Days, Real days or game days?
If you have Pking, then it is logical to assume that a Pker would run the risk of coming afoul of the law. Prison would be the most logical choice, but instead of being just an inescapable cell, let?s say it is a road crew \"chain gang\" or a Mine or a quarry where one does \"hard labor\". The harder you work, the shorter the time is you spend in Jail.
Just having a period of days to wait through game or otherwise means that the player can just go to one of their other characters and play that one until the time expires that is not really a punishment, just a good reason to develop another character. Instead you want that player to have to attend the misery of his character, thus instead of a sentence of time a sentence of an amount of labor ? in the case of a mine he/she must mine out X amount of iron ore. In the quarry, they must move X amount of stone ? each crime would carry with it a different amount of material. Let?s say the game is averaged at 3 minutes of mining per lump of iron ore. Thus for theft you want the player out of game for 30 minutes you would have him mine 10 iron ores. Say for murder you want him out of game for 2 hours that comes to 40 ores.
Thus the player gets to commiserate with his character and reflect on what s/he did and no matter how long they log out that character the work remains to be done ? therefore they can decide if they want to take the fast way, working hard and meeting their quota, or the long way, working a few minutes each day until they worked off their sentence.
Add a bit of interest. Let?s say that if the player just keeps his character swinging the pick without moving the character the length of time (average) to get an ore is 5 minutes. But if he moves around, picking new locations (thus having to stay with the character instead of going to do something else like watch TV) the time is reduced to 2-3 minutes on average of finding an ore.
Pking should not be strictly considered murder. I assume that the game can pretty much determine who initiated the fight, thus even if the Pker looses he still gets to go to jail while the person who defends themselves get no sentence for what is self defense. We can strike up the knowledge of crime as being a stain upon the character placed there by the Gods or something along those lines. Instead of needing investigation, witnesses, detectives, trial, etc. After all there is magic in the realm, it is easy to assume that some great and powerful magic makes it clear to all who commits a crime.