Fines used to have a little more teeth back when you got all your taxes in bonds. You can't use the bank while you have outstanding fines. So you used to have to pay your fines before you could cash your bonds and use gold for anything at all. People did not used to be able to choose to not pay a fine unless they were also willing to live without gold. (Or were willing to swap realms to avoid the fine, but then you lose all your bonds anyway.)
The reason that you can't slap additional fines down on people who already have a fine is that you would be basically cutting off all of their access to gold, essentially preventing them from playing the game. (At least this is the reasoning that I heard many, many years ago about it.) If you kept slapping fines on someone, I wonder if that might be considered harassment. It would probably depend on the situation, I guess.
Yea, pretty sure I heard that argument too. But I still disagree with it as I did then. Fines don't prevent you from playing the game, they prevent you from doing certain actions in your realm. This is not harsh. Slapping a 5000 gold fine? Target can't do some actions for some time in the realm. That's all. If he wanted, he could have banned the person instead, in which case: target can't do much actions for very long in the realm, and then can't do any actions in the realm, being forcefully removed from it.
As banishment is an option, and one that is not very restricted, then why have more restrictions on a softer punishment?
As a side note, though, can fines be removed if the judge gets replaced or changes his mind? This would be the only issue I could see with large fines.
