Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

You have questions? We may have answers.

Moderators: Forum Moderators, Active DMs

User avatar
The GrumpyCat
Dungeon Master
Dungeon Master
Posts: 6565
Joined: Sun Jan 18, 2015 5:47 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by The GrumpyCat » Tue Oct 27, 2020 3:01 pm

Interesting idea Seven.

At the center of this argument for me is Consequences Vs Freedom, which comes up a lot in this sort of design.
Lets use pvp as a really easy example of this.
On the one hand you could have a server like say, Sinfar - where pvp means pretty much nothing. At that point you have a LOT of freedom. But because there is just freedom, because you cannot forcefully mechanicaly act with pcs in any meaningful mechanical way - all your rp is very strongly dependent on the desires of the other player. RP has very little weight to it, very little meaning. You can do/ say whatever you want, nothing will effect any other pc unless they want it to.

The other side of the coin is say, City of Arabel (at least when I used to play - it may be different now) when, for example, upon death you lost all your items, and I think it was two thirds of your XP. Further more , as I recall, PvP death could potentially be perminent. (To be fair, in pvp subdual was the auto option but still...)

Now this meant that people treated PvP death pretty seroiusly, and actually didn't often deploy it quickly, ot reat it offhandedly. Because generally, if you activily /murdered/ another pc, or were murdered by them, it meant things got serious! The downside of it was that people were very, very cautious and of course - theoreticaly at least - it was very open to abuse.

The trick in any good server is finding where your middle ground is. And honestly that will change from server to server. Both the above styles have an amount of validity to them, and that's a balence I feel is importent when looking at Arelith server design.

To go back to our actual topic.

On the one hand - allowing anyone who feels like it to just wander into your quarter and take whatever they please would be far, far too high consequence. You'd be very much relying on the good will and favour of others and lets face it, not everyone is like that. (And also add arguments of lack of rp before and after ect ect ect.)

On the other hand making homes 100% imprenible forever and ever fortresses is equelly discouraging. No amount of effort, gold, collusion, roleplay, items, time, or skill is EVER going to get you into a home if someone doesn't want you in, and that can be increadibly frustrating.

That's why I lean on the side of having a little consequence, ideally backed up by some roleplay...
This too shall pass.

(I now have a DM Discord (I hope) It's DM GrumpyCat#7185 but please keep in mind I'm very busy IRL so I can't promise how quick I'll get back to you.)

KeldonDonovans
Posts: 114
Joined: Sun Oct 25, 2020 12:03 am

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by KeldonDonovans » Tue Oct 27, 2020 9:42 pm

An idea occurs to me that may solve some of this, but it's a little longer, so hear me out. Feel free to pick and choose what you like, implement no part/some part/all of it as you see fit.

Step 1.) Fixtures in quarters are untouchable by those who do not own the quarter (or, if you'd rather, check for a key to the quarter)

Step 2.) Modify storage in quarters so that you have two chests instead of one (obviously you can reduce save capacity to protect server resources). One chest is off limits, needs the quarter key to open it. This lets the person who lives in the quarter keep the items they deem too important to risk losing, though not necessarily valuable. Think that stack of coal was too important to lose? Fine. Put it in the secret chest. The choice is yours. The other chest is an "RP Theft" chest. It works like a shop, so to speak. So a burglar tries to take items from it, it opens a dialogue option. This dialogue option reminds the player of 1 theft per day. It also, and possibly more importantly, gives them the option of leaving a calling card of sorts. That's where the RP comes in. They can take their one item from the chest, sure, but it leaves a calling card* so that they can be tracked down. And sure, someone might say that not all burglars would leave a calling card, and that's true. But not all serial killers will converse with you for a while before attempting to kill you either. This would fall under "Be Nice", and PvP of any kind being two-sided. Because theft without the chance of getting caught is not two-sided.

Step 3.) A -Burgle command, that opens up a dialogue option, and allows you a few options. You can either A.) Steal X% of quarter's rent, and be done with it, as you've made your payday. This will put the money in your inventory (Taken from the owner's bank** like rent is), and kick you from the quarter. If there is not enough money to cover it, you make away with less. Rob someone richer next time. Ideally this should be a small percent, so that the RP options are encouraged over the "Grab and go" technique. B.) Steal X% of quarters rent (larger than option A) and maybe a copy of any keys in their chest, or one of the fixtures. This leaves your calling card, allowing you to be tracked down.

Step 4.) Work into existing systems (Scry? Track? Both? Whatever you think) a method for characters to track down the owner of a specific calling card. Could even come up with a command like -patdown or some such that allows you to pull stolen items off of a restrained individual (to prevent the pridegaming response of "I'd rather die than give you the eight gold in my pocket!" responses we all know and love)

Step 5.) Profit.


*NOTE: A calling card would be designed by the player. It could be anything as simple as write something on paper, or you could create one at an enchantment basin, whatever floats your boat. Having said calling card with you when you try to break into a quarter could give you a massive bonus to picking the lock, so that you can actually have a chance at the massive DC without being a level 30 toon whose dedicated every waking moment to expertise in all things lockpicking.

**NOTE: The stolen money comes from the character's bank in an effort to prevent abuse, where someone buys a quarter and has their friend "rob" millions from them. This makes it so that the money has to exist in order to be stolen. It also may seem frustrating at first to notice someone stole some money from your account, but not as annoying as finding out someone stole all your fixtures because they came with a group.

Tikin
Posts: 203
Joined: Tue Feb 11, 2020 11:34 pm
Location: France

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by Tikin » Wed Oct 28, 2020 5:13 pm

I love the way you think, Keldon! :)

These ideas (except for the fixture part, as it would fall under possible grief), are really brilliant from where I stand ... I mean, I don't have any experience in being robbed or in robbing someone in Arelith, but I imagine that I would be ok to be at one side of the deal or the other with your system.

Now, still from where I stand, meaning as someone with no experience in developping, it looks like something very difficult to put together, and a tremendous work to manage the trick to include your system in the game. But then again, I know nothing of developping, and have already been surprised more than once by the deeds of the Arelith Team ;-)

KeldonDonovans
Posts: 114
Joined: Sun Oct 25, 2020 12:03 am

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by KeldonDonovans » Thu Oct 29, 2020 3:41 pm

Tikin wrote:
Wed Oct 28, 2020 5:13 pm
I love the way you think, Keldon! :)

These ideas (except for the fixture part, as it would fall under possible grief), are really brilliant from where I stand ... I mean, I don't have any experience in being robbed or in robbing someone in Arelith, but I imagine that I would be ok to be at one side of the deal or the other with your system.

Now, still from where I stand, meaning as someone with no experience in developping, it looks like something very difficult to put together, and a tremendous work to manage the trick to include your system in the game. But then again, I know nothing of developping, and have already been surprised more than once by the deeds of the Arelith Team ;-)
Avoiding grieving is why I said just one of their fixtures, as that falls within the rules now for acceptable theft. As far as difficulty of implementation, the only thing I can think of being all that difficult is perhaps including the fixtures in the options, otherwise copy-pasting the existing shop code, tweaking it for a few minutes, then applying it to quarter chests should be adequate. In this way you wouldn't even have to go into all of the quarters in the module to add a secondary chest, just have it so that you set the "price" equal to 0 if you want it concealed, and set a limit of "X" items in a chest at priced zero, everything else defaults to one to trigger the script, if that makes sense. If a developer were feeling froggy, they could even implement it so that, rather than a percentage of rent, the stolen amount from the bank is based off the set values of all items. Why not set everything to either zero or one? That's the froggy part. The lower the value of the item (barring zeros, which are off limits) the easier it is to steal. So when you set prices you have a difficult choice, do you want to be safer, or lose less if successfully robbed?

Exordius
Posts: 542
Joined: Mon Apr 09, 2018 11:42 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by Exordius » Thu Oct 29, 2020 5:34 pm

Make the act of breaking in carry a perma-death penalty if the thief fails to beat the skill check and make the check all but impossible to beat... would solve this problem easily and once and for all.

User avatar
God_In_Action
Posts: 152
Joined: Thu Jun 13, 2019 11:43 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by God_In_Action » Thu May 26, 2022 10:59 am

Apologies for thread necromancy, but after being a long term player but only recently returned, I really would like to offer some perspective on an issue that doesn't appear to have been resolved. Maybe GrumpyCat or the other Devs would still mull this old topic over.

Clearly, the only thing that matters is players having fun. So we need to make burgling more fun. Obviously, player interaction is the root of all fun. But burgling isn't always fun, because there's no counter-reaction open to the homeowner if the burglar doesn't go out of their way to make it possible to identify who broke in. We have a situation where a skilled burglar has a reward for little or no risk, potentially causing disproportionate upset to the victim if a sentimental or very rare item is lost. We need to have interaction, and we need a genuine risk vs reward.

So, the solution should involve a mechanic which forces the burglar to have to interact with the homeowner, if the homeowner so chooses. Clearly
since burglar and homeowner may not be logged in at the same time, the interaction needs to be supported over the ongoing term and not just during the brief burglary itself. The interaction will give the homeowner a way to react, making the experience less bitter by making them feel like they have some agency in the situation, generating roleplay through interaction, and therefore ultimately Fun (which is the only reason any game mechanic should exist at all).

In practice, the solution would have to look something like a mechanically supported way for the homeowner to identify the burglar. The act of identifying the burglar should be easier overall than the original burglary, since it needs to be open to a wide array of types of homeowners of all builds and levels.

Details: the homeowner could -investigate after a quarter theft to reveal clues about the identity of the burglar. This would use a wide range of skills, so open it to more players. A wide variety could make sense, even the social skills to represent talking to local witnesses, or lore or spellcraft to recognise physical clues in the "crime scene". The DC would be comparatively low, to make sure that the burglar is forced to face consequences and future interaction. The higher you beat the DC the more information you discover, e.g. gender, race, height (keyed from charcter creation, e.g. "short/average/tall for a halfing"), subrace, Outcast status, Settlement exile status, attunement (with Divination), settlement or faction they belong to, IC represention of approximate primary class (e.g. "warrior, a sneak, a mage, a divine, etc", and ultimately with a good enough -investigate roll the burglars real name. Other suggestions for balance reasons would be that the DC is reduced the more quarters that the burglar breaks into inside the same settlement, or the more NPC guards there are in the area. Importantly, the -investigate roll would always offer at least something, so that there is always going at least some hook to enable roleplay which involves tracing and identifying the culprit.

For example, this could result in the kind of situation where the victim of a burglary -investigates and finds out that a tall elf "sneak" from Guldorand who is exiled from Brogendenstein broke in. Or a the Cordorian Guard might garner from multiple burglary reports that a halfling burglar attuned to Water is on the loose. A skilled investigator could be contracted to identify a notorious thief by name.

This would introduce roleplay hooks, but also invigorate settlement guard or investigator character concept roleplay. And so the victim is given a way to go across the island, tracking down the infamous thieves...

User avatar
MissEvelyn
Arelith Silver Supporter
Arelith Silver Supporter
Posts: 1584
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2015 8:43 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by MissEvelyn » Thu May 26, 2022 6:28 pm

ReverentBlade wrote:
Fri Oct 16, 2020 12:31 pm
I've never gotten any theft RP past a "haha I ganked your stuff" note on the door. Always anon, of course.
Same. I wish I could say I had, but I haven't.

After many years of playing on this server and thinking burglar RP has to be fun I've just yet to find the fun kind, I have come to the conclusion that it is entirely unfun. And I say this as someone who hasn't suffered much at all under it. Most of the things that were taken from me were replaceable.

So I agree with the crowd that says nothing should be available for the taking in a quarter. And furniture theft/griefing is actually even worse than getting something taken from your chest, especially if they're taking bookshelves filled with books that you spent real hours arranging. Or those flower vases you spent a long time arranging perfectly.

To clarify, I'm not saying quarter breaking should be entirely prohibited. By all means, break in and spy on people, read their secret messages, find their embarrassing book collection, and leave notes that threaten to expose them lest they pay a ransom (thus creating RP).

But theft within quarters should be entirely disabled. It would be a quality of life update.


Northern Kings
Posts: 14
Joined: Thu May 12, 2022 11:47 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by Northern Kings » Fri May 27, 2022 7:28 pm

Honestly I think there is a way to give players a feeling of a 'win' without completely screwing people over in some capacity. That allows them to be happy with their choices while also making it not feel absolutely awful any time you end up losing many of your most valuable things.

1) Have there be areas where characters intending to be thieves or burglers can go into as their own little thieving dungeons. Have them even be focused on non-combat, puzzles, disabling traps, bypassing doors, avoiding guards. Whatever, give them something really nifty that they can do to have this experience that rewards them for it.

2) Have it perhaps be that upon unlocking a player chest, or what have you, instead of just grabbing whatever they please from it? Have something maybe give them X amount of coin for successfully getting in. I understand that losing things should just be a part of the game, but I've definitely been part of time periods where despite full locks, I'd lose 5-6 items a week because I'd be hit by different people daily and I basically couldn't keep up with it. I don't want to say it was being done maliciously - it's just what players built to be able to do. But I feel like there's still some way to have it be meaningful without it feeling incredibly shitty.

Northern Kings
Posts: 14
Joined: Thu May 12, 2022 11:47 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by Northern Kings » Fri May 27, 2022 7:31 pm

God_In_Action wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 10:59 am
This would introduce roleplay hooks, but also invigorate settlement guard or investigator character concept roleplay. And so the victim is given a way to go across the island, tracking down the infamous thieves...
This is a good idea. But as soon as somebody is caught stealing from everyone else they are going to be killbashed off the server until they roll. That's just the reality of how strongly most people feel about this. If somebody knows you're going around stealing things from everyone, you're going to be hunted down by pretty much every group on the server at different times. You won't like it.

I don't think that's -fair- or even 'nice' as part of the be nice rules. But if you steal somebodies hard to find loot, or artifact stuff that they might never get another of? I don't think there's going to be any mercy. Players are just... that way

Aelryn Bloodmoon
Arelith Supporter
Arelith Supporter
Posts: 2028
Joined: Thu Sep 11, 2014 4:57 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by Aelryn Bloodmoon » Fri May 27, 2022 8:26 pm

The GrumpyCat wrote:
Tue Oct 13, 2020 10:11 pm
Eira wrote:
Tue Oct 13, 2020 9:08 pm
Gouge Away wrote:
Tue Oct 13, 2020 8:57 pm
I've long thought quarters and storage locks need to be separated. Put reasonable locks on quarters and strong or even unbreakable locks on the chests inside. Breaking in to prank, ambush, spy, snoop on message boards etc IS fun and good for RP, it's the theft that's the biggest problem.
This would be great. Lock the chests, make the door easier.
I agree, this idea is awsome. It would involve a major overhaul, but personaly I adore this.
Since we're necro'ing this thread, I still think this would be a premium solution, and the staff has gotten bigger since 2020, so maybe there's someone around willing to try their hand at this now?
Seven Sons of Sin wrote:
Wed Oct 14, 2020 9:21 pm
I think there should be a "someone is in the quarter" Open Lock DC cap, and a "no one is home" Open Lock DC cap.

The "no one is home" can be the standard 127 or whatever.

The "someone's home" could be significantly lower, like maybe DC 90? 80? Sure, you can break in, but you have to deal with the occupants.

People don't like getting their stuff stolen, sure, but the flipside is that all quarters have become impregnable fortresses that promote safe, exclusive, and mindnumbing roleplay. The fact quarters are the safest places in the entire sever is a problem.

I also think this is absolutely inspired - the biggest complaint about quarter breaking is that it almost always happens when the owner isn't even logged in and they frequently get no interaction out of it. Incentivizing break-ins to be (mechanically) easier when players are actually inside the building addresses that side of this complaint and also opens said RP avenue up to other characters besides highly specialized lock-breakers just looking for a quick piece of untended loot.
Bane's tyranny is known throughout the continent, and his is the image most seen as the face of evil.
-Faiths and Pantheons (c)2002

User avatar
MissEvelyn
Arelith Silver Supporter
Arelith Silver Supporter
Posts: 1584
Joined: Sun Jul 12, 2015 8:43 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by MissEvelyn » Fri May 27, 2022 10:22 pm

Northern Kings wrote:
Fri May 27, 2022 7:31 pm
God_In_Action wrote:
Thu May 26, 2022 10:59 am
This would introduce roleplay hooks, but also invigorate settlement guard or investigator character concept roleplay. And so the victim is given a way to go across the island, tracking down the infamous thieves...
This is a good idea. But as soon as somebody is caught stealing from everyone else they are going to be killbashed off the server until they roll. That's just the reality of how strongly most people feel about this. If somebody knows you're going around stealing things from everyone, you're going to be hunted down by pretty much every group on the server at different times. You won't like it.

I don't think that's -fair- or even 'nice' as part of the be nice rules. But if you steal somebodies hard to find loot, or artifact stuff that they might never get another of? I don't think there's going to be any mercy. Players are just... that way
On the bright side, it's good to see Tormites and Banites come together and agree on something 😋


User avatar
TheBlueWizard
Posts: 34
Joined: Tue Sep 03, 2019 4:03 pm

Re: Is Open Lock/Disable Trap basically redundant? Or am I mistaken

Post by TheBlueWizard » Sun May 29, 2022 10:21 am

After two years of thinking about this as an issue, and still wanting to RP a burglar style character in as wholesome a way as possible, my solution would be to put most of the impetus in wanting to do this on the Burglars themselves, by implanting things like:

- the Burglar has to "scope" out the residence in question (have some time based action needing to take place that they can be discovered doing, it needs multiple "scoping out" sessions to lower a quarters DC)

- the Burglar needs to make a "copy" of a quarters key. In order to get this they need to successfully pickpocket the quarter owner 5 or so times, to get "proper imprints" of the keys teeth or some nonsense. But it's basically a way to lower the DC to manageable levels, and after a single use the key breaks, so no repeated burglary

- Improving locks and traps on quarters doors should be a service rendered by "locksmiths", ie. characters with high Open Lock and Trap based skills. Generates a new kind of economy, RP, etc. Introduce a new "trap" that alerts a character to the fact that their quarter is being broken into?

- then all the obvious stuff about making fixtures unbreakable in quarters, and only making certain things steal-able or something.

- On the flip side of a burglar scoping a place out, once someohow has broken in, let them leave behind "clues" to ascertain information about them.

I can only imagine it being a heck of a lot of work for RP only a handful of people might want, but in an ideal world it's something I'd love. I was gonna ask a question here the other day, but forgot, about the lack of a solid Thieves Guild on Arelith. A Thieves Guild is one of the go-to standard fantasy tropes in these kinds of settings, but there's a distinct lack of one (that I'm aware of)

As much as it leans into grieving and being a knob and stuff, I still think there's some chance of decent RP to be had from burglary. You get the scoping out, the theft, the capture and all that.

Post Reply