Shattered Kingdoms

I empathize with Trag on this topic. The game needs villains that are willing to break laws, and also needs heroes that are willing to break laws (in evil kingdoms). It's not only the jail system, but the entire law system that is both very easily twinked around and yet at the same time extremely punishing to players who decide to break those laws for their characters' RP.

A single high murder or too many crimes means that you're going to be banished, and banishment means never entering the entire kingdom again without bounty NPCs being hot on your trail the entire time, which of course is a slippery slope that incurs only more crimes at an exponential rate: The more bounty NPCs you fight, the more you get reported and the more bounty NPCs you spawn, and it doesn't take long to get to the 3 bounty NPC per room quota. Even getting jailed and serving your sentence doesn't matter as a banished character, as bounty NPCs still spawn very reliably even for banished characters that have no crimes.

At the moment, there are only two main ways around this fate if you're playing a character who brings conflict in the form of PK. One is to twink the legal system so that you can manage to jloot people without the risk of banishment. This is actually obscenely easier, ironically, if your targets are tribunal members, because attempted murder/attempted mugging aren't reportable against trib members. Tolene spam stunning the HF of Alshain in the middle of Exile over a 3 minute timespan so she could junkloot her EQ in front of her is one example of this and Surrit stun-full looting Ghavorale in the middle of a crowded Nerinan square is another. Incidentally, the change to the poison spell which puts it on the fast affects system and also makes it inflict true damage is another twink around the "high-murder" banishment line. All of these tactics are bad, IMO, because they involve the sort of gameplay twinkery that would make any normal player want to just quit the game if they were used against them. The fact that joining a tribunal actually makes you -less- protected by the law code is the sort of logic that makes me want to wear my pants on my head.

The only other feasible way to avoid the inevitable deluge of 3 bounty NPCs per room spawns is to consistently empty the coffers of all of the kingdoms you are banished in. This is an exercise in frustration for everyone involved, and the fact that it's even an option is appalling, but it's still a more desirable option than trying to participate in tribunal PvP with auto spawning NPCs giving the defender an unbelievably huge advantage.



I have a solution against this that is two-fold. First, revert back to the law code where any crime at all allowed you to be banished, and make it so that crimes against trib members are reportable: But make it very clear from an IMM perspective that a trib leader who attacks people only to banish them for self-defense will be stripped of his leadership and ejected from the trib with an oathbreaker flag, and encourage people to log and report such events. Leaders who overstep their bounds should be the exception to the rule, not the rule itself. Making all crimes banishable removes the twinkish aspect of committing murder without "really" committing murder, and getting off scot-free. In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing some sort of delayed timer that allows a PC to be banished up to an IRL day after they've served time for their crimes just to prevent the stun/loot/serve-time-before-the-trib-leader-logs-on tactic, although that would certainly require extra coding that isn't as essential.

Part two of my solution is just as important, however; make bounty NPCs spawn based off of a fast-affects based timer connected to the CHARACTER who spawns them with a much lower cap than it currently is at: You should only be able to spawn one bounty NPC per person at a time, and it should be limited to one per minute per person, or one per thirty seconds per person. That way we can also put bounty NPCs back to their original types so that they are thematic again and more than just a roadbloack which serves no purpose other than to slow down the attackers while dying: Taslamars should be brought back to paladins, the Empire's back to the hellions, etc etc. The reason they were converted to the harmless sissies they are now is on account of the fact that they could spawn en masse and totally wipe an entire party without any PC interaction.

I think the bigger problem with jail is the fact that bounty NPCs artificially inflate your crime list to an absurd degree, and also make it more likely for you to get caught in general.

I really like the idea of having bounty NPCs spawn on a timer. The real purpose of bounty NPCs, in my opinion, is to inform tribunal members of the presence and location of a criminal. That should be the disadvantage of a criminal moving around a kingdom, rather than having to face speed bump after speed bump.

I like this idea, but lets talk about twinkery on this sort of thing, too.

I'm a major criminal. I have learned how often bounty NPCs will spawn on me so I enter one part of the kingdom and get a bounty NPC. I kill that NPC quickly, then I gate to a completely different part of the kingdom and wreck faces. The defending tribunal, meanwhile, is going to travel quickly to the first location I spawned bounty NPCs, not realizing that this was all a ruse and I won't actually be there. Is this D-bag twinkery, or good tactics?

I don't see that as twinkery at all, but just intelligent. Besides, even at a heavily reduced rate of bounty NPC spawning (one per 30 seconds to a minute) doesn't leave you that much time at all to play musical chairs as you'll still have your presence noted pretty quickly wherever you travel. For example, it takes 10 seconds just to cast gate, so unless you already have a target in mind at the other location, you aren't going to be able to get much done in that timeframe.

This is getting a bit off the topic of exorbitant jail sentences, but I agree the bounty system could be tweaked as well.

Bounty could be an actual command usable by tribunal leaders instead of an automatic function of the game. So, for instance, if there were a criminal who was already banished from your land, you could set a bounty on him with bounty <name> <amount> where the name is the criminal and the amount is the funds to be deducted from the tribunal accounts to post the bounty. The amount will determine the strength of the NPCs that pursue the criminal.

In all cases the frequency of bounty NPC appearance could be reduced from what it is. But, if you have a massive bounty set on you (the maximum could be 100 obsidian, I suppose) you may end up with armed groups that show up, like maybe a swashbuckler, mercenary, rogue group armed with no-save tanso weapons and appropriate no-save armor (how annoying would that be?). If you have a tiny bounty (minimum 10 obsidian) you end up with one sissy NPC like you get now if you just spawn one. This would be a one-time deduction from the tribunal accounts (though a bounty could later be increased by paying a whole new bounty), and bounty NPCs would not report positions of enemies. They would just attack them and try to bring them in. The bounty would persist as long as the criminal in question remains an outlaw. If he is ever pardoned or serves out his entire sentence, the bounty is removed.

Until someone who is already banished has a bounty set on him, there will be no bounty NPCs coming for him. Only the guards will pursue him (and report positions). The number of armed wandering guard NPCs in the wilderness could be increased (along with guards that march standard routes, such as along roads), and wandering guard NPCs could inform other wandering guard NPCs where a criminal has been seen (ie, set the other wandering guards to hunt down the outlaw starting from where they are presently). Just a handful of NPCs in each kingdom would suffice.

But all of this does nothing to address the issue of jail time (which may or may not need to be addressed).

Interesting...

I like styles post there on bounty system. Would only tweak it to have maximums set per status level. Though most of the major players will most certainly be GM, would suck to have a bounty put on you of 100 obsidian for at a mentor status.

How about a deathmark? It works like a quest that starts from a judge in the country that has a deathmark set on the person. If the person enters the country a player that has received the quest can kill the marked person and receive a reward (monnetary or otherwise). Make it so the person receiving the deathmark quest has diminishing returns for the same deathmark. Also a murder related to a deathmark could be legal which may be a big no no. Deathmarks could be limited to the big enemies of a country that maybe have a long list of crimes.

Deathmark will never come back, according to D.

Whatever system is implemented, it needs to be automated. If you make it by a leaders hand, you run into the problem of leaders who are not around often or who are on at odd hours and the law breakers just run a muck around those times they are not around. It would make it super discouraging to be in a tribunal in that case. I say, if you break the law so much that you wind up with that much time then you should be prepared to deal with being in jail or have your law breaking buddies bust you out. That simple. Just my two cents.