Pickpocketing should be fun for everyone

What I'm seeing a lot of is people bragging "I'm a thief!". There's even a "thieves guild" now that is advertising openly that everyone should "watch their pockets".

At this time, I'm going to reveal something that I haven't talked about in a long time. Most of my time playing MUDs was as a thief. I greatly enjoyed the competition and the roleplaying that OFTEN occurred in text based games before UO existed and a wider variety of gamer emerged. Don't get me wrong, I robbed people blind and infuriated quite a few people in the process, it was great fun. But the mechanics of the game were such that it was fair. In the games I played, Gemstone III and Dragon Realms, there were all kinds of ways to protect yourself from thieves. One of which was if you knew how to pick pockets yourself, you were instantly much better at defending yourself from other pickpockets. Something I thought was a very clever way to balance out the act of stealing.

But my favorite defense was employed by sorcerers who could literally curse an item (usually a gem) and then put that item in their inventory. A cursed item would be stuck in a players hand until they found someone (a magic user) that could uncurse the item. This meant that whenever a thief picked the wrong pocket, he or she would be standing there with a cursed gem in their hand unable to equip their weapon! And so they would literally be caught red handed! HA!

It was this mentality that I carried with me through my early adult years and around 1999 I sought to find new games that I could explore thieving in. During the pre-game stages of Shadowbane (which lasted forever), I began something called The Penshire Street Bakery.

The Bakery, was constructed for the sole purpose of stealing the living daylights out of everyone in the game. However to most people that were not paying attention (and who on the internet does) we were just a very weird guild that wanted to "Bake to Crush" and seemed abnormally preoccupied with "baking bread", a skill that didn't even exist in the game.

The Bakery didn't have a guild leader, it had a top chef. It didn't have thieves, it had bakers. It didn't steal, it "made bread" and over time we developed a very rudimentary thieves cant based off of these concepts. For example if someone was becoming a problem you might say something like "knead that dough until it breaks" or if you had a prospective customer you might ask them to "place an order for 12 muffins". Lots of bread puns and innuendo.

We had well over 300 members off the books, all of which were NOT specifically on the known employee roster of our small business that had but a few "regulars" that were (upon release of the game) to be the crime bosses and leaders of the many alts, spies, and people in other guilds that wanted to be a thief in their spare time (we called them part-time staff).

The entire organization took up a lot of time to manage and prepare even during pre-game, as most all of our activities involved planning, scheming, and otherwise conspiring to commit future crimes in-game when the time was right. Unfortunately, the development team of Shadowbane made some choices (specifically to allow multiple characters with absolutely no way of tracking who was who) that sent me personally over the edge some 16 years ago. I very hastily decided that I would take my ball and go home, instantly dissolving the guild and walking away from the game that I had very much looked forward to playing but never did out of spite for what I still think was a horrible decision. (I'm very much in support of same last names for alts here)

The regulars of the guild enjoyed the concept of the bakery so much they began their own version (or franchise) called The Dragons Blood Laundry. Which like it's predecessor was built on the idea that being a thief didn't mean you had to run around standing directly behind everyone you came in contact with, and then once you stole from them yell out "I'm a thief!" in every chat room and forum you could find. Like the Bakery, the Laundry could leverage interesting puns like "we'll get the starch out for you".

But those days are long gone for me. I no longer have pick pocket skills, and my path in New Britannia is a very different one from my days following Shadowbane. Still, I look out at the thieves in this game and I can't help but think that they're supported by extremely poor mechanics. Stealing is too easy and requires very little skill. The ability to mesmerize someone creates both a stationary target and one that can't protect itself, removing any challenge from the act of stealing which should not be a brute force attack like that and instead should be something performed by stealthy low key people in the shadows. Thieves shouldn't want people to know who they are. Yet I see people standing around common areas, unstealthed, and just walking right up behind people having a conversation about how they're a thief and they're going to steal from them.

Thieves in this game are annoying pests that blindly use whatever mechanical imbalance they can to grief and otherwise annoy the general populace. They're almost like spammers, only instead of enlargement drugs they're only selling constant irritation.

What I'd like to see going forward is a more thoughtful approach to pick pocketing that removes the ability to stun or mesmerize targets from the equation. I'd like to see NPC guards patrol common areas that makes it near impossible to steal from players while they're close by. I'd like to see an innate ability (let's call it alertness) that helps protect players from being stolen from just because someone pressed a button. I'd like stealing to require more tact by making repeat offenders unable to steal from the same players over and over again. Something like allowing a player to effectively "block" up to 5 players from stealing by name. That means that if you develop a really bad reputation for being a thief (because you have a big mouth) then you will be on everyone's block list and you'll be very sad.

@Chris Please consider these requests. I believe making these changes would make pick pocketing more fun for everyone involved, not just the loud mouth "thieves" that abuse the mechanics of the game.