Quarterbreaking

[I will never sleep]

The fact that you need either an assembled ooc griefer team or to basically exploit the game mechanics by carrying around multiple full gear sets and spam for 20s really tells me we just shouldn't have this. It's the worst mechanic on the server.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

quarterbreaking, in the current meta is actually not easy

Not sure how to feel about this statement. I've built one myself. It wasn't difficult. It was also the easiest character I've ever geared on account of the fact you can skip combat related things (like universal saves and constitution). The most expensive thing is rogue leathers.

The actual act of getting the door isn't particularly "difficult" either, but mind bogglingly tedious amount of clicking.

Click -> esc -> click -> esc -> click -> esc -> click -> esc -> disable trap attempt -> click -> esc -> click -> esc -> refresh prayer -> click -> esc............... etc etc.

I think you're also overstating how "difficult" it is to hit a 1/100 chance. With unlimited, and instant attempts. And time. Because the person is offline. I've owned maxed out quarters (even putting trap strength to 127). They were still cracked. Because it is really not that difficult with the proper setup and limitless attempts at the door. Elves also can get higher search, so in some cases, much higher than a 1/100.

OK, get four rogue leathers. - We should note, by current pricing in game, this is about a 1.5 million gold investment just for the leathers.....

It sounds like you're overpaying, slightly. But my weapon master's weapon alone costs 2m+. Not to mention everything else. It's really not That Much money, comparatively.

ALSO, I do not think how difficult something is to execute, if that was even true, would justify keeping it in the game.

[Glowing Mushroom]

It's difficult to respond to everything within this thread, but the original post is something I agree with strongly.

The prompt when you take a fixture explicitly states that you *must* RP when stealing a fixture.

But the 24 hour theft rule states that you don't have to. You just have to limit yourself to destroying or stealing one fixture per 24 hours.

It seems like these rules have to be revisited.

RP should absolutely be a requirement when it comes to these things. And it shouldn't just be RPing with yourself, or RPing with the people around you. But RPing with the person you are stealing from. If they are not present, then it should include the necessary notes or clues left behind that are relevant enough to offer a lead. Not just an anonymous note that say "I stole your thing", because that's not helpful at all, and it does not create meaningful RP interactions.

Fixture theft is awful. Most especially when you pour a significant amount of writing into a description, all to find it suddenly missing one day without any RP left behind. Yet this, by the 24 hour rule, is acceptable.

There's no easy solution. But having your valuable/RP items stolen is simply never, ever fun for the party on the receiving end, unless meaningful RP is left behind that actually provides a means to engage in further RP.

I've had things stolen or destroyed before, but notes and clues were left behind. Followup RP happened, and the interactions were fantastic.

I've had things stolen or destroyed or even re-described (which means someone took possession of one of my fixtures, redescribed, an replaced it) with absolutely zerp RP before, and it's miserable. It comes across as petty, OOC, and simply unfun. Which to me would be a breach of the Be Nice rule, which is what the in-game prompt states anyway.

I believe the answer here is to revise the rules to be more plain.

RP should absolutely 100% be a requirement when stealing/destroying fixtures. This is what the in-game prompt says anyway, so why does the 24 hour rule contradict this? If you are going to steal or destroy a fixture, then you need to leave RP behind to let the owner know what happened, and offer the appropriate clues to discern how to follow up. Thus creating an actual story arc in RP, rather than leaving one party stranded and dismayed with nothing but a loss.

[toftdal]

People are petty. I am petty.

Let's say that I, toftdal, get annoyed with another established player. Like, really annoyed. I decide I want them off the server.

I could go the direct route - likely end up with a ban, I don't want that.

Instead, I could reach out to a few friends on the server - let's for argument's sake say they don't like the player either. All of us have a QB lying about, because of course we do. So, each of us do a hit-and-run, grabbing what looks the most important to the character, be it a stack of addy, a fixture with a nice long description on it. We are in different time-zones, there is no link between the characters.

Tell me again:
a) How would the DMs enforce -anything-
b) How should the targeted player do -anything-

Now, this is a game players are sinking thousands upon thousands of hours into. Good faith QB is all fine and good - but I feel like that is not what people are sad about. And people get -salty-. Like, I-am-willing-to-burn-a-cdkey-to-hurt-this-player-kind-of-salty.

EDIT: And this is not even accounting for the 3AM bored player with no-one around. "*shrugs* I guess, I'll go see if they have something nice lying about. I wonder if I can get four millions worth of stuff from Greyport this time around."

[-XXX-]

If other players can access a character's citizenship storage while they're is browsing it, then I'd consider it an exploit and would report it should any items go missing as it's essentially the same as sneaking into somebody's quarters through an area transition that they've just used (which isn't something that people should be doing either as I understand it).



The matter of valuable items theft is an interesting topic. Whether or not this should be possible might be an interesting conversation, however one thing that becomes immediately apparent to me is how incredibly favoured STR based characters are here as they can afford to carry all their priceless items with them 24/7.
Whenever a STR based character finds a top tier runic material or adamantine, they get to keep it in their inventory pretty much indeffinitely and can be parted with these items only of their own volition or by DM powers.

[Sincra]

Not exactly for or against anything said here but I am already sitting on a proposal awaiting approval/feedback internally to expand investigate.
This feels like an area of controversy that would benefit from an inclusion to said expansion and will be something under my consideration.
Soon(TM).

[ltlukoziuz]

If other players can access a character's citizenship storage while they're is browsing it, then I'd consider it an exploit and would report it should any items go missing as it's essentially the same as sneaking into somebody's quarters through an area transition that they've just used (which isn't something that people should be doing either as I understand it).

Let me reiterate - this was a thing from day 1 it was released, and even though it was almost immediately noticed by people in unofficial discord (because back in 2018 there was no proper official discord and everyone (including DMs/contributors) were there), no action was taken and it is how it is up to today. I hoped there was earlier post in forums, but most talk only about overflow, with only 2020 being first time in forums someone posted about multiple people looking into your storage - viewtopic.php?f=52&t=30985&p=244810&hil ... ge#p244810

So how this happens is we have more than one access point for citizen storage. If more than one person is opening them up the system will have trouble distinguishing which character is accessing them. What it does instead is open it up to all accessing characters to the person actively using it.

To avoid this, only access the citizen storage while alone. Or have characters wait their turn. (This is why we haven't deployed things like instanced housing due to issues like these.)

(And I have no clue why Spyre later on dismissed it....)

And as I said one page back - this is STILL A THING. I've shown my storage to other folk, I've seen people getting their items yanked and replaced even this week.

[xanrael]

People are petty. I am petty.

Let's say that I, toftdal, get annoyed with another established player. Like, really annoyed. I decide I want them off the server.

I could go the direct route - likely end up with a ban, I don't want that.

Instead, I could reach out to a few friends on the server - let's for argument's sake say they don't like the player either. All of us have a QB lying about, because of course we do. So, each of us do a hit-and-run, grabbing what looks the most important to the character, be it a stack of addy, a fixture with a nice long description on it. We are in different time-zones, there is no link between the characters.

Tell me again:
a) How would the DMs enforce -anything-
b) How should the targeted player do -anything-

Now, this is a game players are sinking thousands upon thousands of hours into. Good faith QB is all fine and good - but I feel like that is not what people are sad about. And people get -salty-. Like, I-am-willing-to-burn-a-cdkey-to-hurt-this-player-kind-of-salty.

EDIT: And this is not even accounting for the 3AM bored player with no-one around. "*shrugs* I guess, I'll go see if they have something nice lying about. I wonder if I can get four millions worth of stuff from Greyport this time around."

Don't think this is really any different than a group of people getting together OOC on a private Discord to alternate in killbashing someone. Heck you can potentially ruin someone's fun by having a group of "unrelated" people spread a bunch of rumors about one person without needing any features in game.

Maybe you've had a different experience, but the vast majority of the people I know that quit due to pressure was because of the OOC bad-mouthing and not anything related to game mechanics.

That's not to say I think that quarter-breaking is perfect, but I hope the mentioned investigation changes could allow for better interaction post-theft. My belief is that any PC should be at risk of loss, whether that's the home owner or the thief.

[Curve]

People are petty. I am petty.

Let's say that I, toftdal, get annoyed with another established player. Like, really annoyed. I decide I want them off the server.

Sure, people can be petty and I have heard of vague stuff like this over the years. This kind of thing should be kept in mind when deciding server rules. But, and this is a big butt, we should actively seek to report anyone who behaves like this and not use their smallness as metric for the server. People like this do not belong on Arelith.

Like, what? I legit can not imagine anyone I know ooc asking me to participate in this or even doing this. I am not petty and if you are petty like this you should not log into Arelith ever again.

[toftdal]

Don't think this is really any different than a group of people getting together OOC on a private Discord to alternate in killbashing someone.

I agree, except for one crucial thing: Interaction. (and little or no risk + you get stuff)

[I will never sleep]

Don't think this is really any different than a group of people getting together OOC on a private Discord to alternate in killbashing someone.

You at least have to find that person (or just effortlessly scry them because that is a cool mechanic) and be seen and fight them. They could actually respond in some manner, outside of a DM report. Killing someone requires interacting with them.

Heck you can potentially ruin someone's fun by having a group of "unrelated" people spread a bunch of rumors about one person without needing any features in game.

Maybe you've had a different experience, but the vast majority of the people I know that quit due to pressure was because of the OOC bad-mouthing and not anything related to game mechanics.

This is still kind of scummy, but at least they are not tangibly, physically affecting you.

That's not to say I think that quarter-breaking is perfect, but I hope the mentioned investigation changes could allow for better interaction post-theft. My belief is that any PC should be at risk of loss, whether that's the home owner or the thief.

How do we rationalize, in character, not being able to take something off someone's corpse when they are literally killed but be able to just lockpick their door and take something? There is a glaring narrative dissonance here in intention and the game's mechanics.

The matter of valuable items theft is an interesting topic. Whether or not this should be possible might be an interesting conversation, however one thing that becomes immediately apparent to me is how incredibly favoured STR based characters are here as they can afford to carry all their priceless items with them 24/7.
Whenever a STR based character finds a top tier runic material or adamantine, they get to keep it in their inventory pretty much indeffinitely and can be parted with these items only of their own volition or by DM powers.

I agree, especially as more and more inventory bloat is added, as well as Arelith's lack of magic bags in age old decisions. It's just another feather in the already many feathered cap of strength builds. Can't rob me when I have 7k carrying capacity and just carry everything on my person. You could still pickpocket them, I suppo- oh wait...

--

To borrow more from the other thread, things that I intensely agree with:

i don't think a new rule needs to be written. i think a simple amendment to an existing one would suffice:

"Combat actions, theft, and political actions (using our Citizenship System) against other PC's (PvP) MUST BE INTERACTIVELY ROLE PLAYED. That means you interact, they interact, etc: BEFORE any action occurs. No exceptions. Thus you must INTERACT DIRECTLY with a player before issuing an EXILE or a Pariah status, or evoking a shop or ANY OTHER POLITICAL ACTION. NO EXCEPTIONS. No speedies or NPCs may be used in lieu of this. If your character is killed by another PC (or vice versa), you must wait one realtime day before participating in PvP or interacting in any way with that PC or other hostile PCs from the battle unless both sides explicitly agree to. You are always free to take flight from PvP. Having an opposite or evil alignment is not sufficient reason for PvP action. Before attacking another player the dislike/hostile state must be activated."

if that reduces quartertheft to only happening if the victim is at home, that's fine by me. it at least means theft requires interaction. it would encourage pickpockets to also do more than stealth by wordlessly and nab gold from players (an issue I had in another thread, but i don't want this one to become about pickpocketing).

EDIT: a change like this would also still allow quarterBREAKING, to allow for the things you listed (spying, assasination, Information gathering, tricks, forging, Squatting, Bribing, And more), but not quarterTHEFT, which is my primary issue.

The infrequency of something should have nothing to do with how permissive it is. If something sucks, it sucks, whether it happens to one guy or a hundred. If your most oft-repeated defence of something is "well it doesn't happen that much" then maybe you ought to examine why that is instead of snarking down your nose at me. Maybe people don't like being mean to enrich themselves, or more probably they don't want to level up highly-specialised quarterbreak builds that do very little except open doors and take things.

I have stolen much more than I have been stolen from, and the fact that I could decide that, actually, I no longer really care about observing the little things like "not being a douchebag" right now with my character that I still have and still play, and just start hitting quarters and taking things from anyone who doesn't feel like paying the tens of thousands of gold in rent for very high DC traps (the only thing I really struggle to get through through some oopsies on my part, not to imply these are impassable by any means); that's what I'd say is, a good 90% of people.

In this thread I am told that this is fine, or that it doesn't matter if somebody's item just gets snatched out of nowhere -- because it's not hard to replace. According to the rules, according to the repeated comments of several administrators in this thread, taking things from people for no reason except to be a Pufferfish is perfectly fine, and if not everyone has fun, so be it. Why is something that offers 0 value to anything but my personal in-game bank account perfectly fine? That does not make even an iota of sense to me, and to defend it so fiercely strikes me as rather bizarre.

I don't care how frequent or infrequent pointless destruction is, just that it should not happen, period end. If you ask me, trying to intellectualise quarterbreaking as anything else but a frequently candy-coated form of griefing is just willful pretension.

I wonder: if quarterbreaking required interaction, would you see it more, or less?

[xanrael]

That's not to say I think that quarter-breaking is perfect, but I hope the mentioned investigation changes could allow for better interaction post-theft. My belief is that any PC should be at risk of loss, whether that's the home owner or the thief.

How do we rationalize, in character, not being able to take something off someone's corpse when they are literally killed but be able to just lockpick their door and take something? There is a glaring narrative dissonance here in intention and the game's mechanics.

The break from "reality" comes from the lack of being able to loot the corpse, not that a home can be robbed. Even if there was no quarter theft we'd still have to rationalize away that you "get to take it with you" when you die.

[Aelryn Bloodmoon]

Your comparison to the pvp rule though is actually accurate, and it does seem weird that one exists without the other. My solution, and everyone is going to hate it, would be to change the pvp rules. Instead of Arbitrary rp before a fight, people should just need a legit rp reason to kill someone. It will actually tone down the amount of pvp on the server and make pvp mean a bit more in the long run, I am certain of it, but I am also certain no one believes me

My personal thought - perhaps a little simpler of a solution than trying to revamp the PvP rules in their entirety, and mechanics inclined to avoid extra reports on the DM's.

1: Waiting for someone to leave their quarter, disarming the traps, breaking the lock, getting inside, opening the chest, stealing the item, and getting back out are all okay from an IC perspective. They all make sense. However, they aren't interactive, and the stealing player has an undeniable mechanical advantage (complete anonymity and no obligation to provide any sort catalyst to inclusive RP).

2: WE HAVE SCRYING and other forms of divination. These have counters and interactivity.

3: Solution - Allow diviners to cast scry on any quarter chest with a target of "The last person who stole from this chest," thus using the chest as a qualifying connection to their target. Normal scrying counters and interactivity apply.

Do this by flagging the stealing player with a resref or tag tied to any Quarter Chest they break the lock on, possibly by giving them an item that can't be dropped/sold/traded for 24 hours on breaking a quarter chest lock, and having a scry cast on that chest look for that resref/tag.


Thieves will still be able to counter scrying. Thieves that log out less than an hour after stealing an item should have that item returned to the referenced chest when they log out. We have to give TWO WEEKS notice to stage a raid, and Be Nice is a rule; if you don't have an hour to give people a chance to interact with your theft, you shouldn't be committing the theft.

[Duchess Says]

If other players can access a character's citizenship storage while they're is browsing it, then I'd consider it an exploit and would report it should any items go missing as it's essentially the same as sneaking into somebody's quarters through an area transition that they've just used (which isn't something that people should be doing either as I understand it).

This ought to be a separate thread as it's getting lost here.

Frankly I think it should be shouted from the rooftops that you shouldn't keep anything valuable in settlement storage. But instead I see echoed, from DMs even, that it's safer than quarters. It's absolutely not but I don't think enough players know that. I'm only using it for crafting supplies from here on and if possible I'm using True Sight before accessing.

Should it be reported? Yeah probably. but I have zero expectation it would get looked into and even less than zero that an item taken would be returned. It needs to be changed mechanically or needs to be well known this is just a way to store stuff you can afford to lose.

[godhand-]

The fact that you need either an assembled ooc griefer team or to basically exploit the game mechanics by carrying around multiple full gear sets and spam for 20s really tells me we just shouldn't have this.

So by this logic, we should remove secondary sets of gear that people use for opening runic chests.
There are MANY characters that put 1 point into openlock/disable trap, and have a spare gear set to get up the last 25 points, so they can hit 45-50 DC locks for runic chests.
I'd argue the time spent working for 20 rolls represents the time taken to work the lock and open it. - It is not an instant action. It takes time to open the lock.

The actual act of getting the door isn't particularly "difficult" either, but mind bogglingly tedious amount of clicking.

Click -> esc -> click -> esc -> click -> esc -> click -> esc -> disable trap attempt -> click -> esc -> click -> esc -> refresh prayer -> click -> esc............... etc etc.

I think you're also overstating how "difficult" it is to hit a 1/100 chance. With unlimited, and instant attempts. And time. Because the person is offline. I've owned maxed out quarters (even putting trap strength to 127). They were still cracked.

You are right. it is easy to do, but as you said, mindbogglingly tedious. i'd even say as far to say, MIND NUMBINGLY tedious.
And this doesn't take into account human error. Sometimes you get the 19/20 roll, and your fingers, on autopilot, ESCape out of it and you lose it....

It can be cracked, yes. But it becomes a time vs reward investment.
You can get lucky, You can, We've all seen triple 20's happen in combat.....
But we've all also seen the inverse happen. tripple 1's too.
Sometimes RNJesus just doesn't play in your favour.

The reason i explained the mechanics of how this works - because you will literally be spending alot of time, having to rest, regather your charges on consumables to hit the doors. - All the while standing outside someones door?

Reality of application vs perception of application.

People are petty. I am petty.
.... SNIP....

I think one of the common arguments in this thread is that it can be used to grief -
I'd be interested to see if this has ever actually happened, or how many reports of this have come through ot the DM. Most of this thread is based in the hypothetical in that "ITS POSSIBLE" And not alot of "It actually happens."

<Sarcasm>
Hey, while we're at it, we should ban settlement mechanics, Because everyone settlement leader on discord could get together and decide to exile people to grief them out of all surface settlements and get them off the server.
We should ban Scrying because players can get together and make ganksquads, using Scrying to hunt down targets and KB them.
We should ban PvP because players can get together and grief people.
We should ban assassins because they can be abused to grief people
</sarcasm>

The problem isn't the tool being used, The problem is griefing - which is a breach of the #1 rule - BE NICE.

On the forums i always seem to see people are assuming the worst of people on this server?? It seems a very negative outlook. I've had these things happen, as single one off occurrences, but never as repeated griefing in an attempt to get me off the server. I have played this server for a literal decade.

I play on arelith, a roleplaying server to have fun and build a collaborative narrative. If you don't come here to do that, what are you here for?

All of us have a QB lying about, because of course we do.

Does everyone though? I really doubt it. I'd like to see Spyres Player-count numbers released so we can see the -actual- numbers of them floating around in vaults, compared to the number of them floating around in peoples perceptions of the character vaults.

[I will never sleep]

2: WE HAVE SCRYING and other forms of divination. These have counters and interactivity.

3: Solution - Allow diviners to cast scry on any quarter chest with a target of "The last person who stole from this chest," thus using the chest as a qualifying connection to their target. Normal scrying counters and interactivity apply.

Do this by flagging the stealing player with a resref or tag tied to any Quarter Chest they break the lock on, possibly by giving them an item that can't be dropped/sold/traded for 24 hours on breaking a quarter chest lock, and having a scry cast on that chest look for that resref/tag.


Thieves will still be able to counter scrying. Thieves that log out less than an hour after stealing an item should have that item returned to the referenced chest when they log out. We have to give TWO WEEKS notice to stage a raid, and Be Nice is a rule; if you don't have an hour to give people a chance to interact with your theft, you shouldn't be committing the theft.

This may be a topic for an entirely different thread but I am leery of throwing more and more cookies on what is already the only rp relevant form of magic, and faceless command. Scry has done nothing but become more and more prominent and omnipresent, imo, and the counterplay around it is incredibly polarizing.

To being able to be functionally immune to it for hours and hours at a time, effortlessly, at no cost to you, to needing to tap a wand over yourself every. seven. minutes. To being virtually defenseless against it unless you burn thousands and thousands of gold in consumables. There are scry-proof rooms, but I don't think "have something sensitive to talk about? go to one of these 3 areas on the server" is always cool, fun or particularly reasonable.

There should be more ways to find people that isn't a command tied to feats.

Quarterbreakers, ironically, are in the camp of being immune to it for hours and hours with virtually no effort due to the class used. At least self contained ones are.

[Kaeldre]

I strongly believe it is important that our character's spheres of safety can be challenged and broken into. To me, a persistent world is one where you are given the opportunity to influence it, but accept that it can influence you as well. Whether you want it to or not. I find that quarters fall into this kind of sphere.

That said, I think it is a sound idea to encourage further roleplay from scenarios where this safety is infringed. A simple way to spark roleplay and interaction following a faceless intrusion is investigation. Simply put, tie the chest to the -investigation command. That way people might just be able to put a face on the interloper, and with a potential wealth of roleplay to boot.

[La Villa Strangiato]

Taking an Enlightened Centrist position on this issue...

Let us assume, for example, Character A has a house. Character A is, for whatever reason, antagonistic with Faction B. In the realm of IC reasoning, it totally makes sense for B to bust into A's house and steal something important-- whether this be a plot item/MacGuffin, a stack of adamantine, or the secret information on Faction C, A's allies.

But, because it would be very silly for professionals like Faction B to leave a note saying who did this and why, it seems like B just broke into A's house with no roleplay and stole their crap. And while it's good that B got roleplay out of finding out the secret information or stealing the MacGuffin, A didn't get any roleplay. A just had their stuff stolen.

As much as bad things happen to good adventurers, and no area should be inaccessible to a savvy player, the anecdata from this thread seems to indicate there's not much of a give-and-take regarding theft RP. A similar thing has happened to me; I placed a marker fixture of a sort in the corner of an open area, and a group that was antagonistic to my character's group for completely valid IC reasons moved it away. My group found it and moved it back; their group moved it again. A total of one of our group was involved in RPing with the people who moved the marker.

There are a couple rubs to this. One, it's definitely on me for putting the fixture within the range of the opposing group; IC consequences are IC consequences. Two, I'm assuming the same general group moved it a second time. While it's completely valid for this to happen, it still means that most of my group haven't got any roleplay out of it-- we just have to put the marker back, which is annoying. Alternatively, make plans about moving it somewhere else, which is difficult because FOIG.

It's not even that the other group is playing in bad faith, because they aren't. They're not doing this out of an OOC desire to greef our group; it's easy to just move the thing because character reasons, and because they can't exactly chase us down to roleplay with us every time. The same applies to the problem of quarterbreaking; your average QBer might not have the build or the time to lug around a basin to edit furniture to leave clues.

My conclusion is that making an interactive roleplay experience out of a system that doesn't really have the mechanical tools for making it interactive is hard. This is, of course, not even getting into the people who just QB because they can. Unfortunately, expecting people to always operate in good faith when you give them something exploitable just isn't feasible, and it's my opinion that quarterbreaking in its current state could stand to be monitored or changed in some way.

[I will never sleep]

Let us assume, for example, Character A has a house. Character A is, for whatever reason, antagonistic with Faction B. In the realm of IC reasoning, it totally makes sense for B to bust into A's house and steal something important-- whether this be a plot item/MacGuffin, a stack of adamantine, or the secret information on Faction C, A's allies.

But, because it would be very silly for professionals like Faction B to leave a note saying who did this and why, it seems like B just broke into A's house with no roleplay and stole their crap. And while it's good that B got roleplay out of finding out the secret information or stealing the MacGuffin, A didn't get any roleplay. A just had their stuff stolen.

This is not meant to be a direct response to you- but in response to what was a commonly repeated notion in this thread:

What is more "Must Win" in this scenario? Faction A or Faction B?

I have repeatedly failed to see how asking you interact with the people you are stealing from is somehow more "Must Win" than just snatching people's items while they are offline.

Not to mention things like plot items, wherein you can just take them and hijack plots without ever actually directly roleplaying with them at all, just at and around them. I think it is very insidious, and justifies insular and exclusionary behavior, regardless of most any context you can throw around it despite some people arguing the opposite.

[Watchful Glare]

I only know of one case in the recent years where anything remotely resembling a plot item or something that wasn't just material convenience was stolen by a QB.

When the QB learned this, they were willing to give them back but wanted Z thing done in return. Nothing costly. The owner of the item freaked out, so the QB decided to just give it back anyways and for free.

In one character i played once, I had my quarters broken into and stolen from. The thief left a nice calling card, which my character was able to put together after he did some investigation, the thief had used it in other places as well. Then he sought a QB of his own to break into the most messed up place he could think of, to take something, and leave the calling card with some extra info about the thief on it. You deal with that now.

I've never seen any case of someone chain-breaking into a place and stealing one item a day. And if it were like that, I really don't think the DMs would look at that and go "Can't do anything chap, it's within the rules." "They're even taking the rugs" "Sorry, within the rules" "I don't even have pants anymore!" "Can't help you", anymore than they would let someone getting randomly killbashed once a day go without looking into it for suspicious motives.

It can also be that you play a faction that has enemies everywhere- And the stealing is actually not coordinated but just different factions thinking about getting clever at the same time.

I've been guilty too in the past about thinking that most people are stinkyheads up to no good, and the server is dominated by toxic cliques that rub their hands and snicker maliciously looking for their next victim. So far what I've seen the only toxicity has been either players being... Prejudiced because of things they've heard or things they expect to happen, which is understandable, or people panicking in moments. (Like someone jumping someone else in PvP- and then apologising in tells because they panicked and jumped the gun when they could have played the scene differently)

Perhaps I've had a really privileged experience, but I'm not sure, most of the characters I play are unrepentant waffles out there to be mean and wind up being antagonists for others

If there's to be any change at all- I'd have it so the stealing of fixtures requires some RP, in the form of whatever. Fixtures in and of themselves usually have a lot more of RP value and RP-energy invested into them. Ten stacks of dragonhide sure can be handy, but it's not as meaningful as a carved statue with some history attached to it. And those most of the time do not even require quarterbreaking for one character to just take.

[Drak]

If you want impregnable storage there's citizenship storage. Just use that.

You know this isn't completely true, right?

[AstralUniverse]

The problem is not with quarter breaking, the problem is RP-less pvp in stealing items from the chest.

Solution that has been proposed like a million times: Lower the DC on doors, make them *slightly* easier to break, and make the chest itself fixed 127 DC for all quarters, or just make it unbreakable entirely.

That's a great solution, and pretty much what I'd love ot see implemented - but I've talked to the staff about it and it's unlikely to ever happen as it means revisiting every quarter on the server and doing intensive amounts of work. Sad times.

I'm not all that sad about it tbh. I'm on the boat that no place is safe, no item is mechanically beyond theft and I kinda like it in some ways. I admit I've also not been a victim to RP-less-pvp-theft very frequently in my years playing here. But I cant help but wondering what these threads about this topic are even good for if the most obvious and effective solution already exists but sort of is impossible to implement.

[-XXX-]

no item is mechanically beyond theft

Except the ones in a character's inventory

IMO the formula for calculating carrying capacity and encumberance might use some overhaul.

[Ebonstar]

the rule should be swapped to that for QB you can only steal a statue or a painting or something that has RP value and not crafting or mechanical value.

also change the rule that it can only happen once a real life month not day. This would have the QB have to plan a theft and have chances to be caught before hand which yet again creates more RP from what now is a mostly non RP event

This is a simple way to end the worry that most have, and creates RP that the breakers must follow if they are so hell bent to be thieves.

In its own right, it would also create an art or similar black market style of RP for the thieves have to have a way to unload their loot.

[The GrumpyCat]

If you want impregnable storage there's citizenship storage. Just use that.

You know this isn't completely true, right?

True, yes as I've been reminded. But it's still safer than quarter storage.

[ZeroPointEnergy]

Can't fixture owners just keep a description/name back up on a notepad somewhere?

The only things that are truly irreplaceable is the rugs around because they're grandfathered in.