Not a fan of the 'pickpocket enemies during/before combat to get bonus stuff' mechanic - if I can pickpocket them, I should be able to take it from their cold dead corpse.
I actually think this is a decent system, because it discourages save scumming the result, since you don't need to reload to find more mooks and you don't want to reload a hard won boss fight. Obviously it makes little to no sense simulation wise, but it serves as a nice gameplay mechanic to reward the player for fighting well enough to waste turns that give no benefit in the battle itself, and serves as a sort of thematic 'fuck you' to your enemies, like a taunt. Especially if you manage to steal some sort of unique item related to that enemy that serves as a trophy of sorts.
No, it's a retarded system because it is retarded.
It's the kind of system where you need to spell out everything that's possible to do with it to the player explicitly, because there is no fucking logic to it. It inherently doesn't lend itself to experimentation or building emergent gameplay on top of it.
The main reason simulationism is superior isn't that the games must slavishly emulate reality. The main reason is that it allows games to directly benefit from a lot of internal logic that reality has and players understand. Players generally understand concepts like 'theft' and 'having something on your person'. If your game includes those concepts and let them work as expected then those concepts don't need any explanation beyond signalling that they exist. They also can be incorporated into higher order gameplay either by the devs or by the player.
However if your game includes those concepts but 'having something on your person' doesn't actually mean having it on your person or 'theft' doesn't actually mean taking stuff someone else has in their possession, you start to need to explain basic concepts to the player. You also need to spell out explicitly how those concepts can be incorporated into higher order game logic, because player can no longer rely on their understanding of them, plus you risk tripping yourself because you can no longer be sure the logic you're building won't clash with itself at some point.
In other words: you start constructing some giant clusterfuck of fail with no obvious benefits because in lalaland of
you can go and steal from someone stuff they don't have after which they may proceed to hit with stuff you stole and they didn't have in the first place and it isn't exactly obvious how any of this can logically tie into anything else.
This kind of mechanics is infectious too because if there is one thing that works like this there are at least two ways it can poison everything else:
- By not letting the player assume that anything else works in sensible manner, because clearly some things don't and the pattern, if it even exists, isn't obvious.
- By letting the side effects of illogical mechanics propagate into situations described by other systems.
Meanwhile in
simulationist land the fluff seeks to describe the crunch as well as possible. So it's not surprising to the player that things people have are the same things that can be stolen or looted from them and the same things that they can use themselves, so player can for example plan to sneak in before a fight and take bad guys' weapons so that they have nothing to fight with and they can reason that, for example, dropping something valuable in bandits' hideout may cause them to fight and kill each other over it (it's possible in Skyrim, BTW), and that if you want research notes A from NPC B who in turn wants you to escort him to the town C which is helluva long way from where you are before he gives them to you, you might as well just steal them or pretend to agree, walk him just outside of town and murder him to take the notes.
It's ironic when
and
seem to have so much more sense in them than your average Codexer.
Any pickpocketing mechanic that encourages savescumming is shit.
By that logic everything is shit, because everything short of super easy challenges encourage save scumming.
Savescumming is mostly up to the the player and does not have much to do with the game. Instead of being and idiot and trying to pickpocket with that 5% chance maybe build a character who can do it well enough.
Git gud bois.
And what if it's 50%? What if it's 95% and you roll badly?
How do you git gud at rolling virtual dice?
You seem to have this deep and worrying lack of understanding of what RPGs are really supposed to be about.
What do you mean?
I mean that if you use the term "have to" you probably don't understand the point of RPGs.
I never said that stealing should be important in RPGs, I just said that it was never really necessary, even if you wanted to "role-play" a thief.
And how exactly do do you reoleplay a theif without stealing?
Let me help you out:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/thief
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/theft
No need to thank me.
A thief that is extremely rich won't bother stealing random crap from the pockets of npcs.
How about keys? Signets and other means of proving one's identity? Notes containing useful information (including passphrases)? Items carried by couriers?
Locking a significant victory behind a single roll isn't really better than a single roll forcing a game over.
Ressources must ALWAYS be scarce. What the fuck does a ressource matter if you have too much of it to worry about using it? Every game that showers you in gold has shit economics and i hate the fact that developers are being so fucking lazy about that stuff.
Scarcity is hard to do because it's not stable (It's not unlike RL economy, come to think of it).
If player is doing worse than you've expected, for example due to random factor, they lose.
If player is doing better than expected they gain more and more resources to burn to get even better off and then they drown in wealth.
That's one of the reasons inventory limitations are crucial - they impose a cap on how well off a player can be (and yes, for this very reason gold should have weight as well), so are all sort of constant resource sinks - supplies, repairs, etc. - some of which need to be correlated to how well off the player is (repairing a legendary artifact is going to be expensive, using it to stab rats is going to burn a lot more funds than it will earn), so that it's possible to descend back into recoverable murderhobo phase instead of crashing hard into rock-bottom if unlucky or not gud enuff.
