It's not irrelevant. The bounty board's primary intent is not for wounds received in battle. While it is reasonably activated should someone be wounded in battle, that is not the reason people would place gold on the bounty board.
I know that we've had this discussion before, probably on the old DList. The purpose of the bounty board and assassination is NOT to remove people from positions. If you are using it primarily for that purpose, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. Assassinations are intended to wound characters, and knock them out for varying amounts of time. For this purpose, it works. but it is *not* a "Get him out of office" option. If you want to increase the chance that it does so, then that's a different feature request, which I feel pretty confident that Tom will reject.
The reason infils so rarely knock councilors out of office is complicated:
First, because there are relatively few assassinations, as compared to battle or preaching wounds. Both of which , by the way, I have seen remove characters from duchies, government offices, and region lordships, all in the past three to four months.
Second, some continents, notably Atamara, have often had negotiated "No councilor attacks" treaties. And I've seen this on other islands as well. Councilors often to do not march with the army on fight on the front lines, and often have large troops of men. Many realms also take a dim view of allowing assassins to operate out of their realm. (With notable exceptions like Talerium and Perdan.) That makes councilors harder to attack, and harder to successfully attack. Thus, council level assassinations that remove from office would have to be one of the rarest events you can find.
Third, successful infiltrator assaults depend on many factors, such as infiltration skills, sword skills, and just plain dumb luck. No, the actual equation for determining how wounded you are from an infiltrator attack is not the exact same as the equation for wounds from combat or preaching. But once the actual wound level has been determined, all wounds proceed from there down the same path to recovery.
Also, it IS relevant if the current code base makes it difficult or nigh impossible for infiltrator wounds to actually result in the loss of positions.
I see what you're getting at. But it does not.
It is quite possible that this is true, and that infiltrator wounding code is different than battle wounding code. One may be more likely to lead to loss of a position than another.
It is not.
This could be done for a variety of reasons. Battles are voluntary choices by players, while infiltrators can attack them against their will. Putting in place a modifier so that other players can't stop you from playing "as long" may be something in the code.
There is no such modifier. Once the actual severity of the wound has been determined, then the recovery is handled by common code that doesn't consider the source of the wound. In fact, the source of a wound is not even tracked.
In addition, your statement also doesn't address the core concept in my request that a bounty can be filled without a player losing their position.
That's because the bounty board is not intended to be a "knock these people out of office" board. It is quite possible that people on the bounty board do not even hold a position. You can put someone's name on there, and hope that they will eventually lose their office over it. But if that's what you want, then you take the chance that it just won't happen, and all your money will be wasted.