Looking for IDEAS to help improve the THIEF system I made

Anyone who is a fan of Conan knows that “thievery” is a major theme of the stories. So, adding a thievery system to my server is something I really wanted to do. I released the first part of it today, but I’m wondering if anyone can improve it with ideas or features that would make it more rich and interactive.

Right now, here is the way it works. Tell me how I can improve it please.

Admin created structured scattered around the world, have interactive doors that give the player a prompt to either “break in”, “lock pick” or “back away”.If a player chooses to lock pick they must have one of 4 different types of lockpicks (iron, steel, hardened steel, starmetal) in order to have a chance. The chance of unlocking the door and entering is based on the quality of the lockpick and the difficulty of the structure. So, for example, the lowest tier of structure has a 100% chance for starmetal and a 33% chance for iron. On the other end, the highest tier structure gives a 0% chance for all lockpick types except starmetal. If the lockpick fails, it breaks.

If a player has no lock picks, or if they just elect to force open the door, there is a minor chance it opens and a much greater chance that it gives them a “You made too much noise trying to break in” message and spawns a random collection of enemies around the perimeter responding to the disturbance. The player might need to attempt to “break in” multiple times, fighting different enemies before getting the lucky roll that allows them to enter the building.Once the door opens, there is a small chance that an “occupant” will spawn inside the building that the player will have to fight.

Inside, I’ve placed various interactive nodes ranging from cooking pots, to bookcases, laundry baskets, chests, cupboards, and crafting tables. When a player interacts with one of these they get an RNG roll at some appropriate loot. The cooking pots offer a chance at good food or spoiled food.The higher tier structures (3 and 4) have a chance at the player discovering a clue in the form of a note or journal that tells the player where another, much richer, cache of riches is hidden somewhere in the world.

Finally, I made a faction of brigands the player can join to work their way through so that they can either organically find these houses in the world as they roam, or be directed to them over time through the faction quests.So, I feel really excited about this system, but I’m sure there is always room for improvement.

So, please give me any ideas for ways I can expand or improve it. Even if it doesn’t seem completely possible, given all the mods we have access to, and a little outside the box thinking, I might be able to make it work. Thanks.


EDIT: Scroll to the bottom for new pictures of other thievery villages.

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I like the idea, but could you replace that menu with means/tools you have at hand? It feels artificial compared to just facing the door and swinging at it with a blunt or improvised weapon, or just switching to a weapon with a nice kick alt. Same with [Pick the Lock[; if you have any kind of lockpicking tool, you could slot it and activate it while facing the door. This is less immersion-breaking and feels more personally engaging than text telling you “This is a door you can get through and these are the ways you can get through it.”

How about a crowbar tool? Depending on your skill or strength you might be able to jimmy it with minimal scarring to the wood, or might leave the kind of splintering that tells the resident, “You’ve been jacked!”

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I’m not sure how well it’d work for this. But Indrid’s Custom Races and Classes has a Stealth mechanic. You could put a guard using Pippi Spawners and edit their dmg to something like 10x so the player is encouraged to try to avoid rather than directly fight.

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Exiled Lands and Siptah just don’t support the kind of civilization that Conan liked to steal from. R.E. Howard didn’t write about depriving people of crap that Conan could easily have foraged for himself, and I don’t see any big heists that you could write an adventure about.

Forget random rolls that turn player participation into a farce and just spawn the enemies. Beat 'em up, take what you want, or run for your life and hope they haven’t sketched a picture of you to post on every wall.

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That is actually amazing that you did all of that. Very nice!

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This is why Server Admins are able to build such civilizations. And we can even do so without taking up valuable building space or despawning resources.

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I am sorry I have no knowledge on mods and programing.
Yet…
DUDE THIS IS AWESOME!!!
I really hate the stealing mechanism of the game, that’s why my solo game is always pve official. Still, if the game had this kind of mechanism, to steal pve and not pvp, I would love to have it, so yes, bring it on :grin:.
My opinion on multiple (more than 3 times) break in failure is to spawn inside the room a boss. You know that bosses are destroying everything when they fight, like a bull in a glass market :rofl::rofl::rofl:. So this way players would be panished choosing the buly way to steal.
I really love this idea and it is one of the best ever ideas I ever read here, brilliant!!!
I wish devs will consider this idea and use it on Sepermeru and North area. Why not, create some civil villages in the starting river, so you can steal them too. But in these villages the loot should be tools, hides, food, no big value things, just survival.

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Seriously cool you are combining aspects of alot of our old favorites.

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Gotta say, that’s genius and has a lot of potential. I’ll definitely be keeping watch :+1:

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Also there is a few mods out there like Roleplay Redux and Custom Stats that allow for picking doors and locks from other players (if they are online). If anyone’s looking for a thievery system that players can do on one another.

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We use the RR mod and absolutely luv it! It would be great if it could integrate with some other systems because I really like this concept.

Good news is they are working on a API so other mods could latch in. But as they say it will be entirely experimental.

Naturally but that is wonderful news!

Awesome ideas. I’ll definitely be using both the guard dog and the “other thief” idea.

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Unfortunately, I can’t really do that at this time. But they’re good ideas. I’ll keep them in mind for the next time when I try to expand my dev-kit skills. All this stuff was set up on the admin-side.

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That’s interesting. I will look into that. So far, ime almost all the mods that touch on stealth, lockpicking, etc all do so with “roleplay in mind” between players where it requires another player to also be “rolling” outcomes in a combined RP. This is more PVE and less RP. But I will definitely check it out!

That’s not entirely true. Having recently listened to several Conan audiobooks again, I can tell you that the books tell you that “in between” his huge adventures he was just a regular thief in many cases. Sure he might have killed a sorcerer last year…and he might be king next year, but in the meantime he’s very “hand-to-mouth”.
Having said that, I’ve got some very interesting things that people can get through thievery and they can “work their way up” to ever more grand hiests.

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Thanks for your reply. I’m definitely going to do this on the higher tier structures, making the enemies that spawn greater or resulting in a boss inside after repeat failures. I’m building more towns and villages in scattered locations now.

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The problem with that is that it requires other players to facilitate, which really means it’s all one big RP, which is cool…but limiting. I was looking for more of a PVE-RPG experience.

This sounds awesome and very immersive.

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