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Emulation of Real-Life Law Enforcement
It is important that methods be provided to punish offensive and abusive players in a way that really matters. Although Origin gamemasters do have the ability to jail and even ban players, they cannot intervene in every case, due to their limited numbers and their other responsibilities. Furthermore, it is often difficult for a third party to determine which side might have the moral high ground in a dispute -- it is better to formalize this in a way which can be controlled by the players.
In real life, we don't like having just anyone kill someone else, even if there was a really good reason, because that leads to Chaos. So we have governments, armies, and police, who perform these functions in an orderly fashion. These bodies are answerable to the populace if they get out of hand, but are able to operate on their own initiative without being penalized, as long as their behavior is reasonable. Emulating this model is an important goal of a player-run justice system.
Town Governments and Guards
The simplest and most obvious implementation of such a system would be to have elected town governments, based on a variant of the guild system, which could appoint a certain number of guards as a police force. These guards would be empowered to enact Justice, under various restrictions. The regions of jurisdiction would need to be large enough to cover most of the map, at least in Britannia. Fortunately, there are enough towns (and Britannia is small enough) that this is conceivable.
In order to limit abuse and prevent this system from becoming an easy way to harass people, limits would be needed. At first, a limit of perhaps one jailing per day per government would make sense -- allowing the guards to stop or slow one particularly bad offender would be a huge improvement over zero. The guards would be able to jail a character regardless of criminal or murderer status, since the main issues with the existing system revolve around the fact that it cannot detect all cases where Justice is needed. A system should be enacted to track the number of times a character has been jailed, and increase the sentence exponentially according to the miscreant's history in that town. Someone who has been jailed for the first time might get out in a minute or two. Someone on their tenth offense might be in for the long haul.
Part of this system has to recognize that some governments will be corrupt and will have enough support from those who benefit from the corruption to stay in power despite a democratic election process. Because of this, it will be necessary to allow independent tracking of "jailings" so that someone who was, in effect, a political prisoner of the corrupt government in Trinsic can move to the relative comforts of Yew without having a history of false accusations following them. At the same time, this system would enable an establishment to enact effective restrictions against harassment, forcing the harassers to move elsewhere.
Governing Towns
I suspect that there are a good number of players who would quite enjoy the chance to govern one of the existing towns of Britannia. Obviously their governance would be limited, and they probably couldn't be accorded the title "mayor". But the elected leader of the town could control tax rates, guard appointments, town combat rules, and other facets of town life that have significant impact, and this would be an exciting goal for the politically-inclined among the playerbase.
This essay is still being developed.
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