Rethinking Legal Immunity

[Anders]

Legal Immunity is a fun advantage, but it bugs me a little that it doesn't say anything about Control Rating. How about remaking it as a leveled advantage where for each level you take, you treat your society's CR as one level less. So in a society with CR 3, a person with one level of legal immunity would be able to have LC 2 items with just a permit.

[Gumby Bush]

Seems fair: that is essentially a leveled Wildcard version of the Permit perk.
Add 5 points for divergent LC, for the cases where the rules are just different, not less harsh (making different but harsher a feature, I guess, if you wanted, but probably a perk). Then you should get about the same point values, but a different underlying system.

The diplomatic pouch won't be caught with this, but just calling that a 5-point added charge to any level as before shouldn't affect the tweak too much.

[Stormcrow]

You've made the "what you can do" part more fine-grained, but you've completely removed the "what you can't do" part of Legal Immunity.

This system would also be a bit of a nightmare to implement beyond equipment Legality Class, as you'd have to not only work out the laws of the society at its Control Rating, but also every version of its laws at every other Control Rating. "In my CR3 country, killing in self-defense is allowed, but it's vital that the killer prove that it was self-defense, or at least not let the prosecution tell the jury that it wasn't. But my personal CR is 2, so when I kill and claim it was self-defense, my word is taken as good, and the prosecution can't dispute it. And my boss's personal CR is 1, so he can kill without even claiming self-defense, so long as he has a plausible justification for doing so. Now let's talk about money-laundering..."

[Gumby Bush]

Yeah, for simplicity's sake you should probably assume all non-standard CRs are divergent and cost the 5 points for "different rules apply to me."

A simpler method, if the GM has rolls taking comparative LC and CR into account--particularly cases where the government is nominally CR 3 or what have you, but the nuances haven't been pre-established--would be to apply a modifier to those rolls as a side effect of standard Legal Immunity rules.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

You've made the "what you can do" part more fine-grained, but you've completely removed the "what you can't do" part of Legal Immunity.

This system would also be a bit of a nightmare to implement beyond equipment Legality Class, as you'd have to not only work out the laws of the society at its Control Rating, but also every version of its laws at every other Control Rating. "In my CR3 country, killing in self-defense is allowed, but it's vital that the killer prove that it was self-defense, or at least not let the prosecution tell the jury that it wasn't. But my personal CR is 2, so when I kill and claim it was self-defense, my word is taken as good, and the prosecution can't dispute it. And my boss's personal CR is 1, so he can kill without even claiming self-defense, so long as he has a plausible justification for doing so. Now let's talk about money-laundering..."

I mean, it's not like the vanilla system doesn't require GM input. It is by necessity an advantage that requires a lot of thinking around what 5 and 10 points mean.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Anders

I mean, it's not like the vanilla system doesn't require GM input. It is by necessity an advantage that requires a lot of thinking around what 5 and 10 points mean.

Yes, but whether any characters have Legal Immunity or not, the game master needs to have some idea of how the laws work. That work will be done no matter what. The published Legal Immunity just requires the player to decide in what way the normal laws do not apply to their character, nothing more.

Your proposed advantage isn't character-specific; it's setting-specific. It requires that every CR version of that society's laws be worked out to some degree. Any character might take the advantage at any level, and the mere existence of the advantage means the various levels of law WILL be relevant in the game, so the GM can't shirk the job.

[Imbicatus]

Legal immunity just prevents prosecution, it doesn’t change anything about how easy it is to obtain restricted items. A foreign ambassador can’t be arrested or charged for walking down the street with narcotics or weapons, but they can’t just waltz up to a pharmacy and buy morphine or walk into a gun shop and buy a rpg.

The ability to obtain restricted items are usually included in either legal enforcement powers, unusual background “license” advantages, contacts for black market suppliers, or in having organizations with access to those items as a patron.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by Imbicatus

Legal immunity just prevents prosecution, it doesn’t change anything about how easy it is to obtain restricted items. A foreign ambassador can’t be arrested or charged for walking down the street with narcotics or weapons, but they can’t just waltz up to a pharmacy and buy morphine or walk into a gun shop and buy a rpg.

The ability to obtain restricted items are usually included in either legal enforcement powers, unusual background “license” advantages, contacts for black market suppliers, or in having organizations with access to those items as a patron.

Interesting point. I'll have to think about that.

[Gumby Bush]

Originally Posted by Stormcrow

Your proposed advantage isn't character-specific; it's setting-specific. It requires that every CR version of that society's laws be worked out to some degree. Any character might take the advantage at any level, and the mere existence of the advantage means the various levels of law WILL be relevant in the game, so the GM can't shirk the job.

Actually, I don't think this follows. One might work out what the lowered CR means on a case-by-case basis, or one might work out several varieties of Legal Immunity available in the setting, in which case one only needs to know what the available lowered CRs mean--not every mathematically possible lowered CR. The fact that the advantage is set up so variably doesn't mean that all levels will be available in any given setting.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Gumby Bush

Actually, I don't think this follows. One might work out what the lowered CR means on a case-by-case basis, or one might work out several varieties of Legal Immunity available in the setting, in which case one only needs to know what the available lowered CRs mean--not every mathematically possible lowered CR. The fact that the advantage is set up so variably doesn't mean that all levels will be available in any given setting.

It means if any player DOES take a CR level that hasn't been taken before, all that work will have to be done again.

The proposal is to scrap an advantage that says "You are an exception to the normal laws of society" and replace it with an advantage that says "There are varying levels of law in society." An exception is exceptional. The latter form is a much more complicated baseline.