How often do the police get involved in your game’s fiction?
I’m just curious as to how often the police show up or how heavily they get involved in other people’s games. Cops showing up to break up a loud party forcing everyone to scatter is something I’m sure happens pretty often. But what about other things? Murders, kidnappings, car theft, etc. Do the cops get involved in your games?
I always find them to be disrupting the narrative. Things get too real with police and everything. I’d rather handwave a lot of that stuff.
Only once, to bust the characters for underage drinking and get their parents on the phone. I think that’s the extent that I’d like them in my games.
Alternatively, if there was a single investigator or something that could eventually require the characters to do something horrible to make them go away, that could also work.
In rhe real world, ideally, involving the police is a way to hand off responsibility – you discover a murder, you call the police, they take care of it; someone gets kidnapped, you call the police, they do what is necessary to find them.
In a game world, the PCs are supposed to be the main characters, so the cops aren’t going to solve the murder for you – that’s your mystery – and besides that, it involves monsters, so you probably have motive to keep the police from looking into it lest they look too closely at you.
Including police works best if they are related to one of the characters and extremely loved. That way you have the drama and tension of doing everything you can to screw them out of doing their job well while suffering the consequences with them for their failure.
I think we had police have a fairly heavy presence in one game but that was mostly because someone made a adult character who was a police officer for an NP, and even in that game a character managed to beat his father, who happened to be a celtic god, to death with his bare hands in the police parking lot without them getting involved.
Mostly I have used the police as a consequence for a failed rolls when it makes sense “You hear approaching police sirens”>Announce off-screen badness or “NPC dials 911″>Announce future badness.
There was one other game where the police played a heavy role without being an NPC but that was mostly because the PCs either called them (during an argument with their house mate that started getting violent, the cops got called to remove them from the premises) or their arrival made sense (Landlady showed up with a few cop to deliver an eviction notice, cops showed up on the scene when a guy broke into a house and set off the security system, Cops also showed up when a house containing a guy two PCs wanted to beat up suddenly exploded killing him as the PCs were walking up to the house). Most of the time the players have already gotten away, (Except in that house explosion thing they kinda figured they had been set up by someone and refused to run and further incriminate themselves and willingly got arrested/questioned and eventually released) because getting caught by the police really only removes players from the plot either temporarily or permanently.
Often, but only to muddy the waters and make trouble.
Great responses above. I feel like this teenage genre comes with a narrow zone of competence which the cops pierce.
tvtropes.org – Competence Zone – TV Tropes
I pretty much feel the same way as the comments here. Once the police get involved past a certain level, I feel like they’re running the show and the characters get hamstrung.
My last season had the police involved at the beginning and the ending. But they just served the purpose of showing how ignorant the adult world is towards the characters. They were called when one teen from their class was missing and disclaimed that they would return in a day or so anyway. So it was up to the characters to take the search seriously. At the end of the season in some kind of epilogue, they found our dead characters in the ghost house and directly explained that “this terrible new drug ran out of control”.