Admin Settings

Penal Code

Your community's laws: what can be charged, what it costs, and how long it carries. Officers search this list when they add a charge to a report or a warrant, and the totals on the paperwork come straight from it.

What an offence carries

The sentence is always in days

Jail time is entered and shown in days, everywhere: the charge builder, the panels, and the printed paperwork. Long sentences stay in days rather than rolling up into months or years, so the number on screen is the number you set.

Rules

Above the list sits one panel called Rules, with a switch per rule and a short line saying what each does. The ⓘ next to a rule opens the full explanation. Click the panel's header to fold it down to a single line that shows each rule as On or Off, so the list of offences stays in view.

Delete records about them decides whether a record stays once an officer has filed it. With it off, players see no delete button on reports and warrants someone else wrote. What they filed themselves (backstory records and warrants they added) they can always remove, and officers can always delete. Turning it off removes nothing that already exists.

Real-time lockup, if you play it

Some communities also take the character out of play for a few real minutes after an arrest. Others only record the sentence and carry on. The Real-time lockup rule covers the first kind:

• Off (default). Nothing changes. Offences carry a sentence in days and nothing else.
• On. Each offence gets an extra optional Time-out (minutes) field.

The two are separate numbers and are never converted into each other — thirty days on the record alongside fifteen minutes out of play is a perfectly normal combination. The sentence in days keeps appearing on every report and every printed page either way, and the time-out is not added onto a report; it belongs to the offence, not to the arrest.

Turning the switch off hides the field, it does not erase what you typed.

Fine and jail days are per count

This is the one thing to get right. The fine and the days you set here are charged once per count, and the totals multiply them out — three counts of the same offence is one line reading 3× on the report, at three times the fine.

So set the values for a single instance of the offence. An amount that already assumes "a few of them" produces triple that on any real arrest.

Codes people can find

Officers search this list by name and by code while a suspect is sitting in the back of a car. Two things make that fast:

• Consistent codes. A scheme like PC.1.01 sorts and searches predictably; ad-hoc numbering does not.
• Names people would actually type. Murder in the First Degree is findable by typing murder. An offence named Homicide (1st) — CAP §1.01 is not.

Use Category to group; it is what makes a long list navigable.

Importing

There is a bulk import so you do not type a full code from scratch. Import first, then edit — adjusting a hundred fines is faster than creating a hundred offences.

Download the template on the same page and fill it in with any spreadsheet program. Only code and title are required; every other column may be left out or left empty. The importer is forgiving about how a sheet is saved:

• Classification can be written as Felony, felony, FELONY or just F (likewise Misdemeanor/Misdemeanour/M and Infraction/I).
• Semicolons or commas both work, so a sheet saved by Excel in a European language imports as it is.
• Numbers may carry the formatting a spreadsheet adds — $1,500.00 reads as 1500, and 30 days in a jail column reads as 30. A dash or N/A counts as empty.
• Special characters such as § survive, whichever way Excel saved the file.

Importing again is safe: an offence whose code already exists is updated, not duplicated.

When the import finishes, a summary shows how many offences were added, updated and skipped. Every skipped row is listed with its row number and the reason, so you can fix the sheet and import it again. Columns the importer does not use are ignored and named in the summary, so an extra column of your own does no harm.

Changing it later

Editing an offence changes it for future charges. Reports already published keep the totals they were filed with, which is correct: the paperwork records what the fine was at the time, not what it became afterwards.

That also means correcting a wrong fine does not retroactively fix reports filed against it. If that matters for a case your community is playing out, it is a roleplay conversation rather than a database one.

Starting over

Delete all codes, at the top right of the page, empties the whole penal code after you confirm. Use it before importing a different code, so old offences do not linger next to the new ones.

• Reports and warrants already filed keep their charges, fines and sentences.
• Officers cannot add charges until there are offences again: load the standard pack, import a sheet or add them by hand.
• The rules above stay as they are.

This cannot be undone. If you might want the current list back, keep the sheet you imported it from.