Stolen items and how to handle them

[qwar]

It should be as realistic as possible, hands down. As for how to implement it (and sorry if this has alreayd been said, there are a lot of replies)…

1. Differentiate between “fungible” (or stackable if you prefer) and “unique” items. A sword is unique. A tunic is unique. An apple is fungible. A loaf of bread is fungible. A dinning plate may or may not be unique/fungible, depending on it’s quality.

2. Give every kind of fungible item a “notorious threshold”. ie if apples are stolen, and you are found with apples, nothing happens, because it’s a fungible item. Unless 50 apples have been stolen and you have 50 apples (give or take), because that’s way over the unspoken threshold (which for apples we could say that having more than 10 makes you suspicious).

3. Create a flag system for characters that have had their unique (or fungible if they go over the notorious threshold) possessions stolen. Those characters keep doing their thing, and when they come across other npcs they “spread” the flag to them. In this fashion, a guard will only look for stolen items if he’s been informed of the robbery by the merchant, or by other guards to whom the merchant talked, and so on. Also, other villages won’t receive the news until much later (when some traveller gets there the news of the robbery). Obviously the first thing any npc should do when they notice the missing items is to go and talk to the guards, and they would also spread the flag to anybody else they “talked” to.

4. Receivers of stolen items who haven’t received the flag yet remember who sold them the stolen item once they receive the flag.

5. Both “rememberance” (4) and “searching culprit” (3) flags decay over time. The higher the value of the item(s), the longer it takes to go away.

6. As for how this would resolve: Once caught, the value of the “searching for culprit” flag and the “rememberance” flag would add up, minus the popularity of the character in that place. So let’s say that they have been searching for you for a long time but it was an item worth quite a bit (100 points remaining out of initial 1000), but since you’ve been caught right at the action of selling the item, the “rememberance” flag is fresh. This means that the witnesses remember your face clear as day, so another 1000 points. But you are quite popular in this town, because you singlehandledly saved it from a group of bandits while the guards were out in the woods looking for them, so it reduces the angriness of the town towards you by 500.

This would be compared against a table that goes like.
0-100 = minor fine
101-250 = regular fine
250-500 = major fine
500-750 = regular fine and physical punishment
and so on.

In this example, you have avoided capital punishment (or whatever) because people were tired of looking for you (possibly reducing at a pace of an inversal logaritmic function = very angry the first day, and rapidly cooling off, with low difference between the day 120 and the day 121), and they liked you quite a bit before, ending up with just a fine.

Of course, the values are completely arbitrary and made up (and should never, ever be presented to the player). This system could also be used with any other crime, equalling it to stealing a unique item.

[andrewgilmore]

I believe it should be simple, not too complicated. A simple notoriety system, so if you get caught to many times stealing items, the village,city,keep will know you for what you are, “a dirty thief!” If you are able to steal without getting caught, then there should be no way the village/city/keep will know your the little thief that is stealing things. BUT, if you prey on one village/city/keep to long, if you keep stealing items in the same village/city/keep. Than the guards should double, and since you are an outsider, the natives will act suspicious towards you. This can be changed if you have completed enough quests for the natives to be considered one of them, or a local hero, and be resolved of all suspicion.

[raedwulf]

With no doubt the realistic approach is the best for this game. But I think there’s so many things around “stealing” that should be considered.

First of all is the inventory size. A normal person couldn’t carry 100 apples, 3 axes, 3 swords, his clothes and someone else’s, dishes, glasses, etc. I could hide an knife, but not a sword. So it should be impossible for me to get a sword from the wall and walk away. I’ll have to wait until nightfall and make my move, and then hide it. That’s real for me.

Second thought comes to selling stolen (or not stolen) items. There’s no reason for a blacksmith to buy an apple from me if next to his house there’s a farmer selling them. They know each other for a long time. Also, if you know the Witcher series, every vendor has a type of items to buy/sell. Can’t sell a sword to the alchemist or a book to the butcher. The idea is to avoid easy money in the game.

As said before, maybe reverse pick pockets is so hard to do, but it is not to put something into someone’s house/shop and “call the cops”. So there’s a way to do a favor to a third person or even to get the chance to blackmail someone.

There’s a lot to explore for a realistic item system.

[Gruz]

Realistic. Nothing more to say, but I need 20 characters.

[JimLeCreep]

Stealing in most games is too easy (the actual act of grabbing the item) and selling is made artificially difficult. The realistic approach is the way to go and I really appreciate the thoughts and opinion in this thread.

Since I usually play Rogues/Assassins/Spies I like to snatch items off peoples bodies without harming/mugging them.

Stealing objects has to be separated in “common”, “personal” and “unique”. Common goods like food, household items, casual clothes et cetera. Personal items would be tailored/handcrafted for a specific person, possibly selfmade or just individualised (as someone already mentioned stiching, holes, colours…). I would count weapons into this category, it is unlike other games not a mass product that looks the same. Weapons are made by a few craftsmen, those usually have their own marking or style. The higher the quality the more likely people will recognize the maker. You could have bought it, in this case you could name the merchant, or tell a story how you won it in a game, which would make charisma and persuasive skills handy. You could also intimidate, threatening the robbed person to harm his family/house if he tells anyone. Depending on your “reputation” he either keep his word or go to the authorities.

Unique items will be recognized immediately. As long as the owner did not hand it to you, which he might tell his neighbours (this guy saved my life, I gave him my unique medallion…) or you won something in a competition/game (in which case the loser might tell a story about the loss and bystanders might talk about how you won a masterly crafted bow…)

The act of stealing should be challenging. You can either stay hidden, cut his purse (as seen in the trailer) or sneak into the house and loot the place. This requires a great situational awareness, others might see you entering the house, pulling out the knife or behaving suspicously.

You could also mug people on a road, threathen them and rob them in broad daylight. If you were not masked, people will recognize your face and tell the guards, who will be looking for you. If you were masked they might descripe your clothes, so you have to wear other clothes around people. If they see you in the “crime outfit” or see you possess such clothing, they might tip you off.

All in all it is about mouth propaganda. It should be natural and not psychic. If a guard is alerted, he does not magically appear, he has to investigate and the more clues/evidence you left, the easier it will be for them to find you. There are no fingerprints or DNA samples, no CSI to hunt you down in one episode…if you were caught red handed, you were done for, if you were cautious, wore different, casual clothes, did not have any special items equipped (like a sword, bow…) your chances are high to not be caught at all.

Pickpocketing should be the most difficult action. But the most rewarding and least tracable (as long as the coins are not specifically marked or otherwise serialized). Just walking up behind someone and press “E” to cut off his purse is not the way to go. You have to check your surroundings inconspicuously before even walking close to someone. People will get mad at you when you are to close to them. So it will only work on really distracted individuals, in a crowd, on sleeping/drunk persons and so on.

I hope my chaotic post makes sense. I wrote down what was going through my head.

[Feek]

I would say that the best realism-complexity compromise would be that AFTER stealing an item, you could offer it for sale, but there would be a chance of the merchant recognizing the item as stolen.
The probability of this chance should increase if you try to sell the item in the same area where you stole it.
Also on very unique items the percentage of the merchant recognizing the item should be higher.
Of course that selling stolen goods to shady merchants should be possible, but I would guess the prices should be greatly reduced then.

In my opinion this system would not be super hard to implement and still pretty realistic, especially considering the times the game takes place in.

[JimLeCreep]

I would like more depth to it. More unforseen consequences of actions long time ago. If you loot a house and help yourself to the golden candleholders the grandparents once handed over as a dowry, chances are the merchant in this town will be alerted. In a small village there is no such thing as secrecy. Everybody knows what is going on by the usual small town gossip. Wealth is especially a hot topic, even today. Chances are that this candleholder is the only valuable item this family ever had and probably will have. You have to sell it to someone far off, not jsut the next big city, because if my precious candleholder has been stolen, I would go any length to find someone who might know something, even the next city (since there was no mall to get all your stuff from back then).

Weapons and armour are handcrafted, heavy and not concealable. Stealing those would require a fence to even sell them. No one would buy a sword or heavy plate (or have the money to do so). Those were expensive back then. Bows and knives not so much (depending on quality). In most role-playing games, you happen upon a massive amount of items to choose from, which I think is highly unrealistic.

If you are on a battlefield and everyone wears armor and has their weapons, you might stumble upon loads of “slightly used, mint conditon” items. But only there you will find such things. However, armour was never “one size fits all”. A small knight won’t fit into a giant breastplate of a slightly obese knight commander who accidentally fell of his horse or the captain of the guard who is 2m tall and took an unlucky arrow to the knee.

If Kingdom Come likes to push the realistic setting a bit further, there it is. This is not just stealing, it is also an issue of loot in general.

Stealing armour and weapons should be the most risky business. The smaller the item the easier, of course. Wearing your stolen armour should be almost impossible, if it even fits your character. Weapons are also visible most of the time and will raise suspicion of word spreads someone stole a specific sword with an ornament on the hilt and a cheeky engraving on the blade.

This brings up another opportunity: Crafting. If you stole an item, you probably want to get rid of such distinctive signatures. Grind down the engraving and you are less likely to be caught. Changing the size of armor, well, this depends on the scale of crafting in KCD. But I would say it is almost impossible to resize a helmet.