Better Burglary

[alephnaught]

One of the more obviously broken parts of Daggerfall is the ease by which one can break into shop after shop, loot them completely dry, go take a nap then return to the same shops the following morning and sell it all back to them - rinse and repeat until you're extremely rich.

Later TES games addressed this by making it impossible to sell stolen goods to anyone but the Thieves' Guild, but that seems too restrictive a solution for a game as open as Daggerfall and it would take away an aspect of the classic gameplay loop which is fun, however cheesy.

So, what can be done to make it more challenging? Here are a few ideas:
- As has been suggested elsewhere, let there be a chance of an armoured guard spawning inside stores at night; the chance is higher for higher level stores.
- Much higher base chance of guards being alerted when bashing a door, somewhat higher when picking a lock.
- Make lockpicking require lockpicks.
- No more unlimited lockpick attempts for a given lock - have a certain % chance of a lock jamming on failure, once jammed it cannot be picked again for 24 hours.
- Have the game keep track of recently robbed stores. If the player attempts to sell to a store in the same town, let there be a % chance that the shopkeeper will recognise goods as stolen and call the guards. This percentage chance will decrease over time and based on distance from store robbed. For example, if the player tries to resell goods to the burgled store within 24 hours, they are near certain to be recognised, within the same city there's about a 50/50 chance, within the province perhaps a 25% chance, all of these decreasing over time and modified by skill checks (PER/LUC/Streetwise/Etiquette/Mercantile/Stealth or some combination thereof). Pawnshops or low quality stores are perhaps less likely to notice/care about stolen goods also.

What do y'all think - would these kinds of features be relatively straightforward to implement? I think it would make roleplaying a thief character far more specialised and fun.

[pango]

- No more unlimited lockpick attempts for a given lock - have a certain % chance of a lock jamming on failure, once jammed it cannot be picked again for 24 hours.

That was a recent regression, it's fixed in 0.10.4

[Ommamar]

I think it should be more difficult to fence stolen items and in fact would be in favor of only being able to sell to a fence. This could be a freelance person who would be rare and would take some time to find. Kind of like the guys that will give quests for a coven. With the thieves guild fence giving a much better option and ease of finding.

I like the idea of lock picks as a limiting factor in the ability to use the lock pick skill. Your idea of guards coming to check on someone bashing a door makes sense but would switch it with the use of lock picking skill being the less likely to garner attention.

Someone guarding a store at night would make sense, doesn't necessarily have to be a guard, could be a free lance adventure who took the job through the fighters guild or directly from the shop owner.

A unique tag for each item would be a good option that would allow NPCs to perform a stolen check, or you could just make a stolen/not stolen Boolean flag with no NPC check needed they would just not be shown stolen items unless the mentioned skill check was passed.

As for role playing you can easily to choose to not sell anything where you have stolen it, only use fences in the thieves guild, or simply not break into stores and take all the items. The current system allows these choices to be role played as much of or as little of as you choose to.