D&D Nerd.com

Normally, adventuring is associated with delving into deep caverns, ancient ruins, or even distant lands. People don’t normally associate adventurers with the court room.

But sometimes, adventurers can be on the wrong side of the law. Or perhaps they witnessed a crime, and need to provide witness testimony. Or they could even end up having to serve on the jury. Of course, there’s also civil cases that adventurers could get involved in. Perhaps there’s a contract dispute, or maybe one decides to sue another.

You can definitely get creative with this idea of having player characters going to court for whatever reason. Of course, the party rogue could easily get in trouble. In a way, it’s rather expected. But most players will probably find this boring, though perhaps amusing.

A dispute with another adventuring party could bring some excitement to the players. Perhaps they went searching for some artifact, found it, and had it stolen by another adventuring party. Despite what may end up happening once they both get back to the main city, both parties could end up going to court over who originally discovered the artifact.

You could also allow the players to sue whoever sent them out to find an artifact. Perhaps it can be over the undue danger they were put in, and that their payment was not sufficient for it. Or maybe they were just not paid at all when they delivered the item.

Jury Duty
Now, aside from the more obvious court cases, where the PCs would be on either side of the case, there’s also the idea of jury duty. Perhaps one, or more, of the PCs is a resident in an area where trials are decided by juries. And of course, they PC is eventually chosen to report to jury duty.

Now, instead of simply letting time pass by just jumping ahead, you could roleplay the entire thing. You can even make it more interesting if one of the PCs resided in the jury, while the others are on one (or maybe both?) of the two sides in the trial.

I understand that there may be players who won’t be overly thrilled by the idea of roleplaying their characters in a courtroom, let alone being in the jury stands. Also, this idea may not necessarily be fitting for all campaign settings, whether pre-made or custom made. To be honest, the only campaign setting that I can really see this fitting into is Eberron, but only in select areas.

So what do you think about having court systems being a part of the lives of PCs? If you’ve actually done something like this with your group, how did it turn out? Please leave a comment!

Also, this post is courtesy to the Superior Court of California, from which I received a jury summons in the mail on Saturday.