Assassins rules rejig summary

[Amorphous]

Due to a combination of factors, the main one being boredom, I rejigged the rules during the holidays. In theory they take account of some of the experience gained during the trial run, while other things were tweaked just because they bothered me for no good reason.

They are essentially the same as DrAlex's rules (in the sense that there was a lot of copying and pasting involved) but with the following changes:

1) Structural rearrangement. The original set of rules followed the Cambridge set of rules, which seemed (to my mind, at least) organised in a way which I found totally counter-intuitive and therefore made looking up certain rules very time-consuming. The only section I could reliably find first time was Weapons, because DrAlex did some neat trick where the Weapons appendix always appears on its own page. Attempts to replicate this in my own version have failed utterly.

2) Some minor re-formatting. I like hyphens.

3) Introduction of Honourable and Dishonourable Discharge, the latter of which is basically another name for disqualification.

4) All areas re-classified as one of three zones. This included making corridors of academic buildings bang-kill zones, contrary to a decision made during the trial that they were out-of-bounds. This is my own (changed) opinion and didn't involve any discussion with Swerg: the reasoning behind the original decision was that performing kills in academic corridors might be a nuisance to staff (academic or otherwise), but it struck me more recently that bang-kills should mean no mess or excessive noise therefore it would be no more of a nuisance than two students standing and having a discussion.

5) Chief of Police and Police Force renamed to Squad Leader and Hit Squad (composed of Hitmen/Hitwomen/Hitpeople) respectively, and their roles more thoroughly defined. My reasoning behind this (which truthfully I don't entirely follow now) was that in the original rules the police didn't seem much like real police: they had no standardised weaponry or anything which you might expect from a real police force. Additionally there is no death penalty in Britain, although I suppose the police officers would get away with it if they said they mistook the assassin for a terrorist.
For whatever reason, at the time I quite fancied the idea of a hit squad (employed by, I dunno, a corrupt mayor tired of the wanton destruction in his/her 'city' of St Andrews). It has occurred to me since then that the use of 'assassin' and 'hitman' in modern speech is pretty much interchangable. I blame the Discworld series, which has convinced me that assassins are stylish noblemen dressed in black while hitmen are simply common thugs on the street.

6) 'Miscellaneous Weapons' edited to include two novel weapons which were licensed in the trial; the Hands Of Destruction (a pair of gloves with a sign on them, which caused death if held against the victim's head for - I think - 3 seconds) and a bird with bird-flu (I think the user may have had to wear a face mask and gloves while handing the bird-flu bird).

7) Style of rules changed from 2nd person to 3rd person. I just prefer the feel of it, I can't explain why. This change is quite possibly the main contributor to the increased word count.


Those are all the changes I've noticed while having a look through, though I've been back and forth over them so often it's entirely possible I can't tell what's new anymore and therefore I've missed something.

One last note: another decision made during the process of the trial concerned a sabbatical officer and whether or not their office in the Union counted as a place of work and therefore out-of-bounds. We ruled that it didn't, and I've been wondering if it was the right choice ever since. I can't speak for Swerg on this one, but I think my own opinion on the matter stemmed from the fact that in other forms of work (e.g. working at a bar) there's a clear employer-employee relationship where it is in the best interests of the employer to make sure the employee is as productive as possible. This could be compromised if the employee is having to look out for assassins and generally be paranoid, so the rule is in place to eliminate assassins-related risk to their continued employment.

However the whole union/sabbatical system is much less clear, at least to an outsider like myself - I have no idea how regular the hours are (e.g. 9-5), how busy a working day is or how much of it is actually spent in the office. For example, I would suppose that a sabbatical officer might need to go downstairs into the main bar to discuss something with a member of staff or some other work-related thing but to a nearby assassin it might look like the sabb is taking a break from work and just having a chat. Would a kill in this situation be legal? Come to that, would a kill during an employee's breaktime be considered legal? In the latter case I would be tempted to say no unless the employee was outside their place of work, but I don't really have an answer to the first question.

Moral of the story: the game is as fallible as its organisers. Or something.