Theiving other players = bad

[Rageburst]

Here\'s how it can be designed to make it fun for the thieves, but only mildly annoying for the victim.

Here are the various ways of stealing:
- From a player victim: Has a chance of becoming wanted if player is too high level. You can decrease this chance by improving your pickpocketing skill. Thieves should only be able to steal money from players and not items. When you are marked as wanted, npc guards will kill you/send you to prison if you\'re near them.

- From a monster: This provides a safer way to improve your pickpocketing skill. An unaggressive monster has a chance of becoming aggresive when pickpocketed. The higher the pickpocketing skill, the less there is a chance of this happening. Stealing from monsters is not really stealing. This merely generates a random item that is droppable from the monster. You can only steal three times from the same monster. Note that you might not get anything from pickpocketing if your pickpocketing skill is too low.

Also note that stealing won\'t actually remove droppable items from monsters. Stealing would just be a way to generate MORE items from a monster.

[paxx]

Clearing things up a bit


What I meant as far as a copy?the victim never looses the item, and the thief never really has said item in a usable way, it must be fenced (sold to someone who deals in stolen goods).
What the victim would loose is use of an item for some amount of time depending on where it is equipped.

Another thing is, 99% of the items a character has are game items, sword, armor, stat boosting items, money?but one can assume that the character will have more things then what they have in ?game terms? this is the area we (as thieves) can frolic in. The only time we will get a usable item from a pickpocket/burglary would be as part of a quest, or from certain NPC groups that are out there to motivate thieves.

Just to make even more evident, Pick Pocketing is not the mainstay of any master thief?it is his/her training.

It is what early or small time thieves might do,  the idea of pick pocketing some ?ogre king? in my opinion is stupid and something role playing games have truly messed up in doing. What pick pocketing in the high end game would be a very selective (pre combat disarm) where said NPC then cannot use his primary weapon or is in some other way of lessened effectiveness. It would not be a (thief gets free stuff as some other group are in combat) this would be the thief types version of a debuff, or if not a thief and was an assassin, the character would backstab the opponent instead.

I think a major issue is the role of thieves in the game. I have many lofty plans for them at the high-end, but at issue is how they should get there. Where and when do they acquire the skills needed to pick a guild house lock and pilfer through the guilds stuff to steal their member list, or their standard?.or some other thing important to them.

Or how can we justify a spy, and saboteur getting into a guild house and opening the front door. All while not allowing it to be a 3 minute jump over the fence and do it type thing.

In short, supply the thief types with many uses, fun content, and a feeling of a breed apart,  and useful in a group. But I would not want them to be the ?useless till levels X when they out damage everyone? like in some other games.

Of course we also need to remember that there will be mages and fighters that have certain thief skills and that needs to be monitored?.but don?t think of pickpocketing and the mainstay of the thief type.

[Rageburst]

How about this?

I think that you should be able to pickpocket a monster and get free stuff. It\'s a bit self oriented, but that\'s what a thief is about... stealing.

HOWEVER, you can also choose to steal a monster\'s weapon stealthly (unless the monster\'s level is too high). If the monster is sleeping or is not in aggresive mode, you can sneak up to a monster (using some stealth skill) and pickpocket the weapon. That in essence disables the monster\'s weapon for a set period of time.

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Besides pickpocketing, thieve skills are also associated with poison, stealth, daggers (throwing or not), and backstabbing.

[Tranor]

I propose sumthing like thieving in Morrowind! If u are nto familiar with it here... You must crouch and be hidden to steal from an NPC or u will automatically cought! if couhgt all surrounding NPC\'s attack you and u die! Now with PC the same except it is at random whether the PC catches the thief, therefore, everytime a thief goes to steal he is taking a risk to be cought and sent to jail or killed by the PC without any reprucutions against the PC and the PC would get there item back whether they kill the thief or send them to jail (it would be players choice whether the thief was killed or sent to jail) however if the thief is succesful in stealing from a PC, there should be a limit on how much gold stolen adn each weapon/item in the game should have a rarity level adn thieves could only steal certain rarity level items from chars and this eliminates anger over PC\'s losing precious items they worked hard to get and i think there should actually be a jail where thieves that were cought are sent... that brings us another possibility.. escaping from prison and then bounties!! yall can discuss ideas about bounties and things but i belive this would be a rather fair way for both the thief and PC\'s

[Rageburst]

Sounds good to me.

Here\'s what I propose to make it more balanced.

Stealing would be like morrowing... BUT if you steal something that\'s not armor or weapon, you get to keep it. If however you\'re stealing the npc\'s weapon/armor, then you cannot keep it, but you disable their use of that weapon/armor for a period of time.

Since this is like Morrowind, the stealing screen doesn\'t show all possessions, but only a few random things.

Against players, you can only steal money... since people might find some way to abuse this.

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As for the prison idea, that sounds like fun if properly implemented. A fellow thief can disguise himself as a guard and sneak material in for his/her fellow thieves. Things like lock picks in bread.... Or nail filers.

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Anyway, the thing I like about being a thief is that people will always be suspicious when you\'re around. If you can support that kind of suspicious attitude towards thieves, I think that will greatly enhance the roleplaying experience.

[Abemore]

There is no \"stealing screen.\" Thieving is fast; you don\'t have time to pick and choose.

[derwoodly]

I would like to see a working system for stealing myself.

The problem is exploits.  You can not assume that thieves will pick targets that they would have to run from.  People will do things in a game that they would not do in real life.  That is one reason for playing a RPG. People will target characters that they can just mug.  No matter how long it takes or what flashing message you get they will just take the item.  They may even have someone to heal them, or maybe your character is out of mana or low on stamina you.  In most cases the target will loose.  

The idea of knocking the thief out with one hit is interesting.  I don\'t think it is realistic but that is probably not a big concern.  I am not sure if players would want to be a thief if their powerfull thief got knocked out by a whimpy noobie mage.

Consider a game like Unreal.  You take normal friendly people and place them in the Arena, and soon people that normally cringe at the Discovery channel are knee deep in body parts and shouting \"who\'s the @%!$ &%$!# now\" (Yah babby, that is what PvP is all about!).

All in all this is a good thread it should have some stars next to it.