Game Meandering

Some­times sto­ries just hap­pen in my head—usually revolv­ing around some of the char­ac­ters in the world sam­bear has been build­ing for over 20 years. I’ve learned a lot about char­ac­ters’ back­grounds because I essen­tial­ly over­hear con­ver­sa­tions they have with oth­ers, or read let­ters they’re writing.

Last night, for some rea­son, a dread­ful­ly dis­turb­ing char­ac­ter pre­sent­ed him­self and would­n’t get out of my head until I final­ly shared the vignette with Sam. The character—I’ll call him Hunter for now—isn’t use­ful to the game, the plot, etc. I have no desire to have him show up, ever. His sit­u­a­tion does, how­ev­er, call up some legal issues for the main char­ac­ters in the game.

A mur­der­er walks into court and confesses—brags, even!—about his crimes in front of every­one. He is mag­i­cal­ly proven to be telling the truth. The roy­als hap­pen to be peo­ple who are more than proac­tive, and if they’d met this guy on the road a year or two back (before being wran­gled into pol­i­tics), they most like­ly would have killed him with­out much wor­ry. One of them is, after all, a pal­adin. They have to turn him over to the legal sys­tem, though, because they know that once they start mak­ing excep­tions about such things they won’t real­ly have a rule of law at all. Then there’s the issue of fig­ur­ing out whether or not he’s insane or just ter­ri­bly delud­ed, to know whether or not he is com­pe­tent to stand tri­al. The fact that he’s an admit­ted ser­i­al killer who tar­gets a polit­i­cal­ly tem­pes­tu­ous pop­u­la­tion is difficult—especially since there’s absolute­ly no evi­dence that he’s ever actu­al­ly com­mit­ted a crime in this par­tic­u­lar coun­try. It’s a young coun­try, with a brand-new “mak­ing it up as we go along” legal sys­tem, so who knows how a rul­ing on juris­dic­tion will fall out?

I real­ize all of that is prob­a­bly too bor­ing for words to any­one else, espe­cial­ly those who pre­fer hack ‘n slash games. We’re play­ing a very high-lev­el game with a lot of intrigue, pol­i­tics, and big issues, though. After your char­ac­ters get up near 20th lev­el (I’m no longer cer­tain of lev­els at all in this game, and we’re large­ly play­ing dice­less), the chal­lenges have to change.

I find myself curi­ous about what would be decid­ed, how much polit­i­cal fall­out there would be, and whether or not it could be finessed rea­son­ably well.