Pick Pocketing

Gamer is concerned about the current state of pick pocketing:

From the NWNVault Interview:

Trent: There is an animation of Pickpocketing currently. It will be a small motion of the player bending down and stealing. If you are stealing from another player character and you fail the dice roll, the player will get a message letting them know. If the player notices the animation, they can also catch the thief.

Please say that this is changeable, as a quick survey on IRC showed that 100% of persons polled thought this was A Very Bad Idea ™. You are taking a game skill that has a clearly defined mechanic for being noticed (Spot Check Vs. Pick Pocket Roll) and giving people a “twitch gaming” style method of detecting it. To say it shortly, you are giving people the ability to act on player knowledge that their character does not (and should not) have.

Suggested Solution: If their character didn’t notice it, the player shouldn’t be able to. Thus, only play the animation (perhaps with a little notice ala bg2) when the character makes a successful spot check.

Don’t worry, we don’t have our hearts set on this feature yet. Once it’s in the game, we’ll have a closer look at it. If it sucks, we have no qualms about getting rid of it at that point. That goes for plenty of other things as well.

Thanks for raising the issue, though,
Rob Bartel