@faraday Interestingly enough... A Song of Ice and Fire has done nicely with several "Main Character" deaths. It may not be your cup of tea (I honestly don't know), and it's definitely gotten "softer" on permadeath (silly Red God), but I think it's a very interesting example of a novel where the (arguably) main characters die with some regularity.
@Arkandel and @Alamias I think the only possible excuse for a telenuke is if the target player is actively (OOCly) avoiding conflict RP. Otherwise, I think that the attacker's player should contact Staff, have a GM contact the target player (if Staff decides that there's valid reasons for the attack, not like the BS "never met before" telenuke you mentioned), and arrange a scene.
Also, I agree with you on "Big Enemies =/= Hardcore." While I sometimes do enjoy a little competition with the PCs while I'm GMing, I don't consider it a win if I kill (any of) them--I consider it a win if I force them to use every IC trick and tactic they know, and force them to make hard IC choices (which may include retreating, surrendering, using one of their own as bait, or whatever).
On the case of an economic system, @Ganymede and @WTFE (I quite agree with your list, by the way), it sounds like the idea economic system would:
- Require no more than 1-2 inputs every 24 hours at most.
- Be based more on character stats than player actions/time.
- Have some element of risk/reward, some element of character/player choice, and some element of randomness.
- Only be a way to get extra money, not the primary way to get money.
I would suggest something like: choose which type of "job" you want to do that day from a menu list (con job, card games, day trading, smuggling, teaching, etc), choose how risky you want it to be (con job: shell game for pennies, 3-card-monte for dollars, reselling a "diamond" ring for a couple hundred), roll some virtual dice based on the appropriate skill (Deception in this case), see if you gain money or lose a little (based on how well you rolled, your skill, and how much risk you took), your "job" goes on cooldown for 24 hours.
So, you absolutely could just have a timer set up so that at 9PM every day, you went in and took the easiest, least risky job for your best skill and did it... and you've got the boring option for minimal payout every day, but at least you're getting some money--heck the system could give you that option every 24 hours if you didn't want the player to have to type in the commands/forget, then everyone would get a default amount of money if they didn't want to risk anything else.
Or, you could go in every day, decide how much you wanted to risk based on what you needed and when, and gamble a bit. There probably wouldn't be any consequences beyond losing a bit of cash, but maybe if you rolled really poorly (or well), a GM could be notified and could bring it up in your future RP (or post about it on an appropriate board, if it was exceptionally spectacular).