Chapter 8.7 Bounty Hunting

Bounty Hunting
Players can attempt bounty hunting by collecting wanted posters. Wanted posters are self replicating, you can take as many copies as you want without the posting disappearing. This is important to understand since you will need to burn the poster each attempt to enter PVP against a player. With bounty hunting, you must be stronger and more skillful than the player or NPC you are trying to take in. Warding protections are negated if a bounty hunting poster with your identity on it, (including your aliases,) is activated near you.

How to Use a Wanted Poster
Using a Wanted Poster will burn it, and the flames from the pages will fall to the floor and radiate outwards in a limited radius. If the wanted person is in the radius, the flames will radiate to the wanted player or NPC, and they will now be marked. However, this activates PVP with any player or NPC in the area if they choose to fight. This allows people who are siding with the criminal or bounty hunter to join in, or merely ignore it and allow the two to duke it out. Any other player attacking you will be marked as an enemy after their first strike against you. Players who are supporting you will have friendly fire turned off.

Switching Sides
Exiting the affected PVP radius, and re-entering it will reset choices if players accidentally attacked the wrong person, or if they want to change sides. Only the player who activated the wanted poster can choose to collect the unconscious player, or fully eliminate the player if the wanted status is Wanted Dead or Alive, or Wanted Dead.

Heading to the Prison Controller
By tying up the player, and putting them in your possession (carrying, or on your mount or a wagon pulled by your mount, you will gain a compass UI). If more than one controller wants the player turned in, multiple icons will appear on your map, and the compass will point to the closest one.

Bounty Hunting in a Party
Activating a wanted poster will enable all party members to attack the wanted person automatically. Players would need to leave the party if and exit the PVP zone and re-enter if they want to change sides. Only the player who first executed the wanted poster can interact with a captured player or NPC, but party members can assist in the take down.

Bounty Stealing
However, crime skills can activate a wanted poster and overlap a current bounty hunting. This is useful for criminals trying to retrieve a bounty, or a greedy bounty hunter that really wants to take someone in themselves.

Being Collected by a Wanted Poster
While in a collected state, you can log off, but your player will not revert to a firefly state, you will remain fallen. While collected, the item tying you up will decay over time. If the player that captured you goes inactive, or stops maintaining your ties, you can break free. The ties will show a runic symbol, indicating a wanted poster link to interactivity. If you are logged off, and the ties break, you can continue to revert to a firefly state automatically.

Captured in a Firefly State
Players can use wanted posters on players in their logged off firefly state. This will allow them to capture you in a lantern. The same tied-up rules apply, where runic symbols indicate you were captured due to a wanted poster, and the lantern will need to be maintained to keep you in it.

Wanted Poster Timeout
If you cannot get a captured bounty to a prison in time, the wanted poster's affect will time out. The prisoner can break free, and run for it.

Dropping Off Criminals
You can drop off a criminal at a jail/prison controller that wants them. It needs to match up with your wanted poster for it to be complete. This will delete the same posters still up on bulletin boards and other areas in the open world. It will mark other player's in their inventory and core menu as crossed off, and they can delete them from there. Or you can drop off a player or NPC at a location and have authorities pick them up, or you can meet them somewhere and the players who created the posters can mark it complete then.

Rewards
Rewards are granted automatically, only if you have the wanted poster in your inventory. It will take up that slot. If you ran out of room in your inventory, or set all rewards to be picked up at a spitbox, you will need to go to a spitbox to obtain the item(s). You can delete any rewards you don't want from the spitbox. Completing bounties will add to your bounty and quest legend. There will be reward cooldown timers for bounties, to avoid fake bounty hunting.

Bounty Hunting Strategies
Make sure that the player or NPC you are targeting is within radius bounds. You will see this radius when you select the wanted poster. Only you will see this radius, but others will see it once activated. This means to would be a bad idea to go straight into a thieves guild or shadow cult and activate a bounty. You could be overpowered. It may be a good idea to see if you can catch the criminal alone.

Other Considerations
Other criminals can use riftcraft to break these to free other criminals, and other bounty hunters may try to pay you off for your catch. In PVP worlds, other bounty hunters may try to attack you, and retrieve the criminal to collect the bounty. So keep the distance of the drop off location in mind, and keep your captive in sight at all times.

Attempting to Free a Bounty
Criminals who try to free your bounty, are able to be attacked and pursued, but they can attack you as well. This will time out if attacks no longer land in the case the player or NPC got away. Attempting to free a criminal will leave riftmist (crime trail) at the attempt point, even for a bounty hunter who changes their mind. If the criminal breaks free, you can attack them within a time window, and if they escape for too long it will time out and you will need to burn another wanted poster to attack them again. (Unless it is a PVP world and they are unprotected.)

Turning in a Criminal with No Wanted Poster and Other Turn In Options
You can drop them off at the wanted poster's indicated spot for it to auto complete (you will obtain the reward via a spitbox). Or you can contact authorities to pick them up at a location, and the people who created the posters can mark it as complete once they drop them off to the jail/prison themselves. If you don't have a wanted poster, and drop off a criminal at a jail, the wanted posters will still be marked as complete after they served their time. (More about justice and forgiveness in the next chapter.)

PVP Nuances
In PVP worlds, wanted posters are not needed to activate PVP in unclaimed, and unprotected land. Have the wanted poster in your inventory, attack the player, and capture them. You will still need to activate a Wanted Poster to break through any warding set in a PVP world. For example, a settlement may be set as a safe haven, or the criminal is walking around in unclaimed land with a protection lantern, but you can still collect wanted players or NPC in either case using a wanted poster. Wanted posters will break all applied protections.

NPC Infamy
If you gain high enough infamy with some groups of NPC, you will be bounty hunted by them. Some NPC work for the deity of justice, and get direct information from the deity themselves. Others will just be pissed by actions you have taken. They will not be satisfied until due justice has been served. Dying from them and resurrecting won't count as justice, but it will offer a cool down affect. Bounty hunter NPC that work for the justice deity be granted wanted posters that will appear in their inventory. But lead by the deity, so they don't need to burn the wanted poster to find you. Instead they will have magic skills that draw the power from the wanted poster itself. This means, they can continue pursuing you if they found you. Their strength will scale based on your criminal legend and current wanted level. This also means, if you have not been caught before, and no players have identified you enough to create a wanted poster, you're going to want to retrieve the wanted posters from these NPC and destroy them before another player finds it and identifies you as wanted.

NPC Witnesses
NPCs will post wanted posters at allowed locations if they witness a crime against one of their own, or if the player who hired them were killed, or if an NPC witnessed a crime on their hired property. Magic using NPCs may conjure vengeful spirits that may pursue you as well. However, If you change your outfit, hair, and eyes or cover these features up with different items like hoods, NPC will not recognize you. Witness NPC will run and scream if they recognize you from a murderous crime, or they may fight you on the spot.