A session I am writing for my gaming group will take the characters through a murder trial. One of the players is the accused, and he and his companions will need to build a case and defend themselves.
In the past, with my group, role-playing trials has not been fun for everyone. A few people get into it, but the others sit back and watch. I can't just skip the trial as it is an important story element.
My thought to make this more engaging for everyone was to abstract the trial concept out a little and play it out that way. For example:
Take two Jenga towers, one for me (the GM and the prosecution), one for the players. The players take turns pulling blocks from their tower, and I pull one from mine between every turn. As we build up our towers, this represents building up the strength of our case in court. Whoever's tower topples first has built their case too weakly, and it crumbles and is dismissed by the judge.
I like this idea, and will probably use it, but I want to draw it out a little. My thought was to have 3 separate tribunals that the party must face and convince of their innocence. But I don't want to just play 3 rounds of Jenga.
What other ways are there to abstract a courtroom scenario and allow all types of players to participate?
Best Answer
I would do this with roleplaying and whatever social combat rules your system uses. The level of detail is determined by how important you want the trial to be in your game. If you are not using a system with social combat, you can also model it with "chase" or "extended contest" rules, anything where success accrues over time can probably be kit-bashed into doing the trick.
My problem with Jenga is that you're not building something stronger as you progress, you're making something weaker. It just completely goes against the thing you're modeling.
Here's how I would handle it:
Each of those activities could be an encounter or string of encounters. In the run-up to the trial, decide what the PCs get for succeeding or failing in these efforts. Smaller benefits could be modeled as skill bonuses, while larger benefits could be "free" successes to apply.
So if most of the PCs go out to convince people who can confirm the accused's alibi to testify, you can play that out. When they succeed give them a bonus to one or more "lawyer" skill rolls for use during the trial. Meanwhile, the (presumably imprisoned) accused PC is trying to track down the real killer in his prison. If he can get the guy to confess, you can grant them some number of free successes, based on how credible the confession is, etc..
In this way, you keep everyone engaged in the pre-trial process, and everyone gets to see their contributions contribute concretely during the trial.