Lawyer Characters

On Sun, 25 Nov 90 20:32:03 PST you said:
>
>Date: Sun, 25 Nov 90 00:18:28 PST
>From: John Wilber [email removed]
>Subject: (1841) TDR Ideas
>
>I've been reading quit a bit about TDR on the TML here.  I'm all in
>favor of it, and I'd like to submit a few ideas of my own.
>....
>CHARACTER GENERATION
>
>Suggestions: Police, Lawyer (useless in some campaigns, great for
>others), Techie (a catch-all for electrical engineer/auto
>mechanic/telephone repairman/computer programmer types).

Being a proto-lawyer myself, I thought I'd throw in my two cents here. In my
opinion, a lawyer can be just as useful in a variety of campaign settings as
any other character class.

There is a lot more to being a lawyer than a wealth of legal knowledge (Legal),
although it is important. A lawyer has to deal with a wide variety of people
(Liaison), from professionals (Admin) to the lower strata (Streetwise and
Carousing). Plus, a lawyer has to be able to get information out of people and
piece things together (Interview/Interrogation). Being able to sift through
huge amounts of information and do effective research may require a certain
facility with computers. Further, various areas of the law may indicate
specialized knowledge: corporate/commercial lawyers would tend to have economic
skills, while lawyers in technical fields (ex. patent law) would have some
expertise in engineering or something similar. You get the idea.

So, even if the campaign won't directly involve legal matters, a good lawyer
should be able to serve effectively in other roles. I'm more or less testing
that proposition in the PBEM game...

FYI, a past issue of Challenge had an extended version of the Law Enforcement
character (like the Police you mentioned.) Sorry, can't remember which one, but
it wasn't a recent issue. I may be roused to do an extended lawyer generation
system for TDR, or is there any other law-type out in TML-land?

On an unrelated subject, let me say that I like vehicle designs on the TML. I
have archived them and squirreled them away on floppy for a future reference.ay
After all, why reinvent the wheel? I don't mind occasional large groups of
designs (like from Robert Dean) but I DO mind a daily flow of HUGE chunks of
designs that goes on and on for many days, like from Scott Kellogg. I would
MUCH prefer smaller, more spread out chunks. Thems my $.02 worth.

Nicholas Sylvain

"If you want to play the game, you better know the rules, love."
                            -- Inspector Harry Callahan (_The Dead Pool_)