I would love to see thieves in the game!
But you need a justice system that involves the players.
Like Wanted poster/Bounty hunter system where you take a chance stealing stuff.
So that if you say make the right roll to pick pocket you but some one notices that you where around when it happens.
Then they could complain to the guards and if enough people notice stuff missing when your around and complain to the guards(the Game Server); you would have a bounty on your head.
Like wise if you fail at pick pocketing, you would have an automatic complaint registered but, this would be registered with formal character complaints.
So there would need more than one to have a bounty placed you.
Each of these complaints would have a decay time. So as time went along the bounty would lessen till it went away.
Pretty simple database stuff, as far as the bounty/wanted information goes.
Also when you went to look at the Wanted posters.
The game would bring up a seperate scrollable GUI.
So you wouldn\'t have to Render that kind of realtime information in the 3D world.
PK Wanted / Bounty System:
http://planeshift3d.com/forum/thread.php?threadid=3441&boardid=11&styleid=2&page=1#11