From my perspective after returning Tibia 1,5 year ago after 8 years of not playing:
First of all death penalties were strongly reduced since Tibia 7.6 (at least on regular open-pvp worlds, dunno about retro ones). You have option for additional blessing (Twist of fate), which allows you to keep all the regular blessings while killed in pvp and also if the level difference is big, the penalty is further reducted up to 80%.
Random pking by higher lvl players and comming after you happens rarely - happened to me once since I returned and I managed to escape.
Provoking people to attack skulled players and then trying to kill him is common, so you should be careful with this, unless someone attacks you, then, with no pz-lock, the risk is mitigated.
If someone messes with your spawn (enter your hunting spot, remove letter ect) or in any other and you open a skull it is likely some higher lvl might come after you. They might think you're random pker, even if you're right.
Hunting people and making them pay usually doesn't happen, unless you mess with dominando guild. You're obligated to respect the dominando rules to avoid troubles - leave spawn when asked by them, not to participate in certain bosses (Orshabaal, Ferumbras and more). Read the forum post of your server of choice to learn about their rules or contact them in game.
Other common, malicious practices: offering hunting together in a spot where access is required and trying to make you enable "red mode" of pvp and use fire bomb rune. Scammers doing this will die with some low lvl characters on the fire bomb, resulting in you getting black/red skull and kill you (all your eq will be lost to killers). Learn how pvp options work and never, ever use "red mode".
Killing people by Henricus (INQ blessing) hoping you don't wear AoL. Always keep AoL or two in your backpack and wear one immediately after you died and lost blessings. Get blessings, including twist of fate, as soon as you can afford them.
While this might look scary, if you stick to some basic rules, like those I mentioned, and you can live with the fact that some pvp-related death might occasionaly happen, you should be good to go on open-pvp server. I haven't played on retro-pvp, but in a past pvp options were less friendly and not sure if death penalty reduction in pvp applies to retro worlds, so I'd rather suggest to go with regular open-pvp.
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