My Honest Opinion

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

But they are perceived as honest in universe and those law breaking aren't significant for describing the in universe personnage !
The movie Battle of the Bulge action is near Bastogne, even if the Spanish mountain are visible in the background...

Sure. Which is why I noted that GURPS Honest might be a possible trait of protagonists in children's fiction or games with a similarly distant relationship with versimilitude, but didn't actually suit adventurers in any fiction set in world's where the law worked even remotely like the real world.

The sheer number of laws in a modern first world country means that it is functionally impossible to avoid breaking laws on a daily basis. Reasonable people distinguish between laws that actually matter and anyone cares about enforcing and the morass of laws that exist for other reasons.

Everyone who works for an international company, finance company, in a medical field, for a public institution or in any other of the hundreds of fields where legislators keep adding new laws which affect the field, cannot actually function without breaking dozens of laws each day. Even perfectly ordinary people routinely break laws every day without anyone noticing or caring, because laws are often badly worded and thought out, and what they literally say may not be what anyone intended or what anyone can actually enforce.

With the Internet, significant parts of the daily lives of people may actually occur in other jurisdictions. This makes it even more impossible to actually follow every law and even more necessary for psychologically healthy, actually functioning people to develop the facility to distinguishing between what may technically be written into law and what they actually should or should not do.

Having GURPS Honesty means that doing so requires a SC roll, which is going to fail on a regular basis. Even if the SC is 15, that's a whole lot of failures when you need to make a roll for every business transaction and, in some jobs, every email, minor decision or trivial interaction.

Which means that a GURPS Honest character are constantly taking action to 'do their best' to ensure that other people follow laws that are impossible to follow without breaking other laws, not to mention constantly turning themselves in for minor infractions.

And, really, while Hollywood scripwriters may believe that only minor legal snags exist for vigilantes, pointing excitedly at some romantic idea of citizen's arrests, the reality is that almost everything that adventure-fiction protagonists do is breaking one law or another.

For one thing, it doesn't matter how justified some act of self-defence or citizen's arrest may have been if you conceal any relevant facts from the police in the aftermath. Hell, just causing property damage and then concealing your identity from the insurers and the owner is breaking the law.

Superman breaks the law every time he lays hands on someone without then going through the requisite legal steps afterwards. It's no good stating that 'it would have been a valid citizen's arrest', because it isn't. Superman has never performed one in his life. Hell, he's an illegal alien whose life as Clark Kent is probably founded on felony fraud.