Shattered Kingdoms

I kinda like Salandrin's suggestion.

1) You are caught for the petty crime of attempted theft in Ayamao. You are taken to a remote area within Ayamao: a patch of forest recently burned by a fire, and upon arrival, the guard informs you that if you attempt to escape, you will be killed. He doesn't mention that if you do happen to escape, you will be treated as a fugitive from justice, and punished to the fullest extent of the law - which in Ayamao, is execution. You a stripped down and handed an Ayamoan prisoner's uniform, as well as a bag and a shovel. Inside the bag are seeds for trees. Your duty is to plant the whole bag of seeds. When you are done, you return to the guard, and he escorts you back to the nearest city (Elisaire or Sith or the centaur place, randomly chosen), and informs you that because your crime was attempted theft, half of your total wealth has been taken by the Guardians, but you are allowed to keep all of your equipment.

2) You are caught for the crime of low murder in the Empire. You are escorted to a remote Imperial mine. You are given the same speech about death and escape, and once again stripped bare and handed a prisoner's uniform, and this time, a mining pick. Your job is to bring iron back from the mines. Once you collect enough iron, the guard takes you outside, and gives you back some of your equipment - you notice that one of your necklaces and a ring are gone, probably taken by a greedy guard. Your equipment also seems a bit beat up - it looks like they didn't treat it very well, while it was out of your possession. The guard doesn't mention it, but all of the gold you were carrying is gone, too - but your bank is still intact. Right before it seems like he's about to let you go, though, the guard cackles and chops off your arm and shoves you to the ground, still laughing as he heads back inside the mine.

Change all the penalties for NPC related crimes to mutiliations or monetary/equipment fines. I can understand making you sit twiddling your thumbs for a while if you're killing other players but time penalties for harrassing NPCs is moronic.

Question: Is there any reason NOT to just set up a trigger while you're sitting in jail? You can't yell, you can't send tells, you can't amuse yourself by killing prisoner NPCs, you can't spam spells...you're basically just dead weight on the server anyways. There's literally no reason for you to be at the screen, so what's the reason not to set a trigger? Other than being deleted, of course.

This is a decent idea, but it still just doesn't seem to fit. For example, if you murder a city full of children, you shouldn't just lose all your EQ, limbs, and get to walk away.