How to Handle Legal Dramas

[Ian Charvill]

In terms of the size of the audience, obviously a great number of people watch legal dramas of one type or another.  Unless you want to argue that there's something specific about the fantasy/sci-fi/horror audiences that predisposes them to roleplaying that would suggest a possible audience for a legal rpg.

And really we need only to be talking about, say, a few thousand people to make it a viable project.  So you can run made up numbers like 10 million non-roleplayers watch Ally McBeal, a few thousand is less than one tenth of one percent - it doesn't seem like an impossible audience to aim for.

For it to feel like a legal rpg it's going to have to involve the kind of colour that you see in a legal drama: so you're going to need people citing cases, cross examining witnesses, summing up, shoutin 'objection' and so on.  And you need some kind of procedure for organising all of this.

The greater the degree of expertise required to run the process, the higher the barrier to entry to the game.

[pete_darby]

If I'm going to get started seriously on writing this, and it sounds like I may be, I'd better set out some stated aims for a concrete project. Otherwise this is going to be another "all things to all players" discussion that nods and agrees "something must be done...."

So in the spirit of setting a social contract for further discussion...

Intended audience: at the moment, I'm aiming for the kind of gamers that would enjoy Inspectres, Dust Devils or Nicotine Girls, to kind of draw up the external boundaries of the target.

While not aiming at a mainstream audience, I'd like to end up with something that an intelligent TV viewer could grasp and play enjoyably without instruction from an experienced RPG player. That's not going to happen in the first iteration of the design, but if I don't have that in mind at the moment, it'll be 9 billion times harder to implement later. Yes, I came up with that figure scientifically.

That also means I'm not particularly worried about the size of the target audience yet: I'm pursuing this for personal satisfaction, as the reaction has polarised into "can't be done" or "should be easy, someone should do that..."

I've always wanted to be someone. If I can be someone who acheived the impossible, so much the better.

In the style of play, I'm still revolving around the traditional RPG set up of GM and regular group of players, possibly due to my mental inertia, but also because of my bias towards HW as a system.

Format for the game is, in my mind, presently a supplemental article with mechanics for Hero Wars. Mechanics for other systems to follow, possibly with expert input from experienced players of other systems (*cough* commercial D20 PDF *cough*). Again, developed with a view to developing a stand alone LawyerQuest game (this is not a serious suggestion for the name).

Back to the mechanical questions... I think John and Ian are both right (and wrong). Please bear in mind that what I'm talking about is developing a system for running legal dramas, including but not restricted to court room cases, as role playing games. That pre-supposes that I'm going to be creating some sort of mechanistic system to represent / simulate aspects of the court system, although the staging suggestions would, I hope, be valuable to anybody freeforming a courtroom drama.

I'm also going to have to have suggestions / instructions / systems for a simplified legal system within the game, but it will be as vastly simplified as the system presented in most legal dramas (although running things as tortuously as the first season of Murder One as an extended campaign certainly appeals to me).

John Kim wrote:

As for not reliably systematizing, I'm not sure what you mean. Systems don't always need dice and numbers to resolve them, like Hero Wars does. For example, Apples to Apples is a card game which relies on subjective judgements. It is systematic in that it has a clear way of deciding the outcome -- the designated player chooses. While cards are played, the outcome is entirely a subjective decision.

The same could easily apply to a legal drama. i.e. Each player has a lawyer PC or two. For court cases, two players play the prosecution and the defense. Another player is the jury. Other players may play the judge, the defendent, or other characters -- or they might be abstracted out. The outcome of the case is chosen by the jury player.

I think you can see from the above that we're talking about vastly different staging methods. I think your idea would work as a stand alone, more freeform game (Host Your Own Trial?), but even then, I baulk at the idea of a single player as jury. The idea of "12 good men and true" is to eliminate (or at least reduce) personal bias in favour of assessing the balance of a case. I'd rather mechanically abstract the jury than the judge, precisely because the whole point of the game / session is the judgement of the jury. I think that's too much responsibility for a single player.

There's definitely a card game in here too... how does "devils advocate" play?

And I've come up with a really terrible name for a prime time TV RPG system, but it's soooooo bad, I'm embarassed to admit it.

[James Holloway]

In terms of the size of the audience, obviously a great number of people watch legal dramas of one type or another.  Unless you want to argue that there's something specific about the fantasy/sci-fi/horror audiences that predisposes them to roleplaying that would suggest a possible audience for a legal rpg.

Well, no, but I think that the RPG audience as it exists is pretty heavily committed to science fiction, fantasy, and pulp in general. Neither here nor there, I suppose, but I doubt people would argue that that's the way it is.

I have to confess that I'm not seeing the problems inherent in staging a trial as an RPG contest, or at least not a dramatic trial. Let's look at Law & Order as an example. Every case on the show is either one where there's some kind of ambiguous moral point at issue (is a white supremacist leader whose teachings are clearly related to the hate crimes of his followers culpable in a crime one of them committed without his knowledge? Is a mother who killed her child during a religious ceremony guilty despite the fact that she was acting within her religious beliefs?) or where Jack McCoy has to struggle with the difference between the law and justice (this guy is guilty as sin, but a legal technicality has invalidated much of the evidence). Bear in mind that these cases aren't addressed in very much detail -- the trial and the debates between the lawyers behind the scenes seldom take up more than 20 minutes of screen time.

So then, how do we apply this format to a game? This is the way I'd do it, and represents my own control-freak play style.

The GM decides on a case, angling it in such a way that there's a moral question of some kind posed by it. He or she bears in mind the attitudes of the players and the characters, and tries to pitch the case such that it will create an interesting reaction among the lot of them. At the same time, the GM tries to figure out how the NPCs will react to the case -- I'm assuming here that Van Buren (the senior police officer) and Adam (the DA) are NPCs in this campaign, as well as nebulous things like "the Mayor" and "the press."

The case is presented to the PCs, either through a PC investigation like in the show or just sort of "on a platter." The PCs examine it, learn about it, and decide whether to prosecute or not. They don't have to agree, and this becomes a little mini-trial, with Adam as the judge. Bonus fun here because Adam's standards aren't like a real judge's or jury's.

DANGER POINT: it has to be (at least for me) possible for Adam to refuse to prosecute. I'd keep a backup case on hand.

Next, the PCs prepare for trial. They have to persuade people to testify and figure out what their argument is going to be. The GM also uses this time to introduce the defense attorney, giving the PCs an idea of his or her skills and personality.

Then we have the trial. The GM glosses over a lot of the testimony. I'd just say "yeah, the cafe owner testifies that he saw the defendant jump into the car and drive away. The defense tries to get him to admit that he didn't get a good look at the defendant, but he stands firm."

We play out the questioning and cross-examination of major witnesses in detail, as well as the opening and closing statements (although somewhat abbreviated). If I were the GM, I'd be making little notes as the trial went on, possibly in line with a chart I'd prepared ahead of time representing the jury's feelings. This might be different for each jury, and maybe some PC skill could even allow them to get a look at the chart ("I don't think this jury will stand for another surprise witness. It'll look too much like showboating."). Each time either side did something the jury liked or hated, I'd just make a little note on my (preferably legal) pad.

My personal taste would be to abstract purely legal shenanigans (both sides always have some horseshit argument, even when clearly in the wrong. No one ever says "you got me there! There is no chain of custody!") by having people roll on relevant skills or however you would normally handle such a thing. But I would make clear what effect these shenanigans have and force the players to work around them in making their cases.

Once that's all done, the GM plays out the judge's summing up, and then some method is used to determine who wins... possibly a point-tallying method based on the notable things each side's done, modified with a random element of some kind (because you're always a little in doubt in these shows).

Then some aftermath. Ta da!

This does mean that the players are going to have to have some rudimentary knowledge of the law, but in general Law & Order never hinges on really obscure technical issues. They are going to have to understand a little bit about sentencing policy for the all-important plea-bargain scenes, and a guide to the jargon would be good ("Man One. Five to ten." "Excuse me?"), but I don't see why this is going to be any harder to assimilate than the average fantasy game ("Which ones are the Aelwydrinni again?" "The ones with grey eyes." "I thought they all had grey eyes."). And, in the bargain, they get to learn something about the real world with which they can impress people at parties!

Now, I'd never ever be able to find people to play it with, but I just don't understand why "players have to have a bit of knowledge of the overall legal structure" is considered to be a bad thing. Players in many games are required to (or encouraged to) know huge amounts about the world. Surely a generic (or even made-up! As long as it's consistent...) legal process isn't going to be too hard. I'm sure there are any number of books or websites for beginners, and heck, the GM could even "rip from the headlines" like the show itself does to come up with trials. But it's much more important to get the PCs and NPCs talking the talk, going around saying "your witness, counselor," and "I don't see a compelling interest here" rather than knowing anything about the law.

The key is the preparation of the case by the GM, which is where my play-style bias (I'm a heavy prep GM, and I place a huge importance on verisimilitude expressed by background detail) comes through.

Does that make sense?

edit: I forgot a very important thing, which is that of course the TV show writers have a luxury the GM doesn't, which is that they can introduce stuff about the characters in order to make cases relevant to them. So we didn't know until it came up that Jack McCoy was an ex-sixties radical or that Briscoe's parents were Jewish but he was raised Catholic. Players could introduce that in order to create PC reactions to cases, but the GM can't count on it pitching the case.

[pete_darby]

James: Er, in a nutshell, well, yes. Dead on what I'm looking at, and god bless you for expressing it better than I have.

BTW, anybody know a web site for "law for writers?" I know they exist, but damned if I can find them ATM....

[James Holloway]

James: Er, in a nutshell, well, yes. Dead on what I'm looking at, and god bless you for expressing it better than I have.

woohoo!

I've been trying to do something like this for a long time, although primarily with the idea of the PCs being beat cops rather than lawyers -- a similarly mundane game with a similar set of concerns about morality rather than the detail of the law.

I could do Third Watch, but not CSI.

I watch too much TV.

[pete_darby]

Oh yeah, systems and hints for hooking characters into the drama. Definitely looking into that.... Maybe even a DD style mechanism for forcing it, but certainly HW personality traits.

Look at the L&O example form the other end of the telescope... assume that the show bible has established that Jack was a radical, but there hasn't been a case that highlights that. The show runner requests a script that brings that in, rather than his radicalism being added into a pre-existing script to "punch up his involvement."

Building story hooks at PC creation allows players to use PC passions to enhance their perfomance (but that also allows the opposition to use his passions to enhance their dirty underhanded tactics, and may lead to emotional outbursts in court, censure from the judge... or crunchy gaming goodness, as we call it round these parts).

Thinks... modelling parts of the show development process in the game itself... could be fun. hold that thought for later development.

[pete_darby]

I watch too much TV.

Ah, but now it's research!

[contracycle]

Now, I'd never ever be able to find people to play it with, but I just don't understand why "players have to have a bit of knowledge of the overall legal structure" is considered to be a bad thing. Players in many games are required to (or encouraged to) know huge amounts about the world. Surely a generic (or even made-up! As long as it's consistent...) legal process isn't going to be too hard.

Judge Dredd had a cool rap sheet that each player was expected to keep handy, mostly so they could arrest random citizens and cite a suitably spurious law.

I wonder if we have been using "requires players to become experts" in two different ways: 1, that the game is didactic, 2, that the players have prior knowledge.  I support option 1, not 2.  I think the printed material should equip the players with suitable knowledge jargon to employ; IMO, jargon = colour.

[pete_darby]

If it's written right, the expertise level is kind of self selecting: if the game is pitched at those interested in TV legal drama, then that's the level of expertise in the law (and, more importantly, the tropes of legal drama) that the game should need to work.

If you know enough to enjoy Ally McBeal, that should be enough to grok the game, from a legal knowledge aspect. Grokking RP as a whole may be a different thing.. or may not. I'd have to run it.

edit: the rap sheet: I'm thinking of a bullet list of Things You Can Do In Court, Things You'll Get A Warning (or Objection) For and Grounds For Contempt of Court, backed up by a section in the game about court procedure.

2nd edit: So, once again, it's a bit of both. I'm assuming that anyone interested in the game will have some awareness of the process of law, but give plenty of hard information, staging tips, and "this isn't law, but it plays law on TV" stuff.

[John Kim]

We play out the questioning and cross-examination of major witnesses in detail, as well as the opening and closing statements (although somewhat abbreviated). If I were the GM, I'd be making little notes as the trial went on, possibly in line with a chart I'd prepared ahead of time representing the jury's feelings. This might be different for each jury, and maybe some PC skill could even allow them to get a look at the chart ("I don't think this jury will stand for another surprise witness. It'll look too much like showboating."). Each time either side did something the jury liked or hated, I'd just make a little note on my (preferably legal) pad.
...
Once that's all done, the GM plays out the judge's summing up, and then some method is used to determine who wins... possibly a point-tallying method based on the notable things each side's done, modified with a random element of some kind (because you're always a little in doubt in these shows).

This actually sounds fairly compatible with what I would enjoy.  As I understand you, the point totals are based on the GM's subjective judgements of when the PCs did things that the jury liked/hated.  The important thing to me is that the system be founded on human judgement of how convincing the arguments are.  This appears to do that.  However, I have some comments.  

A central question is: how important is the random element at the end?  Previously, I had suggested that there being no randomness.  However, I don't think I would mind randomness being a small-modifier which decides ties or very close outcomes.  On the other hand, it isn't necessary for doubt -- at least to the players.  To everyone except the person who controls the jury, the outcome remains in doubt.  

Also, as you yourself say, this is pretty GM control-freakish.  As you describe it, the GM controls the judge, jury, defendant, defense attorney, and even the senior police officer and DA.  These are roles which I would tend to distribute among the players.  

I think John and Ian are both right (and wrong). Please bear in mind that what I'm talking about is developing a system for running legal dramas, including but not restricted to court room cases, as role playing games.
...[Re: my suggestions]...
I think your idea would work as a stand alone, more freeform game (Host Your Own Trial?), but even then, I balk at the idea of a single player as jury. The idea of "12 good men and true" is to eliminate (or at least reduce) personal bias in favour of assessing the balance of a case. I'd rather mechanically abstract the jury than the judge, precisely because the whole point of the game / session is the judgement of the jury. I think that's too much responsibility for a single player.

As for it being "standalone", I don't see a problem with having a different system for investigations and personal life -- while still using a more  subjective trial system like the one I described.  In principle, you might have a more traditional setup during the investigation with a GM responding to players.  But you have a different set of rules for handling trials.  

As for the jury -- well, obviously I disagree.  On the one hand, I can see your point about personal bias.  i.e. The prosecutor's player Alice might be encouraged to use her real-world knowledge of the jury's player Bob, to pitch the arguments in a convincing way.  Thus, one player as the jury doesn't perfectly represent the principle.  However, while I see that as a potential pitfall, to me abstracting the jury into a set of numbers and die rolls does far, far more damage to the principle.  

One option might be to make all of the players the jury.  That is, no one plays the jury during the trial.  But then at the end of the trial, everyone switches and plays a jury member.  They debate the merits of the case, perhaps for some fixed time, and then vote for what the outcome should be.  This is similar to, say, the "bests" voting system in "Shadows in the Fog".  The prosecution player could vote for his own side, but he might also be convinced otherwise.  To minimize bias, you could have the players evenly split during the trial between prosecution characters and defense characters.

[James Holloway]

John Kim said:
Also, as you yourself say, this is pretty GM control-freakish. As you describe it, the GM controls the judge, jury, defendant, defense attorney, and even the senior police officer and DA. These are roles which I would tend to distribute among the players.

Yeah, this is an effect of my having chosen Law and Order. Van Buren and Adam aren't big enough characters to be made PCs, and they're both authority figures the PCs (Briscoe, Curtis, McCoy and whatsername -- the one with the nose) have to persuade. Adam never appears in court either, so he wouldn't be very interesting to play. Likewise, the defendant and the defense attorney are different every week and therefore can't be PCs (In a traditional campaign format anyway).

Of course, you could always assign the defense to any players whose characters aren't in court this week.

[Daniel Solis]

This talk of legal dramas, medical dramas (in the mundanity thread), and now police dramas has got my scheming brainmeats percolating an idea: a compilation rpg book, or maybe a series of rpg book. "True Tales of Human Drama" or something like that.

I might give these concepts a shot as well, I've already got titles for them if I do go give it a go: "Stat!" "Objection!" and "Freeze!" (Medical, legal, police games respectively.)

The nice part of having the three games sharing elements would be crossover possibilities similar to Law & Order. An investigation and subsequent arrest of a suspect can happen in one game and later on, the case and accompanying details can be hashed out in another game, perhaps with a completely different group. I don't know how the medical game would work into the crossovers exactly, but I'm sure there's a way.

[W. Don]

"Stat!" "Objection!" and "Freeze!" (Medical, legal, police games respectively.)...

The nice part of having the three games sharing elements would be crossover possibilities similar to Law & Order. An investigation and subsequent arrest of a suspect can happen in one game and later on, the case and accompanying details can be hashed out in another game, perhaps with a completely different group.

Neat titles, Daniel. How about something like that TV series called "Boomtown"?

- W.

[Daniel Solis]

Can't say I've ever seen that show, I take it that it had elements of medical, legal and police dramas?

[W. Don]

The show is described as a dramatic jigsaw puzzle, looking at events in Los Angeles (aka Boomtown) from a variety of perspectives – including detectives, police officers, politicians, paramedics, reporters and ordinary citizens – until the whole picture is clear.

(snipped it from here)

Not that much medical stuff ala ER, but it does typically include  paramedics. I've only seen it a few times myself. I was led by your last post to suggest that perhaps the way the Boomtown episodes are structured might be a good model for a police/law/medicine "cross overs" game. Might be interesting ground to look for ideas.

- W.