My biggest issue with theivery is actually just the pawn shop interactions. The way certain items are set to be unpawnable or items that sell for over a platinum being reduced to a few bronze really kills a lot of the earning potential.

> Not to sound like a complete jerk but I sometimes wonder if folks are just doing it wrong? Heh.

Yeah, they're not sitting in dedicated thievery classes for hours.

Honestly, I have multiple characters, my thief is my highest, I love the guild to pieces... and thievery is the worst skill in the game.

For me, it's not really about training the skill itself. At my ranks, I can train just fine using my own scripts and running around from place to place.

I'm really more interested in giving the skill more unique applications within the game. That's why you will see me latch on to things like more museums, because it's a really fantastic system and fits perfectly with the theme of the guild. It serves as a fantastic way for putting some interesting items (both fluff and portentially something useable) into player hands.

The crowd stealing that was talked about before is also along this same vein as far as giving us more unique applications for our "guild skill" to be used with.

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The Kasto mimic abruptly solidifies, looking very much like Kasto.
>
You say, "What a handsome fellow you are!"

And thievery isn't our "guild skill". Backstab is. Anyone can steal. No one else can backstab.

Monster Elec

You hear the distant echo of a savage Horde snarling in barbaric disapproval of your deeds.

>>has to jump through that many hoops to learn a skill.

Theurogy is far and away more irksome than thievery. Though I'm personally a smidge amused by the "I don't wanna steal on my thief" stuff. Ranks up there with refusing to learn weapons on a barb or music with a bard to me.

Samsaren

>I think it may help to more clearly define what you would hope to get out of a revamp.

A more diverse use of the skill. Thievery skill means what stealing, so why was it renamed? Expanding the skill could help with what people think of when "I need train thievery" comes to mind.

Guild identity:
What identity we have is well...What do I want to be like.
We don't have many systems to support being a different "type" of "thief". This however deserves it's own thread.

>the initial few ranks can be difficult

mark ditty bag

You begin to carefully size up your chances at nabbing a ditty bag.
Considering actually grabbing the item, it would be taking candy from a baby (0/12).
Regarding getting away with the theft, nobody will ever miss it (0/12).
You feel highly confident in the accuracy of your judgement.
Roundtime: 1 sec.

Learned: Perception, Appraisal

Add Thievery exp gain to mark, or swap out the Appraisal exp for Thievery.
Make the exp gain from mark scale. Have it teach the best when the challenge is there for the character then scale down when marking toward trivial and scale down toward THUD

This would make it so that it rewards people more for actually using mark and still keeps it so you have to keep up to get the best exp out of it. I also would not expect exp gain from mark to actually be able to "lock" the skill.

>I understand the downtime can be frustrating

Tie this into binning. This would reward people for binning with a little more than just rep. A way to gain the attention of the guild leaders.

What this would do is once you have gained enough attention through binning, you would get a message that the guild leader would like to have a word with you. Set a timer on how long this stays active. It takes what 1 hour to wait out the shop timers, and as primary we can pulse off from 34/34 in how long? Now you simply go have a conversation with the guild leader and somewhere in this conversation they digress into talking about some of the exploits they experienced. Put in some pulsing RT with the conversation and when they are done you get awarded a chuck of thievery EXP.

Really haven't thought this out too much. Was something that came to mind so though I would share.

How about just cutting the timer in half? That would go such a long way to making things less painful. Or perhaps doing away having to be logged in to wear the timer off.

I think my complaint is boredom with the skill. High risk vs reward, especially when you consider at level hunting and not having to worry about multi-plat fines for failing one bad roll.

If I could create a perfect skill, I would create more options to learn thievery, such as the following:

1. Give a practice option that maximized XP gain at the cost of coin gain.

2. More things to do with the skill. That could be planting bombs or goos, utilizing trip wires or other traps, NPC stealing (even if it's a TM/Theivery ability done only before combat is engaged that lets you steal their weapon/held armor/junk), more museums, an intimate verb you can use while bartering (or not?), or even rare (stealing only) items that you can occasionally pilfer.

3. More interaction, such as protection khris or escapes. Paladins and Barbarians have abilities to protect themselves in combat. Bards have abilities to protect instruments. Mages have an assortment of counter-magic abilities. Thieves don't really have a lot of protection for thievery after a bad roll.

> Is creature stealing off the table? Or perhaps the better question would be... Is learning thievery in combat off the table?

I don't think so. Creature stealing is out of my wheelhouse.

My personal goal would be to find ways to enhance use of the skill outside of combat. I agree with the sentiment that Rigby's work on the museum is the bar future work will be measured by.

/salute

-Ssra

The problem I have with training Thievery is that it requires a script that is more complicated, and that requires more up-keep, than my combat script. All to train one single skill. I don't mind to put that kind of work into my combat script because I can train 26+ skills at the same time, but even thinking about the maintenance of keeping up a stealing script is enough to stop me before I start.

Yes, you don't need a script to train it, but I'm not able to get through all of Crossing by hand before I'm annoyed and just give up. I would rather sit in a class outside of justice all day than to do either of the other options.

>>We need a renown scroll for fines in the Guild.


You could do one for total fines paid lifetime (assuming it's tracked) or one for highest single thievery fine.

>even thinking about the maintenance of keeping up a stealing script is enough to stop me before I start.

>Yes, you don't need a script to train it, but I'm not able to get through all of Crossing by hand before I'm annoyed and just give up

This is possibly the biggest problem. So yeah, the mindset of more and interesting ways to learn the skill should be a great place to start. Thank you Ssra for looking into all of this.

I haven't done a single full stealing run since 3.0. Have pilfered an item or two then decide I really don't feel like doing this right now.

> > If you can conjure up ideas that involve the "look and feel" of a heist or something worthwhile/fun (without just handing you a million platinum coins) we can probably work together as a group to see something come to fruition.


- You see a glowing iron fragment (or other guild specific rare drop).

- You pick up a glowing iron fragment.

- You bring a glowing iron fragment to <local guild leader>

- You give a glowing iron fragment to the guild leader.

- Guild leader accepts it (flag on you for 20 seconds).

- Ask guild leader about rumors.

- Guild leader will almost always tell you that there's nothing going on; however, there's a very low chance (1/100 - keep it rare) that he tells you that a guild/group is up to something based on the item you brought [in this case, cleric]. Go steal an <item> and an <item> and an <item> and check them out. Don't buy them or you may arouse suspicion.

- You go steal items, let's say a cassock and a candle and a vial filled with water and a knife. (major bonuses to xp gain)

- You wear and hold the items, and just those items, and go back to your guild leader. If you don't, he tells you that you're not ready for this kind of job and shoos you out.

- If you are, he tells you where to go to meet a contact. You show up. You go through a scripted RP session. You have to say the right thing at the right time based on the clues. You have to pretend to know information about the guild/group you're infiltrating.

- You play up your part, find the right room (search it out), and pick the right lock, and convince the right people that you are who you say you are then you find the guardian. You have to either disable or kill the guardian (again, you're naked, no armor/containers other than the ones you stole as part of the intro - so it's not easy).

- Then you get the item and you have to sneak out. If caught, you lose the item and get thrown out.

- If you succeed then you essentially get one of a small handful of items (treasure chest quality) themed to the pretend to be the guild you just infiltrated.

You're locked in thievery, stealth, locks, and perception while you do this, but each stage is on a fairly tight timer.

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Now, that's probably a lot of work, but it would be cool.

Let's be realistic all kinds of museum type of establishments take a lot of work to set up and you will forget about them in 5 minutes after you have gathered all the interesting items you can get. Pretty much the same thing happened to the TC museum and i doubt you will meet a lot of people there these days.

At the risk of repeating myself i still want to come back to the "climb practice" style stealing mechanics. What ever the RP you put behind it, that would address the issues with scripting complexities. You would have to move to location and start "practicing". I mean it doesn't really have to be practicing even, could as well be profiling for potential robbery or what ever. Just make it more time consuming than the regular couple of seconds of round time.

>Let's be realistic all kinds of museum type of establishments take a lot of work to set up and you will forget about them in 5 minutes after you have gathered all the interesting items you can get. Pretty much the same thing happened to the TC museum and i doubt you will meet a lot of people there these days.

I don't know about you, but I frequently have people asking me about the museum. Both how best to do it, when to start doing it, and if I would ever help with setting up a group to do it together.

As Ssra posted, we have a few people here with very different desires from the Thievery system. There is no reason to have one without the other when all points could be addressed.

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The Kasto mimic abruptly solidifies, looking very much like Kasto.
>
You say, "What a handsome fellow you are!"

There are a ton of known and unknown noble families in Zoluren, Therengia, and Ilithi. Being able to break into their houses or the houses of other lesser-known gentry and steal from them would be great for both training and for the ability to flip some potentially attractive items to either pawnshops or players that might want them. Even if it's just fluff, people love that stuff. Even better if there's a way to add a random component to the items being generated so the colors/fabrics/metals/gems/etc were random, so there was a tiny chance for the occasional jackpot rare material.

Like, I scale a wall (athletics), scan for and jimmy open a loose window (perception+locksmithing), and sneak in. The room you get is random per house. It might be a smoking room or a parlour or a lady's bedchamber. And then you start grabbing, watching for patrols or residents and hiding if you hear anything.

Difficulty can change with time of day, perhaps. Day thieving is a lot harder than night thieving. This gives a way for people to kind of scale the difficulty. Maybe you have an easier time finding the "choicer" grabs in the day too in exchange for the difficulty.

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Thayet
Twitter: @thayelf
Tumblr: thayette.tumblr.com

And with that, Ssra has released crucifixtion as a punishment for thievery. Thanks for participating.

Monster Elec

You hear the distant echo of a savage Horde snarling in barbaric disapproval of your deeds.

Ssra,

What are the chances we can just flip flop the req for Thievery and BS behind the scenes? Making Thievery count for Nth without the hard req, but force it into your 8 if you must. I get we need a hard req, but I guess my thought stems from the fact that we have more abilities that are based around BS than stealing, more khri that work that way, and BS is an exclusive skill. I understand I HAVE to steal. I personally feel we're more Rogues than Thieves, and we really always have been. Maybe things have finally changed enough now where it just makes more sense. I don't know. There's been SO much dev since I joined the guild its not even the same (Which is awesome. I'm not Valcering about it), and to continue on just because of the same old same old seems silly.

Monster Elec

You hear the distant echo of a savage Horde snarling in barbaric disapproval of your deeds.

<<Thievery and BS>>

BS as in backstabbing? I thought that skill went away? I'm confused now :(

Sorry for the double post but I have to comment on Valcering. Incredible and amazing, sir.

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AIM: the_sly_fox