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Thief Roleplay
Nylith
Beaverton, OR
Inspired by the raging debate in the Serpent's class subforum, I've been thinking about reviving my thieving tendencies. Realizing though that there are some inherent problems with theft (stealing from players who do know how to handle it etc), I was hoping to get some suggestions on how you think someone could roleplay a thief without being a complete jerk. Some ideas I have include: Dueling victims(or champions of the victims) for the items, allowing individuals to buy the property back at a reasonable rate, or in certain circumstances (when OOC reasons dictate) returning the items after a proper debate between good and evil or what have you.
Any suggestions?
4
Comments
Be aware that, in the end, thieving annoys a lot of players. Period. You're not going to get meaningful interaction every time and may even face a lot of frustrated, semi-OOC rants thrown your way before you have an opportunity to build a reputation in the metagame as a decent thief willing to roleplay. Have some patience. Some people find acquiring gold to be incredibly frustrating and seeing hours of work disappear can be heartbreaking, especially for anyone under level 80 where gold farming takes time. For that matter, targeting high-level players (who have greater opportunities to acquire gold) is a great suggestion on @Sena's part.
Is thieving viable against denizens? There are opportunities there too that haven't been explored, if you found a way to create meaningful interaction with players as a result.
@Nellaundra That's too bad, as that might have provided an avenue of roleplay too to supplement thieving from players. Oh well.
"Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that [everlasting] life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man."
@Jhaeli Not really. You pickpocket them, fail or succeed, and if you succeed you get some amount of gold with no drawbacks whatsoever beyond not being able to do it again for a while (and possibly angering the denizen)
What did the cap of pickpocketing gold get increased to? First it was 2,500, then I remember something about 10,000... no idea what it is now.
5,000
Really think it should be a flat percentage of the total gold pile, and that's speaking as someone who doesn't have a serpent alt. It wouldn't necessarily be terrible for it to be, say, 3-5% of total.
So if someone has 10k gold on them, you get 300-500 gold per pickpocket. Novices generally don't carry around that much so you could expect to get 25-100 gold maybe?
As I said in the other thread - if they raised the level at which one can be pickpocketed to 60 instead of 30, a lot of these supposed problems with theft would be solved. Fringe cases like "But I just came back after a long dormancy" are no excuse.
If this is some ploy to get with Strata IG, it's not going to work. I'm already married to my veil.
I said their hearts. Mine belongs only to eldritch, unknowable monstrosities hellbent on ruining this world and many, many others. Also music, but that's basically the same thing.
Your veil doesn't even hide you, it just gives you +1 to protection against peasants at the cost of a -2 charisma penalty when interacting with them, and also acts as a cookie clicker-esque item where the number of veils bought per unit of time is directly dependent on the number of veils in the system, except I bet @Sarapis wished he had a magic button he could just press at whim to convince someone else to buy one.
That is correct. You'd also get over 100k a pop from assholes like me carrying around 2 million +
Hm... I don't steal too often, but when I catch a novice around without selfishness, I usually just tell them to put it up because there won't be a second warning. They're usually quite grateful for that, even made some friends that way. If I got less than 5k, I usually return a bit of it if they are still somewhat unexperienced (not really after a newbie's pocket change anyway). If they are more obviously more experienced (level 80+), got their gold out without selfishness and don't seem to pay attention... they had it coming.
Targeted pickpocket works. On a very very very very very small chance. So, make it count. Steal obvious things of worth, like journals. Or be daring and steal someone's mount/falcon/pet.
As far as thief roleplay goes, always offer them a chance to get it back. If they instantly hire or yell at you, they just lost their chance. If they plead, give them a condition, or give them a portion of it back.
For style, you can't go wrong with leaving a note/receipt. I got a stationery box strictly so that I could leave people receipts/letters.
If you manage to rob a shop, definitely leave a note. Half of your reputation as a thief hinges on people knowing who robbed them. While you might think, "Hey, I'll be able to rob more people if people don't know who I am", you're missing half of the fun of being a thief, which is that everyone instantly puts up selfishness if they see you at, say, a Scarlattan concert.
This is boiling down to good vs. bad role/game play.
Any form of harassment is not fun. If we played ANY game and the idea behind was to HURT you personally...I doubt any of us would play long.
Game = Friendly Competition
Since it's a Role Playing Game, you could almost suggest winning would mean having the Best Role Play. Be it whatever role that is.
I believe the number one Golden Rule, is "Don't be a jerk"...
Steal as much as you can without being a dick about it. Simple.
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But still, Targeted Pickpocketing...I mean maybe it could be a little higher success rate with the down fall of longer pickpocket time?
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Also, I know this is hard to take but the only people not sitting, hugging a guard pile happen to be level 30+ novices or elderly with decayed items. Hence why they are the targets.
Allow serpents to slip into guard stacks and pickpocket and the prime targets will change dramatically.
Will never happen. If you allow any class to slip onto enemy guard stacks, 2 things would happen 1. it would never happen. 2. it would never happen.
As much as it does make sense that things like evade should bypass guards almost completely, 95% of the Achaean population would consider being able to do so a form of harassment. Guard stacks allow people safe haven from the consequences of their own evil deeds (see: harassment) and if you take that safe haven away from them, they wouldn't play.
I just tested mesmerise some more - Went around stealing from everyone I could find. Item-pickpocket didn't work even once. The fact that you can't even retry after a fail makes it really ridiculous. Considering it takes a while to acquire targets, you're probably not going to steal an item more than every few hours of straight theft-time, if that. I'm not sure how stealing one item from someone is seen as some type of uber-griefing, anyways. It's really not worth the effort for the thief if virtually every theft attempt is an auto-fail. Need to move it up to working at least 50% of the time. I really don't think that'd be over the top, considering how the failure currently works(can't retry, can't steal more than one item).
@Santar According to @Tecton they haven't changed it since they put it up to a 50 percent chance. If I remember what he said correctly in the other thread.
Claron would like to thank @Datrius for returning his journal. Honor among thieves? Haha, when it got stolen I was pretty pissed off, I had just put on this long ritual that I needed to paste in a book as part of House training, then my laptop overheated and shut down because it's a million degrees in Michigan, so I lost the log. Logged back in and was all flustered, didn't have selfishness up, got out my journal to write in it, journal got stolen. I was just like "Awwww man things just aren't working out."
Well, to be fair, when I stole it I didn't know any of those things, @Claron. I just flitted by, appraised and saw a journal and no selfishness, heh.
True, true. Thieves will be thieves. It was pretty cool of you to give it back, though.
No problem.
There's no way it's 50%. When targeted pickpocketing first got put in place, Antidas and a few others showed that the chances of succeeding are near-impossible and should be fixed - which it was. That fix was more like the 50% it supposedly is now - but there's no doubt in my mind after a couple weeks, targeted pickpocketing was silently reverted back to near-impossible odds, where it still is today.
I've literally never had it work except for day 1 of implementation(after which it was nerfed).
I was playing around with it last night and I tried targeting journals/letters at least 10 times and failed each time. It was a mess. Thanks for the suggestions though everyone, I've tried to implement a few of them. We will see what happens.
Nylith
You can steal from shops?! I wanna steal all the things!!!