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Games that reward pickpocketing

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
That's great and all except the reasons people steal shit in the real world doesn't apply in video games. What reason is there to avoid killing someone and taking their shit?
A well designed game should provide enough reasons to have functioning NPC communities around and have things like random murder disrupt this, even if it doesn't affect player directly.
A society with lots of unsolved murders will naturally function worse economically (hampering typical RPG shopping routine), will have more distrust towards outsiders (such as PC), more guard activity and less tolerance for overall bullshit.
Nevertheless...
Do you have moral concerns about pretend people? No.
Actually yes. Game shouldn't be unlike any other work of fiction in this regard. In a well constructed work of fiction the audience tends to care about characters.
Are you going to get caught by medieval CSI who figured out you killed a complete stranger to get his fancy hat? Not realistically.
Realistically. Off-screen actions can be abstracted pretty much at will. If you don't have good detailed mechanics to represent something (such as NPC investigation) you can just collect whatever modifiers you can realistically implement and silently roll for it. It won't deprive player of control or detail because the player won't be there to react or observe (and if they try to observe you can auto-bust them for being there using the old "return to the scene of crime" trope).
Hell, even Skyrim has a sort of delayed detection mechanics in the form of hired thugs, even though it isn't tied to it's actual crime system.
Implementing basic workable "medieval CSI" system isn't fucking rocket science.

Moreover, if you want realism, my character is going to be a baker or something instead.
What for? You're already seem to be baking a lot IRL, judging from your posts. :M

There's no incentive to wandering the world being heroic for no reward just so you can die from infection of a minor cut you got in a non-lethal scuffle with a drunk.
Game's premise should be constructed in such way that it works as an adventure hook. PLus sufficiently advanced magic and/or technology can be used to carefully tune realism to the level required by premise and gameplay to work.

If people react realistically to pickpocketing why can't I skip this sword bullshit and craft myself a gun?
Because your character doesn't know how and the game doesn't give you tools to actually translate your IRL knowledge (you presumably don't have either) into mechanics - which isn't much of a problem given that your character isn't supposed to know how to make gun in the first place. OTOH pickpocketing evidently does exist in the gameworld so people should know how to deal with it, and it's the obligation of the designer of the world to design it so that this way is actually conductive to the gameplay - or don't implement thief oriented skills at all because it wastes time and resources that could be spent on something useful.

Why can't I wait for my enemies to be taking a shit before ambushing them?
Presumably because even BW animators might have objections to creating necessary content, but there have been games where you could exploit a guard taking a piss so there is no clear reason no to do it.
Why can't I kidnap their children and use them as hostages?
Because it's hard to implement. There is no good reason not to if you can and it doesn't compete with some other feature that's going to have more/broader impact.

Anyway, none of those reasons matter if you have already decided to have stealing in your game.

Why didn't any wizards bother making a poisonous gas cloud that is invisible and scentless instead of bright green and foul?
Probably because player would keep wandering into their own poisonous clouds. :P
Anyway, there is no good reason not to as long as there is some way to detect or expect such gas.
For example Skyrim has colorless flammable gas in some areas that can only be seen because of refraction effects and is easy to not notice against some backgrounds or in a hurry. Wandering in with a torch or while slinging fire spells (or having some slung at you) ends with FOOM!.

Why is anything valuable ever even remotely attainable by the PC?
Why not? If it exists in the world it's accessible in some way.

If the realism has to stop somewhere anyways, it may as well stop wherever it needs to allow for interesting gameplay mechanics
Since realism in this case simply means that the fluff and the crunch are consistent with one another, realism stops wherever mechanics stops.
If you for example implement your pre-combat special pickpocket idiocy it means that you should have either stopped before making any pickpocketing mechanics and made something like another magic school or made a proper pickpocket mechanics working like pickpocketing.
Mechanics is your model, fluff is your description of what you want to model. If you keep modelling after your description has ended (or in a completely different direction) you are just making unrelated bullshit.

Else why not make game about cubes firing rainbow octahedrons at each other and exploding with candy? After all realism needs to end somewhere.
:M
 

DraQ

Arcane
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32,828
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I think some NWN modules do pickpocket well, where if you steal, you'll get an alignment shift penalty toward chaotic. Obviously pure thieves don't care, but it puts a hard limit on how much a Paladin, Monk or Druid can steal. You have to balance it so that it's only worth stealing really great items. Also these modules "mark" stolen goods so that you can only sell them at a black market.

Off the top of my head, Baldercan's modules and ADWR both use this system.
That's a good idea if you already have alignment system, but so far I'm convinced that alignment systems are inherently shit.

Shit happens, so what? Do you reload everytime something goes wrong in RPGs? Also maybe do not attempt to steal at only 50%?
No but I reload on things like TPK so I'll also reload when losing an entire city or just a good merchant to a bad dice roll.
Actually, I will reload anything where the entire outcome hinges on a single diceroll and bad diceroll just fucks me over in an unrecoverable manner, unless I'm playing ironman, in which case I will avoid such situations altogether (which means no or almost no pickpocket for me in, say Wizardry 8 ironman) unless it's unavoidable, then I will avoid it by not playing the shitty game it's in.

Make sure you are very competent and not just half assed comptentent? Must be too hard I guess. :roll:
Yes. Clicking a '+' enough times over several tens of hours is just too fucking hard for me.
Brilliant fucking diagnosis, Dr. Watson. :roll:

The main reason simulationism is superior isn't that the games must slavishly emulate reality. The main reason is that it allows games to directly benefit from a lot of internal logic that reality has and players understand. Players generally understand concepts like 'theft' and 'having something on your person'.

Years of lazy game design has re-defined how these concepts are perceived in video games.
You would need to reteach players that in your game they can try things off the beaten path for alternative outcomes.
In this case bethtards are the last best hope of gamerkind, because Bethesda at least tries to keep its mechanics consistent - "inventory is inventory is inventory" has been part of their games since Morrowind.
I'm not sure if I should be amused.
:gumpyhead:
 

Jimmious

Arcane
Patron
Joined
May 18, 2015
Messages
5,132
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
You seem to have this deep and worrying lack of understanding of what RPGs are really supposed to be about.
+M
What do you mean?
I mean that if you use the term "have to" you probably don't understand the point of RPGs.

I never said that stealing should be important in RPGs, I just said that it was never really necessary, even if you wanted to "role-play" a thief.
And how exactly do do you reoleplay a theif without stealing?
:M
Let me help you out:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thief
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/theft
No need to thank me.

A thief that is extremely rich won't bother stealing random crap from the pockets of npcs.
How about keys? Signets and other means of proving one's identity? Notes containing useful information (including passphrases)? Items carried by couriers?

Locking a significant victory behind a single roll isn't really better than a single roll forcing a game over.

Ressources must ALWAYS be scarce. What the fuck does a ressource matter if you have too much of it to worry about using it? Every game that showers you in gold has shit economics and i hate the fact that developers are being so fucking lazy about that stuff.
Scarcity is hard to do because it's not stable (It's not unlike RL economy, come to think of it).
If player is doing worse than you've expected, for example due to random factor, they lose.
If player is doing better than expected they gain more and more resources to burn to get even better off and then they drown in wealth.

That's one of the reasons inventory limitations are crucial - they impose a cap on how well off a player can be (and yes, for this very reason gold should have weight as well), so are all sort of constant resource sinks - supplies, repairs, etc. - some of which need to be correlated to how well off the player is (repairing a legendary artifact is going to be expensive, using it to stab rats is going to burn a lot more funds than it will earn), so that it's possible to descend back into recoverable murderhobo phase instead of crashing hard into rock-bottom if unlucky or not gud enuff.

The meaning of RPGs is to roleplay depending to the character(s) you pick.
What I'm saying is that stealing in CRPGs is very rarely worthwile since no keys, signets or whatever are to be obtained from only this method.
Developers expect the players to murder everyone anyway so they don't care to make the stealing mechanics any good.

I don't get how you argue with that, apart from very few exceptions, its the rule in CRPGs.
Thieves are usually useful only for disarming traps and backstabing during combat.

If you have examples of games that do that differently feel free to inform us
 

Damned Registrations

Furry Weeaboo Nazi Nihilist
Joined
Feb 24, 2007
Messages
15,759
In Draq land, the ideal game involves 50% of development being spent on random hyper realistic functions like pickpocketing and AI routines following their reactions, while other equally important things are completely ignored because eh fuck it omniscient infinitely spawning fearless guards are a better abstraction than pickpocketing extra loot. This is a good decision so that Draq can LARP being a thief for about 20 seconds before he gets bored and realizes he didn't need to steal a key anyways, because he can just kill all the guards from across a small body of water, since swimming and decent combat couldn't make the budget after all that pickpocketing stuff. Then the key breaks in the lock anyways because realism so he climbs in through a window. 10/10 GOTY.
 

Sneaky Seal

Aurum Dust
Developer
Joined
Sep 14, 2016
Messages
346
Location
Sealand-upon-Duck
Arcanum did it great both in mechanics and related role-playing.

You could steal pretty much anything altering most of the quests making some of them ridicilous (I think you could've stolen king's crown and things like that).

Also the game has a system of teachers that allow you to reach new heights in thieving the last of whom asks you to run naked through the city. It gives you a permanent perk with -5 attitude towards your character from everyone you meet and the teacher explains that only those not accepted by the society can truly take advantage of it.
 

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