It has always seemed odd, unrealistic stupid and un-rpish to me that in many games enemies were a resource of power rather than a problem, I believe this can be avoided by doing three simple things.
First and most obvious is a high punishment for dying, if the Death Realm is painful enough and takes enough time to get out of (preferably RL days), it might be enough.
Second is Making combat give you very little in terms money when compared to crafting, and very little of combat experience when compared to sparring or training (with the time the deaths will take taken into acount).
Third, and most important is making it combat extremly risky, this is best done by making even the most resilient of warriors go down after three, at most four hits (this should probably be reserved for Krans and Ynwns), and making normal people go down after one or two, and make the chance to hit slim, this way, with a little bit of bad luck an experienced swordsman can be brought down by an untrained newcomer (this should also discourage constant challengeing of the newcomers, since even the most experienced of warriors should have a, say 20% chance of losing instead of the 0.0000001% chance most games have between even short intervals of experience).
But won\'t this make ranged combat overpowered? make it so that most objects launched by various bows and crossbows often miss and even more often can be absorbed by even light armors, and make it so that spells usually either miss, backfire or are resisted.
My third point in short: have combat consist of mostly dodging/absorbing blows with your armor/parrying/resisting spells/missing, but make it so that a few hits can take down even very resilient krans or ynwns, making combat depend a Great bit on luck thus making it so that no one can fight safely even against a much weaker opponent.
If we do all this, combat will be so risky and unrewarding that people will try to avoid it most of the time, making the stalacite much more realistic and in my opinion rp friendly.
