticed that.   For example, you can have a society that is so authoritarian that crime per se basically doesn't exist, especially on an organized level.   In those societies, the law enforcement system often is the organized crime in the society in that it's much easier for a criminal to exist inside the system and abusing the authority there of than it is to exist outside the system in a police state with broad authoritarian power and an organized informant network.   Likewise, you can have organized crime existing precisely because there is no law enforcement to speak of.  And you can have crime existing but not on an organized level because the criminals don't trust each other and operate as independent agents, which is fairly common when you don't have a large enough population to support crime as a business.Again, you could have wrote an entire essay just listing all the different plot hooks that might be generated by investing in world building to create a detailed judicial system.  After all, I'd think the whole point of an essay like this on world building is trying to get people to recognize that the world building involved has an actual payoff at the game table in terms of more enjoyable play.  World building for its own sake is fun, but probably not worth it for a GM that is actually running a table unless it makes the game better.  The part here where you list 4 or 5 plot hooks is probably the best part of the essay, but there is not nearly enough meat here to really inspire the creative juices of anyone reading this that didn't already have those creative juices flowing.This is a very good point, but again you miss the opportunity to list out many examples of varying views of what constitutes a crime that could become plot hooks.   Maybe more to the point though, for a DM it's not really the PC's expectations clashing with those of local authorities you have to worry about - it's the clashing expectations of the players.  While having a culture that shatters the player's cultural expectations may have merit, you are potentially going to run into big problems if the player takes offense at the very existence of the culture and treats you as endorsing the behavior that violates their cultural norms.   As a hopefully not triggering example, if a culture accepts slavery as a cultural norm - as virtually every ancient culture did - then you are dealing with a potential minefield as to how players and their PC's are expected to interact with your culture.  The same is true of cultures that are distinctly not modern with respect to the treatment of women and any number of other things that people take for granted. Again, you could put together a lengthy essay on just the widely varying ways societies have chosen to punish wrongdoers (or at least, people that they thought were wrongdoers).   All of that is true, but the reverse is also highly plausible.  It could be that divination and magical evidence is not admissible in court, precisely because such evidence is too easily faked, or because they gives the erroneous impression of infallibility when in fact the methods have some chance of failure.  If the society is not in fact ruled by the spell-casting caste (whatever that is), it's highly unlikely they'll rely on them wholly to determine guilt or innocence.   Moreover, the society may find ritual evidence admissible that has no relationship to what D&D normally thinks of as magic.   For example, you managed to get through this whole essay on where laws come from without once mentioning Trial by Combat or Trial by Ordeal or all the many other historical ways guilt and innocence were determined before we assumed some quasi-scientific rational investigation, presentation of evidence, and verbal debate got the best results.</blockquote>

Verification