Steal & Stealth

[mystry]

I feel as though steal should take into account how large an item is in its difficulty.

Stealing coins that people leave in their first line of inventory should be relatively easy.

Stealing Lans's greatsword... not so much.

[Taunya]

I feel as though steal should take into account how large an item is in its difficulty.

Stealing coins that people leave in their first line of inventory should be relatively easy.

Stealing Lans's greatsword... not so much.

It does already I believe.

[phoenixdoll]

I feel as though steal should take into account how large an item is in its difficulty.

Stealing coins that people leave in their first line of inventory should be relatively easy.

Stealing Lans's greatsword... not so much.

It does already I believe.

I think you just can't steal something of a certain size+ at the moment, which is a bit.. eh. What if someone was sleeping in public? SUS but I should be able to rob them of literally their everything if they don't wake up!

I too wish for NPCs to steal coins from PCs especially if low lawfulness metric.

[Taunya]

If they're sleeping in public, 'take' works.

[galaxgal]

My thoughts:

0. Everything Phoenixdoll has said. Thieving is riddled with what are basically newbie traps. The weirdness they describe with stealing, containers, and the 'open inventory' (which is often riddled with junk items no one is realistically open-carrying 24/7). And hide breaking in confusing situations and being defeated by 'spam look'. If anyone should be consulting on the issues with stealth, that is, from a player solicitation perspective, I feel it should be them and/or Aukanaii's former player.

Now my own ideas:

1. NPC interactions! Give thieves something to do when they don't want to annoy other PC's.

-Populate NPC's with a bit of coin or trinkets that can be stolen. Maybe make thieving on NPC's harder the more you do it in a given 'region' to avoid super-exploitative spam or.. something like that, but let people do enough to pool and create a fuss so Reeves have more crimes to investigate.

-At higher Steal levels, certain important NPC's could even have unique objects tucked away in their inventory. Imagine, say,, nicking a limited vanity object like Lysander's favorite mug or an instrument from that Bard in the Bluebird.

-...These are still all real crime on real people, so of course they could still be auto-reported and investigated on.

2. Stealth: One wonky thing is that it's less powerful the busier an area gets, making it counterintuitive to say, blend into parties. We really need some balancing mechanism against this...

3. While possibly out of the scope of this discussion, I would love a "disguise" system to, on a limited basis, allow players to create disposable identities/sdescs or infiltrate places they don't belong in. But maybe covert dualguilding will allow the latter again

[Taunya]

I believe there are already mobs that can steal from you when the law metric is low. I'm not certain if it's coins or also items, but note that you don't have to kill them to take your items back, you can knock them out and 'take' from them without killing them.

I wouldn't mind stealing from NPCs. Steal currently only works while in RP, however. You can't steal from NPCs currently unless another PC is in the room. I'm not sure how easy it would be to populate the NPC populate with coin and loot, either. They're currently pretty static once loaded.

Perhaps something like the woodcutting system or nodes could be used. Instead of stealing from existing NPCs, a chance of a mark showing up in random locations, some with better loot than others. Maybe taking metrics into account. It should not be risk-free to steal from said marks, though. You could be caught and have guards called on you, for example.

[galaxgal]

It should not be risk-free to steal from said marks, though. You could be caught and have guards called on you, for example.

My idea was that bare minimum an NPC mark should report a crime on failure and possibly on a delay after a success, like would happen with normal PC's. Give the Reeves something to chase other than sumptuary violations.

I still like the idea of thieves being able to steal 'exclusive' objects at higher levels, so that there can be objects with more inherent 'rarity' for better thieves. I guess the problem there would be that they're automatic meta evidence of being or associating with a thief, but that could also encourage them to fence or launder those hot items quickly.

[phoenixdoll]

Currently the only NPCs that typically have anything to be stolen from are the NPCs you pay to enter an xblocked room, so the NPCs at the bathhouse for example.

I don't actually mind that there has to be an XPRP ticker to use the steal skill, it's actually the least unfriendly aspect of being a naughty criminal covert type. IRL pickpockets often work in pairs.

Some.. kind of echo that indicates when someone has seen you would be nice -- I don't know if I'm just too low level to get that or what. But I genuinely thought nobody had seen me taking champagne glasses off folk at the reception xD

EDIT: I wanted to say that I love the idea of NPCs popping up with trinkets / gold to steal. A comment I would make is that gold would probably be more useful to steal from NPCs, because trinkets will just be like.. foraging junk. Nobody will want it, it'll go into the pawn shop and nobody will buy it, for essentially no reward for a chance at being fined, having your hand cut off, or hung by the reeves.. Wooo.

[Geras]

because trinkets will just be like.. foraging junk. Nobody will want it, it'll go into the pawn shop and nobody will buy it

Ouch.

[galaxgal]

One thing I am wary of with these requirements like the RPXP ticker is that they are not considering the effectiveness of Stealth and Steal vs. doing anything else in code.

We have a lot of code options that in theory enable players to be real jerkheads, do not feel fair to the victim, and are not stealing. The combat code just works and it lets you break peoples' legs or arms or outright kill them. The arrest code just works and can leave a player stuck in a locked waiting room for IRL days. The most popular and mean magic just works (once you are over the hump of newbie magedom).

Taking a thing from someone,which can be bought back or replaced, has far gentler and far less permanent consequences to the victim than any of the above. In that sense, stealing should just work.