No excessive theft rule

No Excessive Theft is one of the 5 golden rules on Arelith servers. The following are few explanations and clarifications for it.

The world of Arelith supports and even encourages a little bit of light lifting. Remember, though, that only a really stupid thief is going to hit the same mark over and over again. That's just begging to be caught by the local authorities, not to mention is a form of griefing through hostile action, which may violate the Rules of Engagement or the "Be Nice" rule.

Pickpocketing is considered a hostile action, and may result in an attack if spotted by certain non-player characters.

Only one item from a player every 24 hours

The server rule is that player is allowed to steal one item from a player every 24 hours. This includes:

• items gained by pickpocketing
• coins taken from their corpse
• For quarter chests, it is a theft of one quarter per 24 hours, not one player!
• If you are in a party, it is 1 item *per* party, as you are considered one entity for the theft. This means for quarter chests, your entire party can only take from one quarter every 24 hours.

"...stacks are generally considered 'one' item. Chests read them as 'one' for limit purposes, PP steals 'one' item."

If the pickpocketed item is given back by the system, then it does not count as a successful attempt, so the thief is free to attempt to steal an item that they get to keep.

"The item size thing is an Arelith hack put in to prevent people being able to pickpocket plate mail, which is clearly dumb. Unfortunately, the only way to achieve this is to hook the code into just after the item is stolen, which is OOC. If you steal an item and it's immediately returned, then IC, the attempt never happened."

"Here's how it works. You try and steal from someone. Your options are: you fail, you succeed and get an item, or you succeed but the item gets taken off you.

• If you succeed or fail, that's it.
• If you succeed but the item is then taken off you, the attempt never happened so you can try again."

Items from the chests in the player quarters may be stolen as well. If you can manage to break in (or get naively invited into a quarter when you have a treacherous intent), you may steal one item, or one stack of the item from a chest (IE, one shield, or a stack of 99 gold ingots), assuming you haven't stolen from the chest-owning character in the last 24 hours (or you have their explicit OOC permission that you may proceed). However, logging out in a quarter to log back inside it later, bypassing the door in order to steal again is a major exploit and a punishable offense.

Roleplay tips

The good thieves follow a policy of moving away from a mark as soon as they get an item. The exceptional thieves will do such clever and RP-inducing things as slyly selling the lifted goods back to the player ("Want to buy a ring, guv? Why, it looks like it was made just for you! Even has your name engraved on it!"), or offering them another way to recover the loot, especially if the stolen item is very valuable or unique.