Sneaking round arrest criteria

[Greg Smith]

Normally a judge can only arrest a perp who has performed a melee or shoot action.

However, if said perp was to wonder around inflicting Incinerating Finger on a judge, would that be liable for arrest? We ruled it would.

What about even less aggressive psi talents, such as Daze?

Conversely, can a Psi Judge do the same back without attempting an arrest?

We decided not.

 

[chaoschild]

By the strict letter of the rules, using special actions to activate psychic talents falls outside of the arrest rules. So judges still have to arrest perps, even if they've been using psychic talents against them.

But then equally psi-judges can zap anyone they want to.

Maybe this needs rewording?

 

[Winged_Human]

I'm not sure you're interpreting the arrest rules correctly.

the perps don't have to do anything for the judge to attempt to arrest them, just being on the field is a violation of the law. So all Judges must attempt to arrest them before passing sentencing (which is usually death).

Now, if a perp attacks a judge *(via shooting or melee) the judge is not required to attempt to arrest the perp, and may proceed immediately to judgement and summary execution.

I hope this clears things up a bit.

*The JDMG RB only specifies melee and shooting attacks. Maybe Matt can look at including *ANY* type of attack on a judge in the gang as killable offense?

 

[Greg Smith]

I understand the arrest rules. The point is both gangs usually approach cautiously using terrain for concealment and so a judge usually has to expose himself to fire in order to make an arrest.

Whereas a pimp could approach a judge, inflict damage with incinerating finger and not be automatically liable for arrest. In fact a could of psi muties could conceivably take out a street judge, not be seen by the rest of the Judges and get away scot free.

 

[locarno24]

I understand the arrest rules. The point is both gangs usually approach cautiously using terrain for concealment and so a judge usually has to expose himself to fire in order to make an arrest.

Whereas a pimp could approach a judge, inflict damage with incinerating finger and not be automatically liable for arrest. In fact a could of psi muties could conceivably take out a street judge, not be seen by the rest of the Judges and get away scot free.

He's still liable for arrest, just not for being shot out of hand.

Well, that kind of makes sense from a story perspective as well. If you've shot at a judge, arrests go out of the window and he can slot you with a lawgiver.

If he's been burned by "spontaneous fire", he necessarily can't prove it was you, so he (or his partner if he's down) still has to try and arrest you. It's the same as heroes - you still have to try and arrest them if they haven't opened fire yet, even knowing they'll pass the WTF check automatically.

By comparison, Psi-Judges know it's you (see Anderson in the Dredd film), so they can probably get away with using psi talents to bring you down, but an automatically registered and theoretically unprovoked lawgiver discharge is probably pushing it too far.


Essentially, as you say, it essentially hands 'first shot' to a non-judge gang because the judges can't use the full range of their lawgivers until bullets start flying, and they have to risk a shot to make an arrest.