Thievery Enhancements

D

Dupin

First time out of the vault
I was playing Arcanum, and I thought that both Fallouts could learn something from it... I liked how in Arcanum you could use the thief skills to rob shops, but in the Fallout games you can only steal the inventory of very few merchants.

I was wondering what would be the best modding tool, if there's one, I think this would be a good addition to the games, since it would make the thief skills more useful. When I'm better at modding, perhaps I'll add safes, traps, and NPC patterns to make the heists better.
 
I thought F1 did better with theft than F2 w.r.t. the shopkeepers. I had bigger issue the economy in general though which negated things after a certain point. Kill enough raiders and you can trade in all of the armor and weapons for anything that might need later.

An actual bank heist that required some planning like arcanum or wasteland had would be welcome I suppose. Simple breaking and entering into a shop isn't particularly interesting. Anyway I loved the bank level in Thief 2 because of its scope but that is probably asking for too much.

The tools you probably want is mapper and the script compilers (and original script sources). I got most of my stuff off of teamx.ru as it has a really good consolidated list of all of the available tools though much of that is also on this site. Mapper is not a full featured editor but its pretty good at most of what people would typically need to create a level/map.
 
We should start first by making stealing itself harder to pull off. When my steal skill is at 14% and I'm flinching submachine guns off folk with relative ease, then something isn't terribly right. It's also way too cheap to quickload and try again right after you fail. You shouldn't even be able to view an NPC's inventory unless your steal skill is high enough. This whole effortless pickpocketing business really rips apart the balance of the game and makes putting points into steal 99% useless.
 
encinodude said:
We should start first by making stealing itself harder to pull off. When my steal skill is at 14% and I'm flinching submachine guns off folk with relative ease, then something isn't terribly right. It's also way too cheap to quickload and try again right after you fail. You shouldn't even be able to view an NPC's inventory unless your steal skill is high enough. This whole effortless pickpocketing business really rips apart the balance of the game and makes putting points into steal 99% useless.
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Lets assume 14% is indeed like what you would expect of a 100%

14/100 = .14

So every .14% is equivalent to a 1% change in stealing.

Perhaps we could set a negative value via memory editing, then allow the player to as normal invest points?
 
The cautious pickpocket trait in my extra traits mod caps the maximum chance of success at pickpocketing to half of your stealing skill, so at 14% you'd only have a 7% chance of success. Doesn't really help with cheating via quicksave/quickloading though.

Really you'd want to have a big penelty for item weight/size that would push your chance of success down to 0 if you tried stealing a submachine gun with a stealing skill less than 100. That's not easily modable though...
 
Hell, I think you shouldn't even be allowed to view a target's inventory if your steal skill isn't high enough. This seems to have been done for some NPCs in the F2RP. I don't think I'm the only one who thinks that the steal skill is worthless. I have never put a single point into it and yet I'm stealing from anyone and everyone. Often I rape their pockets on the first try, nabbing at least half their inventory. I set a personal limit for myself, that if I fail the first time I quickload and can never try to pickpocket that NPC again until the next time I enter the town. Even then, it still feels sorta like cheating.
 
Hmm... maybe instead of focusing on scripting, item sizes could be drastically adjusted with F2wedit?
 
encinodude said:
Hmm... maybe instead of focusing on scripting, item sizes could be drastically adjusted with F2wedit?
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by sizes i think you mean weight. if you adjusted the weight of the items drastically, you may end up with mini-guns that weigh 5 pounds or so. that would enable room for another problem, and that is having too much ROOM in your inventory. :P
 
encinodude said:
Weight and size are two different things.
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yes i know mass and weight are two different things.
by size do you mean quantity?

like looting 500 bottle caps should be harder than looting 1 or 2?
 
I think the "size" modifier is based on the item's weight. Unless there's a secret stat on items that I don't know of.
 
Hey guys, you realise the person who started this thread has not even replied back yet, but it's still interesting. :)

Many places you can loot the shelves and tables of merchants, but I think you need high sneak skill (and you should).

I like the idea of tweaking stealing to conform to size/mass as that makes sense. Some money or drugs should be easier to lift than a weapon. I wrote about this in another thread, how we shouldn't be able to steal Bozars from Buster's guards, or any other guard who is supposed to have their weapon equipped and ready.

I steal as a way of exploiting the game without actually cheating. Tag steal and raise it to 150%, then take everything I can! As long as I can do this without having to reload a saved game because of failing too many times, I will. Too easy to take all the guns from Bishop's gang, or Vortis' gang, then massacre them as they try to punch me. I can also gain an extra level or two just from Klamath and the Den this way, plus a whole lot of items and cash!

Megamod addresses this to some extent, and Restoration Project should also. Make those enemies have items in their item slots first, and then we can consider what could be changed about thievery. Just my opinion, anyway. 8-)
 
Size and weight are two different values that are available in an item proto. I was always under the impression the size of an item was the main factor in how easy/hard it is to steal an item. *thinks he remembers reading that somewhere in the modding forum*

Can anyone actually confirm this assumption?
 
It's also absurd, I might add, how you can go around looting from most containers and nobody kicks up a fuss. Sneak should play a part in this, though it would mean more scripting than anyone cares to do.
 
Take a look at the Vault article on "Steal". Size is a major factor, but can be eliminated with the Pickpocket perk.
 
Ashmo said:
Take a look at the Vault article on "Steal". Size is a major factor, but can be eliminated with the Pickpocket perk.
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by size could you also mean how much you can hold?
 
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