Make stealth fun (and useful)

[beardhat]

Alright, stealth (Alongside marksman) is pretty much a joke skill atm, it doesn't do much, sans the very arbitrary ability to mask scents, problem? Everyone's going to be pumping perception anyway on their first characters anyway so they'll see those scents.

So here's an idea.

1: Add lockpicks, they require soft metals to make, take roughly 10-20 minutes to use, give a message upon use to anyone in the village UNLESS they are a friendly villager when used, after 10 minutes they roll from 1 to their quality cap vs the lock's quality, if the roll is higher then the lock's quality, the lock breaks and the door is opened, should anyone step through these doors, they gain the debuff 'thieves honor" which acts like visitor debuff, but allows theft but doesn't allow assault or murder

2: make lock quality matter, and reintroduce metal locks, the quality test between lockpicks and locks would be like an arms race between thieves and stingy villagers, wood locks use base quality when determining their picking cap, metal locks are calculated as the quality*2, and locks on villages that you aren't a part of count as quality*2 for wood locks of quality*3 for metal locks

3: if a lock fails to pick, it breaks and becomes unusable, thus high level picks and locks are extremely valued.

4: crafting a lockpick is hardcapped by stealth, softcapped by √dex*smithing

5: bonuses to picking can be gained via new high level crafts, such as thieves gloves, or you can reduce the quality of a lock by half if you have a slave key copy

6: make it so you can apply locks to cabin doors, to pevent early game pick shinanigans

Edit: was posting this during break at work, ment to draft, not post sorry.

[blank]

Perception goes hand in hand with exploration to help find curios and other forgables, (edit. it also helps with Marksman damage i believe) i think what you mean is intelligence. inteli is what helps you find scents if im not mistaken..

[Granger]

Alright, stealth (Alongside marksman) is pretty much a joke skill atm, it doesn't do much, sans the very arbitrary ability to mask scents, problem? Everyone's going to be pumping perception anyway on their first characters anyway so they'll see those scents.

So here's an idea.

Here are some downsides:

1: Add lockpicks, they require soft metals to make, take roughly 10-20 minutes to use, give a message upon use to anyone in the village UNLESS they are a friendly villager when used, after 10 minutes they roll from 1 to their quality cap vs the lock's quality, if the roll is higher then the lock's quality, the lock breaks and the door is opened, should anyone step through these doors, they gain the debuff 'thieves honor" which acts like visitor debuff, but allows theft but doesn't allow assault or murder

This is instant death to every non-faction settlement, as all containers would be empty (and despawned) or gone every morning.

2: make lock quality matter, and reintroduce metal locks, the quality test between lockpicks and locks would be like an arms race between thieves and stingy villagers, wood locks use base quality when determining their picking cap, metal locks are calculated as the quality*2, and locks on villages that you aren't a part of count as quality*2 for wood locks of quality*3 for metal locks

Given 1: Perfect secuity for faction settlements, such a metal lock of endgame metal quality.

3: if a lock fails to pick, it breaks and becomes unusable, thus high level picks and locks are extremely valued.

In case this is to be read as people who have the key can't use the door/gate when it's broken this is insta-grief for everyone through an altable denial of access. Very bad plan.

4: crafting a lockpick is hardcapped by stealth, softcapped by √dex*smithing

What would be the quality for the locks?

[skipped the rest as it already looked dead enough to me]
Sorry, I don't see this as a mechanic that would be fun for >1-5% of the playerbase, while driving away the rest.

While the idea of 'thieves honor' sounds like a plan to avoid bloodshed it would at least have to have an additional limit on how much could be carried away (and be resistant to alting it for mass production). Let me try a different approach:

1. Both the pick (being softcapped by the stealth skill of the character attempting it) and the lock RNG roll from 1-(their Q)[* multiplier for lock] and roll higher wins, to give a chance to work on every lock. On success the gate should only let in the one character that picked the lock, noone else. Amount of stuff to be carried away needs to be severly limited, same for taking stuff from containers and dropping it to decay to prevent griefing (1 SHP per item dosn't cut it for high con characters). Buff needs to be evictable. Also the action would need to be non-scriptable so one (bot-users) wouldn't end the session with 'pick-break the lock on my door so noone else can pick it, then logout' as we did in Legacy with 'drink tea, wait for buff maximum and logout'.

2. Could be sane in case 1 is fixed with softcap on character and a RNG roll for the lock.

3. If a pick fails the lock should 'break' in the sense that it's no longer pickable, not as 'no longer useable with a key'. This flag should clear the next time the lock is used with a matching key (emitting a system message 'the key turns somewhat awkward in the lock' or similar). Possibly to avoid cheesing the system (by breaking the own lock) the time to use the gate when the lock is broken could be increased (a hourglass when accessing the door with a broken lock) - but a delay opening a 'broken' lock sounds pointless as it either is to short to matter or it is long enough to be used for griefing...

Bottom line: the idea isn't completely pointless but IMHO needs more thought as the sideeffects of it can be severe and need to have limits.

[Gensokyo]

aka how to make stealth more fun and an actual skilldump of interest +1

seriously, how has it been so terrible for so long? it never had any relevancy considering it's directly countered by one of the more popular choices picked up by everyone (per * exp) and the only relevant usage it was given was back in world 8 when you could slam out high Q mirkwood offerings thanks to it

[MadNomad]

give a message upon use to anyone in the village UNLESS they are a friendly villager when used

10-20 minutes to use

don't u think this would't be possible to be succesful in like 90% cases? (not counting the noobs with low-value things of course)

also even noobs could alt vault if needed if u indeed could get something this way

i assume the defender would be able to aggro so how would murder be impossible for the one who opens the lock? (otherwise why would defender need to be informed about thief, to bypass everything by alt vaulting or what?)

imo bad idea but thats just my opinion

[Potjeh]

I think it could work with limits on the debuff. Something like a heat meter, when it fills up you can't steal anymore. The amount of heat you get per theft could depend on ratio of the thieves int*stealth vs the claim owner's per*exp (or maybe some other skill and will, dunno). The point is to require high investment characters for high value targets. There should also be a passive heat gain for just being on the claim to give theft a sense of urgency, but it should still be fairly slow, and it should be based on the skill ratio as well. Heat should dissipate slowly over time, something like 4 hours after the thief was last on a hostile claim to start dropping, and like another 12 to drop to 0. Also, failed lockpicking attempts should give a good amount of heat, and lockpicking should be impossible at full heat.

[mrzli]

Pretty good ideas here, but how about a combination of stealth equipment (lock picks & tinkers table/workshop) and hearth magic.

So you'd be able to make lock picks with stealth + locks and bolts from soft metals. The quality cap of the lock picks being governed by the quality of the soft metals/nuggets and the tinkers table/workshop (new workstation where you'd have to craft locks, lock picks, torches, make key copies, maybe even smaller weapons like daggers etc.) and soft capped by stealth + int + perception +dexterity. The quality of the picks would increase the chance of picking a lock. Players would be able to carry up to 5 lock picks on a special "Thief's keyring". Aside the regular lock pick there would also be a item called "Master thief's key", basically just fancy lock pick with a higher lock picking success rate, which would require a silk thread, any soft metal, a gold nugget and a swan feather to craft and would also serve as a curiosity. Regardless of the quality lock picks would have a 75% chance of breaking upon use.

But after making lock picks you wouldn't be able to pick a lock directly, instead you'd get hearth magic (from learning stealth and locks&bolts) called "Sabotage lock". So before gaining to ability to pick locks you'd have to cast it on a gate 3 times with a 24h cooldown maybe longer.

Sounds easy enough right? But on the other hand to make things more balanced... A person with the master key for that very lock could inspect the lets say locked gate (with the master key in their inventory) and would get the message "The lock on this gate has been tempered with". So the owner of the lock can either replace the lock or repair it with "Repair lock" hearth magic. The magic would cause a Odor of Trespassing to appear on the outside of the gate and refund 50% of the exp spent on "Sabotage lock" to the person sabotaging the lock, sending them a "All your hard work has been undone." (or something similar) system message.

Seems pretty balanced and would make it easy to break into inactive settlements.

[Headchef]

If things like this really go through instead of crates and chests I'll just use alts who stand in certain places so when I quit playing all the chests are offline yay for fucking the system

[beardhat]

If things like this really go through instead of crates and chests I'll just use alts who stand in certain places so when I quit playing all the chests are offline yay for fucking the system

People already do this with a ton of high quality valuables.

[SANICHEGEHOGE]

Alright, stealth (Alongside marksman) is pretty much a joke skill atm, it doesn't do much, sans the very arbitrary ability to mask scents, problem? Everyone's going to be pumping perception anyway on their first characters anyway so they'll see those scents.

So here's an idea.

1: Add lockpicks, they require soft metals to make, take roughly 10-20 minutes to use, give a message upon use to anyone in the village UNLESS they are a friendly villager when used, after 10 minutes they roll from 1 to their quality cap vs the lock's quality, if the roll is higher then the lock's quality, the lock breaks and the door is opened, should anyone step through these doors, they gain the debuff 'thieves honor" which acts like visitor debuff, but allows theft but doesn't allow assault or murder

2: make lock quality matter, and reintroduce metal locks, the quality test between lockpicks and locks would be like an arms race between thieves and stingy villagers, wood locks use base quality when determining their picking cap, metal locks are calculated as the quality*2, and locks on villages that you aren't a part of count as quality*2 for wood locks of quality*3 for metal locks

3: if a lock fails to pick, it breaks and becomes unusable, thus high level picks and locks are extremely valued.

4: crafting a lockpick is hardcapped by stealth, softcapped by √dex*smithing

5: bonuses to picking can be gained via new high level crafts, such as thieves gloves, or you can reduce the quality of a lock by half if you have a slave key copy

6: make it so you can apply locks to cabin doors, to pevent early game pick shinanigans

Edit: was posting this during break at work, ment to draft, not post sorry.

This is a pretty neat idea. It will add a few more fun little things and give stealth a purpose. I don't really see why this shouldn't be added.