Blatant Thievery
You’d have bedhead too if there was a spider and and an undead rat competing for your pillow. Add a little casual theft to the equation and it’s a recipe for a bad hair day.
Ever since Thief and Wizard went on their first date 317 comics ago, blatant thievery has been a part of their relationship. Of course, like we said at the time, stealing from the party is just unfun. It’s the kind of petty PVP that results in hurled dice, slammed doors, and trolling the local game shop for a new group. But that’s only if you’re doing it wrong.
As a thought experiment, let’s give the “it’s what my character would do” crowd the benefit of the doubt. You’re a career criminal with a diagnosable case of kleptomania. You steal from anyone and everyone, and your fellow party members represent irresistible targets for your sticky little mitts. How do you go about doing justice to your character concept without annoying the bejesus out of the rest of the party?
I think that Thief offers a useful demonstration in today’s comic. She’s not skimming an extra 20% off the top. She’s not stuffing a dragon’s hoard into her bag of holding or keeping a magical artifact secret from her buddies. Instead, she borrowed a very minor magic item. She used it as a catalyst for RP. She stole in the name of fun rather than powergaming, and that makes all the difference.
This is exactly the sort of tactic that Laurel mastered back in her favorite Exalted 2e campaign. If you read her other comic, you may already be familiar with the characters in question. The larceny-prone PC and her NPC ally used pickpocketing as an ongoing competition and, later in their relationship, as a form of flirtation. The money was never the point. It was always at the service of character, and it was a dynamic that both participants enjoyed.
That’s just one example from my own experience. I’d be curious to hear if the rest of you guys have ever managed a similar trick. Have you ever found a way to make intraparty theft fun rather than infuriating? Is it possible? Is it worth the risk? Let’s hear it in the comments!
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Back in my first online pathfinder campaign, we did the opposite of stealing: we tried to sneak things into each other’s possessions, usually gross stuff like monster parts, moldy fruit, or cursed objects. At the time I played a monk so he was pretty good at spotting the characters trying to hang a “kick me” sign on his bag, whilst I made sure to stick a few coppers in their trousers when we run into rust monsters. Fun times.
The closest thing to stealing from each other was admittedly intentional when a GM dropped a very obvious powerful but possibly cursed magic ring. It was a 5e game and the ring added your proficiency bonus to your AC and Damage, but anytime you touched it you had to roll a Wisdom Save. The GM never specified at the time what exactly when you failed or what the DC was, so everyone was playing hot potato with it. It didn’t help that the ring had very obvious cues of when it was and wasn’t active, so the reedy players tried to make a grab for it when possible. It was basically like the One Ring.
Turned out the positive effects of the ring was all in our heads, or at the very least if you failed the save all your enemie’s ended up gaining bonuses that essentially negated the positive effects of the ring. It also served as a scrying beacon for a BBEG since it was his ring we took from his crypt, which to be fair we should’ve known since he was a pharaoh lich and had the whole “whoever dares ventures into my tomb shall find only curses and instead of riches” warning. But alas.
One of the players in our Hackmaster campaign had a habit of falling asleep during the sessions. It was fine with us, we had been friends for years (and the DM and the party fighter were his brothers), played all-day sessions, and were quite relaxed – and he played the Cleric, so we let him sleep, then kicked him awake when we needed healing! But it did result in the odd prank. In particular, in one dungeon we found what the DM described as a “big stinky cheese”. As the Cleric was asleep, his brother the fighter wrote it in his equipment list, and that cheese stayed their for at least 6 months of real time!
Love it. Exactly the kind of harmless pseudo-PVP-as-RP that I can get behind.
Heh. I made the mistake of overusing the “cursed bonuses” trick. Turns out that, when everyone in the party has their own super awesome item that secretly does the opposite of what they think it does, that’s a lot of extra work behind the screen!
I’ve only really got one. Most of my Rogues work with a “I don’t steal from the people I expect to have my back when monsters show up” rule. But I did play a young street urchin in Nexus who attracted Luna’s attention once. She was later taken in by a mysterious martial artist who ran a school in the city, under the caveat that she was going to sneak out and he could only punish her if she got caught. The martial artist (Gold Faction Sidereal) was the framing mechanism for the Solar Circle I was playing with. Well, they went very Martial arts with their pecking order, and my character still grew close to them as a surrogate family. Eventually some bad decisions were made, and the Zenith, who specialized in that one Firewand martial art, decided that he was going to buck up to the Dawn Caste elder brother.
Now, for those who are not familiar, Firewands are effectively guns when you use that Style, and they do not have a nonlethal setting. Knowing this, and having seen the two arguing for the last few days, my character was actually all for them fighting and getting it out of their systems. But she didn’t want to lose a brother in the process. So while the two guys are standing up, acting out their argument, I pad up behind the Zenith’s player and grab where two guns would be worn on his hips. The GM smiles at me, and makes a dice throwing gesture. I roll, hold up 4 fingers, then walk back over to my couch seat. The GM calls for a Perception+Awareness from the Zenith, who only gets 2, and they go back to arguing. A few minutes later, the Zenith does the gunslinger gesture and the Gm says “Your guns aren’t there.”
One lost kung fu fight and a lot of humilating punishment later (not inflicted by my character), I walk up to the Zenith and hand him his guns. “You two can fight all you want, but I don’t want to lose either of you. Weapons are for killing. You don’t use weapons on family.” He was mad, but he did have to concede that he went for lethal damage rather than a reasonable response.
Was the dude made in-game or out-of-game?
For my money, this seems like a great use of intraparty thievery. It’s at the service of RP rather than increasing your personal power, and it resulted in interesting conflict and cool character moments. Nicely played!
A little both. He was annoyed out of character at what seemed like my character siding with the Dawn caste. While my Changing Moon did see it as the Zenith’s fault, she had not stated as such openly and I hadn’t said anything out of character. In character, his Zenith was mad at being beaten up and talked to like a petulant child by the Dawn, but he accepted that the Changing Moon’s cooler head had kept the argument from getting out of hand. Out of character, the Dawn Caste player had stated that he would have taken a Lethal attack as a sign of intent to kill, and reacted in kind.
The way I see it, if you’re running with a PVP crowd, you can’t get upset when PVP happens. My two cents anyway.
In a Hackmaster campaign I played in, most of us engaged at one time or another in skimming off the top of the treasure hoard. It helped that we had all known each other for over 10 years, and we were playing Hackmaster as it is written (as a bit of a tongue-in-cheek parody) so no-one got mad at the others shenanigens.
The party Rogues smoothest move (that I found out about) was after we killed a bandit chief. Due to a bit of deception that I may have mentioned before (I cast a cantrip simultaniously with the cleric casting a spell that paralysed the cheif, and bluffed it as though I had cast a much higher level instant-kill spell to terrify his allies into surrendering), the rogue was briefly left unsupervised near his corpse. Recognising a ring the chief was wearing as similar to one he wore himself (a ring of protection +1), he gambled and swapped his ring for the one on the chief. He would have got away with it, but when I Identified the ring we found on the corpse, the GM revealed that not only did I know what it did, but I knew I had Identified this very ring before (as I had identified the ring of protection before we gave it to the Rogue). My character being a bit shady himself, I kept quiet, and charged the Rogue a “silence fee” to identify his new ring without telling the rest of the party. The new ring turned out to be a +3 version, so his gamble paid off.
In the same campaign, I wasn’t innocent either. My Wizard was the party accountant (since no one else wanted to bother with the maths of in-game taxation and loot shares), so naturally he was embezzling a cut off the top (when no-one else is checking your maths, its easy to slip a % or two here and there). Also, our loot distribution agreement included a clause that I had automatic claim on anything that can be used as a spell component, and as anyone who has ever played a Wizard knows, a lot of gemstones fall into that category at higher level (I didn’t over abuse this, but a couple of diamonds fell into my hands that I never intended to use for the spells I didn’t even have!).
If no one else at the table knows or notices, why bother?
OOTS spoilers
notices Thief sparkling in the sun
Oh. My. Calistria. Thief is a vampire! It’s the Durkon situation all over again, kill it! Kill it with fire!
Back at the height of Twilight popularity, if someone had introduced a branded shampoo it would have 1) made millions and 2) clogged millions of drains with glitter-sparkles.
I briefly played a gentleman thief who had a knack for stealing things… A few of his dastardly schemes included:
Stealing a rich guy’s magical camera for the party to use during their vacation.
Reverse-pickpocketing the party Sorcerer to give him a collectible medal for his collection.
“Acquiring” a ticket for the amusement park, so that the Sorcerer can get in and win more medals.
“Borrowing” some cheap gems from a drunk guy and buying fancy pizza for the party.
Gosh, I don’t know how I didn’t get kicked out with all this disrupting roleplay… smh
As it turns out, people don’t mind stealing. They just don’t like it when the stealing happens to them. lol
My one thief Sweet Smiling John had deemed himself a nobleman and not a thief and thus did his best not to steal.
We at one point had acquired an evil sword a vampire was chasing after us for and we were making our way to a magic academy that might have been able to assist us with breaking the sword.
But much more important to me I would be able to get my own magic sword repaired returning to me a whole host of magical abilities. The party is going very slowly though so with my absurd forging skills and stealth I used my sleight of hand to put very worrying notes from the vampire that it was about to attack. My sleight of hand even beat out the gmpc with his ridiculous stats worrying even him.
Unbeknownst to me the vampire had died weeks ago to another dm’s characters so there wasn’t even a point.
I think that reverse pick pocketing for the sake of shenanigans might be my favorite form of pick pocketing.
Did you do this with secret note passing, or did the rest of the players know that your character was the source of the misinformation?
Oh they didn’t know for months. The dm was good at instilling dread in the game so I told him to write down what I think the vampire would write down with my very limited knowledge. I told him this a few days before the game. He didn’t disappoint.
You’ve got to pull these kinds of hidden information shenanigans if you’re actually trying to pull one over on players. Nicely done leaving it to the GM! The second actual-note-passing enters play, it’s all down to metagame knowledge anyway.
I always enjoy playing a character who skims off the top then uses the money to benefit the party. Such as a wizard who uses the money to make magic items he generously gives to his fellow party members. Or a thief who just so happens to have some spare potions or wands that he totally spent his own money for. Only once have I stolen from the party for another reason. We had come upon a artifact that there was no way we could control so my Arcanist sold it to a very strong wizard he knew for a staff thus keeping the party from being hunted by the family of the artifact’s previous owner. That staff ended up saving our Paladin’s life a couple of times.
I think you and Fighter are using the same rationale:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/sell-sell-sell
Truly you are noble creatures. 😛
We did a variant of this a few years back. One of the PCs got cursed, but no one knew what the curse did. Then when he left for a bathroom break, the DM turned to the rest of us and said,
“Here’s how his curse works: whenever he leaves the table, someone must add an innocuous yet weird item to his equipment list…”
Well then. Speaking of blatant thievery, *yoink!*
My current sorcerer theif in 5th ed D&d did this to join the group mid session and it’s become a running joke. He has no idea how bags of holding work, so the first time he picked the other players I got raptor claws at random, I went back and got caught starting my first session in the group, now it’s a running joke that I always pull a pickaxe out of his bag because he thinks (not the pick axe) when he trys it again, he only just got a bag of holding about a year later and it’s full of ammo for his catapult spells, so he still has no idea how they work…
Someone get that guy an Arcana check, STAT!
Once in a Vampire The Masquerade game i was playing a Malkavian. Like in VTM Bloodlines, my pc was aware of various things that were around him. So he uses that insight to make things interesting. The “Party” was resolving a murder as a “favor” for some elder. The task at hand was to recover the murder weapon so this elder could acuse us of the murder, since he was the one who cometed the crime and hide the weapon. Either we uncovered the weapon and he uses us as patsys or we don’t and he was safe. So using my insight, the very cryptic tips from the DM, my pc steals the weapon. When we arrive and find the elder with the Prince, since he was a badly disguised expy of Prince, our party ventrue takes the whelm and comment how we manage to recover the weapon and then presents it to the Prince and elder, except that since my pc have stolen it he has nothing. Prince gets angry for this, so the elder but then while we were getting nagging for our incompetence the toreador of the “party” realize that the elder have slipped some details about the murder that only we knew. The elder got in serious problems and so did the ventrue of the party too when i put the weapon back on him. Since the elder could no longer blame us it was fun time for intra-party conflict. When it’s revealed that our party ventrue really got the weapon i manage to suggest his involvement in a conspiracy with the elder. The rest of the party buys it and so both elder and ventrue ends getting a tan for betraying the Prince, breaching the masquerade and conspire to get us killed. The ventrue player actually liked how all of this ended. His pc was such a jock jerkass, even he was sick of.
Now see, this is why I don’t play Vampire. It’s a cool story and it sounds awesome and I want to understand what happened, but with all the move and counter-move I’m completely lost! I’d make a terrible shadowy undead master manipulator. 🙁
Play the game, surely V:TM Bloodlines II it will be slightly less complicated 🙂
So that’s why Thief Rogue’s hair has been getting floofier.
The continuity strikes when you least suspect it!
I’m deciding to imagine that the overly fancy braids are part of the magic item’s effect. =P
I can’t say I have any good stories of that kind, though I’m now inspired to make a character that will snag little items from and reverse pickpocket little presents to fellow party members.
Those oils are a very popular brand:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/style-is-key
I’ve also been toying with the idea of making a “nice” character. One who thinks the best of everybody and is generous to a fault. I’ve been a sarcastic wizard and a cynical thief so often lately, nice would be nice for a change.
Yeah. Lately I’ve been feeling a bit stuck in a rut as far as characters go and have been putting effort into trying to make them a bit more interesting. So I’ve been making characters that are more cute or funny (without being in classes where that’s expected of you) or actually kind of evil or at least rather questionable (in non-evil games).
Because “badass” or “mysterious” and the like are kind of the expectation in D&D and such games. By all means I still am enjoying my extremely stoic strongly pro-nature Firbolg Fighter (who is basically hating every minute of being in Ravenloft), but I just had a great time the last few days while my Geomancer Farm-girl spent effort questioning a suspicious stranger solely as an excuse to delay them so she could play with their semi-demonic dog companion as if it were a friendly neighborhood puppy.
I made a pair of characters that are twins and meant to be played together. One is a Dashing Thief Swashbuckler. The archetype changes the way he can regain panache from a killing blow to stealing an object worth 100xlevel from an opponent. If I ever get a chance to play him, I’ll have the choice of only relying on crits to regain panache or stealing mostly from my party members as they’re the only ones that will reliably have items worth that much. I’ll just have to remember to give them back afterwards.
Nice! What’s the build look like? I’m assuming high appraise, disarm, and sleight of hand. What else you got?
Both have teamwork feats and I plan to get them both Rings of Tactical Precision so they can each share one of the feats with the other. Dashing has Improved Steal and Disarm, Agile Maneuvers, and the teamwork feats are Disarm Partner, Outflank, and Paired Opportunists. His sister is a Phantom Thief and has Butterfly’s Sting to transfer crits to her brother. She also has Improved Steal and the same Teamwork Feats except for Paired Opportunists. She has Broken Wing Gambit instead. The builds go up to level 9.
Butterfly’s Sting is one of those “I wish I ever got to use this in a real game” feats. It looks SO GOOD on paper, then it comes time to build and my ability to plan cooperatively with another human seems to go out the window.
Yup. But I figured that Phantom would get more use for it. Since she was built to cooperate with someone else.
I also gave it to Irlana, figuring she could transfer crits to Mick. But I realized that just letting the AoO chains go on would do more damage.
I always wanted to play a Kender character. And when it came to stealing from the party, it’d be something like:
Wizard: I pull out my Wand of Fireballs and…
Kender: Oh.. um.. here you go. I just wanted to see how it works…
If I was near another PC and they wanted to use an occasionally-used piece of equipment, instead of them pulling it from their pack, I’d pull it from mine and hand it to them. If I’m not near them when they want to use it, then I haven’t taken it (or I’ve taken it and managed to put it back without them noticing). Sort of a bit of retro-active theft that doesn’t hinder the party at all.
And maps, of course. I’d constantly be stealing the party’s maps.
Never had a chance to play that character, but it
I actually used that retroactive stealing mechanic as a curse once upon a time. One of the party wound up with a kleptomaniac tail. Any time a party member tried to pull out an item in combat, they’d roll a retroactive sleight of hand vs. perception to see if they still had it.
Keep in mind, this was a curse.
A curse.
Not a PC but a CURSE.
I suspect that the Kender would be a better one-shot gag PC than a campaign-long travelling companion.
There’s an extremely greedy character in one of my group’s current games. Another character stole from him—one good piece, didn’t even try to be subtle. It was hilarious.