Notes towards a Harry Potter RPG

That last entry reminded me of some half-formed ideas I had for a Harry Potter role-playing game:

Inspired by School Colors from Out of Space (or “What if Rumiko Takahashi Went to 0 San Before Writing Urusei Yatsura?”), each character would have a pair of attributes corresponding to general cultural knowledge of muggle and wizard societies. Either the two would by inversely paired (the higher one is starting out, the lower the other must be), or the lower starts out capped at some fraction of the higher. A special advantage could be purchased to build characters like Hermione, who can have high values (arbitrarily high, or just a higher fraction?) in both.

Other special advantages would give the characters bonuses when acting from certain motivations. Any character could buy any advantage, but each starts out with the advantage associated with his or her house for free — acting bravely for Gryffindors, seeking knowledge for Ravenclaws, seeking power for Slytherins, and bringing things up to counts of four but otherwise staying offscreen for Hufflepuffs. (Do other schools have houses? If so, what traits are associated with them? The game should have more than four, but characters probably shouldn’t be able to buy more than two or three at most.)

Lawrence v. Texas sodomy decision

I’ve just dowloaded the Supreme Court’s decision (authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy) in Lawrence v. Texas and read it. Here’s a quick summary:

• Remember Bowers v. Hardwick, the 1986 case in which the Supreme Court upheld a Georgia anti-sodomy law? Forget about it; those guys were on crack.
• We could overturn Bowers on Equal Protection grounds, but that might imply that anti-sodomy laws might stand if worded differently, so we’re going with a Due Process argument. Bowers is toast, and charred carbonized toast at that.
• This ruling here is not about, and does not legalize:
  • Underage sex
  • Coerced sex
  • Gay marriage
  • Prostitution
  • Public sex acts
• Pretty argument in support of what the right calls “judicial activism”:

  Had those who drew and ratified the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth Amendment or the Fourteenth Amendment known the components of liberty in its manifold possibilities, they might have been more specific. They did not presume to have this insight. They knew times can blind us to certain truths and later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress. As the Constitution endures, persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.

O’Connor’s concurrence:

• Yes, Lawrence v. Texas should be overturned, on Equal Protection grounds — that it’s unconstitutional to have a law that just forbids sodomy between same-sex couples, as the Texas law did.
• But Bowers is still OK, because it banned sodomy for everyone. That’s constitutional, but “such a law would not long stand in our democratic society”. (And she may be right — Georgia’s state supreme court eventually overturned that law.)

Scalia’s dissent:

• The justices in the majority are a bunch of liberal judicial activists, inventing new constitutional rights out of whole cloth.
• And they don’t know what “due process of law” means.
• Many of the arguments used today for overturning Bowers could also be used to overturn Roe v. Wade, so watch it.
• Discrimination against homosexuals isn’t equivalent to discrimination against blacks, because anti-miscegenation laws (invalidated in Loving v. Virginia, 1967) enforce white supremacy, while anti-gay laws, um, er, hey, we’re banning same-sex sodomy for everyone, not just gays, so it’s not discriminatory!
• The majority is also wrong when it says states have no legitimate rational interest in controlling their citizens’ sex lives. The mere fact that a majority (or perhaps even a powerful minority) considers a particular act yucky is itself a legitimate interest. This decision will make it harder for to make life difficult for gay people. We won’t be able to fire them at will, or evict them from their homes, or ban their yucky behavior.
• Um, not that I have anything against gay people. Honest.

Thomas’s dissent:

• Mumble mumble mumble.