As far as additional characters go, I think that the current system needs to be changed. Currently, medals coalesce under the magnetic eyes of powerful Kings, Dukes and other important players, while most other people are left out of the loop. This leads to situations where a small amount of players will have 20+ medals, where as most others will lack even five. This is not because those few elite players are twenty times more fun or trustworthy or that their roleplaying is twenty times better; it is merely because they enjoy positions that receive a lot of attention, so the decentralised, amateur-run reward system, which is by it's nature prone to a narrow-minded redundancy when issuing awards, single-mindedly caters to them and only to them. This does not lead to a fair spread of medals across players, so many players who would be capable of playing an additional character are under-utilised.
Also, I think that the idea that giving players an additional character would dilute the amount of effort put into each individual character is false, or, at least, it's effects exaggerated. The principal cause for lack of effort put into this game, I think, would most often be the total lack of wars in many areas. It's not that the game is too much of a time burden for most people, it's that there are so many realms where there's a total lack of anything to do, because they lack the most reliable and effective cause for activity, warfare. The lack of warfare has roots in the lack of characters, as in the vast majority of realms there are simply not enough landless characters to make imperialism worth it, nor do they posses enough characters to wage proper war anyway (for one thing, gold is often so abundant as to make the economy of war totally inconsequential, such is the case in Darka, where the dukes supposedly have 50,000 gold saved up -- a bottomless warchest if there ever war one). So, far from reducing the amount of effort put into individual characters, reducing the character restriction would result in a net increase of effort all around.
