Thievery should be more prominent than in IE games

[draft1983]

Maybe if you steal unique items they can have bounty hunters after you like in skyrim? a group of them but only 1 time for each theft and its totally random when they attack so you cant quicksave in preperation....

[IEfan]

Hell, you could toggle a quest this way. Consider that every NPC has a check value. You try to rob from a rich-looking but shady person who you can't speak with as the guards don't allow to (could be assasination attempt for all he knows). The only way naturally to pickpocket is to do it in the market with lots of commoners around. He catches your hand/arm when you try to pickpocket him (due to his very high perceptional skills, related to his career), bemusing whether he should cut your hands here and now or send you to the judge/jail. If you have high ability of convincing, eg speech, good weapons/armours, high level, good persuasion/intimidation skill (though i really hated these in NWN as they took away from dialogue/took attention to the glaring fact of obvious functions of dialogue choices (and no grey shades)), etc etc... You can try to spark a conversation with him/make an impression on him and convince him that you and your group could be of use for him. Depending on above mentioned parameters, he might consider yourself as useful (not as a thief really but perhaps as a muscle (due to party); you can also succeed in pick pocket but right away he surrounds you and suspects you & inspects you, once again to his great alertness) and invites you to his villa, where you would could become his right-hand / could be PC's one of the really few entries to the hidden underworld and politics of it (when can be hard to to enter without losing your life).

 

To add on above consequence scenarios: you try to rob a house at night, the man/wife and a child/children wake up on it. Decide if you want to go to jail or hurt the parents in front of the children (or try to leave the house asap somehow).

Have it that somebody could see you from eg opposite house (dice/luck based?) or if anybody in the streets saw you walking at night in that area/close to the house/out from the house.

Edited September 21, 2012 by IEfan

[Rabain]

Everything that is suggested can sound kind of silly when you think about it. For example someone suggested sneaking ahead and picking the potions off the bad guys before you fight them. Well if I was a bad guy standing around waiting for someone to come along I would have one hand on my potion of awesomesauce in anticipation of the fight etc. If I was a merchant and there were two people in my store and 5 minutes after they leave I find something missing I'm going to report both of you to the guards and summon them immediately if either of you set foot in my store again.

 

Realworld pickpockets don't start by pickpocketing babies and then work up to billionaires, they start out as bagmen who get handed the goods when someone with more experience picks it and they hand off to someone else. Some never get further than picking pockets in the street themselves, they never work up to burglary or whatever.

 

Unfortunately in games you very rarely have to worry about the consequences unless they are dramatically over the top (like in BG where the entire town goes hostile). If you are indoors and someone sees you loot, you kill them, take everything anyway and forget about it.

 

This is where systems like Karma can help, they can temper over the top behaviour (killing and looting everything) by providing a negative drawback somewhere else in the game. You kill a merchant and loot his store, you kill a whole row of npcs in their homes and loot them, later you find other merchants have acquired super unlockable locks because you were greedy and they became over protective or civilians have formed a neighbourhood watch and you get beaten up and all your stuff is taken.

[Rostere]

Although I like a stealing feature in a RPG I think it should has some obvious limits.

 

- You should not be able to steal objects someone is clearly using at the moment of the theft. Stealing the pike out of his hand or the armor he is wearing from a guardsman is, in my eyes, just ridiculous!

 

- It should be logical which items are stealable.

For example:

-- Stealing a coin purse out of a pocket / cutting it off from a belt does make sense, stealing a ring from someone's finger does not!

-- Stealing the little, decorated dagger from someone's belt makes sense, etc., stealing a two handed axe in the middle of a crowd does not (everybody around would notice, that the little Halfling did NOT own an axe of his size 2 seconds ago...)

 

- If you stroll into a house/building that is not open to the public, the residents should ask you to leave immediately and, if you stay, call the guards/attack you. I mean, how would you react, if a gang six suspicious looking people would burst into your home and start opening chests and searching shelves.

(Like ownagefool mentioned, this was done quite well in the gothic/risen series.)

 

- If you steal something from the shelves of a shop you should not be able to sell it to the shopkeeper. He would recognize his own wares.

But: I really don't like the approach that you can sell stolen goods just to certain merchants. Why would that be? Have the items a label saying: "Beware! I was stolen!"? Have the "honest" merchants some kind of sixth sense that lets them identify a certain item as stolen?

 

- If you get caught stealing / pick pocketing, there should be a harsh punishment. In most cultures, thieves faced things like chopped of hands etc.

 

- I really would love to see some (little) consequences even for successful thievery! For example:

-- If you stole a purse from a maidservant she could start complaining that she will face punishment at her employers house, because she had not been careful enough.

-- A merchant could turn on his no good bodyguards for not preventing a theft.

-- If you stole from a farmer, he could become desperate, now that he would not be able to buy the two cows he had been saving his money for 2 years.

-- If you stole from somebody who would give a quest to you later on, he could say something like: "I would have offered you 50 gold pieces, but since some bastard stole my purse, I can't."

-- If you stole from a beggar kid he could start to cry, now that he and his little sister would have to starve...

Even if it would only be "role play" consequences, I think such little events would make you think twice before doing the "steal-harvest" on a map, before moving on...

I agree with that there should be more consequences for stealing. When you choose to kill certain people this can sometimes have profound consequences on the game, however when you steal something nothing will happen. There should always be bad consequences for these kinds of actions.

[teknoman2]

how about vendors rejecting fenced goods (in pst)? ugh, that hurt :D

yeah, i never liked that. i mean it was like the guards from the TES games who magicaly knew exactly what item you had on you was stolen and what not. i mean i had 15 diamonds on me, how the hell did they know that 1 of the 15 generic things was stolen in the other side of the continent? it wasnt a famous piece of jewelry or anything! the same goes for vendors in BG and PT... its a damn copper ring (round, brown and completely unremarkable) like hundreds of others with no particular markings or magic properties. how the hell do you know that i got this ring by pickpocketing a guy in the street and didnt found it in a dungeon like the other 10 i have with me?

[Badmojo]

Yea, I can understand if you try to sell it in the same town that someone would recognize the crest of the towns mayer on a wepon. However, a town over should not. I would not mind if shop owners had a suspision check, that they *suspect* the item is stolen, they will still take it, but at a lower value then its worth. However, if you have some speech skill you should be able to talk your way, if you are really good you should be able to convince the person it is several times its worth.

 

One thing I will give it up for the elder scrolls, if you see it, you can go there, break in, and steal anything there. I would like this, If you see a building, you should be able to break in and steal anything as long as you are a high enough level (although the more valuable places will have gaurds/traps, etc). If there is a bank, you should be able to break in. If nobody sees you stealing then nobody should be able to put out a reward for who stole their stuff unless there is a witness.

 

Day and night cycles are a must, it makes no sense for a thief to break in during the day. Also, there needs to be a sleep cycle for NPC's, I hate games where NPC's are awake all the time, it makes no sense.

 

Oh, and I also think magic should be used besides mages, but customized for your character. I always wondered in other games why magic was not created for different classes. Why thieves(and assassins) did not learn magic to open locks, turn invisible, or (from a distance) teleport items from the pockets of NPC's into you hands. Just have a check to see if the skill passes, if it did not, the victim should have a high chance to catch the thief.

 

Also, there should be a few thieves that try to still from you, like in fallout where the child thief steal money from you, but if you are quick you should catch them in the act, also you should be able to chases them down/track them.

[Humanoid]

I've always had a bit of a conflicted position on the thieving mechanics of RPGs, in that, a) I almost always play a thief (not a rogue, dammit, a thief) in CRPGs, but b) rarely actually ever end up stealing anything but plot items. I don't feel it's really possible to simulate anything that would even vaguely resemble how a traditional thief would act, making general thievery beyond the super-abstract.

 

The feeling I dislike most is that of thievery essentially devolving into 'harvesting' NPCs in the same manner any regular character would harvest a roomful of crates: check every single one and take everything your pockets can hold.

 

As for solutions? I'd be keen to experiment with firstly removing the general interface function for stealing everything in sight. I'm not interested in the game trying to depict the act of pilfering mundane goods. Now, this is where I think a feature common to old adventure games with text parsers might find a new home - the 'look' command. As you enter a new room or 'room', you perform this untargeted function and the game returns a report with potential targets: quest items, unique gear, or otherwise special and interesting stuff. The detail, i.e. whether some or all of the actual stealable stuff is returned, may depend on your thief's perception/awareness/stealing/whatever skill, and stuff that isn't in the report can't be taken. The stuff that is in the report becomes interactable, either via normal looting for unattended items, or, for items on a mark's person, either via dialogue or a loot function (I prefer the dialogue approach).

 

As for the mundane stuff that I said should be taken out, an abstracted approach could be taken. On the rest/camp screen, say, assuming such a beast exists, you have the option of sending your thief to go on a 'mission'. This mission need not be shown at all by the game engine, just the results (modified by the thief's ability) displayed, either some cold hard currency or at least easy-to-liquidate goods. Or utter failure, of course.

 

 

 

EDIT: Actually, failure is probably the next most interesting to discuss in this context. To be honest, I've only skimmed the above posts about the consequences of being caught and all that and how difficult it is to simulate a believable reaction. I'm wondering though, if with a reasonably designed system, failure could be removed altogether - your thief may simply not be able to make an attempt at a certain item if they've not got the skills. In terms of the system I've proposed trying, the no-fail mechanic would be applied to the "special" thieving mechanics, while failure in the mundane thieving missions would either result in returning with no loot, or having to bail/break your thief out of prison.

Edited September 21, 2012 by Humanoid