[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Legal Immunity [5, 10, 15 or 20] is a mundane social advantage, providing you with some degree of exemption from laws, and thus their enforcement. Like Legal Enforcement Powers, it is in the “privilege” sub-category, and can be lost if abused. This advantage appeared in this form in GURPS Religion for 3e, with a precursor in International Super Teams.

You aren’t immune to laws with this advantage, but the laws and enforcement that apply to you are different from those that apply to most people in the setting. At [5], the laws that apply to you are approximately as restrictive as the normal ones, just different. For example, a medieval abbot is not subject to local law, but the bishop who can hold him to account will normally want to ensure that his conduct is creditable.

At [10], the laws that apply to you are significantly less restrictive. The canonical example is a medieval bard, who cannot be seriously punished for anything he sings, even if it’s libellous or insulting to the local ruler. He can be excluded from court, or even banished, but not fined, imprisoned or physically punished. This immunity has prerequisites, in that you need actual skill as a bard. You also need the good opinion of your fellow-bards, who provide enforcement by being cruel in their performances about anyone who breaches your immunity.

At [15], you can do pretty much as you like, provided you don’t harm the interests of whoever granted you Legal Immunity. Monarchs traditionally have this, but the canonical example is modern Diplomatic Immunity [20], where you are only subject to the laws of your own country and can’t be punished for anything by other countries. Local police can arrest you, but can’t hold or prosecute you. The only thing a country can do is expel you, by declaring you persona non grata. This requires a Duty to your own country or government, and often some kind of Rank. The extra [5] cost is because you also have “Diplomatic pouch” privileges, allowing you to send and receive physical messages that other countries aren’t allowed to intercept or read. That privilege is possible for lesser levels of Legal Immunity, if the setting allows it.

Various GURPS supplements add new forms of Legal Immunity, including “Answerable only to other Gods,” “De facto government in his own tower,” “Igor Immunity,” “Represents the Patrician,” “Subject to Guild Discipline” and “Trial by His Peers” all [5] from Discworld, while Banestorm limits Bardic Immunity fairly strictly, in favour of “Skaldic Immunity” [10] and “The King is the law” [15]. Boardroom and Curia has organisations where some members have this advantage, and City Stats has “free cities,” whose populations have it in the surrounding area. DF17 Guilds provides it as a benefit for members of the right organisations, while Horror offers it for children and Men in Black. Locations: Hellsgate’s rulers have the [20] version, while students and teachers at Worminghall have to settle for [10]. Power-Ups 8 has the “Informal, -50%” limitation, which works, but can be lost easily, and Social Engineering: Keeping in Contact has “freedom of the press” extending to that level, and Pulling Rank can have it as a prerequisite for all kinds of Rank.

My personal experience with this advantage is with full Diplomatic Immunity [20] in a THS game where the PCs were a group of consular services troubleshooters for the EU on Mars. One PC was an SAI, and another an under-age cat-girl bioroid, so having a human with Legal Immunity who was a director of the SAI’s holding company, and the cat-girl’s legal guardian made travel between different polities a lot easier. I never actually had to invoke Diplomatic Immunity, but having the ability to do so was an effective way of keeping confrontations from escalating.

Has Legal Immunity been important in your games?

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Maxed-out LI has always been attractive to players in my games, because they love having an official, sanctioned-by-the-GM-and-paid-in-points excuse to go around like they have a license to kill pretty much anybody who gets in the way. Thus, I'm very wary of permitting it unless the player asking for it is capable of some in-character discretion. So the answer is that yes, it has had its place in my campaigns, but never below the 15-point level, usually as a way to let would-be James Bonds laugh at Rank, Status, etc. as they pursue whatever mission they're pursuing.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

I've never had a game where players would mark this on their sheet, because it was either something that no one in the party would have, or everyone in the party would be treated as having it, so charging the points wasn't meaningful.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

We were a bit more restrained. Jianwei Chen was a professional diplomat. He did carry an electrolaser on field operations, but hardly used it. He did once use an SDV in orbit as a prop for Intimidation, mind you.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Not itself, but I use a variant that's very slightly different that allow couriers to travel anywhere and bring information to anyone. Holding them for even an hour against their will somewhere can lead to huge legal complications and even that is barely important because anyone who wants to be able to send messages privately knows they'll lose that privilege the moment they try to stop someone else's message.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

In THS, I played a PC whose backstory including obtaining a Diplomatic Immunity from New Guinea by . . . dubiously-legal and corporation-related means. The main uses in play I remember was ignoring LC restrictions on some military hardware during one quest, notably a very old model of RATS (due to newer models being unaffordable in both cash and points) and APFSDSDU ammunition.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

I've never seen anyone try to take 15-point Immunity as a "Can get away with murder" advantage, and I'd certainly require an implausibly good justification if anyone tried that in a game I was running. The diplomat John mentioned from the THS game was effectively spending the 20 points to be the Serious Accredited Diplomat of the party, making him the point man in dealings with local authorities and so forth.

One could argue that the base cost for Diplomatic Immunity (before the extra 5 points for Diplomatic Pouch Privileges) in modern-day games might often be less than the 15 point version, depending on your employer's attitudes and the state of their relations with the host country. (And note that, by the Vienna Convention, diplomatic immunity only applies in the country where you're an accredited diplomat.) Your employing nation will at minimum be very annoyed if you embarrass them, and is actually free to waive immunity and hand you over to local justice if they're annoyed or embarrassed enough. Or they may prosecute you under their own laws. Or they may recall you, or the host nation may expel you, and you may find that you've just terminated your career, or at least screwed up your promotion prospects.

Going by the Wikipedia entry, yes, a few diplomats have literally got away with murder -- but others have suffered actual consequences. I think I've even heard of cases where diplomats who'd behaved like idiots suffered worse consequences after recall than they would have under the host nation's justice system; murderous dictators can be very annoyed at losing face. So perhaps a diplomat with few special connections, from a law-abiding country that values its squeaky-clean image, should be paying just (10+5) or even (5+5) points for Diplomatic Immunity. Heck, some may not even have useful Diplomatic Pouch Privileges.

I've not seen other forms of Legal Immunity come up at all in games, which actually makes me think I've not tried hard enough. Hmm...

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

It wasn't really getting away with murder. The PCs actually acted alongside with more 'accredited' forces in what essentially was an ad hoc counterterrorist operation. But it involved the civilians who happened to be on the spot . . . being amusingly well-armed. In retrospect it certainly was an optimistic interpretation of the Immunity's applicability. But not outright over-the-top.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Even if we posit some form of diplomatic immunity that can be applied to covert agents, the same thing applies – if you get caught, you're an embarrassment to your sponsor country, and your career as a covert agent is over, because the country that caught you is going to put your face/prints/DNA on terrorism watch lists all over the world, and anyone who'd like to embarrass your sponsor will have an easy way of doing it. ("This guy got caught in Paris, and they think they can cover it up by sending him to Kinshasa?")

Even the most tolerant of agencies probably frowns on murderhobo killing sprees.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Honestly, Kromm's example feels less like, "I'm going to shoot this guy just cause" and more like, "Relax, central's not going to be upset that I snapped the guard's neck, even though he's technically a civilian."

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Clandestine operatives in enemy territory would have legal immunity from the patron government if not from the nation they are operating in. That is they probably would be immune to extradition even if they break the law in the process as long as they don't break the Patron's law. This probably would only rarely include "License to Kill" unless it is an actual time of war.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

That should only really happen if either a) the "diplomat" doesn't actually have a diplomatic passport or b) the host nation does not respect the diplomatic privileges from the diplomat's nation.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Or if the country the diplomat serves is extremely strict about not using it except for official purposes.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Depending on how you're defining 'useful'. Only using the diplomatic pouch for its official purposes is a big problem if your campaign doesn't actually have any interest in the diplomat's job. It might barely be any constraint at all if the proper use of the pouch aligns with the focus of play.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

That's a Catch-22: it can't know whether the pouch is being used for official purposes or not because it can't know the contents of the pouch without looking inside. So the only way to deny the pouch restrictions against search . . . is to outright deny the pouch restrictions against search.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

I agree. Carrying something with a giant radiation signature would likely be noticed but a diplomatic pouch would let you walk a gun through a metal detector because all they get to know is you have metal and it's very important.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

I thought ravenfish was referring to a diplomat serving country A being strict about using the diplomatic pouch not that country B, the country in which country A has posted said diplomat, had any strict rules about diplomatic pouches.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

With how players think vs. how career civil servants think, I should think that constraints are almost inevitable.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Same here. I can easily imagine policy being "We're trying to avoid embarrassments, and also we've had incidents where people who should never have been in the service used the diplomatic pouch to smuggle drugs. The only things we'll put the official seal on are cases carried by our official couriers, and they have to be inspected by our security people at both ends of the trip."

Which is no problem if you're a classic cultural-attache-hem-hem, but a problem if you're a junior trade official trying to get their superhero mask and utility belt into Latveria.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

I’m now also imagining Legal Immunity taken with a Requires a Skill Roll limitation. (Administration? Law? Fast Talk?) Your Immunity is frankly questionable, but argue hard enough and it works.

Benefit of Clergy seems to have devolved into an interesting slightly limited version of the advantage by the Renaissance...

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Even if you are a for-real intelligence officer running dangerous covert operations, what a player wants for the operation and what a professional civil servant in the Foreign Service can sign off on being authorized are going to be wildly different, diplomatic pouch or no.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

The only diplomatic pouch that was seen in play in the EU on Mars campaign was a large crate that came in from Brussels. The contents were petabytes of one-time pads, and the Ambassador's official supply of high-quality coffee beans.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

In my opinion and experience, there is a not-so-rare case when LI working like a literal license to kill at the character's discretion entirely makes sense. A wizard, psi, xianxia cultivator, or super Person of Mass Destruction and Army of One that is so powerful they can crush armies with ease. They cannot bothered to obey the laws of puny humans, yet for whatever reason they don't want to overthrow Muggle governments and become the new ruler. The latter probably b/c they do not want to be burdened with the hassle of administration, and prefer to focus on adventuring, research, etc. Yet they find obeying the law far too inconvenient to do what they like to do.

A compromise to ease co-existence between the OP individual and society establishes the legal fiction they are sovereign nations. They don't own any actual territory, but they enjoy the equivalent of diplomatic immunity, and any place they choose to live is treated like an embassy. As a rule, Muggle authorities treat the character with the same respect due to a superpower or nuclear state.

In practice, the super agrees they shall not threaten the security of the world, and the human governments agree to look the other way about any crime they may do. The only feasible check, should such a super go rogue and do something like large-scale atrocities or environmental devastation, would be a posse of superpowered individuals that is strong enough to overwhelm them. However, those other high-powered wizards or supers, assuming they exist, cannot be bothered to intervene if their peer occasionally abuses some unlucky Muggle. Quite likely it is b/c they enjoy the same privileges and find it too convenient.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

In fact, that is almost exactly one of the settings I proposed in Chapter 8 of GURPS Supers, and I ran a campaign based on it where the PCs were a squad of supers not quite powerful enough to be sovereign as individuals, but able to survive a fight with a sovereign and versatile enough to get them under control—or offer a meaningful threat. Things like Clark Kent's apartment being legally the Kryptonian Embassy were part of the legal structure I envisioned.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

These posts from Legal Enforcement powers thread are probably relevant: once you start extended Legal enforcement powers and Legal Immunity the difference between them can get blurry.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

While there's probably truth in that, those cases seem more like having simply picked the wrong one.

It seems like there's a pretty plain divide between them though: Legal Enforcement Powers is built around an authority to make demands with the force of law (in particular demands to surrender to your arrest and demands to let you conduct searches, but I could see that being extended). If someone defies your authority it's not just you they're defying, it's the entire system that accords you your Powers. Legal Immunity doesn't give you any coercive power at all, it simply prevents regular laws from being enforced against you. If you have extreme Legal Immunity you might be able to kidnap someone or toss their house and get away with it, but your victim isn't obligated to cooperate.

However, the higher levels of Legal Enforcement Powers and of Legal Immunity do have much the same trend towards 'no rules govern your actions'.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Well yes, I remember from one or two histories the diplomats often being annoyed at the spooks using their privileges to presumptuously.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

One cliche from cop shows is a villain with legal immunity. A diplomat's dependent or even a prince involved in some outrageous crime. Of course in real life that is usually for parking violations and if he behaves badly enough will be declared persona non grata (a fancy word for "tossed out on his ear").

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Diplomatic_Impunity

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Yeah but there are three cases I know of off-hand where a diplomat did in fact get away with actual no fooling murder using their immunity. I'm particularly fond of the ambassador who murdered his wife and then burned her body in full view of the police and the press. The television cliche is supported by reality.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Except what then happened is he was deported back to Burma, where he was officially to be put on trial. Then he utterly vanished. Which wasn't unusual for people who displeased the regime of Burma in the late 1960s, and isn't generally a sign of a good outcome.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

By the way, Ken and Robin’s podcast this week has a nice illustration of why Diplomatic Pouch Privileges might not always work quite right in the 17th century.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Yeah, I am very fond of that particular bit of GURPS Supers. We conceived the basic idea independently, but I am grateful you added it to the sourcebook and wish we could have a whole sourcebook about it.

If you ask my opinion, this system deals with the elephant-in-the-room issue of high-powered supers co-existing with Muggle society in a much more practical, realistic, and satisying way than assuming all non-villainous OP supers got Honesty in their character sheet or were brainwash... err, reared by their parents to obey the law no matter what like Clark Kent.

As I see it, it just takes one OP super or three facing a government decision they really find intolerable, and the whole house of cards falls apart. Marvel Civil War shenanigans aside, a typical case I can think of is a judge ruling aganst a powerful super in a child custody case. Even many otherwise 'good' supers would realistically be sorely tempted to say "f**k the law" and bring down the courthouse on the judge rather than surrendering their child.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Very much so. Of course, in many cases having high-level Legal Immunity means your personal power is so great you can bring levels of coercion down on someone that are practically indistinguishable from the ones the state may deploy. Think of a mob boss or a warlord in a police-free zone or failed state situation, or an OP wizard or super declaring themselves independent from the law. It makes little practical difference if the ones imprisoning you are the local cops, the goons of the mob boss/warlord, or the OP wizard/super. Threat of retribution is always what makes you cooperate.

Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week: Legal Immunity
 

Maybe, but in that case you have to separately purchase the other traits that give you so much power. Whereas Legal Enforcement Powers directly builds them in. (And then you might not have Legal Immunity. A mob boss in general doesn't have Legal Immunity, but they do have plenty of coercive violence on tap when they decide it's worth using.)

Tangentially I don't think you should take Legal Immunity if you're 'immune' because there's simply no law enforcement around. Of course, if your people are controlling the area and serving as law enforcement (for some value of law) on the populace you're back at high level Legal Immunity.