Sleight of Hand

Sleight of Hand

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Pickpocketing is the process of using Sleight of Hand to take items from NPCs or other players, potentially without using combat. Although supported on Arelith, pickpocketing is subject to the Be Nice rule as detailed below.

Pickpocketing with Sleight of Hand

• Stealing from PCs can bring the potential of more roleplay. Make sure to know the rules about Excessive Theft, Be Nice rule and 48 hours rule.

• Pickpocket skill renamed as Sleight-of-hand.

Skill Description:

 Sleight-of-hand (also known as prestidigitation) refers to fine motoric skills of the wrist, hand and fingers, when used by performing artists in different art forms to entertain or manipulate. It is closely associated with card magic, grifting, and stealing.

A character developing ranks in this skill may use it to pick pockets, steal from NPC shops, cheat at card and dice games (With "Loaded Die" or "Spare Deck" Items) and unlock certain conversation options..

• Vanilla pickpocket is completely disabled. New pickpocket ability can be found under class radial. You still need to be trained to use it.

• It is no longer possible to pickpocket items from players only exception of keys. (Keys in keyrings cannot be pickpocket.) Golds can still be pickpocketed. Gold gain is increased and uses following calculation to determine gold amount: D(victim's level * 100). So pickpocketing a 30 level character will result in D3000 gold. If victim doesn't have enough coins, remaining gold will be reduced from victim's bank account. NOTE: This isn't actually intended as gold being lost from the bank account, but rather a representation of having lost expensive scarves, lockets, etc, all those things you're character might be carrying that aren't actual valued, and often irreplaceable inventory items, which was previously the case with this ability.

• Has a 4 second timer.

• Moving Automatically fails the timer.
• Cancelling fails the timer.
• For every 10 hard ranks of Sleight of Hand the timer is reduced by 1 second.
• This means a 30 HARD Ranks of Sleight of Hand equals 1 second timer.
• This cannot go to 0 seconds for players.
• NPC Systems are unchanged, they are instant.

• New players pockets are now full of lint, they cannot be stolen from!

• Pickpocketed players will receive a notification that they have been pickpocketed after a 60-120s delay.

• Pickpocket is made against the target's Spot skill, if the thief is detected making an attempt, he cannot steal.

• It is no longer possible to pickpocket same character in 24 hour. This means if you pickpocketed Billy, you cannot pickpocket again for 24 hours. This is now enforced with code as well.

• Successful pickpockets against the same character will reduce the gold stolen for successive pickpockets. Eventually, the victim character will not provide any reward to pickpocketers. Every in-game day will gradually increase the gold available.

• You now only need to carry a single blade orb for a (low, but reasonable) base chance of intercepting any successful pickpocket attempt. However, carrying additional blade orbs (even stacked) will further increase this chance.

• Nearby players can now detect any pickpocket attempt from distance with a penalty. It is a spot of observer vs Sleight-of-hand of pickpocketer check. Observer character needs to be within 20 meters of pickpocket victim. Or cannot attempt to detect a pickpocket attempt.

• Pickpocketing hostile NPCs remains same, there is no change done to it.

• Pickpocketing non-hostile NPCs is completely changed and will result in good rewards compared to old system. A pickpocketed NPC cannot be pickpocketed by anyone again for 1 game day. (You will still need to do pickpocket attempt to determine whether NPC was pickpocketed by someone else with the chance of being detected.) Failing a pickpocket attempt will make NPC shout about they being pickpocketed and will put them into wary state. Every failed pickpocket attempt will increase the wariness level of NPC. DC for Sleight-of-hand check will increase based on current wariness level of NPC. Wariness of a NPC will decrease every 1 game day.

Also, failing a pickpocket attempt means pickpocketer is detected by the NPC (same for players).

• If the pickpocket target NPC has a shop, the pickpocketer will attempt to steal an item from shop with a delay between 1 - 10 rounds, continuously (while in this action, you cannot enter to stealth. And moving will cancel the theft process). Upon successful check and stealing the first item, DC for further Sleight-of-hand checks will increase and pickpocketer will receive a random item from the shop.

On any failure, the NPC will shout an alarm. If the NPC belongs to a nation, the pickpocketer will lose access to all merchants of that nation until next reset. Also, if the pickpocketer comes near the merchant that he failed the steal attempt against, NPC will shout about the thief again. Bluff or stealth can help to bypass this.

(It is still pickpocket attempt, I just worded it as steal attempt because it made more sense to me since you are dealing with merchant.)

• New command -observe added. It allows you to observe a character. While observing a character, you get +20 to your spot check for detecting your observation target's pickpocket attempt. Only one character can be observed at any time. Entering this command will put you into targeting mode. Then you just need to select the target you want to observe.

• Characters with 15 base Sleight-of-hand ranks can decide to use loaded die in dice table. They need to have "Loaded Dice" item in their inventory of course. Each ranks in Sleight-of-hand skill gives you 1% chance to swap regular die with loaded ones. This chance cannot exceed 95%. If success, you will able to set desired rolls for two die. In case of success, everyone that is in your 5 meters will roll a spot check against your Sleight-of-hand ranks to detect the dice swap. -observe command will work for this spot check as well and there is no distance penalty.

• Characters will able to cheat on card game with "Spare Deck" item. This is not implemented yet.

• Task timer bars have been updated and are now interrupted (by):

-: Pickpocket (Moving, Taking damage, Using any items, Equipping, Un-equipping and Casting any spells.)

PvP after pickpocketing

Attacking a thief caught in the act is NO LONGER OK. This will now break the Arelith rules. You will need to interact before you can attack your Pickpocketer.

Pickpocketing in towns

Can a cut purse operate within the confines of Cordor or not?

DM Qizzia:

"Short answer: Definitely yes, Cordor might be sort of pickpocket's paradise.

That said.

Any shrewd pickpocket would of course not do his or her job right into the face of a guard. Use common sense here. Anyone should know that killling someone a few steps in front of a NPC guard, ignoring his presence, is metagaming. Pickpocketing is much more subtle, so they have more space to operate, but I would say that pickpockets should operate with very much caution within a sword's length (or a crossbow bolt's reach) from a guard. Unless of course as a member of a gang, where others distract the guards. Which could be quite fun RP.

As many-times-possesser of Barth & Garth (the two gate elite guards), I mostly play them as rude and corrupt. And watching someone steal a firewood from someone's inventory, would probably not make them do anything else but furrow a brow. Whereas a diamond, maybe would.

So, in short. A general answer to this, I can not give. Like in so many other cases, it's a case to case, of where, who, what, how and why."

"Stolen Treasure" from NPC

When pickpocketing NPCs, character could possibly in lag obtain a Stolen Treasure that looks a little like a deck of cards. This is considered a bug. For more info see what to do when finding unusual items in game. In normal circumstances, the stolen treasure item is automatically removed from characters' inventory.

"This will give you a random drop that the creature you stole from would have carried - you might have to scroll up in the server window to see what you got. If you didn't get anything, then the NPC wouldn't have carried anything. Some races have empty loot containers I believe.

This was a little hack put in place to make it possible to steal from NPCs without having to cycle the loot matrix until the loot was actually required (i.e. death or pickpocket). Before loot spawned in with the NPC, but that was inefficient since some NPCs (ignored mobs, guards) would never be killed. Also since mobs spawned multiple creatures at once, spawning each of those creatures' inventories at the same time could easily result in a lag spike which isn't desirable. Much better to smooth it out." Fire Boar

External links

Pickpocketing on NWN wiki