NationStates

Description: After a slew of fraudulent wills and other testamentary documents, the lack of public notaries to authenticate such documents has become a hot-button issue.

Validity: All Nations

Choice 1:
"We need notaries," says your secretary @@RANDOMNAME@@, excitedly stamping and putting a seal on every object in your room, "How could @@NAME@@ ever function without them?" Just think of everything we could do with a small slew of professionally trained notaries, bound by oath and law to approve these documents of the law! Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?" @@HE@@ remarks while stamping your forehead.
Fallout: wills take years to be approved by self-righteous notaries.
Validity: All Nations.

Choice 2:
"I have never heard so much baloney!" exclaims @@RANDOMNAME@@, while blowing cigar smoke into your face. "I've got a proposition for you, @@LEADER@@. Refuse this proposal, and I will make sure that the next time a @@MAJORINDUSTRY@@ head sleeps with the fishes, you get a cut of the @@CURRENCY@@. What do you say about that? Isn't that an offer you ca- wouldn't want to refuse?"
Fallout: government officials base their spending sprees around the deaths of major financial leaders.
Validity: Invalid for nations which have anti-corruption laws or very low rates of organized crime.

Choice 3:
"@@LEADER@@, this ain't where the problem lies!" your centenarian grandmother, @@RANDOMFEMALENAME@@, cries from her room in the retirement home across the street. "Why even have wills? We old folk deserve to be buried with all our material possessions, like the pharaohs! Why do the youngsters have to take everything from us? Now get over here, Snookums, I baked pie!"
Fallout: grave robbery is a booming industry.
Validity: All Nations

What do you guys think? I'd love to hear your suggestions or editorial feedback!

The only thing I dislike is the assumption that @@NAME@@ doesn't already have notaries. Other than that it's pretty nice.

USS Monitor wrote:The only thing I dislike is the assumption that @@NAME@@ doesn't already have notaries. Other than that it's pretty nice.

Hmm... should I make it not available to nations with high or above-average government size?

You could instead talk about a shortfall in public notaries, and demand outstripping the capacity of public notary services.

However, the responses this issue presents to that shortfall don't really work, as you've basically structured your issue around whether public notaries are a useful thing to have (to which the answer is "yes, obviously", which makes for a weak issue).

If you were addressing a notary shortfall I'd expect the options to be more like:

1) Reduce the requirements to be a notary, for example, not requiring a law degree.
2) Reduce the demand for notaries, by reducing the certification requirements in the private and public sector.
3) Provide state-funded notary services to increase national capacity of notary services.

However, you will note that said options are universally boring, and you'd need to make them non-boring to make the issue worth publishing.

Why did you submit this after only a few days? You did no editing of your draft at all. I have deleted your submission.

You have not edited your issue to incorporate the advice that you were given. Please do that and resubmit after a much longer period of time than four days, maybe a month. Also, I recommend changing your title. There are already two similarly-named issues in the game.

How do you plan to force people to become lawyers when they don't want to persue such a carrer?