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Aliquid
2017-12-15, 02:44 PM
Imagine (in a D&D type world), a large city that has various high and mid level spell casters working for the city... what happens with the justice system?

Spells like "zone of truth" and "discern lies" or any divination type spell being available would have a major impact. What would be the result?

I guess there is also the possibility of corruption within the city. So, those who cast the spells for the city might... manipulate the situation to let certain people go free... and high level criminals would be able to resist the power of these spells various ways.

But petty criminals and low level members of organized crime would have a hard time avoiding being caught.

Thoughts?

Deliverance
2017-12-15, 05:02 PM
In a truly lawful justice system they'd all be banned or considered hearsay as divination is not a reliable source of evidence. Consider:

Ex1:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a cleric. My GOD told me.
Q: So we are talking hearsay, here?
A: HERESY!


Ex2:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a wizard, divination is my specialty!
Q: So you don't actually have any evidence that we can use, just your statement of what you believe happened?
A: But I know it. Why don't you believe me. Who do you trust, him or me?

Ex3:
Q: So, how do we know this invisible "zone of truth" does what you say? Preventing deliberate and intentional lies?
A: Enter it and try lying - see, you can't.
Q: Interesting. I certainly felt an effect, but how do I know this is a zone that affects everybody in it? What if your magic just prevented me from lying?
A: It doesn't work that way.
Q: Prove it.
A: I just tried to lie, I can't do it either.
Q: ...
A: Be reasonable. How on earth do you expect me to be able to prove to you that my magic does what I say it does and nothing else?
Q: That was actually going to be my next question to you.

Ex4:
Q: This divination you are going on about sounds interesting, except for how it tramples all over the constitutional mental privacy guarantees so essential to maintaining our society. What differentiates it from the many types of magical violation of peoples' rights that caused those guarantees to be part of our constitution in the first place?
A: I'll get back to you on that.

In a less just but perhaps more practical justice system you'd choose to believe the practitioners of magic and accept convicting innocent people when the practitioners lied or were incompetent, frauds, or just made honest mistakes.

Or perhaps you'd pay a second magic user whom you trusted to oversee the others and check on their magic, or perhaps you'd accept word of god as interpreted by a cleric to hold up in court or whatever.

But regardless of your precautions, you'd be at most one step removed from the good old "if X men in good standing says somebody is guilty, then that's evidence enough to convict" justice so popular in medieval and pre-medieval times.

Aliquid
2017-12-15, 05:25 PM
I think that in many scenarios, the local church of a god with the "Law" domain would likely be in charge of the justice system, and I doubt any of them would question or challenge the validity or workings of a "zone of truth". I also doubt that people would question the honesty of a magistrate that is an official cleric of said church.

Your "constitutional" rights idea is a modern concept that likely wouldn't apply in typical D&D style settings.

For petty crimes in medieval type times, a magistrate would be both judge and jury, and the accused wouldn't get any help with their "defense" (no lawyer etc). Having a magistrate that can cast zone of truth, would be a big step up from a magistrate that just made decisions based on his mood.

Jay R
2017-12-15, 06:38 PM
I think the predominant effect would be immediate rush to develop a "Protection from Truth Spells" spell.

Scots Dragon
2017-12-15, 06:40 PM
Your "constitutional" rights idea is a modern concept that likely wouldn't apply in typical D&D style settings.

Not necessarily. Medieval England had the Magna Carta, effectively a prototypical constitution that protected liberties and similar concepts dating back to the 1215 CE. This included concepts such as the right of habeas corpus and the right to due process. Ancient Rome had a concept known as a 'Ius', which was a right to which any citizen was entitled by dint of citizenship; this is actually the root linguistic origin for the modern word 'justice' itself.

This is a concept that literally goes back millennia, and they were often brought in as a response to certain things. The idea of constitutional rights would certainly exist in a D&D-style setting.

ngilop
2017-12-15, 07:59 PM
In a truly lawful justice system they'd all be banned or considered hearsay as divination is not a reliable source of evidence. Consider:

Ex1:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a cleric. My GOD told me.
Q: So we are talking hearsay, here?
A: HERESY!


Ex2:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a wizard, divination is my specialty!
Q: So you don't actually have any evidence that we can use, just your statement of what you believe happened?
A: But I know it. Why don't you believe me. Who do you trust, him or me?

Ex3:
Q: So, how do we know this invisible "zone of truth" does what you say? Preventing deliberate and intentional lies?
A: Enter it and try lying - see, you can't.
Q: Interesting. I certainly felt an effect, but how do I know this is a zone that affects everybody in it? What if your magic just prevented me from lying?
A: It doesn't work that way.
Q: Prove it.
A: I just tried to lie, I can't do it either.
Q: ...
A: Be reasonable. How on earth do you expect me to be able to prove to you that my magic does what I say it does and nothing else?
Q: That was actually going to be my next question to you.

Ex4:
Q: This divination you are going on about sounds interesting, except for how it tramples all over the constitutional mental privacy guarantees so essential to maintaining our society. What differentiates it from the many types of magical violation of peoples' rights that caused those guarantees to be part of our constitution in the first place?
A: I'll get back to you on that.

In a less just but perhaps more practical justice system you'd choose to believe the practitioners of magic and accept convicting innocent people when the practitioners lied or were incompetent, frauds, or just made honest mistakes.

Or perhaps you'd pay a second magic user whom you trusted to oversee the others and check on their magic, or perhaps you'd accept word of god as interpreted by a cleric to hold up in court or whatever.

But regardless of your precautions, you'd be at most one step removed from the good old "if X men in good standing says somebody is guilty, then that's evidence enough to convict" justice so popular in medieval and pre-medieval times.



basically the complete opposite of these examples. In a world where magic is common place and NOT THE REAL WORLD .

Necroticplague
2017-12-15, 08:17 PM
Spells like "zone of truth" and "discern lies" or any divination type spell being available would have a major impact. What would be the result?
As a person who has spent a good amount of time studying truth and falsehood, the idea those spells are anything but a minor speedbump is hilarious. Anyone with a couple brain cells to run together can get around those easily.

I guess there is also the possibility of corruption within the city. So, those who cast the spells for the city might... manipulate the situation to let certain people go free... and high level criminals would be able to resist the power of these spells various ways.
High level? You don't need any levels to simply never make statements that have a truth value to be tested, or that are so hedged as to be impossible to be false.


Thoughts?
In more modern court systems, the fact that divinations are literally impossible to verify to anyone else (and, thanks to saves and other factors, may not produce the same results when made by different people) would make them inadmissible as evidence.

Enixon
2017-12-15, 08:26 PM
basically the complete opposite of these examples. In a world where magic is common place and NOT THE REAL WORLD .


I fail to see how magic being common invalidates any of those examples.

Heck, in Legend of the Five Rings it's canon that magic cannot be used in trials for a similar reason that no one save the magic user casting the spell knows for sure what spell was actualy cast. In it's example a Shugenja summons up the ghost of a murder victim to be a witness in his own murder trail which leads to the suspect being convicted and executed. Only later the murder victim is found alive and well, the shugenja had actually just cast an illusion spell durring the trail.

And even if it CAN be proven to the satisfaction of the setting's judicial system that it indeed Zone of Truth (or whatever) being cast, those spells tend to offer saving throws, so even then there's no telling that the subject failed his or her save and is actualy being effected. This could lead to guilty parties "proving" their innocence by saying that they didn't do it while in a zone of truth that they have resisted.

Jay R
2017-12-15, 09:24 PM
In a truly lawful justice system they'd all be banned or considered hearsay as divination is not a reliable source of evidence.

"Lawful": doesn't mean "modern".


Ex1:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a cleric. My GOD told me.
Q: So we are talking hearsay, here?
The god in question: <blast>
Q: <becomes a pair of shoes and a small pile of dust>


Ex2:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a wizard, divination is my specialty!
Q: So you don't actually have any evidence that we can use, just your statement of what you believe happened?
Lawyer: Your honor, we have 153 expert witnesses ready to give testimony on that subject.


Ex3:
Q: So, how do we know this invisible "zone of truth" does what you say? Preventing deliberate and intentional lies?
A: Enter it and try lying - see, you can't.
Q: Interesting. I certainly felt an effect, but how do I know this is a zone that affects everybody in it? What if your magic just prevented me from lying?
A: It doesn't work that way.
Q: Prove it.
A: <waves hands> It doesn't work that way, and you're a frog.
Q: Ribbit.


Ex4:
Q: This divination you are going on about sounds interesting, except for how it tramples all over the constitutional mental privacy guarantees so essential to maintaining our society. What differentiates it from the many types of magical violation of peoples' rights that caused those guarantees to be part of our constitution in the first place?
A: The duke has the right of high, middle, and low justice, and has just p*ssed on that constitution.


But regardless of your precautions, you'd be at most one step removed from the good old "if X men in good standing says somebody is guilty, then that's evidence enough to convict" justice so popular in medieval and pre-medieval times.

No, not even one step removed. Swords. Glaives. Chain mail. Castles. Knights. Kings. Nobles. Dungeons.

These are medieval times.

Aliquid
2017-12-15, 09:28 PM
As a person who has spent a good amount of time studying truth and falsehood, the idea those spells are anything but a minor speedbump is hilarious. Anyone with a couple brain cells to run together can get around those easily.

High level? You don't need any levels to simply never make statements that have a truth value to be tested, or that are so hedged as to be impossible to be false. But the person casting the spells and asking the questions would likely have a higher intelligence and/or wisdom than the average commoner, and they would have practice and experience with their job. I'm sure they could phrase questions in a way that counters this approach.


In more modern court systems, the fact that divinations are literally impossible to verify to anyone else (and, thanks to saves and other factors, may not produce the same results when made by different people) would make them inadmissible as evidence.I strongly doubt that a "modern court system" would develop in a world that has always had magic. Things would evolve differently in so many ways. If you accept a system where clerics get their powers from their gods, and that their powers are taken away from them if they act against the prescribed alignment... I'm pretty sure you can trust that they will remain "lawful" in how they apply their spells.

I find people seem to be so fixated on the modern western concept of a justice system as the only "true and correct" system that they feel violated even imagining something different. As if the current western system is the "obvious and only evolutionary conclusion of justice in any advanced culture"



I fail to see how magic being common invalidates any of those examples.A world where magic is and historically has been common would create a culture very different from ours. Magic being common changes everything.


Heck, in Legend of the Five Rings it's canon that magic cannot be used in trials for a similar reason that no one save the magic user casting the spell knows for sure what spell was actualy cast. In it's example a Shugenja summons up the ghost of a murder victim to be a witness in his own murder trail which leads to the suspect being convicted and executed. Only later the murder victim is found alive and well, the shugenja had actually just cast an illusion spell durring the trail. So what? A person could create an illusion of a "live" person to come to a trial and lie. There are thousands of ways for someone to use magic to "cheat" at a trial... why on earth would you think that the justice system wouldn't use magic as well to help deduce someone's innocence/guilt.


And even if it CAN be proven to the satisfaction of the setting's judicial system that it indeed Zone of Truth (or whatever) being cast, those spells tend to offer saving throws, so even then there's no telling that the subject failed his or her save and is actualy being effected. This could lead to guilty parties "proving" their innocence by saying that they didn't do it while in a zone of truth that they have resisted.So... then the "zone of truth" is just one of many tools used, not the only tool.

JNAProductions
2017-12-15, 09:30 PM
Yeah, I'd definitely agree that it's not the be-all end-all to the justice system. You'd still need investigators, witnesses, all that jazz.

But! It'd be hugely helpful.

Keltest
2017-12-15, 09:35 PM
Yeah, I'd definitely agree that it's not the be-all end-all to the justice system. You'd still need investigators, witnesses, all that jazz.

But! It'd be hugely helpful.

Agreed. I don't think it would obviate the need for evidence gathering, but it would drastically reduce the difficulty and increase the variety of collectable evidence.

Nifft
2017-12-15, 09:37 PM
Imagine (in a D&D type world), a large city that has various high and mid level spell casters working for the city... what happens with the justice system?

Spells like "zone of truth" and "discern lies" or any divination type spell being available would have a major impact. What would be the result?

I guess there is also the possibility of corruption within the city. So, those who cast the spells for the city might... manipulate the situation to let certain people go free... and high level criminals would be able to resist the power of these spells various ways.

But petty criminals and low level members of organized crime would have a hard time avoiding being caught.

Thoughts?

I don't think zone of truth etc. would have much effect on most aspects of criminal justice, because capture & confinement become much more difficult if magic is commonly available to criminal elements.

Where those spells would be commonly seen is in civil court, where someone wants to get damages after a contract was violated (or similar). This is both because civil cases tend to involve a conflict between two or more high-wealth entities (persons or business or organizations or dragons or whatnot).


Kobold: "That lying wyrm said she'd pay me scale!"

Dragon: "Duplicitous vermin! Those were some of my best scales!"


For criminal activity, I think we'd see a lot of frontier justice -- mob justice, or a lone Paladin acting as judge and executioner -- which is pretty much what I do see in D&D, so that's one bit of nice verisimilitude from an unexpected quarter.

Aliquid
2017-12-15, 09:51 PM
I don't think zone of truth etc. would have much effect on most aspects of criminal justice, because capture & confinement become much more difficult if magic is commonly available to criminal elements.Depends on how "commonly" available the magic is. It also depends on if you have the wealth, skill or influence to get your hands on such things.

I would suggest that in larger cities magic would have a big impact on petty crimes by commoners. So mid level commoners and low level experts/aristocrats wouldn't be able to get away with anything... you have to be higher level to have access to magic items or a high enough Will save to make a difference.

Stopping crime from mid to low level commoners and low level experts/aristocrats... well that's a good chunk of the population.

Clistenes
2017-12-15, 09:56 PM
*snip*

Magic could be integrated into the judicial system, the same way genetic testing, autopsies, and well, all forensic science has been in our own world...

So wizards and clerics could lie? Well, so can forensic doctors. If you doubt their neutrality, you ask for somebody to repeat the tests...

As for divinations, a wizard could craft an item that casts them, a second expert could identify them, a third expert could test the item, and the judge him/herself could use it...

Nifft
2017-12-15, 10:05 PM
Depends on how "commonly" available the magic is. It also depends on if you have the wealth, skill or influence to get your hands on such things.

I would suggest that in larger cities magic would have a big impact on petty crimes by commoners. So mid level commoners and low level experts/aristocrats wouldn't be able to get away with anything... you have to be higher level to have access to magic items or a high enough Will save to make a difference.

Stopping crime from mid to low level commoners and low level experts/aristocrats... well that's a good chunk of the population.

So there's efficient magical enforcement of the law upon the poor and middle-class only, and the rich can get away with murder.

Suddenly, it sounds like we're playing Shadowrun -- which is awesome in its own way. :smallcool:

But it's not the rule of law. It's a magical oppressive caste system.

... until someone casts Lenin's Liberating Leveler ...

Aliquid
2017-12-15, 10:09 PM
So there's efficient magical enforcement of the law upon the poor and middle-class only, and the rich can get away with murder.

Suddenly, it sounds like we're playing Shadowrun -- which is awesome in its own way. :smallcool:

But it's not the rule of law. It's a magical oppressive caste systemThat is a very possible outcome.

RazorChain
2017-12-15, 10:21 PM
Why not just use more drastic measures.

This isn't contained to the D&D spell list.


Use compel truth to make the subject tell the truth or just better yet read his mind. Dominate the subject so he tells the truth.


There are myriads of ways to get the "absolute" truth from the subject instead of using a dodgy lie detector spell.


Think about a society where it is irrefutable that the gods exist, you'd better be sure that if the gods point out that you are guilty then no matter of lawyering is going to get you out of jail. In fact it's more likely to get you burnt for heresy.

RazorChain
2017-12-15, 10:34 PM
Not necessarily. Medieval England had the Magna Carta, effectively a prototypical constitution that protected liberties and similar concepts dating back to the 1215 CE. This included concepts such as the right of habeas corpus and the right to due process. Ancient Rome had a concept known as a 'Ius', which was a right to which any citizen was entitled by dint of citizenship; this is actually the root linguistic origin for the modern word 'justice' itself.

This is a concept that literally goes back millennia, and they were often brought in as a response to certain things. The idea of constitutional rights would certainly exist in a D&D-style setting.


Why? In the eastern hemisphere the written law has been rather weak, Confucious and his disciplines and Eastern cultures that followed distrusted written laws and put their trust in people and innate human goodness

The idea of constitutional rights may exist in some places in D&D style settings. What constitutional rights people have is up to the goverment. In the Magocracy magic will probalby find out if you are guilty or not and in a Theocracy the priests will divine if you are guilty or not.

Nifft
2017-12-15, 10:43 PM
Why? In the eastern hemisphere the written law has been rather weak, Confucious and his disciplines and Eastern cultures that followed distrusted written laws and put their trust in people and innate human goodness

The idea of constitutional rights may exist in some places in D&D style settings. What constitutional rights people have is up to the goverment. In the Magocracy magic will probalby find out if you are guilty or not and in a Theocracy the priests will divine if you are guilty or not.

Yep, you'd have a Magistrate who walks around, dispensing justice as he or she sees fit. With magic, that might mean the ability to cast mark of justice, or in petty cases using lesser geas to enforce public service for a few days.

That's a lot like how I'd envision the "frontier justice" that I mention above -- it'd be a small group of powerful people who handle justice in an area -- possibly the nobility, possibly a merit-based office.

Merit-based office seems more harmonious with Eastern tradition; hereditary nobility with Western.

Necroticplague
2017-12-15, 10:48 PM
But the person casting the spells and asking the questions would likely have a higher intelligence and/or wisdom than the average commoner, and they would have practice and experience with their job. I'm sure they could phrase questions in a way that counters this approach.If you have wizsards of high enough level to cast these kinds of spells, why aren't the other people similarly powerful? If a cleric who can cast Zone of Truth is rare, than this problem solves itself: such powerful clergymen have more important tasks than trying petty criminals.

However, even assuming your interrogator is brilliant enough, their's still the killer of all interrogations: deafening silence. Those spells may force you to speak truth, but they do not compel you to speak in the first place.


I strongly doubt that a "modern court system" would develop in a world that has always had magic. Things would evolve differently in so many ways. If you accept a system where clerics get their powers from their gods, and that their powers are taken away from them if they act against the prescribed alignment... I'm pretty sure you can trust that they will remain "lawful" in how they apply their spells.Assuming, of course, the cleric in question was telling the truth when they claimed to be a cleric of Law, as opposed to Trickery. And that the clerics rules would find lying about results to be not just an infraction, but a gross one (as otherwise, they could simply compensate with Lawful actions elsewhere in their lives and still be fine). And assuming you believe the clerics as an organization (instead of thinking they're self-deluded, since you can get similar powers from entirely non-theistic sources).


I find people seem to be so fixated on the modern western concept of a justice system as the only "true and correct" system that they feel violated even imagining something different. As if the current western system is the "obvious and only evolutionary conclusion of justice in any advanced culture"It's a matter of values. Said system is, to the best of my knowledge, the one that most encapsulates my thoughts on human rights and justice. To use another model as a basis, I would need a lot of information. What do the people in this theoretical view value, what do they think of as justice, are people who are accused still people, what are considered people's basic rights, is accuracy or that somebody is found guilty more important.....you didn't give me any of that, so I went with what I know.

Simply saying 'add magic' isn't nearly enough to get the sociology of the people down.

War_lord
2017-12-15, 10:57 PM
Just ask the accused to take an oath, in the name of (insert god of justice here), that they're innocent of the charges laid against them. If they're innocent they have nothing to fear, if they're guilty they'll be in for an eternity of consequence.

Whyrocknodie
2017-12-15, 10:59 PM
Sounds like it'd be turning a fantasy genre game into some kind of Harry Potter meets CIS magic-is-technology courtroom drama. Which doubtless already has fanfic somewhere. Somewhere awful.

Aliquid
2017-12-15, 11:20 PM
If you have wizsards of high enough level to cast these kinds of spells, why aren't the other people similarly powerful? If a cleric who can cast Zone of Truth is rare, than this problem solves itself: such powerful clergymen have more important tasks than trying petty criminals. In a city of 100,000 people, there would be a variety of big churches with Clerics living there and servicing the city. Lets say 2% of the population is a Cleric that is high enough level to cast "zone of truth", and 1/4 of those are from a lawful good or lawful neutral church. That leaves you with 500 Clerics that can cast this spell and 98,000 people who can't.

500 Clerics who live and work at a church that promotes law... I'm sure the church would be happy to have some of them dedicated to stopping petty crime while the others deal with other law related issues for the city.

Yes, other people are "similarly powerful", but the vast majority of the population isn't.



However, even assuming your interrogator is brilliant enough, their's still the killer of all interrogations: deafening silence. Those spells may force you to speak truth, but they do not compel you to speak in the first place. Answer the questions or be thrown in jail. We are talking about commoners in a standard D&D setting which is typically quasi-medieval...


Assuming, of course, the cleric in question was telling the truth when they claimed to be a cleric of Law, as opposed to Trickery.I specifically said big city. A big city would certainly have a church for a Lawful god. The trials/magistrate would operate out of the church. It would be rather hard to "pretend" to be a cleric of the church and get away with it. About as hard as me pretending to be a judge, and sitting in a court room.


And that the clerics rules would find lying about results to be not just an infraction, but a gross one (as otherwise, they could simply compensate with Lawful actions elsewhere in their lives and still be fine).A well enough run organization would weed those people out easily enough.

And assuming you believe the clerics as an organization (instead of thinking they're self-deluded, since you can get similar powers from entirely non-theistic sources). Doesn't matter what you think. It really doesn't matter. If the powers that are in charge of the city give the church the authority, then the church has that authority. [edit]Sorry, when I say it doesn't matter what "you" think, I'm referring to the "you" in game. i.e. "if you think the clerics are self-deluded". I don't intend to imply that it doesn't matter what you personally (the person typing) think.


It's a matter of values. Said system is, to the best of my knowledge, the one that most encapsulates my thoughts on human rights and justice.Based on the tools available to us. Different tools are available in this scenario, so a different system would evolve. Even if you keep the same core values.


To use another model as a basis, I would need a lot of information. What do the people in this theoretical view value, what do they think of as justice, are people who are accused still people, what are considered people's basic rights, is accuracy or that somebody is found guilty more important.....you didn't give me any of that, so I went with what I know. But you went with what you know about a typical "modern" world, rather than a typical "sword and sorcery fantasy" world.


Simply saying 'add magic' isn't nearly enough to get the sociology of the people down.Even with the sociology of the western world, 'add magic' would result in something different than what we have today.

Potato_Priest
2017-12-15, 11:28 PM
Ex3:
Q: So, how do we know this invisible "zone of truth" does what you say? Preventing deliberate and intentional lies?
A: Enter it and try lying - see, you can't.
Q: Interesting. I certainly felt an effect, but how do I know this is a zone that affects everybody in it? What if your magic just prevented me from lying?
A: It doesn't work that way.
Q: Prove it.
A: I just tried to lie, I can't do it either.
Q: ...
A: Be reasonable. How on earth do you expect me to be able to prove to you that my magic does what I say it does and nothing else?
Q: That was actually going to be my next question to , or just made honest mistakes.

Standardized and scientific arcane magic is the key here. If a zone of truth can reliably be produced by a wizard by laying out X components in Y configuration and saying Z magic words, then you can trust it.

This is why law enforcement would work closely with mages colleges, (perhaps forensics classes involve some magic too) to standardize and reliably control the use of magic in law enforcement.

But that’s in the magical modern USA. In other times and places values would be different, like others already pointed out.

Grek
2017-12-16, 12:13 AM
You'd probably end up with something more like the Napoleonic Code than any modern legal system:
No Defender vs Prosecutor. Instead, there is a Judge and an Inquisitor. It is the duty of the Judge to know what circumstances would constitute a breach of the law and the duty of the Inquisitor to investigate the circumstances as they occurred and present their findings to the Judge for evaluation.
Division into a High and Low Court. In the High Court, the Inquisitor is (or is served by) a government-sanctioned spellcaster of known probity and competence with the appropriate divination or compulsion spells. In the Low Court, no such spellcaster is employed and only cases where magically assisted evidence finding is unnecessary or too costly to be justified can be heard.
No right against self-incrimination. A Suggestion to "Tell the court the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." is probably the go-to spell for Inquisitors.
In a well-administered legal system, the Judge would be selected via examination and Inquisitors by election. This ensures that the Judge is competent at matters of law and the Inquisitior is at least in theory an honest and well-respected figure. In a poorly-administered legal system, the Judge would be selected by election and the Inquisitor according a tournament ladder to determine who is the strongest spellcaster. This ensures that the Judge is whoever convicts the most people (innocent or guilty) and the Inquisitior is an unaccountable serial killer interested only in amassing personal wealth and power. Most places would be somewhere in between.

kieza
2017-12-16, 02:29 AM
Well, when comparing to a modern, "fair" justice system:

Divinations that read thoughts, track locations or allow remote viewing should require a warrant first, or at least probable cause: using a Divination without a warrant would be an unreasonable search.

The courts couldn't use divinations that determine guilt or innocence directly, unless it's very clear how the spell makes that decision, and that it's based on some analogue to a jury of peers.

They also couldn't use compulsions to tell the truth, unless they allow you to remain silent as long as you don't lie. That would be a violation of the right to not self-incriminate.

In order to be admissible in court, a divination would have to produce some easily observed, un-falsifiable effect, or it would have to be performed by some licensed, bonded practitioner. Maybe have the court diviners examine each other on a regular basis to make sure that all of them are being truthful about what their divinations say? The point is, mere testimony from a diviner would be hearsay.

Pleh
2017-12-16, 06:26 AM
[Insert monty python witch trial sketch]

There is also historical precedent that sometimes justice has some divine urgency. If the ground is shaking because some god is about to rain fire on the village, people will be in a hurry to appease the deity before the ship goes down with the rat.

In absence of a cleric of the suspected deity, roll some dice and hope for the best. If you get it wrong, they were going to die with everyone else and no one lives to remember the mistake anyway.


If you have wizsards of high enough level to cast these kinds of spells, why aren't the other people similarly powerful? If a cleric who can cast Zone of Truth is rare, than this problem solves itself: such powerful clergymen have more important tasks than trying petty criminals.

Eh, it depends on yet more factors. If there are many individuals of this power level, then the criminals may have similar strength, making it difficult to apply justice; they are above the system. At that point, you send a party of murderhobos on a quest, telling them the threat needs to be stopped by any means.

"That's not justice!"

True, but the individual also would not voluntarily submit to justice, so why should they benefit from its protections? They're an outlaw.

If high power levels are rare, then presumably the head cleric very rarely needs his top tier spells. Justice is almost exclusively the domain of law and/or good clerics, when not busy smiting unearthly evils (which we established this subset to consider that scenario rare) a head cleric has literally nothing more important than engaging every banal problem to further expand their deity's influence. The real problem being that they have too much of it to reasonably manage, not that they don't have time for any of it at all.


IAssuming, of course, the cleric in question was telling the truth when they claimed to be a cleric of Law, as opposed to Trickery. And that the clerics rules would find lying about results to be not just an infraction, but a gross one (as otherwise, they could simply compensate with Lawful actions elsewhere in their lives and still be fine). And assuming you believe the clerics as an organization (instead of thinking they're self-deluded, since you can get similar powers from entirely non-theistic sources).

Eh, people would tend to judge such problems over a long period of time. If Trickery clerics were getting thieves and murderers off their charges commonly, people would probably start to lose faith in that justice system. For this to really continue to be a problem, it seems to either need to be sufficiently infrequent as to not attract attention (kind of statistically solving itself) or oppressively ubiquitous, at which point we're just describing a pseudo dystopian sense of justice.

Anonymouswizard
2017-12-16, 07:06 AM
Assuming a vaguely modern system the first step would be, assuming they are available, to ask the accused if they did it within a Zone of Truth. The response would then be treated normally, as it is possible to lie in them, but there would be a greater number of confessions due to the spell either stopping lies or causing people to voluntarily tell the truth.

Most investigations into serious crimes would involve divination. Search the crime scene for traces of the perpetrator, identify them with sympathetic magic, that sort of thing. But the trial itself would still be based on witness testimony and logical extrapolation from evidence, it's just a wizard looking into the past is also a witness.

Necroticplague
2017-12-16, 09:36 AM
Answer the questions or be thrown in jail. We are talking about commoners in a standard D&D setting which is typically quasi-medieval... Well, if we're going with a quasi-medeival system, than actually getting the truth out of someone is unimportant, since the justice system was more of a way to cow the lower classes than any attempt at making society safer (especially since, before rule of law, their existed entire groups of people for whom it was official doctrine that they'd never be punished legally).


I specifically said big city. A big city would certainly have a church for a Lawful god. The trials/magistrate would operate out of the church. It would be rather hard to "pretend" to be a cleric of the church and get away with it. About as hard as me pretending to be a judge, and sitting in a court room.Yes because letting your church operate your justice system is an excellent idea that hasn't proven any drawbacks or hilarious abuses of power whenever it's been tried.


A well enough run organization would weed those people out easily enough.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. Any suffeciently big organization will have corruption. None is safe, assuming psychology even remotely understandable to humans. Even in a society that operates under rule of law, modern ones are rife with this. A quasi-medeival (and thus, pre rule-of-law) society would only have it worse.



Doesn't matter what you think. It really doesn't matter. If the powers that are in charge of the city give the church the authority, then the church has that authority. [edit]Sorry, when I say it doesn't matter what "you" think, I'm referring to the "you" in game. i.e. "if you think the clerics are self-deluded". I don't intend to imply that it doesn't matter what you personally (the person typing) think. Sorry, I meant the royal 'you'. Why does society, as a whole, accept the claims of clerics as a group to begin with? An archivist can easily disprove that they can only get their power from a god (archivists don't have one, and get the same powers). So, you ultimately end up with people who could be mistaken or lying (either directly (saying something they know is false) or indirectly (saying what they believe to be true, not knowing it's false)) making claims that are conveniently unverifiable.



Based on the tools available to us. Different tools are available in this scenario, so a different system would evolve. Even if you keep the same core values.Doesn't this contradict your earlier 'threaten them with jail if they don't speak' point? That goes against a basic value that you can't force someone to incriminate themselves.

Jay R
2017-12-16, 10:35 AM
Agreed. I don't think it would obviate the need for evidence gathering, but it would drastically reduce the difficulty and increase the variety of collectable evidence.

Not as much as you think. It would also be easier to destroy evidence. As explained in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:

"But for heaven's sake-- you're wizards! You can do magic! Surely you can sort out -- well--anything!"

Scrimgeour turned slowly on the spot and exchanged an incredulous look with Fudge, who really did manage a smile this time as he said kindly, "The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister."

Note also that to become high enough level to cast the better spells, you need to have gone through many life-threatening encounters. Perhaps only the places with civil wars and raids can have justice enforced with high-level truth spells, while the civilized and peaceful lands have to struggle along without it.

"Our justice system needs better truth spells. Let's go to war with our neighboring city and get some more experience."

And of course, organized crime and piracy can always develop that level of wizard or cleric. They have lots of encounters for xps.

ngilop
2017-12-16, 10:36 AM
Well, if we're going with a quasi-medeival system, than actually getting the truth out of someone is unimportant, since the justice system was more of a way to cow the lower classes than any attempt at making society safer (especially since, before rule of law, their existed entire groups of people for whom it was official doctrine that they'd never be punished legally).

Yes because letting your church operate your justice system is an excellent idea that hasn't proven any drawbacks or hilarious abuses of power whenever it's been tried.


HAHAHAHAHAHA. Any suffeciently big organization will have corruption. None is safe, assuming psychology even remotely understandable to humans. Even in a society that operates under rule of law, modern ones are rife with this. A quasi-medeival (and thus, pre rule-of-law) society would only have it worse.


Sorry, I meant the royal 'you'. Why does society, as a whole, accept the claims of clerics as a group to begin with? An archivist can easily disprove that they can only get their power from a god (archivists don't have one, and get the same powers). So, you ultimately end up with people who could be mistaken or lying (either directly (saying something they know is false) or indirectly (saying what they believe to be true, not knowing it's false)) making claims that are conveniently unverifiable.


Doesn't this contradict your earlier 'threaten them with jail if they don't speak' point? That goes against a basic value that you can't force someone to incriminate themselves.

Why do people keep insisting that a fantasy world where insects can be the size of a house, a fire burns un-ending upon a stone pedastal, an entire mountain floats, and people just accept that as 'thats how the world works' is going to have the same exact outcome as what we have in the real world. its going to be something that we as modern humans would not recognize. Just like how if we go back 300 years what was considered justice then we (well parts of the world I should say) would balk at.

WHo is saying that people in this fantasy world have a right to no self incriminate. Oh you mean how WE here in earth tell people that so of course fantasy land also get the real world blarghgle?

thats crazy thinking in my opinion.

Pleh
2017-12-16, 11:04 AM
Note also that to become high enough level to cast the better spells, you need to have gone through many life-threatening encounters.

Actually, only PCs are subject to that limitation. NPCs can take all kinds of shortcuts to power (and aren't always even required to justify it).

Aliquid
2017-12-16, 11:30 AM
Well, if we're going with a quasi-medeival system, than actually getting the truth out of someone is unimportant, since the justice system was more of a way to cow the lower classes than any attempt at making society safer (especially since, before rule of law, their existed entire groups of people for whom it was official doctrine that they'd never be punished legally).

Yes because letting your church operate your justice system is an excellent idea that hasn't proven any drawbacks or hilarious abuses of power whenever it's been tried.


HAHAHAHAHAHA. Any suffeciently big organization will have corruption. None is safe, assuming psychology even remotely understandable to humans. Even in a society that operates under rule of law, modern ones are rife with this. A quasi-medeival (and thus, pre rule-of-law) society would only have it worse.


Sorry, I meant the royal 'you'. Why does society, as a whole, accept the claims of clerics as a group to begin with? An archivist can easily disprove that they can only get their power from a god (archivists don't have one, and get the same powers). So, you ultimately end up with people who could be mistaken or lying (either directly (saying something they know is false) or indirectly (saying what they believe to be true, not knowing it's false)) making claims that are conveniently unverifiable.


Doesn't this contradict your earlier 'threaten them with jail if they don't speak' point? That goes against a basic value that you can't force someone to incriminate themselves.applying real world expectations to the justice system is one thing. But you most certainly can’t apply real world experiences with church organizations to a d&d world. ALL of the clergy at a Lawful church would have a lawful alignment. 100% of them. A lawful church would have less chance of corruption than any real world organization in history. You have to stop and think of the implications of an organization where your alignment is mandated.

The challenge would be if people found loopholes or applied laws literally and harshly. Corruption and deceit would not be a problem.

An individual out in some small town might be lying. But not a large organization in a city.

Also. I’m not asking what is the ideal scenario. I’m asking what would logically happen in a typical D&D world. It might not be good...

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-16, 11:45 AM
There is no one right answer, even the same starting conditions can result in very different outcomes.

The point isn't "here's the way to do it", the point is "stop and think about it, and integrate these things into your setting instead of just making it a real-world expy with a veneer of magic on the surface".

Bohandas
2017-12-16, 12:30 PM
In a truly lawful justice system they'd all be banned or considered hearsay as divination is not a reliable source of evidence.

The premise is that this is in a D&D type fantasy setting where divination actually works and isn't just a bunch of blustering old humbugs puttering around with sheep's livers and oracle bones and polygraph machines the way it is in the real world.

EDIT;
That said, the Zone of Truth could potentially be defeated with the combination of circumlocution, half-truths, and/or doublethink

Necroticplague
2017-12-16, 12:43 PM
But you most certainly can’t apply real world experiences with church organizations to a d&d world. ALL of the clergy at a Lawful church would have a lawful alignment. 100% of them. Incorrect. Even the Clerics, the most devout, only have to be within one step of their god. So even the Clerics themselves would only be 75% lawful, (assuming the god/concept was LN, you'd have LN, LG, LE, and TN clerics of them). Then, you'd presumably have a lower rung of disciples who wouldn't even be Clerics (much like how not everyone in a church is a priest), and thus have free alignment restrictions. .

A lawful church would have less chance of corruption than any real world organization in history. You have to stop and think of the implications of an organization where your alignment is mandated. Considering that the law-chaos axis is even more vaguely defined than the nebulous good-evil axis, I have. done so. I imply fail to see it as suffeciently relevant. 'Lawful' is a broad category, and could very well include being able to lie if it helps preserve the status quo. Or advance the goals of the Church itself.

The challenge would be if people found loopholes or applied laws literally and harshly. Corruption and deceit would not be a problem. Keep dreaming. As long as the psychology is remotely human, you'll have corruption and deceit.

An indIvidual out in some small town might be lying. But not a large organization in a city. It's easier to have a person lying in an institution than on an indavidual basis. After all, when you lie for your own goals, you're usually aware of it, and know it's wrong. When you're lying for an organization? Well, then you have ends-justify-means of more than just yourself, so its easy to justify. Groupthink is a powerful thing.

Also. I’m not asking what is the ideal scenario. I’m asking what would logically happen in a typical D&D world. It might not be good...
Than why is my analysis (Human failings allowing for corruption to take root makes this still unreliable) being rebuked by your insistence there couldn't be any corruption in a large organization? That sounds like the very definition of 'an ideal scenario'. Yes, if every individual who has a certain capability could be trusted 100%, that drastically changes things. However, that's a hilariously unlikely scenario, assuming human psychology still holds.

The premise is that this is in a D&D type fantasy setting where divination actually works and isn't just a bunch of blustering old humbugs puttering around with sheep's livers and oracle bones and polygraph machines the way it is in the real world.
And? Just because it actually works, doesn't stop it from being unverifiable. To an outside observer (i.e, jury), there's no visible difference between you screwing around for an hour and then making something up, or actually divining.

The divination I can think of that suffers the problem the least is Speak with Dead (as everyone can hear the corpse talk), but then you have other problems.
1: the corpse very well not knowing, being confused, or simply not providing useful answers (spell itself notes they're usually cryptic, breif, or repetitive).
2:Could be using some other necromancery to animate it and make it say whatever.

Aliquid
2017-12-16, 01:18 PM
Incorrect. Even the Clerics, the most devout, only have to be within one step of their god. So even the Clerics themselves would only be 75% lawful, (assuming the god/concept was LN, you'd have LN, LG, LE, and TN clerics of them). Then, you'd presumably have a lower rung of disciples who wouldn't even be Clerics (much like how not everyone in a church is a priest), and thus have free alignment restrictions. . Most rules state that the majority of clerics have the same alignment as their god, and some might be one step off. So that number is much more than 75%. A minority are one step off, and 1/3 of that minority would be TN in your example.

[/quote] Keep dreaming. As long as the psychology is remotely human, you'll have corruption and deceit. [/quote]No. Because this isn't a random group of personalities. It is a group of personalities that follow the same philosophical view of the world. As vague as the term Lawful is, it doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of the clergy would be unquestionably lawful. Psychology of real world organizations always must assume there isn't such a consistency of belief within.


It's easier to have a person lying in an institution than on an indavidual basis. After all, when you lie for your own goals, you're usually aware of it, and know it's wrong. When you're lying for an organization? Well, then you have ends-justify-means of more than just yourself, so its easy to justify. Groupthink is a powerful thing.when you follow a god that says "uphold the law", you uphold the law.


Than why is my analysis (Human failings allowing for corruption to take root makes this still unreliable) being rebuked by your insistence there couldn't be any corruption in a large organization? That sounds like the very definition of 'an ideal scenario'. is isn't an ideal scenario, it is the inevitable outcome of a group following a god that MUST support their god's views to maintain their power.


Yes, if every individual who has a certain capability could be trusted 100%, that drastically changes things. However, that's a hilariously unlikely scenario, assuming human psychology still holds.not 100%, but a substantially higher percent than any other organization, and as such it would be the organization that the "powers that be" who run the city trust.


And? Just because it actually works, doesn't stop it from being unverifiable. To an outside observer (i.e, jury), there's no visible difference between you screwing around for an hour and then making something up, or actually divining. The "outside observer" has no say in the matter. If the duke, or king or whatever trusts the "church of law" to uphold the law, then that's how it works.

Aliquid
2017-12-16, 01:20 PM
There is no one right answer, even the same starting conditions can result in very different outcomes.

The point isn't "here's the way to do it", the point is "stop and think about it, and integrate these things into your setting instead of just making it a real-world expy with a veneer of magic on the surface".Well put. Yes, there are many possible outcomes, I'm looking for what those might be... and "just like real world, but magic... that isn't used" doesn't seem believable to me.

Keltest
2017-12-16, 01:23 PM
Incorrect. Even the Clerics, the most devout, only have to be within one step of their god. So even the Clerics themselves would only be 75% lawful, (assuming the god/concept was LN, you'd have LN, LG, LE, and TN clerics of them). Then, you'd presumably have a lower rung of disciples who wouldn't even be Clerics (much like how not everyone in a church is a priest), and thus have free alignment restrictions.
That's assuming an even distribution of alignments among the clerics, which I don't think is a safe assumption. A church of Law isn't going to get a lot of people who look at the concept of lawfulness and go "meh, its ok I guess".



Considering that the law-chaos axis is even more vaguely defined than the nebulous good-evil axis, I have. done so. I imply fail to see it as suffeciently relevant. 'Lawful' is a broad category, and could very well include being able to lie if it helps preserve the status quo. Or advance the goals of the Church itself. the goals like... promoting rule of law, perhaps?


Keep dreaming. As long as the psychology is remotely human, you'll have corruption and deceit. The wonderful thing about D&D clerics is that they have to answer to a higher power. Putting their own goals and desires above the tenants of their god causes them to lose their clerical powers.


It's easier to have a person lying in an institution than on an indavidual basis. After all, when you lie for your own goals, you're usually aware of it, and know it's wrong. When you're lying for an organization? Well, then you have ends-justify-means of more than just yourself, so its easy to justify. Groupthink is a powerful thing. Ok, but at this point youre suggesting that a large organization dedicated to the enforcement of laws for its own sake... wont enforce the laws for their own sake. Yes, I suppose if you take the group and replace it with a different one it will sound different, but your premise is fundamentally incompatible with the scenario.


Than why is my analysis (Human failings allowing for corruption to take root makes this still unreliable) being rebuked by your insistence there couldn't be any corruption in a large organization? That sounds like the very definition of 'an ideal scenario'. Yes, if every individual who has a certain capability could be trusted 100%, that drastically changes things. However, that's a hilariously unlikely scenario, assuming human psychology still holds. You don't need every individual to be 100% trustworthy though, just enough of them that they can correct for those who aren't. You think your priest is lying? Get a different one. Get three different ones. Get ten. Unless the church itself is actually a cult to Loki or something absurd like that, there should be enough clerics available to settle the issue.


And? Just because it actually works, doesn't stop it from being unverifiable. To an outside observer (i.e, jury), there's no visible difference between you screwing around for an hour and then making something up, or actually divining.

The divination I can think of that suffers the problem the least is Speak with Dead (as everyone can hear the corpse talk), but then you have other problems.
1: the corpse very well not knowing, being confused, or simply not providing useful answers (spell itself notes they're usually cryptic, breif, or repetitive).
2:Could be using some other necromancery to animate it and make it say whatever.

So, again, get a second opinion. And a third, if necessary. You say its unverifiable, but then make no explanation as to what is stopping people from verifying it.

BWR
2017-12-16, 01:41 PM
Incorrect. Even the Clerics, the most devout, only have to be within one step of their god.

Depends on which edition you are talking about. Stop thinking entirely in terms of 3.x.

Some examples from non-D&D games:
Magic is inadmissible in legal proceedings in L5R. They don't have anything like Zone of Truth, but they are big on sincerity (which is sometimes mistakenly equated with honesty) and a samurai's word should be all that is needed on a subject. This should go double for shugenja, which are priests as well as samraui, and the thought of using magic for dishonorable purposes should be unthinkable.
Obvious comments on human nature aside, this situation came about from one famous court case where a priest summon up the spirit of a dead person to witness. Turns out the 'deceased' was alive and well, and when this was made public the entire idea of magic used in matters of law and investigation was discredited for ever. The architects of this situation were well pleased with themselves for making things ever so much easier for their faction.
No one said Rokugani law made sense.

In the Laundryverse you can magically compel people to tell the truth with more less 100% accuracy (some exceptions apply, but they are not easy to come by), usually with very ugly consequences if they try to resist. Magic is however a big secret in the setting (at least until the events of the last couple of books) so it is not commonly employed outside of the special situations.

Bohandas
2017-12-16, 02:37 PM
And? Just because it actually works, doesn't stop it from being unverifiable. To an outside observer (i.e, jury), there's no visible difference between you screwing around for an hour and then making something up, or actually divining.

It is often verifiable. In the zone of truth example all you need to do is ask the jury to step into the zone and swear that they sky is green, if they find themselves unable that should be sufficient.

Avigor
2017-12-17, 12:29 AM
First, the magics would be subject to the same kind of admission standards and such as modern forensics; get an expert witness and testify the following:

Everyone has a chance, variant depending on several variables beyond the court's full control, to demonstrate immunity (at least for most systems training would allow this if not just randomness, even if additional divinations or whatever can normally detect if they make their save that casts doubt on that method of finding the truth).
These magics don't compel full answers and to do so and/or force voluntary saving throw failure requires mental manipulation.
Last but far from least the simple fact that they often only have apparent results to the person who casts the spell (albeit this might be somewhat alleviated by the use of something like a Harry Potter Pensieve, such as 3.5's Thought Bottle's memory function).


These would conspire to make the use of magic in the courtroom would be controversial at best, at least once the Lawful Evils start properly having their say, even if via proxies (to avoid triggering alignment detection).

Second, the above controversy would inevitably lead to questions of the rights of a suspect and the public in general, leading to legislation restricting both the courts and the law enforcement officers / guards in how much divination they could do, and possibly also making divination defeating mechanisms have some restrictions as well, depending on the setting. For example, in Harry Potter, Occlumency is not taught in Hogwarts, and most don't even know what it is; in a D&D setting, it makes sense that illegal trade in lead might be considered especially suspect.

This really boils down to questions of worldbuilding; exactly where the lines are drawn will vary.

Aliquid
2017-12-17, 01:01 AM
I hadn’t even thought about “detect evil” or “detect chaos”. I could see a strongly LN monarch telling the clerics to go “cast detect chaos on the commoners and toss anyone who tests positive in jail”.

There are lots of nasty possibilities.

Deliverance
2017-12-17, 03:04 AM
It is often verifiable. In the zone of truth example all you need to do is ask the jury to step into the zone and swear that they sky is green, if they find themselves unable that should be sufficient.
Not at all... Well, not unless they are very gullible, that is.

What they know after that attempt is that, at that specific time, and when they were in that specific place, they couldn't, for whatever reason, swear the sky is green (or whatever other lies you'd have them test with). No more and no less.

This does not verify your claim.

Even should they believe your claim that they were all prevented from telling any and all deliberate and intentional lies and that anybody else in that location would have been similarly affected and that this is a completely objective procedure with no loopholes or misunderstandings possible, all of which they they have nothing but your word to go on as your test proved nothing of the sort, they don't know that the way they were affected at the time is the way somebody else will be affected at another time.

But given that they do live in a land where magic is possible, they are probably capable of thinking of several other explanations for what they observed, starting with the most obvious, that their inability to say the sky is green was the result of somebody mind controlling them for his own purposes at that specific time and taking it from there.

So, no. The only ones you might convince with such an argument are people too gullible to be on a jury*. It might play well in a small village impressed by magic, I guess.


* Just kidding. Of course the gullible belong on a jury - it is the only way of ensuring people will be judged by their peers.

Frozen_Feet
2017-12-17, 05:07 AM
There isn't a single outcome for the question. It depends on the rules of magic, which spells are available and in what quantity, and what order spells and spell-using traditions are invented.

Spells like Zone of Truth or Detect Alignment sound way more usefull than they are because they are often considered in isolation, rather than in presence of things like spell resistance, Undetectable Alignment, Programmed Amnesia, Mind Blank, etc.. There's several dozen spells and effects which can screw over the obvious spells you'd use to compell truth out of someone.

Then there's mundane reasons why a truth-compelling spell could fail. The simplest being that such spells compel subjective truth, not absolute facts about the world. False memories, amnesia, lack of knowledge, lack of cognitive ability etc. may all lead to false or useless witness despite the truth spell. We already know from real life that even honest testimonies are not 100% trustworthy, so just compelling honesty is not a big step forward.

Divination that is focused on gathering physical evidence would be much more usefull, as such Divination spells have an independently verifiable outcome. But all such spells run into an uncomfortable question: from whence does the knowledge come from?

In traditional magic, it often comes from some external supernatural entity: a demon, spirit or god. So rather than eliminating need for witnesses or scrutinizing their trustworthiness, magic is now adding several new witnesses that need to be scrutinized. If you are on a Mission from God and already in power, the answer to the question may seem obvious and the whole question reek of HERESY. But if you are your average warlock, or dealing with such, admitting a divination may literally mean accepting the Devil's word on things. Which would be a good moment to stop and think.

---

Lastly, about proving Zone of Truth:

The more insiduous effect of such a spell potentially is that it makes people unable to lie to themselves. So rather than invite the skeptics to try some specific lie, the magician simply invites them in, and now the jury is faced with all truths they have tried deny.

The important part here is that such are typically extremely personal information. The mage doesn't need to know their lies and can, within some constraints, be proven to not know.

Again, though, a question arises: who or what is making the distinction between lie and truth, and how? The default answer is still the mage, but now it would imply the mage can see into your heart and mind, which makes the mage signficantly more frightening before it makes them trustworthy. If it's not the mage, then again we're faced with possibility of an unknown external entity.

Grek
2017-12-17, 07:16 AM
I hadn’t even thought about “detect evil” or “detect chaos”. I could see a strongly LN monarch telling the clerics to go “cast detect chaos on the commoners and toss anyone who tests positive in jail”.

Detect Alignment spells are not a reliable method for detecting evaluating a person's alignment! Consider the following diverse assortment of people:
A CE ghoul under the effects of protection from chaos and who is currently being melted in holy water by...
A level 1 LG tiefling paladin who's also under the effects of protection from chaos as cast by...
A level 1 CG tiefling wizard who keeps casting protection from chaos because of...
A CN satyr who's using charm person to get people to try mixed drink made out of holy water, unholy water, modron blood and black lotus poison.

Guess what they all have in common? Hint: Every single one of them registers as having a faint aura of every single alignment. At once.

icefractal
2017-12-17, 07:42 AM
In a city of 100,000 people, there would be a variety of big churches with Clerics living there and servicing the city. Lets say 2% of the population is a Cleric that is high enough level to cast "zone of truth", and 1/4 of those are from a lawful good or lawful neutral church. That leaves you with 500 Clerics that can cast this spell and 98,000 people who can't.

500 Clerics who live and work at a church that promotes law... I'm sure the church would be happy to have some of them dedicated to stopping petty crime while the others deal with other law related issues for the city.Your numbers are off something fierce. If we go by the DMG demographics, that 100k population city has ... 28 Clerics that are 3rd+ level. So ~6 that are LG/LN.

Even if with a more generous distribution, you don't get to that many LN/LG Clerics unless PC classes are as common as NPC classes and 50+% of the population is 3rd level or higher. Which is possible for a setting, but it would look substantially different than any existing ones.

More importantly, Zone of Truth competes for limited spell slots with everything else. So you don't just need Lawful gods, you need gods who prioritize justice above providing guidance for the future, healing the injured, warding against the undead, fixing the otherwise unrepairable, helping the ill recover, or having their clergy be personally bad-ass. Not nobody, but not as common as 1/4 of Clerics either.


On topic, one big difficulty that magic would cause for the justice system is that eyewitness testimony is all potentially worthless. Say that A witness saw Bob the Barbarian jump from an alley and stab someone, and divinations show said witness to be sane and truthful. Just off the top of my head:
* It may have been an illusion.
* It may be a false memory that was planted by magic.
* It many have been someone else magically disguised or physically transformed into Bob.
* It may have been Bob's body, but with someone else possessing it.
* It may have been Bob, but under the effects of direct or indirect mind control.

Some things of these are serious mojo, and so unlikely for the majority of cases, but not all. Disguise Self and Silent Image are basic magic. Doppelgangers, ghosts, and various possessing/impersonating demons exist, and are known to cause trouble like this. And of course anyone guilty who knows about possibilities like those above will be claiming that's what happened.

Keltest
2017-12-17, 08:49 AM
Not at all... Well, not unless they are very gullible, that is.

What they know after that attempt is that, at that specific time, and when they were in that specific place, they couldn't, for whatever reason, swear the sky is green (or whatever other lies you'd have them test with). No more and no less.

This does not verify your claim.

Even should they believe your claim that they were all prevented from telling any and all deliberate and intentional lies and that anybody else in that location would have been similarly affected and that this is a completely objective procedure with no loopholes or misunderstandings possible, all of which they they have nothing but your word to go on as your test proved nothing of the sort, they don't know that the way they were affected at the time is the way somebody else will be affected at another time.

But given that they do live in a land where magic is possible, they are probably capable of thinking of several other explanations for what they observed, starting with the most obvious, that their inability to say the sky is green was the result of somebody mind controlling them for his own purposes at that specific time and taking it from there.

So, no. The only ones you might convince with such an argument are people too gullible to be on a jury*. It might play well in a small village impressed by magic, I guess.


* Just kidding. Of course the gullible belong on a jury - it is the only way of ensuring people will be judged by their peers.

That's kind of an absurd reaction. They don't literally have to say that the sky is green, just test it to the limits of their satisfaction. And if they don't trust this wizard they can go get one of the other half dozen or so who live in town to get a second opinion. And a third, if necessary.

There comes a point when you need to accept what is presented to you at face value if you are to make any progress. A jury that inherently disbelieves any and all evidence presented to them is a useless jury.

Jay R
2017-12-17, 09:10 AM
How many different varieties of justice system has our world seen, all with the exact same human abilities?

If you change the human abilities to include magic, you will have just as many varieties. They would be different from ours, but there no way to predict what the justice system would be like, because there isn't just one to predict.

GreatWyrmGold
2017-12-17, 09:34 AM
In a truly lawful justice system they'd all be banned or considered hearsay as divination is not a reliable source of evidence.
You're projecting expectations from our own world into a fantasy world, whose culture would have developed around this stuff. They'd know how it works, just as our culture knows how security cameras work--and you don't see everyone questioning whether the security camera recorded what happened or not, do you?
Also, detect magic is a thing, and I'm sure there would be other spells which could detect specifically if X spell was cast properly. Or, you know, use more than one divination.



High level? You don't need any levels to simply never make statements that have a truth value to be tested, or that are so hedged as to be impossible to be false.
In a world where zone of truth and the like are common, lawyers would be trained to spot that kind of evasion and to ask questions which made it difficult (or at least difficult to do without being obvious even to laymen).



It's a matter of values. Said system is, to the best of my knowledge, the one that most encapsulates my thoughts on human rights and justice.
And here we hit the problem. Sure, it's hard to use anything else, but you should realize that your moral intuition was built by living in your world, and that people living in a different world with different rules would have different moral intuition.




In more modern court systems, the fact that divinations are literally impossible to verify to anyone else (and, thanks to saves and other factors, may not produce the same results when made by different people) would make them inadmissible as evidence.
Are they impossible to verify?
Also, freaking vision produces different results from different people, especially once muddled by memory. Yet eyewitness accounts are still taken as valid evidence.



Why does society, as a whole, accept the claims of clerics as a group to begin with?
I've never understood that, either. I mean, people risk their lives on the promises of some people with a book. For a while, it wasn't even a book they could read, so--oh, you're talking about in a fantasy world, where there's concrete evidence of gods' power plus all that real-world ideological crap?



is isn't an ideal scenario, it is the inevitable outcome of a group following a god that MUST support their god's views to maintain their power.
In the real world, we have people following the same god who use vastly different methods to achieve vastly different goals in their god's name. We don't even have to lump all Abrahamic religions together--look at liberal Protestant charities and compare with the Westboro Baptists.
Though I suppose this wouldn't happen if God occasionally came down to slap around whichever groups got it wrong.



Not at all... Well, not unless they are very gullible, that is. -snip-
I guess you could design a spell which prevents people from saying the sky is green. But that's why you only let properly-licensed zone of truth diviners operate them in a legal setting.



Spells like Zone of Truth or Detect Alignment sound way more usefull than they are because they are often considered in isolation, rather than in presence of things like spell resistance, Undetectable Alignment, Programmed Amnesia, Mind Blank, etc.. There's several dozen spells and effects which can screw over the obvious spells you'd use to compell truth out of someone.

Then there's mundane reasons why a truth-compelling spell could fail. The simplest being that such spells compel subjective truth, not absolute facts about the world. False memories, amnesia, lack of knowledge, lack of cognitive ability etc. may all lead to false or useless witness despite the truth spell. We already know from real life that even honest testimonies are not 100% trustworthy, so just compelling honesty is not a big step forward.
Real-world evidence is also tricky. Just as various spells and abilities can screw with divination spells, so can various environmental conditions and criminal actions screw with forensics. (To give a simple example, imagine a criminal scattering a few hairs from someone he's trying to pin the crime on.)
The problems you mention in the second paragraph are true for normal eyewitness, too. Yet that's still permissible evidence--indeed, it's seen as some of the strongest evidence you can get. So clearly it's not a big problem.




However, even assuming your interrogator is brilliant enough, their's still the killer of all interrogations: deafening silence. Those spells may force you to speak truth, but they do not compel you to speak in the first place.
There are ways around this, of course, ranging from making it illegal to refuse to testify (almost a reversal of American judicial sensibilities) to just dismissing the testimony of anyone who clammed up once they entered a zone of truth.


Assuming, of course, the cleric in question was telling the truth when they claimed to be a cleric of Law, as opposed to Trickery.
...Don't most churches keep track of their members pretty well?
(The risk of corruption is an issue, but no more than with any other way of dispensing justice. Possibly less, if the gods actively weed out the greedy and selfish from their ranks.)



Note also that to become high enough level to cast the better spells, you need to have gone through many life-threatening encounters.
Even among PCs, non-combat XP is a thing. Any moderately civilized nation is going to get most of its powerhouses from years of farming XP out of combat.



And? Just because it actually works, doesn't stop it from being unverifiable. To an outside observer (i.e, jury), there's no visible difference between you screwing around for an hour and then making something up, or actually divining.
To a layperson, sure, but there are rules for recognizing spells being cast, which means that there are ways for divination to be distinguished from screwing around. It's kinda like forensic science; laypeople can't tell what's going on, but it's still a valid way to get information that wouldn't otherwise be available, so society will try and find a way to make it work.
And yeah, it's still going to be fallible; divinations can be misunderstood or miscast, forensics can be messed up. But you don't hear many concerns about DNA testing from people who think the forensic scientists might just be making up the data.



How many different varieties of justice system has our world seen, all with the exact same human abilities?

If you change the human abilities to include magic, you will have just as many varieties. They would be different from ours, but there no way to predict what the justice system would be like, because there isn't just one to predict.
If it was easy to predict, it wouldn't be any fun.




So... then the "zone of truth" is just one of many tools used, not the only tool.
Just like how, in our justice system, eyewitness testimony isn't the only tool used.



So there's efficient magical enforcement of the law upon the poor and middle-class only, and the rich can get away with murder.
Suddenly, it sounds like we're playing Shadowrun -- which is awesome in its own way. :smallcool:
It's amazing how quickly kitchen-sink fantasy turns into cyberpunk when you let it.



I hadn’t even thought about “detect evil” or “detect chaos”. I could see a strongly LN monarch telling the clerics to go “cast detect chaos on the commoners and toss anyone who tests positive in jail”.
There are lots of nasty possibilities.
You're not thinking dark enough. Imagine a spell which went somewhere between detect chaos and detect thoughts, letting inquisitors detect those who doubted the current leader's rule and throw those in jail.

Frozen_Feet
2017-12-17, 09:51 AM
The problems you mention in the second paragraph are true for normal eyewitness, too. Yet that's still permissible evidence--indeed, it's seen as some of the strongest evidence you can get. So clearly it's not a big problem.

On the contrary, it is considered an increasingly worse problem and the weight given to eyewitnesses in real life is being reconsidered because of it.

And that's why I prefaced my argument by saying that there is no single answer to the question, as it depends on rules of magic, availability of magic and the order in which magic spells and traditions come to being and are invented. Similarly In real life, eyewitness testimonies were considered trustworthy in part because we were not aware of how fallible human memory actually is. Its weight and permissibility as evidence has gone up and down based on technological and social status of the surrounding society.

Spells that compel honesty won't be big game-changers in this regard, because honest witnesses are still fallible. Hilariously enough, some justice systems in real world still do have a ritualistic or magical component which is meant to compel honesty, even if no thought is spent on their efficacy. So having such spells work would not change the operations of the courts, though it would have possible effect on conviction rates and such.

Bohandas
2017-12-17, 10:44 AM
In the real world, we have people following the same god who use vastly different methods to achieve vastly different goals in their god's name. We don't even have to lump all Abrahamic religions together--look at liberal Protestant charities and compare with the Westboro Baptists.
Though I suppose this wouldn't happen if God occasionally came down to slap around whichever groups got it wrong.

Why even include that first paragraph? As you admit in the second paragraph the first paragraph is unambiguously a case of too-much-extrapolation-from-our-world

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-17, 10:53 AM
Even among PCs, non-combat XP is a thing. Any moderately civilized nation is going to get most of its powerhouses from years of farming XP out of combat.


No, no, that's not how it works, only PCs get to be cool and have levels, the PCs are special and NPCs are just there as background material, PC abilities don't imply anything about the broader in-setting reality.

(I hope that's the right shade of blue for scathing sarcasm, and that it's clear I'm not directing that sarcasm at you.)




It's amazing how quickly kitchen-sink fantasy turns into cyberpunk when you let it.


That's almost sig-worthy it's so true.

Mitth'raw'nuruo
2017-12-17, 10:59 AM
In a truly lawful justice system they'd all be banned or considered hearsay as divination is not a reliable source of evidence. Consider:

Ex1:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a cleric. My GOD told me.
Q: So we are talking hearsay, here?
A: HERESY!


Ex2:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a wizard, divination is my specialty!
Q: So you don't actually have any evidence that we can use, just your statement of what you believe happened?
A: But I know it. Why don't you believe me. Who do you trust, him or me?

Ex3:
Q: So, how do we know this invisible "zone of truth" does what you say? Preventing deliberate and intentional lies?
A: Enter it and try lying - see, you can't.
Q: Interesting. I certainly felt an effect, but how do I know this is a zone that affects everybody in it? What if your magic just prevented me from lying?
A: It doesn't work that way.
Q: Prove it.
A: I just tried to lie, I can't do it either.
Q: ...
A: Be reasonable. How on earth do you expect me to be able to prove to you that my magic does what I say it does and nothing else?
Q: That was actually going to be my next question to you.

Ex4:
Q: This divination you are going on about sounds interesting, except for how it tramples all over the constitutional mental privacy guarantees so essential to maintaining our society. What differentiates it from the many types of magical violation of peoples' rights that caused those guarantees to be part of our constitution in the first place?
A: I'll get back to you on that.

In a less just but perhaps more practical justice system you'd choose to believe the practitioners of magic and accept convicting innocent people when the practitioners lied or were incompetent, frauds, or just made honest mistakes.

Or perhaps you'd pay a second magic user whom you trusted to oversee the others and check on their magic, or perhaps you'd accept word of god as interpreted by a cleric to hold up in court or whatever.

But regardless of your precautions, you'd be at most one step removed from the good old "if X men in good standing says somebody is guilty, then that's evidence enough to convict" justice so popular in medieval and pre-medieval times.

Except this is exactly what the current justice system is. With the exception of DNA (which is often faked), forensics is pseudo-science on the level of phrenology and much of it is expert testimony of the LEO on their "experience"

Aliquid
2017-12-17, 11:01 AM
Detect Alignment spells are not a reliable method for detecting evaluating a person's alignment! Consider the following diverse assortment of people:
A CE ghoul under the effects of protection from chaos and who is currently being melted in holy water by...
A level 1 LG tiefling paladin who's also under the effects of protection from chaos as cast by...
A level 1 CG tiefling wizard who keeps casting protection from chaos because of...
A CN satyr who's using charm person to get people to try mixed drink made out of holy water, unholy water, modron blood and black lotus poison.

Guess what they all have in common? Hint: Every single one of them registers as having a faint aura of every single alignment. At once.People keep on making the mistake in assuming that a monarch would care about the success rate.


Your numbers are off something fierce. If we go by the DMG demographics, that 100k population city has ... 28 Clerics that are 3rd+ level. So ~6 that are LG/LN.Which DMG? I was actually having trouble finding stats, so I made that one up. Also, the distribution wouldn't be evenly split between alignments. Most editions I have read state that human populations have a strong tendency towards law and good.


More importantly, Zone of Truth competes for limited spell slots with everything else. So you don't just need Lawful gods, you need gods who prioritize justice above providing guidance for the future, healing the injured, warding against the undead, fixing the otherwise unrepairable, helping the ill recover, or having their clergy be personally bad-ass. Not nobody, but not as common as 1/4 of Clerics either.I'm sure a LN god would be happy to let other gods' clerics deal with healing and such.



On topic, one big difficulty that magic would cause for the justice system is that eyewitness testimony is all potentially worthless. Say that A witness saw Bob the Barbarian jump from an alley and stab someone, and divinations show said witness to be sane and truthful. Just off the top of my head:
* It may have been an illusion.
* It may be a false memory that was planted by magic.
* It many have been someone else magically disguised or physically transformed into Bob.
* It may have been Bob's body, but with someone else possessing it.
* It may have been Bob, but under the effects of direct or indirect mind control.

Some things of these are serious mojo, and so unlikely for the majority of cases, but not all. Disguise Self and Silent Image are basic magic. Doppelgangers, ghosts, and various possessing/impersonating demons exist, and are known to cause trouble like this. And of course anyone guilty who knows about possibilities like those above will be claiming that's what happened.Yes, this thread is showing me that the impact of magic on the justice system is - magic would provide more opportunities for people to cheat the justice system than opportunities to help the judiciary.


In the real world, we have people following the same god who use vastly different methods to achieve vastly different goals in their god's name. We don't even have to lump all Abrahamic religions together--look at liberal Protestant charities and compare with the Westboro Baptists.
Though I suppose this wouldn't happen if God occasionally came down to slap around whichever groups got it wrong.And that last sentence right there is the major difference. But that depends completely on the world. If you have some place like the Forgotten Realms, where gods on occasion actually walk among the mortals...


You're not thinking dark enough. Imagine a spell which went somewhere between detect chaos and detect thoughts, letting inquisitors detect those who doubted the current leader's rule and throw those in jail.
Now that's something that I could see happening in a fantasy world where magic exists. Dictators try to do that all over the world right now... give them more tools, and things would get ugly.


Hilariously enough, some justice systems in real world still do have a ritualistic or magical component which is meant to compel honesty, even if no thought is spent on their efficacy. I know exactly what you mean. I often wonder how many people put any thought or value into that statement, or is it just said mindlessly out of ritual.

GreatWyrmGold
2017-12-17, 11:09 AM
Why even include that first paragraph? As you admit in the second paragraph the first paragraph is unambiguously a case of too-much-extrapolation-from-our-world
Because most D&D worlds don't have quite that much divine intervention.



Except this is exactly what the current justice system is. With the exception of DNA (which is often faked), forensics is pseudo-science on the level of phrenology and much of it is expert testimony of the LEO on their "experience"
[citation f*ing needed]



Yes, this thread is showing me that the impact of magic on the justice system is - magic would provide more opportunities for people to cheat the justice system than opportunities to help the judiciary.
Just another reason for them to use the tools magic provides.

Aliquid
2017-12-17, 11:19 AM
[citation f*ing needed]eye witness accounts are very unreliable (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/)

fingerprinting is unreliable (http://www.truthinjustice.org/fingerprints.htm)

unreliable arson science puts people on death row (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/death-by-fire/)

police sketches that we see of suspects are accurate only 9% of the time (https://people.howstuffworks.com/police-sketch3.htm)

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-17, 11:24 AM
Except this is exactly what the current justice system is. With the exception of DNA (which is often faked), forensics is pseudo-science on the level of phrenology and much of it is expert testimony of the LEO on their "experience"

Cite?

Or just cynicism posing as "everyone knows"?




eye witness accounts are very unreliable (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/)

police sketches that we see of suspects are accurate only 9% of the time (https://people.howstuffworks.com/police-sketch3.htm)


This one is true, but not really forensics.




fingerprinting is unreliable (http://www.truthinjustice.org/fingerprints.htm)

unreliable arson science puts people on death row (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/death-by-fire/)


In both cases, the concern isn't the underlying concept, but outdated methods, exaggerated reliability, or just plain ineptitude.

Darth Ultron
2017-12-17, 11:43 AM
It does depend on what magic, and how much magic.

Magic, as a tool, would be used for justice. Truth detecting, mind reading, charms, and divinations could all be evidence.

Cops would have divination detectives. You would also have oracle like detectives.

Most divinations would be ''trusted'', though still it would make sense for there to be two or three independent verifications for each detection. It might even be possible that a legal system might have a true neutral group to do the detection.

Magical evidence would really not be any different from mundane evidence or even science evidence. Law and Justice does really on enough vague things even just the mundane things. Things like a witness testimony: if someone says you did something, it can be taken as a ''fact''...though, of course, a person can lie.

Though crime would also change to go vs magic. So more criminals would use shapeshifting, invisibility, darkness and such. And there are tons of mundane ways to foil magic too. Even just the simple: a person can't tell a lie to cover up something if they know nothing about the something.

Aliquid
2017-12-17, 12:02 PM
This one is true, but not really forensics.


In both cases, the concern isn't the underlying concept, but outdated methods, exaggerated reliability, or just plain ineptitude.Fair enough, but we are putting quite a few people behind bars purely based on these (non forensic) crappy tools, and these assumptions of exaggerated reliability. If we blindly accept these things in our existing justice system (when we shouldn't) then I don't see any reason why D&D court systems would "not trust" divination magic.

Bohandas
2017-12-17, 12:13 PM
In both cases, the concern isn't the underlying concept, but outdated methods, exaggerated reliability, or just plain ineptitude.

The death penalty one is also a case of the justice system needing to lighten up.

Bohandas
2017-12-17, 12:35 PM
Regarding the where-are-they-getting-all-these-clerics question, it could, in D&D at any rate, be solved with a permanent magic item. Enchanting a Hall of Truth (Stronghold Builder's Guidebook page 77) is only 3000 gp

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-17, 12:42 PM
Fair enough, but we are putting quite a few people behind bars purely based on these (non forensic) crappy tools, and these assumptions of exaggerated reliability. If we blindly accept these things in our existing justice system (when we shouldn't) then I don't see any reason why D&D court systems would "not trust" divination magic.

The eyewitness testimony one goes far deeper than any particular justice system... try getting people in general to accept the limits of the typical human memory.

GreatWyrmGold
2017-12-17, 12:44 PM
Fair enough, but we are putting quite a few people behind bars purely based on these (non forensic) crappy tools, and these assumptions of exaggerated reliability. If we blindly accept these things in our existing justice system (when we shouldn't) then I don't see any reason why D&D court systems would "not trust" divination magic.
You're exaggerating the crappiness.
Also...what would you do? Modern forensics aren't perfect, but that's hardly reason to imply that using them is a miscarriage of justice.



Regarding the where-are-they-getting-all-these-clerics question, it could, in D&D at any rate, be solved with a permanent magic item. Enchanting a Hall of Truth (Stronghold Builder's Guidebook page 77) is only 3000 gp
Which is only 120 XP from a caster. That's one or two encounters, plot developments, or successful conversions. Getting one per city or judicial region wouldn't be trivial, but it wouldn't be that difficult.



The death penalty one is also a case of the justice system needing to lighten up.
Eh...it's a case-by-case thing. I don't see the death penalty as being much worse than a life sentence, just less expensive and much harder to make amends if you're wrong. In most cases, even most capital crimes, it's as unwarranted as a prison sentence is for spilling someone's coffee...but I don't want to write it off completely just because it's usually the wrong tool.

Aliquid
2017-12-17, 01:09 PM
You're exaggerating the crappiness.
Also...what would you do? Modern forensics aren't perfect, but that's hardly reason to imply that using them is a miscarriage of justice.7% of police sketches are accurate... I think you are underestimating the crappiness. People who can afford a good lawyer get past this stuff... poor people who can't afford a lawyer get pumped through the system and thrown in jail based on eye-witness accounts and nothing else. The number of people found guilty of crimes they didn't commit is much higher than you would imagine, especially petty crime.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-17, 01:11 PM
Eh...it's a case-by-case thing. I don't see the death penalty as being much worse than a life sentence, just less expensive and much harder to make amends if you're wrong. In most cases, even most capital crimes, it's as unwarranted as a prison sentence is for spilling someone's coffee...but I don't want to write it off completely just because it's usually the wrong tool.



Various studies show that a death sentence ends up costing 10-20 times as much as a life sentence without parole.

As many as half of all death-row inmates in some states have been exonerated of the crime for which they were sentenced to death for, in recent decades, as new forensic techniques (DNA, etc) have shown they could not have committed those crimes. (And given the tangent that lead us here, the fact that it's forensics preventing people from being executed for crimes they didn't commit should give the objective reader reason to to think...)

It's just not worth it.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-17, 01:29 PM
7% of police sketches are accurate... I think you are underestimating the crappiness. People who can afford a good lawyer get past this stuff... poor people who can't afford a lawyer get pumped through the system and thrown in jail based on eye-witness accounts and nothing else. The number of people found guilty of crimes they didn't commit is much higher than you would imagine, especially petty crime.

Police sketches are a somewhat separate topic from crime scene forensics.

And I'd note that the article goes into a bit more nuance than "police sketches suck and are worthless".

legomaster00156
2017-12-17, 01:35 PM
In my Pathfinder games, truth spells and divinations are used by the justice systems in most nations, but they are paired with more traditional investigation due to the inherent unreliability of magic (most especially spell resistance, successful saves, immunities, and Divination having a chance of incorrect information).

JNAProductions
2017-12-17, 01:38 PM
In my Pathfinder games, truth spells and divinations are used by the justice systems in most nations, but they are paired with more traditional investigation due to the inherent unreliability of magic (most especially spell resistance, successful saves, immunities, and Divination having a chance of incorrect information).

Yeah, this. Divination and other magics are another tool-a valuable one, and one that might make other tools (such as more realistic science) obsolete-but a tool all the same. You don't build a house with JUST a hammer, you also need saws, and nails, and screws, and whatever.

King of Nowhere
2017-12-17, 02:49 PM
On topic, one big difficulty that magic would cause for the justice system is that eyewitness testimony is all potentially worthless. Say that A witness saw Bob the Barbarian jump from an alley and stab someone, and divinations show said witness to be sane and truthful. Just off the top of my head:
* It may have been an illusion.
* It may be a false memory that was planted by magic.
* It many have been someone else magically disguised or physically transformed into Bob.
* It may have been Bob's body, but with someone else possessing it.
* It may have been Bob, but under the effects of direct or indirect mind control.

Some things of these are serious mojo, and so unlikely for the majority of cases, but not all. Disguise Self and Silent Image are basic magic. Doppelgangers, ghosts, and various possessing/impersonating demons exist, and are known to cause trouble like this. And of course anyone guilty who knows about possibilities like those above will be claiming that's what happened.
This is an important thing that has been mostly overlooked. People will use magic to try to fool trials. And the only defence against it is to use magic yourself. Those fools in cliffport may think themselves oh-so-smart for banning magic from trials (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0363.html). What happens is that a guy can murder 400 people in front of witnesses, then cast an illusion over a poor sod that will make him look like the killler, and nobody will find him. Or he may have used alter self before killling the people, and nobody could have any inkling on how to find the murderer without magic.
No, banning magic from trials is pretty much the dumbest thing one could ever do when handling justice in a fantasy setting. It would be as dumb as banning science in today's criminal investigations. More, because magic has many more ways to hide an assassin than science. It's like, somebody dies and you suspect poisoning, but you can't check for poisons because it's scienceand can be falsified. And you find this guy who had every reason to murder the victim and you find a strange powder in his room but you can't try to analyze it because it's science and can be falsified. Or somebody committs an online fraud but you can't use a computer to try to track him because it can be falsified.

If you're planning a world, face it: people will commit ccrimes while disguised magically, people will project illusions to commit crimes, people will use mind enchantments to commit crimes, and that's part of the world. The world will have developed a way to react to that, which may go from a monumental justice hall with a hundred mid-level clerics and twenty resetting traps firing greater dispel magic at whoever is going to testify to prevent him from having spells on him to interfere, to a bunch of villagers sitting in the mud and crying to the adventurers to help them because they have no way to access the magic needed to solve the crime otherwise.
What you won't have, instead, is a world where an eyewitness testify that he saw the criminal and the defence won't try to claim that it was an illusion, or a memory alteration, or a dippleganger.



In more modern court systems, the fact that divinations are literally impossible to verify to anyone else (and, thanks to saves and other factors, may not produce the same results when made by different people) would make them inadmissible as evidence.

This is just one of many saying that divinations are impossible to verify for the jury, only the wizard or cleric would know it and it's just their word, possibly that of another powerful wizard/cleric. To which argument I say, what's the difference with modern forensic?

In modern forensic we have a guy in a white coat showing a pc screen with a bunch of lines over it and telling that it is evidence. The judge has no way to verify that, and getting the scientific expertise required would take years. The judge has to take in the word of the guy in the white coat who is literally the only person in the whole room who knows enough to interpret those lines on the screen. Who may have falsified the result, may have swapped the samples, may be an impostor, may have manipulated the instrument.
And yet we make it work. We have tests and controls and double-checks to make sure that those guys are reliable, we have a whole scientific community that is made by a very tiny fraction of the population to validate those methods but it is nevertheless big enough to be reliable. And sometimes corruption or mistake can falsify this evidence and throw a trial. Not really that different from real life.
In fact, I'd say this system would be a big step up from real life. Every cleric of 7th level can cast zone of truth, while scientists specialized in foresnic are extremely rare. I'd say in your 100000 people fantasy city there are more clerics capable of casting zone of truth than there are specialized forensic experts in a 100000 people real city. And you could trust those clerics because there is real evidence their god exist and wants to enforce justice, while the only evidence you have in the real world is that those guys never committed a crime before (were never found out to have committed a crime).


So there's efficient magical enforcement of the law upon the poor and middle-class only, and the rich can get away with murder.

Suddenly, it sounds like we're playing Shadowrun -- which is awesome in its own way. :smallcool:

But it's not the rule of law. It's a magical oppressive caste system.

... until someone casts Lenin's Liberating Leveler ...

That's not an oppressive caste system. That's a realistic good system that tries to do its best but has limitations. Heck, I don't know of any real society where the rich and powerful can't get away with much more than the poor can. They have better lawyers and they can devote much more resources. Corporations routinely do stuff that smaller firms would be fine over. But the system is fair enough that when there is clear evidence and the case is bad enough then we can convicct even the rich and powerful; the system is not oppressive, it is simply imperfect. I don't see why you'd expect a magic society to be much different.
Also, just because you can't punish one murderer who's skillled enough to avoid leaving evidence behind, it's no good reason to not punish all the other murderers too



Note also that to become high enough level to cast the better spells, you need to have gone through many life-threatening encounters. Perhaps only the places with civil wars and raids can have justice enforced with high-level truth spells, while the civilized and peaceful lands have to struggle along without it.

"Our justice system needs better truth spells. Let's go to war with our neighboring city and get some more experience."

And of course, organized crime and piracy can always develop that level of wizard or cleric. They have lots of encounters for xps.
Others already replied to this point, but really, only for the purpose of tabletop gaming xp are awarded as a result of killling stuff. In the real world, most learned people got their experience by reading books, not by beating people with them


Your numbers are off something fierce. If we go by the DMG demographics, that 100k population city has ... 28 Clerics that are 3rd+ level. So ~6 that are LG/LN.

According to my 3.0 manual, a metropolis has 25000 inhabitants, and for it you have 4 clerics of levels between 13 and 18. For each one of them you have twice as many of 2 levels lower, and for each of them you again have twice as manny of two levels lower...
Assuming random rolls for the top four clerics being 14, 15, 16, 17, you'd get such a table
cleric level number of clerics
17 1
16 1
15 3
14 3
13 6
12 6
11 12
10 12
9 24
8 24
7 48

which gives you 140 clerics capable of casting zone of truth. And that's for 25000 inhabitants. If we quadruple the number for 100000 inhabitants (and in truth a bigger metropolis would attract even more high level people in relation to the number of inhabitants) we get some 500 clerics. So, it's a big figure. Not enough to run every trial for petty crimes, but enough that you can at least assign one for every murder. And if you can start making permanent zones of truth, and other magic items that work once per day, you can increase the amount of magic available to the justice system.

Of course, the numbers in thhe DM manual are only thhe suggestion of those who made the game. You are free to use entirely different numbers for your game. I generally postulate a larger number of mid-level people but a lower amount of high-level ones, because the high levels are world-changing and the mid-levels aren't.

King of Nowhere
2017-12-17, 03:11 PM
Also, there will be all kind of laws regarding the use of magic and the potential crimes committed with it. Mind control may be considered an especially heinous crime because of all the troubles you could plunge someone into. Dominating a victim into committing a murder may be a greater crime than either murder or domination taken alone. Some spells may be restricted, with wizards needing special permissions to access scrolls with them; they may however be available by the balck market. Murder may be considered a lesser crime than large scale theft, because murder can be reverted with a spell. Surely a person would prefer being murdered rather than being stolen 50000 gp, because being murdered represents a smaller loss. Some uses of divinations will most certainly be considered an abuse and breach of privacy, but which ones and when they will be admitted, and whether using them will be considered a crime or merely impolite, is entirely up to the setting.
EDIT: no serious country would implement death penalty without a serious consideration of resurrection /EDIT

Again, the only wrong way to go about with worldbuilding is to gliss over those kind of question, or slap a blanket "magic won't be admissible in courts because it can be falsified". In fact, this is one of the very first things I considered for my worldbuilding, because a lot of plotlines can be invalidated by some of the answers, and other different plotlines may become possible.

Aliquid
2017-12-17, 03:44 PM
Murder may be considered a lesser crime than large scale theft, because murder can be reverted with a spell. Surely a person would prefer being murdered rather than being stolen 50000 gp,If someone is convicted of murder, maybe one of the penalties is having to pay for the raise dead spell. (or whatever spell is needed)

woweedd
2017-12-17, 03:58 PM
As many have already said, if magic of this type is common enough to be used in trials, ways of fooling it will probably be the same. And a witness who can resist a divination spell is more dangerous than one who was never given the divination because it gives you false confidence. If the suspect knows ways of blocking it, it becomes worse than useless.

King of Nowhere
2017-12-17, 04:02 PM
If someone is convicted of murder, maybe one of the penalties is having to pay for the raise dead spell. (or whatever spell is needed)

they do it in my campaign world. If you pay for a raise dead spell, the crime is reduced from murder to violence with long-lasting, but not permanent, harm (because you lose a level, but can gain it back). If you pay for a true resurrection, the crime is reduced to violence without long-lasting harm. At least if you cooperate with the justice system from the beginning.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-17, 04:33 PM
they do it in my campaign world. If you pay for a raise dead spell, the crime is reduced from murder to violence with long-lasting, but not permanent, harm (because you lose a level, but can gain it back). If you pay for a true resurrection, the crime is reduced to violence without long-lasting harm. At least if you cooperate with the justice system from the beginning.

Is there such a thing as "justified killing", then?

If it's a clear case of self-defense, are you required to pay to bring back the person who was just trying to kill you?

King of Nowhere
2017-12-17, 04:48 PM
Is there such a thing as "justified killing", then?

If it's a clear case of self-defense, are you required to pay to bring back the person who was just trying to kill you?

no, if it was self defence you are required to do nothing. the resurrection law only appplies to unlawful killing, and it's a natural extension of the law that states that you get reduced sentence for theft if you return the stolen goods.
Incidentally it was called into action during the campaign, because once the party was facing an assassin who disguised himself as a civilian before striking with poison, and they accidentally killed a random passersby mistaking her for an accomplice. the woman was raised and given some compensation, and that was it. Since it was an understandable mistake of judgment and the pcs were hired by the state, the government even agreed to pay part of the cost.

anyway, different countries have widely different legal systems. That goes especially for the evil countries.

EDIT: in that case there wasn't even need for magic, as the character plead guilty by accident and there was no reason to suspect otherwise. At the table it went like "why did you kill that civilian?" "I assumed she was in league with him; they were making out before he attacked, I assumed she was some kind of spellcaster" "she actuallly was a prostitute that he hired to pretend she was his girlfriend simply to improve his disguise. But I can see it was a reasonable mistake. I assume you say the same thing to the judge, and he agrees, though you are still guilty of killing a person through a bad decision. So, taking into account the extenuating circumstances, and that you are decently heroic figures, he sentences you to choose between six months of prison or a fine of 5000 gp that will be used to raise the girl"

Aliquid
2017-12-17, 05:42 PM
As many have already said, if magic of this type is common enough to be used in trials, ways of fooling it will probably be the same. And a witness who can resist a divination spell is more dangerous than one who was never given the divination because it gives you false confidence. If the suspect knows ways of blocking it, it becomes worse than useless.I don't buy this line of logic. "if it is common enough to be used in trials...." Lots of uncommon real world technology is used in our trials.

Until recently, the average person had zero access to DNA analysis, but the courts have been using it for 30 years.

RazorChain
2017-12-17, 06:38 PM
In my Pathfinder games, truth spells and divinations are used by the justice systems in most nations, but they are paired with more traditional investigation due to the inherent unreliability of magic (most especially spell resistance, successful saves, immunities, and Divination having a chance of incorrect information).

In my games criminal cases rarely end before court unless somebody important is involved. The magistrates care more about keeping the peace and bagging the real culprit is just an icing on the cake.

Legal disputes are what keep the courts busy.

AMFV
2017-12-17, 07:20 PM
According to my 3.0 manual, a metropolis has 25000 inhabitants, and for it you have 4 clerics of levels between 13 and 18. For each one of them you have twice as many of 2 levels lower, and for each of them you again have twice as manny of two levels lower...
Assuming random rolls for the top four clerics being 14, 15, 16, 17, you'd get such a table
cleric level number of clerics
17 1
16 1
15 3
14 3
13 6
12 6
11 12
10 12
9 24
8 24
7 48

which gives you 140 clerics capable of casting zone of truth. And that's for 25000 inhabitants. If we quadruple the number for 100000 inhabitants (and in truth a bigger metropolis would attract even more high level people in relation to the number of inhabitants) we get some 500 clerics. So, it's a big figure. Not enough to run every trial for petty crimes, but enough that you can at least assign one for every murder. And if you can start making permanent zones of truth, and other magic items that work once per day, you can increase the amount of magic available to the justice system.

Of course, the numbers in thhe DM manual are only thhe suggestion of those who made the game. You are free to use entirely different numbers for your game. I generally postulate a larger number of mid-level people but a lower amount of high-level ones, because the high levels are world-changing and the mid-levels aren't.

The problem is that you're assuming random rolls 90% of people according to the DMG use the standard array, as a result of using player generation mechanisms to plant NPCs you are winding up with way more high-level spellcasters than you actually would have. Also you are assuming that people are going to continue to take levels in cleric instead of take levels in you know expert or Aristocrat if they wanted to make money or be political, straight classes clerics with anything higher than an 11 in their primary casting stat are going to be very rare.

Edit: So assuming that we have a metropolis of 25,000 inhabitants (London in the Early Middle Ages), you're going to have 22,500 people who are not capable of casting level 2 spells regardless of their class (provided that they aren't level four). So then you have 2,500 people who might be advanced further, if you assume that ten percent of people are PC classes (which is not unreasonable, I don't recollect the original numbers of distribution but I think that's close), that gives you 250 total people with the capability of casting zone of truth by level three, then you assume that the classes are fairly even you'd have between 22 and 23 clerics. They can only cast a Zone of Truth for around 3 minutes for most of them, and probably significantly less. And again you're assuming that these are only clerics and haven't split off.

Generally the problems with D&D spellcasting demographics get a lot less severe when you take the Standard and Elite Arrays into account.

Edit 2: So you might see a Zone of Truth in a very significant portion of a very significant case, but probably not in most routine jurisprudence, I mean it might come up, but it'd be the same as advanced forensics, which is also too expensive to see widespread usage.

woweedd
2017-12-17, 07:40 PM
I don't buy this line of logic. "if it is common enough to be used in trials...." Lots of uncommon real world technology is used in our trials.

Until recently, the average person had zero access to DNA analysis, but the courts have been using it for 30 years.

True..But, as I said, DNA evidence has been fooled quite often, and has been found to bias juries because they think it's more reliable than it actually is.

Pleh
2017-12-18, 06:26 AM
Really, concepts of justice systems, courts, crime, and all the related subject matter are so thematically flexible that you can run this just about any way you want. Adding magic to justice kind of opens up some new permutations about the process, but overall it balances out.

It really has a lot more to do with the particular culture that uses the justice system in question and the fact that there are literal gods and extraplanar creatures that are woven from the essence of Law and/or Good that actually changes the fundamental dynamics.

I mean, you guys keep asking about what would happen with a Cleric of Cuthbert prosecuting against a Cleric of Olidammara Defendent. I think the more interesting question is what happens when the prosecutor is an Inevitable?

Sure, there's still the problem of: "make an illusion of an inevitable." Do you know how fast impersonating one of their officers (to thwart the honest conduction of lawful proceedings, no less) is going to get you on their wanted list?

And, as always, all of this is hugely dependent on how common is magic? How accessible? How common are extraplanar creatures? What is the common Level of character in society?

I mean, people are asking about Illusion spells, but in a quasi medieval society, most petty crimes probably have no access to magic whatsoever.

icefractal
2017-12-18, 08:07 AM
According to my 3.0 manual, a metropolis has 25000 inhabitants, and for it you have 4 clerics of levels between 13 and 18. For each one of them you have twice as many of 2 levels lower, and for each of them you again have twice as manny of two levels lower...Hmm, that's funny; I got those numbers from the generator on the d20srd. Either it changed considerably between 3.0 to 3.5, or the one on the site is buggy. :smallconfused:

Edit: Looked it up. It's four rolls at 1d6+12, and then you double the number and halve (not -2) the level repeatedly. So if we assume the raw rolls are 2,3,4,5, then we get:
14 -> 2x7 -> 4x3
15 -> 2x7 -> 4x3
16 -> 2x8 -> 4x4
17 -> 2x8 -> 4x4

So 28 Clerics of high enough level (of all alignments combined). But that's for a basic metropolis, so for a 100K one it could be 2-3x that amount.
Also you just need 3rd level Clerics for this, not 7th; Zone of Truth is a 2nd level spell.

Edit 2: That generation method is a little wacky. A metropolis can have a 28th level Commoner? And probably has several 22nd+ level Commoners? What kind of Epic-level crops do they farm, anyway? I'm not so sure that max level and quantity should be directly correlated.

King of Nowhere
2017-12-18, 11:41 AM
Edit 2: So you might see a Zone of Truth in a very significant portion of a very significant case, but probably not in most routine jurisprudence, I mean it might come up, but it'd be the same as advanced forensics, which is also too expensive to see widespread usage.

makes sense. they probablly aren't going to call a diviner to retrieve a stolen wallet. but for a murder case when the alleged culprit insists that he was mind dominated into doing it, they're definitely going to look into it further.


Hmm, that's funny; I got those numbers from the generator on the d20srd. Either it changed considerably between 3.0 to 3.5, or the one on the site is buggy. :smallconfused:

Edit: Looked it up. It's four rolls at 1d6+12, and then you double the number and halve (not -2) the level repeatedly. So if we assume the raw rolls are 2,3,4,5, then we get:
14 -> 2x7 -> 4x3
15 -> 2x7 -> 4x3
16 -> 2x8 -> 4x4
17 -> 2x8 -> 4x4

So 28 Clerics of high enough level (of all alignments combined). But that's for a basic metropolis, so for a 100K one it could be 2-3x that amount.
Also you just need 3rd level Clerics for this, not 7th; Zone of Truth is a 2nd level spell.

Edit 2: That generation method is a little wacky. A metropolis can have a 28th level Commoner? And probably has several 22nd+ level Commoners? What kind of Epic-level crops do they farm, anyway? I'm not so sure that max level and quantity should be directly correlated.
my manual says you get level -2 and double. Which makes a lot more sense anyway: otherwise you'd have 1 cleric of level 17 and 2 of level 8 and nobody in between.
But as I said, those are just guidelines.

Nifft
2017-12-18, 11:53 AM
Edit 2: That generation method is a little wacky. A metropolis can have a 28th level Commoner? And probably has several 22nd+ level Commoners? What kind of Epic-level crops do they farm, anyway? I'm not so sure that max level and quantity should be directly correlated.

My headcanon is that high-level Commoners only face other high-level Commoners, their encounters are all social, and they're all trying to bargain for better prices / stall position / etc. against each other, mostly using cross-class skillpoints.

So you end up with a region that has a few farmers that you just can't intimidate nor argue down, who have ridiculously high HD and an inflated sense of self-confidence.

This may also give us some insight into the true nature of HD. :smallbiggrin:

Grek
2017-12-18, 12:03 PM
People keep on making the mistake in assuming that a monarch would care about the success rate.

You don't remain king by not caring about whether your security policies are effective and failing to understand how very basic spells work. That's how you get murdered and replaced by doppelgangers. Or enthralled to a vampire. Or enthralled by a 4th level bard. Or overrun by barbarians. Or poisoned. Or having a dozen live cockatrices inserted into your chamber pot by angry priests of Trickster gods.

legomaster00156
2017-12-18, 12:25 PM
My headcanon is that high-level Commoners only face other high-level Commoners, their encounters are all social, and they're all trying to bargain for better prices / stall position / etc. against each other, mostly using cross-class skillpoints.

So you end up with a region that has a few farmers that you just can't intimidate nor argue down, who have ridiculously high HD and an inflated sense of self-confidence.

This may also give us some insight into the true nature of HD. :smallbiggrin:
Although, their BAB is still high enough to put most soldiers to shame. :smalltongue:

Aliquid
2017-12-18, 12:49 PM
You don't remain king by not caring about whether your security policies are effective and failing to understand how very basic spells work. That's how you get murdered and replaced by doppelgangers. Or enthralled to a vampire. Or enthralled by a 4th level bard. Or overrun by barbarians. Or poisoned. Or having a dozen live cockatrices inserted into your chamber pot by angry priests of Trickster gods.I'm not saying that the king wouldn't worry about the policies being effective. I'm actually saying the opposite. I'm saying many monarchs would be more concerned about the policies being effective overall than the policies being fair to the individual. Especially if that individual is a commoner.

Cast "detect evil" and "detect chaos" on all commoners and throw anyone in jail that tests positive. A quick and easy way to get low lever potential trouble off the street. The monarch wouldn't care about false positives... just the cost of doing business.

The monarch would be a fool to think "great, job done. I can relax now"... taking care of the low lying fruit would only be the first step. Now to deal with the false negatives, and they would have to be hunted down with other tactics.

Keltest
2017-12-18, 01:38 PM
I'm not saying that the king wouldn't worry about the policies being effective. I'm actually saying the opposite. I'm saying many monarchs would be more concerned about the policies being effective overall than the policies being fair to the individual. Especially if that individual is a commoner.

Cast "detect evil" and "detect chaos" on all commoners and throw anyone in jail that tests positive. A quick and easy way to get low lever potential trouble off the street. The monarch wouldn't care about false positives... just the cost of doing business.

The monarch would be a fool to think "great, job done. I can relax now"... taking care of the low lying fruit would only be the first step. Now to deal with the false negatives, and they would have to be hunted down with other tactics.

Except being evil or chaotic don't necessarily predispose you for crime or an inability to fit into society, so the king would have just wasted tons of resources going around collecting innocent people for... nothing, really.

AMFV
2017-12-18, 01:48 PM
I'm not saying that the king wouldn't worry about the policies being effective. I'm actually saying the opposite. I'm saying many monarchs would be more concerned about the policies being effective overall than the policies being fair to the individual. Especially if that individual is a commoner.

Cast "detect evil" and "detect chaos" on all commoners and throw anyone in jail that tests positive. A quick and easy way to get low lever potential trouble off the street. The monarch wouldn't care about false positives... just the cost of doing business.

The monarch would be a fool to think "great, job done. I can relax now"... taking care of the low lying fruit would only be the first step. Now to deal with the false negatives, and they would have to be hunted down with other tactics.

That wouldn't be a problem. You don't get a detectable aura until you hit 5 HD so probably zero percent of the evil or chaotic peasants would even ping.

King of Nowhere
2017-12-18, 02:53 PM
I'm not saying that the king wouldn't worry about the policies being effective. I'm actually saying the opposite. I'm saying many monarchs would be more concerned about the policies being effective overall than the policies being fair to the individual. Especially if that individual is a commoner.

Cast "detect evil" and "detect chaos" on all commoners and throw anyone in jail that tests positive. A quick and easy way to get low lever potential trouble off the street. The monarch wouldn't care about false positives... just the cost of doing business.

The monarch would be a fool to think "great, job done. I can relax now"... taking care of the low lying fruit would only be the first step. Now to deal with the false negatives, and they would have to be hunted down with other tactics.

not such a goood idea. suddenly arresting 11% of the population for shady reasons is likely to cause social unrest. mind you, it may work, and real world showed that sometimes a population will follow you in fanatically curtailing "indesirables" from its ranks, but it's hardly a solid foundation for a society. you can at best get a crappy dictatorship based on terror, and those are rarely long-lived.

AMFV
2017-12-18, 03:14 PM
not such a goood idea. suddenly arresting 11% of the population for shady reasons is likely to cause social unrest. mind you, it may work, and real world showed that sometimes a population will follow you in fanatically curtailing "indesirables" from its ranks, but it's hardly a solid foundation for a society. you can at best get a crappy dictatorship based on terror, and those are rarely long-lived.

Again they have to be higher than level 5 to even ping. So basically he's probably wasting effort at the best of situations. Although historically crappy dictatorships based on terror have had pretty long lives. Just not so much in the past couple hundred years.

Aliquid
2017-12-18, 03:18 PM
Except being evil or chaotic don't necessarily predispose you for crime or an inability to fit into society, so the king would have just wasted tons of resources going around collecting innocent people for... nothing, really.maybe in your opinion. But you aren’t the monarch are you? I’m describing behaviour that lines up with the vast majority of real world dictators historically and currently.



That wouldn't be a problem. You don't get a detectable aura until you hit 5 HD so probably zero percent of the evil or chaotic peasants would even ping.Not under any version of the rules that I have played.

AMFV
2017-12-18, 03:55 PM
maybe in your opinion. But you aren’t the monarch are you? I’m describing behaviour that lines up with the vast majority of real world dictators historically and currently.


Not under any version of the rules that I have played.

The case here is that you have been playing a 3.5 or Pathfinder wrong. If you have played those systems. It is a very common misunderstanding that many many players have with 3.5 and Pathfinder but unless they are clerics or have five hit dice they don't have an aura at all and they don't paint under detect evil or detect chaos.

I was basically contained in the rules for evil auras things of less than 5 hit dice that are not clerics or paladins or something else don't have an aura so they don't ping.

Tinkerer
2017-12-18, 04:14 PM
The case here is that you have been playing a 3.5 or Pathfinder wrong. If you have played those systems. It is a very common misunderstanding that many many players have with 3.5 and Pathfinder but unless they are clerics or have five hit dice they don't have an aura at all and they don't paint under detect evil or detect chaos.

I was basically contained in the rules for evil auras things of less than 5 hit dice that are not clerics or paladins or something else don't have an aura so they don't ping.

I preferred 2nd edition myself where the character had to be 9th level, strongly devoted to their alignment, and intent on an action of that alignment at the time in order to register. It was definitely more focused on supernatural evil/good.

Aliquid
2017-12-18, 04:42 PM
The case here is that you have been playing a 3.5 or Pathfinder wrong. If you have played those systems. It is a very common misunderstanding that many many players have with 3.5 and Pathfinder but unless they are clerics or have five hit dice they don't have an aura at all and they don't paint under detect evil or detect chaos.

I was basically contained in the rules for evil auras things of less than 5 hit dice that are not clerics or paladins or something else don't have an aura so they don't ping.Looking at the 3.5 SRD for "detect evil" I don't see any rule regarding 5 hit dice.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/detectEvil.htm

awa
2017-12-18, 04:46 PM
The case here is that you have been playing a 3.5 or Pathfinder wrong. If you have played those systems. It is a very common misunderstanding that many many players have with 3.5 and Pathfinder but unless they are clerics or have five hit dice they don't have an aura at all and they don't paint under detect evil or detect chaos.

I was basically contained in the rules for evil auras things of less than 5 hit dice that are not clerics or paladins or something else don't have an aura so they don't ping.

The detect evil spell seems to disagree, it appears that a normal creature with 10 or less HD has a faint aura and i dont see anything in the spell that says those cant be detected.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/detectEvil.htm

Maybe it says something else somewhere else but detect evil seems to work just fine for what they describe.

Tinkerer
2017-12-18, 05:09 PM
The detect evil spell seems to disagree, it appears that a normal creature with 10 or less HD has a faint aura and i dont see anything in the spell that says those cant be detected.

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/detectEvil.htm

Maybe it says something else somewhere else but detect evil seems to work just fine for what they describe.

It's a Pathfinder correction. So in 1st edition it would detect evil commoners, in 2nd it wouldn't, in 3.X it would, in PF it wouldn't, in 4th it would, and in 5th it wouldn't.

I'm definitely much more fond of the 2nd/PF/5th edition way of handling it.

King of Nowhere
2017-12-18, 05:36 PM
Again they have to be higher than level 5 to even ping. So basically he's probably wasting effort at the best of situations. Although historically crappy dictatorships based on terror have had pretty long lives. Just not so much in the past couple hundred years.

by modern standards, before two hundred years ago everywhere was a crappy dictatorship. And coups were common enough anyway.

As for the 5 hd, others have answered already

Aliquid
2017-12-18, 06:43 PM
It's a Pathfinder correction. So in 1st edition it would detect evil commoners, in 2nd it wouldn't, in 3.X it would, in PF it wouldn't, in 4th it would, and in 5th it wouldn't.

EDIT: Note though for 4th edition most commoners fall under the unaligned alignment so it's a lot more grey than 1st and 3.X.

I'm definitely much more fond of the 2nd/PF/5th edition way of handling it.the old BECMI D&D rules for detect evil pinged for “anyone who wants to harm you”.

Deliverance
2017-12-18, 07:01 PM
by modern standards, before two hundred years ago everywhere was a crappy dictatorship.
Only by an extremely crappy definition of dictatorship, that disregarded the central part of dictatorship, to wit, that absolute power is concentrated in one person or at most a small clique, would that be the case.

Nifft
2017-12-19, 01:09 AM
the old BECMI D&D rules for detect evil pinged for “anyone who wants to harm you”.

Protagonist-centric-yet-also-objective morality.

Truly an exercise in mental acrobatics.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-19, 07:24 AM
the old BECMI D&D rules for detect evil pinged for “anyone who wants to harm you”.


Protagonist-centric-yet-also-objective morality.

Truly an exercise in mental acrobatics.

What I keep wondering is, what if two "Good" characters are opposed to each other, and intend to fight a duel... do does each register as "evil" to the other?

hamishspence
2017-12-19, 07:28 AM
It's a Pathfinder correction. So in 1st edition it would detect evil commoners, in 2nd it wouldn't, in 3.X it would, in PF it wouldn't, in 4th it would, and in 5th it wouldn't.

I thought 4E removed any kind of Detect Evil power from all of the classes that used to have access to it?

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-19, 07:48 AM
To broaden the discussion beyond murders and forced self-incrimination (zones of truth pretty much ashcan the concept behind the 5th Amendment).

Long before there's any formal justice system, magic has the potential to affect how a society views related issues. For example, if divination can reliably reveal who the parents of a child are, what does that do to the deep-seated anxieties over paternity and all the effects that has on the treatment of women in some ancient (and not so anxiety) societies?

Pleh
2017-12-19, 08:50 AM
To broaden the discussion beyond murders and forced self-incrimination (zones of truth pretty much ashcan the concept behind the 5th Amendment).

Actually, I'd say it rather highlights it. Being literally unable to say anything that is untrue makes it especially important that you not be forced to necessarily say anything at all.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-19, 08:56 AM
Actually, I'd say it rather highlights it. Being literally unable to say anything that is untrue makes it especially important that you not be forced to necessarily say anything at all.

If the right to say nothing at all is protected, then yes. I didn't mean that it invalidates the right, I meant that I can see courts demanding the witness speak knowing that only the truth would come out -- and that this would force self-incrimination in some instances. Of course in such a system refusing to speak would probably be seen as an admission of guilt... :smallfrown:

My wording was rough because I was still waking up when I posted.

Hyperversum
2017-12-19, 09:06 AM
Standardized and scientific arcane magic is the key here. If a zone of truth can reliably be produced by a wizard by laying out X components in Y configuration and saying Z magic words, then you can trust it.

This is why law enforcement would work closely with mages colleges, (perhaps forensics classes involve some magic too) to standardize and reliably control the use of magic in law enforcement.

But that’s in the magical modern USA. In other times and places values would be different, like others already pointed out.

IMO, this sums it up.
D&D magic, or better wizardry, isn't a supernatural "HULABULA ABRACADABRA SIMLABIN!" it's theory ancient as probably the world you inhabit. A judge should be a pretty well educated individual, he should know how magic works.
Heck, he may even be given an amulet/item to check if someone is casting a spell (like a simple Detect Magic, you know).

In a heavily magical setting the judge could even be given a wizard trianing in order to be able to cast some spells by himself, or simply as an Expert he may have Spellcraft as part of his training. This doesn't solve the problem but for sure should be considered because the judge thinking that the wizard is an old idiot is probably unreliastic in a fantasy setting.

And about clerics... guys, "D&D fantasy setting" isn't real world, and take down your fedoras. Gods are something that nobody would ever ignore or think as "Unreal". Hella, you are telling me that the King/Emperor/Parliament doesn't have magic-user that work for them?
They have never seen an event in which divine magic was relevant? Not even a lil' monster? They don't see adventurers going around and doings things?

Tinkerer
2017-12-19, 09:33 AM
I thought 4E removed any kind of Detect Evil power from all of the classes that used to have access to it?

My mistake, I checked my notes and I didn't read a little further where it was a homebrew power the GM gave from a campaign that I only played a couple of sessions in several years ago. I really need to put a note in when that happens. I did double check the rest of them though while I was at it and they are all legit.

Keltest
2017-12-19, 09:40 AM
If the right to say nothing at all is protected, then yes. I didn't mean that it invalidates the right, I meant that I can see courts demanding the witness speak knowing that only the truth would come out -- and that this would force self-incrimination in some instances. Of course in such a system refusing to speak would probably be seen as an admission of guilt... :smallfrown:

My wording was rough because I was still waking up when I posted.
Isnt that the whole point of the zone of truth though? Like yeah, evidence based conviction is nice, but if you can just get the suspect to confirm or deny their guilt reliably, you save a lot of time and effort, and possibly other lives if you would have otherwise had to have let the suspect go for whatever reason.

King of Nowhere
2017-12-19, 09:47 AM
Only by an extremely crappy definition of dictatorship, that disregarded the central part of dictatorship, to wit, that absolute power is concentrated in one person or at most a small clique, would that be the case.

two hundred years ago pretty much all the world was ruled by absolute monarchies, which fit very well the "power concentrated in one person or small clique" condition.

Keltest
2017-12-19, 10:13 AM
two hundred years ago pretty much all the world was ruled by absolute monarchies, which fit very well the "power concentrated in one person or small clique" condition.

While they wanted people to think that, in practice the monarchs were beholden to a great many people to maintain their power, up to and including other monarchs from different countries.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-19, 10:22 AM
two hundred years ago pretty much all the world was ruled by absolute monarchies, which fit very well the "power concentrated in one person or small clique" condition.


While they wanted people to think that, in practice the monarchs were beholden to a great many people to maintain their power, up to and including other monarchs from different countries.

Plus "all the world" is something of an exaggeration.

Max_Killjoy
2017-12-19, 10:28 AM
Isn't that the whole point of the zone of truth though? Like yeah, evidence based conviction is nice, but if you can just get the suspect to confirm or deny their guilt reliably, you save a lot of time and effort, and possibly other lives if you would have otherwise had to have let the suspect go for whatever reason.


Coerced confessions rub me the wrong way.

King of Nowhere
2017-12-19, 04:19 PM
Well, just in case it may be of interest to somebody, I'll write some notes on how justice works in different countries in my campaign world. (EDIT: they turned out to be more than a few)

Mirna is a rich, high-magic, good aligned country. They have chairs of truth that can detect the very attempt to resist them, so while it is fully possible to resist, a declaration is legally valid only if only intentionally fails the saving throw. Lawyers are trained to ask direct questions, and evasive answers are suspect. One has the right to remain silent, though, but it doesn't bode well for one's cause. Creative people can still look for ways around that, though; once a villain who wanted to hire an assassin paid a wizard to dominate him and order him to hire the assassin so that he could truthfully claim that yes, he was mind dominated into hiring the assassin.
In general magic is extensively used in important trials, but there are extensive privacy laws requiring a certain amount of proof before you can use magic on someone. So smart villains may still manage to get away with a lot of shady stuff by not leaving behind enough evidence to be incriminated in the first place. If they are forced to face trial, however, they are pretty much done.
Occasionally, the military special forces (read: adventuring parties) may employ mind domination to interrogate a subject, though that is highly illegal. Burocracy ensures that if you take the proper precautions (like disguising yourself before committing the deed) nobody can pin the crime on you. It won't be accepted in court, and citing it may as well get you incriminated, but you can find other evidence with it, or you can use it for state-sanctioned shady operations.
The country is generally well run and corruption is low, but small crime can survive by staying low enough that it won't justify the extensive use of resources to fight it. It is helped by the church of the thieves god olydammara, which has an informal agreement with the civil authorities where it can protect petty criminals as long as it keeps them under a modicum of control.
Basically, the main difference with a real world western country is that if you are actually brought in front of a judge, you can't lie.
The country uses no death penalty, seeing as how it is easy to come back with enough money. Instead it has a special prison into an antimagic field where extensive precaution are taken to avoid the inmates committing suicide: all the walls are cushioned, there are booths with acitve magic and healing potions for emergency revivals, and a crew of mid-level monks can subdue any single prisoner with nonlethal force. Extreme cases are kept drugged unconscious all the time.

Morsk is a middle wealth, poor magic nation. It is just important enough - especially the copper mines - to be useful for Mirna, so it basically became Mirna's vassal state in exchange for protection. If they have some complex case that needs high level magic, they simply ask Mirna to take care of it.

Elbonia is a rich, high-magic crappy dictatorship with a caste system where social standing is dictated by one's skill at chess (it started as a joke, but it grew). Generally trials are eschewed and the word of the highest-ranked person is taken at face value. If there are suspects that a person with power is blatantly abusing his authority or undermining the nation, however, then all stops are pulled. no civil rights are respected in that case, interrogation upon mind domination (the suspect is given cursed items that lower the will save and the spell is cast multiple times to reduce the chance of resisting it) and all available forms of divinations are routinely used.
elbonia believes in cruel and unusual punishment; they'll kill you in an uncomfortable and humiliating way and they won't care if you are resurrected, they'll do it again if you set foot in their country. They have the resources for it. They still keep a top security prison for those who can afford to come back again and again, though. Conditions in it are very miserable: prisoners have their limbs and tongue removed to prevent them from attempting suicide, and are kept in closets and force-fed.

Despotonia is a medium wealth and magic crappy dictatorship run by the church of the tiranny god hextor. most of the population is into virtual slavery. Killing one such person isn't even considered murder, but "property damage"; everyone has a value depending on how much the state expects to profit from their work, and for most people it is around 50 gp (a real fortune in a place where 90% of the population earn, after taxes are detracted, one tenth of a copper piece per day, and has to pay rent for the clothes they wear). They do have a farce of a justice system, and they have some established punishments. for example, the standard penalty for asking freedom is to have your testicles chained to a wall inside a cell; you can leave anytime by ripping off your testicles (women are given a belt of gender change and are subjected to the same penalty). If you do it, you get a licence allowing you to ask for freedom. You can get a regeneration spell afterwards for the standard fee. this follows the church doctrine that rich people can afford to take punishment while poor people cannot.
otherwise their trials are mostly a form of entertainment, where the judges try to find creative ways to mess people up. Legendary is the case of the judge Salamon, who had to judge two women each claiming a child was her own. He ruled that the child be cut in two, each woman getting half. One of the women then relented, asking that the child be given to the other rather than killed. The judge then affirmed that she clearly was the mother. He further declared:
- that the sentence to cut the child in two be carried on, because what would it do to the credibility of the judicial system if sentences were repealed that way?
- that the mother be executed for protesting the decision of the judge
- that the fake mother had her wish to be mother fulfilled by sewing up the two halves of the child, animating it into a zombie, and showing it into her utherus.
Everybody agreed that it was a brilliant sentence, as nobody else would have found good excuses to kill all people involved, while still giving the worst punishment to the actual culprit.
Basically, you don't want to face a trial in despotonia. Not ever. And especially not by judge Salamon. Though if you have money you can always tip the judge.
The church of hextor and the nobles deal swiftly and decisively with any actual threat to the state or its order.

The goblin nation is a poor, high-magic fascist totalitarian nation. goblins have poor agricultural land and have serious problems with overcrowding, exacerbated byb their tendency to make 20 children per family. Most goblin youths are sent into the desert to die because the nation cannot support them; only those who are valuable to society are allowed to stay (and the safest way to be declared valuable is to learn spells, hence the "poor but high-magic"). Goblins therefore have no concept of rights; they say "every breath you take is a privilege you have to fight for; what more can you pretend?". They reacted to their high mortality by putting all their hopes into their nation: a single goblin lives fast, often miserably, and dies early, but the goblin nation will still be there and it will thrive. This sense of community is further enhanced by external pressure, since they dislike and are disliked by pretty much everyone (they sum it up as "everything can divided in three categories: the goblin nation, the enemies of the goblin nation, and inanimated objects"). As a result, the goblin nation has virtually no crime.
Those few who do commit crimes are considered enemies of the goblin nation, and dealt with extreme prejudice.

Several poor, low magic lands are collectively known as the third world. they are generally in anarchy, or they are ruled by small city-states that don't have enough power to intimidate even 5th level adventurers. they generally don't have detailed codes of justice, nor they have many spellcasters to help in trials, much less capable of even mid level magic. their best hopes are paladins: often mid level paladins go to those places to act as sheriffs and administer justice; they will freely use detect evil and sometimes zone of truth because they're their only tools. if they face a complicated case, they may contact their order and ask for external help. Good luck, though.

Frozen_Feet
2017-12-19, 07:01 PM
Protagonist-centric-yet-also-objective morality.

Truly an exercise in mental acrobatics.

It's not "protagonist centric" because the spell is available to non-protagonists.

It actually represents an intent-based morality, so arguments of whether it's objective are arguments on whether intent can be objectively measured. In a world where ESP and telepathy are things.

BECMI didn't even use the two-axis alignment system, it used single axis Law-Neutral-Chaos.


What I keep wondering is, what if two "Good" characters are opposed to each other, and intend to fight a duel... do does each register as "evil" to the other?

As noted, "Good" as an alignment is not a thing in BECMI.

Whether the duelists would register as evil depend on terms of the duel and treshold for "to harm". If the duel is to death, then certainly both would register as evil if they have accepted and follow terms of the duel. If the duel is non-lethal, such as to first blood, an argument can be made that neither would register as evil if they have accepted and follow terms of the duel.

Keltest
2017-12-19, 07:03 PM
Coerced confessions rub me the wrong way.

Id wager they rub a lot of people the wrong way, but if you can guarantee their truthfulness then they are absolutely a valuable tool for determining guilt.

Frozen_Feet
2017-12-19, 07:17 PM
Up to the point where you realize that the process of forcing confession can create guilt, up to and including a false memory of having done the deed you're accused of.

Again, spells that compel honesty, compel subjective truth. Not absolute facts about the world. Or if they do compel absolute facts of the world, even momentarily stepping into Zone of Truth (etc.) would cancel every false memory, every self-delusion, every memory-altering spell etc.. In which case you might have a problem with the target's ego spontaneously combusting in a frightening moment of clarity. (As noted before, to a degree this can happen even with subjective truth version, but it's not quite as bad.)

PhoenixPhyre
2017-12-19, 08:36 PM
The best a spell like zone of truth can do is tell what the speaker believes to be true. Watch Rashomon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon) for a famous take on that concept.

In my setting, the only country to have a formal justice system has the following characteristics--

*Crimes within a single race (other than humans or halflings) with no political consequences are handled by those races' systems. These cases are rare, except for dwarves who don't mingle much.
* Crimes committed within a single guild (word used loosely--more like hierarchical social/economic caste assigned by divination) are handled by that guild. Again, pretty rare.
* Crimes that don't fit into one of those exceptions are handled by the Thieves Guild (which also contains the judges and lawyers). Accused defends themselves (but can hire a guild member as council), accuser prosecutes (with a small selection of professional prosecutors in the guild for cases where no accuser can be found (murder, for example)). The Judge is a guild member of appropriate rank. Either side can hire mages who are certified by the guild, but they have no control over who is called in--that's done blindly. Magically compelled evidence is considered, but only as additional evidence. Mainly detection-type magic (is the witness under a spell?, etc) is used. Appeals are possible to the Scale Balancers (an organization of zealots and priests of Ytra, Goddess of Justice)
* Exceptional crimes (demon worship, treason, etc) are handled by the Scale Balancers, as are appeals. They are notorious for their zealotry in rooting out lawbreakers, using whatever means are necessary including magical compulsion. They are only very rarely called in because they often go on fishing expeditions, and death is the only sentence they carry out. They have no consideration for collateral damage--after all, everyone's guilty of something. Their leader can, in rare circumstances, channel an avatar of her Goddess who dispenses Justice. And smiting. Much smiting. Nobody calls in the Balancers unless they really need to. They do tend to care about the actual truth, which tempers some of the potential for destruction.
* Highly political crimes (or those whose perpetrators are too powerful to be called to court effectively) are handled by the assassins serving the Hollow King, God of betrayal and untimely death. They don't worry about such petty things as proof or due process.

Psyren
2017-12-21, 03:47 AM
Ex1:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a cleric. My GOD told me.
Q: So we are talking hearsay, here?
A: HERESY!

Eyewitness testimony is considered evidence in most jurisdictions. And a (lawful) deity is a pretty reliable witness.



Ex2:
Q: What evidence do you have that the man committed the crime?
A: I know he is. My magic says so.
Q: Errr, I asked for evidence.
A: It IS evidence. I'm a wizard, divination is my specialty!
Q: So you don't actually have any evidence that we can use, just your statement of what you believe happened?
A: But I know it. Why don't you believe me. Who do you trust, him or me?

Except you can empirically test a diviner wizard's powers. This is no different than bringing in a scientist as an expert witness, which is again something many jurisdictions allow.



Ex3:
Q: So, how do we know this invisible "zone of truth" does what you say? Preventing deliberate and intentional lies?
A: Enter it and try lying - see, you can't.
Q: Interesting. I certainly felt an effect, but how do I know this is a zone that affects everybody in it? What if your magic just prevented me from lying?
A: It doesn't work that way.
Q: Prove it.
A: I just tried to lie, I can't do it either.
Q: ...
A: Be reasonable. How on earth do you expect me to be able to prove to you that my magic does what I say it does and nothing else?
Q: That was actually going to be my next question to you.

This is also empirically testable - the judge himself can stand in it for instance. And while the will save makes it less reliable than the first two, it's a good deal more reliable than a polygraph, which is again permitted (albeit more controversial) in many jurisdictions.



Ex4:
Q: This divination you are going on about sounds interesting, except for how it tramples all over the constitutional mental privacy guarantees so essential to maintaining our society. What differentiates it from the many types of magical violation of peoples' rights that caused those guarantees to be part of our constitution in the first place?
A: I'll get back to you on that.

This is the only legitimate argument you've presented - that a defendant would have a pretty hard time defending themselves adequately against judicial magic, and so their constitutional rights could be placed in jeopardy by their use. Of course, the lawful deities who employ such spells are very likely to weigh the benefit such techniques offer to society as a whole as being far more desirable than any loss of personal/civil liberties.

Tinkerer
2017-12-21, 10:21 AM
A lot of the objections on here can be applied to real world scenarios as well. Evidence is useless because it can be fabricated and/or planted. Eyewitness testimony (up to and including being caught red handed) is useless because someone could be lying. There is the potential for error in every step of the process, the question is "does it provide a net gain to society?"