Shattered Kingdoms

At Alshain's request, I am transplanting my original post to its own thread, for dedicated discussion.

I despise the jail system at its current implementation. It's boring, it inhibits constructive interaction between the lawmakers and the lawbreakers, and worst of all, it's unimaginitive. It offers nothing to the game except an extra moment to swear at the screen, when you realize you've been disabled from playing the game for multiple hours. That is, at its best, what jail time is - the game forcing you to not play the game, yet still be logged in.

Personally, I have no desire to see jail continue in its current manifestation. Even if a jail sentence is only an hour long, that's an hour of absolute [REDACTED]. For that reason, I'm still not fond of this idea.

At best, the system currently expresses the attitudes of each kingdom through severity of jail time, and the rather binary option of whether it executes its prisoners.

My vision for the solution is a quest system. Upon capture, you are required to do work for your captors. The work you do is unique to each nation, and contributes to the wealth of that nation. The amount of work is dependent on the severity of the crime. The locale of work would be no-transport, and well-guarded. The most severe crimes would, of course, be punished with execution, but the nature of that execution would vary depend on the nation. The fate of your equipment would also change.

Here are two examples of what I envision.

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.

It's a rough sketch, but such a system would enable significantly more creativity and interaction. A leader could come visit his prisoners, and if he felt the desire, relieve them from their work, or even torture them, if so inclined. It enables the flavor and attitude of each kingdom to be expressed.

It allows some choice on the prisoner's part, too. If they feel morally opposed to the work (the North's work might be very evil, or their hatred of the nation might be too great to allow such contribution), they can commit suicide, either by escaping, or by trying to attack a guard.

I know it's a lot to ask, but I'm not a fan of dreaming small.

I saw the word 'quest' and immediately walked out of the room. Now that I'm back, I can politely say, 'never ever under any circumstances try to force me to do any sort of quest for any reason.'

I love it.

Give a choice: serve your time sitting in a room where at present you can't even RP with other jailed folks *restrains QQ* OR go forth and work off your debt, doing something worthwhile.

While we're at it, for either one - if at some point you do something aggressive, you are hauled off to do the rest of your time in a hood somewhere. Let the nonaggressive folks at least spend their jail time with a CHANCE of interacting.

It gives an opportunity for this aspect of the game to be....a game, instead of a time-out-go-sit-silently-in-the-corner in your free time.

So instead of sitting idle in prison where I can at least send tells, spam sneak/hide/disguise and cruise the internet to waste away my time...you want me to physically type in the same commands repeatedly while I mechanically repeat the same actions over and over again?

You realize you're asking to make jail time a grinding exercise that's just as boring as leveling. I HATE LEVELING AND YOU'RE ASKING ME TO LEVEL IN PRISON WITHOUT ANY BENEFIT.

Not only are you asking me to do this absolutely boring [REDACTED] thing, but I'm going to improve my enemy's economy with it? No. It is my understanding that if I refuse to work, I never get out of jail? No.

While the intentions are good, I would hate this with a passion that is unholy. I'd rather spend my 148 days rotting than actively helping my enemies and mindlessly grinding away bars of iron or whatever.

If you don't want to work, you can always commit suicide. That's not an option in the current system.

I'm not envisioning significant amounts of work. At most, I would cap it at 20-25 minutes of labor. If your crimes exceed that, you get executed, or suffer some other creative higher punishment. Hell, if you really wanted, you could even make it a choice - spend a longer time in jail (a time which should be significantly more reasonable than the current system), or reduce your sentence by working.

Eww.

This seems like too big of a change to ever be implemented. Personally I don't like it either.

I like the idea. It sure needs a lot of tweaking and messing around with, but I like it nonetheless. Perhaps have reduced sentence if you work in the mines or what have you, or if you want you rot in prison.



or something like that. Although it would need a lot of work from both D and the builders.

Or cut jail time in half. :/

Reposted from the other thread:

I saw a suggestion about losing XP instead of doing jail time, but that was shot down because it would be too powerful. I also saw something about suiciding out of jail. What if suiciding in jail got your sentence nullified by caused a major loss of XP? This way it would completely be the jailed person's decision on whether or not to lose the XP. Just randomly throwing this out as an idea. Although using suicide as an example leaves a particularly bad taste right now...

I'm not suggesting losing XP for a jailbreak. I'm suggesting that if you hang yourself in jail, your crimes would be cancelled but you'd lose XP. The amount of XP lost would be based on time left to serve and it would be major. As a preliminary ballpark figure, maybe 1 level per 10 days served. Perhaps no one would use it, but the option would be available.