[Wids]

Like Carcass said, Thay is a nasty place and should be portrayed as a nasty place. Don't worry about offending a few delicate players; the majority of players can be surprisingly resilient, some of them even to the point of being masochistic.

The various domains of the Demiplane of Dread are also very unpleasant settings to find oneself in; I also used to play on the Prisoners of the Mist server and yes, that server can be downright sadistic to the players. And yet they're boasting over 30 players every night. And this is the server where I saw several public executions of player-characters, another character had his hand cut off over a theft, yet another character was permanently turned to stone for angering Count Strahd von Zarovich (and his statue is still standing along the road to Dvergeheim and Krofburg), and one of my own characters was tortured horribly and repeatedly, then dumped in a field and left for dead after trying to spring another character out of Vallaki's Citadel. Vicious punishments are frequent on the Ravenloft server, and plenty of players have enough spine to chin up and roll with them. Surely the playerbase on this server can't be much different. So please don't assume that every player is a bleating weakling just because two or three of them are bleating weaklings who happen to bleat very loudly.

Think of it as a way of weeding out the weak. If a character is subjected to a punishment which he or she rightly deserves according to the setting, but the player throws a screaming tantrum about it, then the DM team learns that that player isn't a solid roleplayer (but is instead a player who expects special treatment merely for playing on this server) and shouldn't be counted on for events which call for solid roleplayers. On the other hand, most people--including the DMs--tend to like a good sport, so the player who chins up and soldiers through his or her character's public torturing or whatever will probably score high marks with the DMs, who in turn may reward that steadfast spirit with rare roleplay opportunities or other rewards.

And what's more, this server actually does have a system for rewarding players who consign their characters to permadeath (namely, giving their next characters a leg up with Experience or Levels). PotM doesn't, yet players over there still relinquish their characters to permadeath quite often. It's just part of the game, only this server actually offers compensation prizes for shuffling off the mortal coil. That tends to lessen the sting of losing a beloved character a bit.

And like Githzerai Monk said, just because enslavement and execution are the two most typically invoked punishments in Thay doesn't mean that those are the only two punishments which the Red Wizards can hand out. Githzerai's idea of trial by combat certainly wouldn't be beyond a Red Wizard's judgement (particularly if that Red Wizard happened to be a fan of blood sports), and Carcass did a good turn with Ihsahn when Meshin's first character tried to steal from Tristella's coinpurse; being the Red Wizard on the ground at the time, and knowing that Tristella is pretty wicked with a whip, Ihsahn adapted his judgement to the situation and ordered that Tristella would drag her own would-be pickpocket into one of Bezantur's pits and give him a public flogging. That was pretty cool, and it nicely demonstrated how flexible Red Wizards can be with their sentences. :)

So I don't think that there's any good reason to handle the players with kid gloves. If their character does something that deserves a smack with the wiffle bat, smack them with the wiffle bat. The players might just thank you for it, perverse lot that we are. And if a player wails and screeches and runs away from the server after his/her character gets smacked with the wiffle bat, let them run. In my experience, those players tend to ruin the server for everyone else, and they tend to be more trouble than they're worth anyway.