[Sawrock]

Except that this puts incredibly undue stress on Guard players to form an airtight patrol schedule, which comes into conflict with a few things I'll be noting later in this post.

It shouldn't. Guards shouldn't always be present. I view what you're saying here, and tell me if I'm wrong, but that's an "Us vs. Them" mentality which is terrible for roleplay. Crimes SHOULD happen. It creates conflict. Now, not all of that conflict will be fun. Some people will be dumb. But people can already be dumb within the laws... so I'd rather have active roleplay instead of casual chatting around the fountain every time I log in, with roleplay going nowhere.

Also, in response to this:

Places like the wilderness, behind houses, alleyways, (most) sewers, etc. are not somewhere you can claim NPC guards to be, unless you have very good reason to say 'my character got this guard to follow him and check this out'.

To which I previously posted...

nd yes, while Cellsvich Square is a big area where there's likely to be one guard, there's almost going to be no roleplay (and thus, fun) in the other parts of Cellsvich, leading to either waiting hours for someone to stumble on you when you're waiting in a housing district, and even then the person can say ((Oh, I'm just OOCly moving to my house.))