Sleight of Hand: Generic Message

[Armaddict]

I'd like to propose that palming, slipping, stowing, readying, and usage of sleight of hand, aside from special cases of 'draw', be changed to a generic message that does not reflect success or failure.

I've been shown something that essentially comes down to people with master sleight of hand using the skill repeatedly to keep track of when they were being watched or not.  I don't think that would be appropriate use of the skill, nor do I think the skill is one that success or failure should be a given, much like you can't tell if you're successfully hidden or not.

[Jihelu]

I feel like stealing and all the sleight of hand skills would be pretty easy to notice, from the 'users' side.
Rubbing up against someone, no matter what I'd say, will generally get them to look at you.

[Armaddict]

I feel like stealing and all the sleight of hand skills would be pretty easy to notice, from the 'users' side.
Rubbing up against someone, no matter what I'd say, will generally get them to look at you.

I'm unsure what this means.  Steal, of course, requires you be in very close proximity.  What I'm saying is that there is the use of sleight of hand when you know that you always succeed or nearly always succeed in order to determine if you're being watched.  I.e. You repeatedly palm something and if you fail three times in a row, you have a high probability that you're being watched.

If we switched it to 'You try and pull it out quietly' instead of you 'you palm' vs 'you get', then that ability to discern your 'alone' factor in the room can't be used.

[nauta]

If we switched it to 'You try and pull it out quietly' instead of you 'you palm' vs 'you get', then that ability to discern your 'alone' factor in the room can't be used.

In point of fact, you will sometimes get  the 'get' rather than 'palm' message even if nobody else is in the room or watching.  At least I have, with no NPCs or PCs in the room.

If I'm wrong, however, then, yeah, 100% behind the idea.  The sneak should not be able to tell if there is a PC or NPC in the area from the echoes: the echoes should all be something like: you attempt to perform X stealthily.

Re: Jihelu) The reason the sneak shouldn't be able to tell if they failed or succeeded is because a failure might be owing to a vNPC spotting you -- not just your mark feeling you touch them up.

[Armaddict]

I don't think I was clear enough.

I know it fails sometimes when you're alone.  But there was an instance where I was exposed to someone doing it over and over and over again, noting the ratio of failure to their normally steady amount of success, and was able to tell they were being watched, and modified their behavior.

The generic message doesn't really cost anything, aside from knowing if they've been caught or not prior to someone reacting to it (which is already kind of wonky.  "Shit!  I failed slip, they saw me put that spice away, run before they can react!" or "Shit, I didn't draw my weapon silently, he knows I'm about to stab him now!").  It shouldn't be a hard change to make.

However, I won't argue too hard on this.  It's not a tremendous deal, nor is the above really common.  I just thought it was a low-effort change that removed that ability entirely at minimal cost.

[Majikal]

I don't think I was clear enough.

I know it fails sometimes when you're alone.  But there was an instance where I was exposed to someone doing it over and over and over again, noting the ratio of failure to their normally steady amount of success, and was able to tell they were being watched, and modified their behavior.

Pretty clear, I'd player complaint that. How the code works, using that in such a fashion sounds like a pretty clear exploit.

About changing the wording of sleight of hand, nah. I'm a practicing magician (ever wonder where my name came from?) and I'm good, real good as a matter of fact when it comes to bar magic/street magic. Hours upon hours I'd spend learning very specific sleights so that I could perform a single trick. Now from the moment I went from a dabbler to the real deal, when I slipped even the tiniest bit.. I knew it. 9 out of 10 times my audience didn't have a clue, but I knew that a card shifted funny, or my pinky slipped, or I lost a grip on a shuffle. I ALWAYS knew when I screwed up, even if my audience didn't.

[Beethoven]

Ugh, it's already so lame to try to guess whether you're hiding or not. With this you could fail a SOH check three rooms back and now you are once again waltzing around in the open, not even trying to hide as you blunder about like a drunk half-giant.

[Armaddict]

Okies.  I'll just leave it to complaints.

[BadSkeelz]

I keep reading this thread tittle as "Sleight of Hand: Generic Massage"

A PP masseuse might be a decent concept actually.

[Beethoven]

I didn't mean to be so negative about the idea as it came across. I would like this idea just fine if I didn't dislike the way hide worked so much.

[Dar]

Um. Definitely complaint that, but I think you're wrong.

I think the two have nothing to do with each other.

You can easily succeed at sleight of hand and the entire room will not see you do anything, 'except' ... the one who was watching you. They'll have the "you notice" thing. Same with peeking, or any other stealth skill. It doesnt affect broad success rate. You roll a seperate roll for whoever watches you. Or maybe they do, I dunno.

[Seeker]

If it works as described, it sounds like a bug.  Can't imagine it was designed to work like that.

If it is a bug, exploiting it is bad form and likely against the rules.

[Armaddict]

Um. Definitely complaint that, but I think you're wrong.

I think the two have nothing to do with each other.

You can easily succeed at sleight of hand and the entire room will not see you do anything, 'except' ... the one who was watching you. They'll have the "you notice" thing. Same with peeking, or any other stealth skill. It doesnt affect broad success rate. You roll a seperate roll for whoever watches you. Or maybe they do, I dunno.

Possible.  The way it looked to me seemed to confirm it, but it is completely anecdotal.

[Dar]

I don't mean any offense, Armaddict. But in all honesty?  Very kneejerky and most definitely does not belong on a public forum.  And no. I'm not the guy who's doing it, or anything like that. That's my opinion of this thread, and your decision to post it.

[Armaddict]

Well that's just like...your opinion, man.

It's one step away from deletion if it must be.  But frankly, so much code, some of it right, some of it wrong, has been posted over the years being chastised for irresponsibility isn't going to bug me much.

Oops.  I was irresponsible, if mistaken.  Shit happens.  *shrug*

[Inks]

Eh..I see what you mean sort of but think it is absolutely fine as is.

I would like rooms that are impossible to hide in show up as a flag to people of master hide.

[anvilsmith]

I'm all for having more information rather than less, so I disagree with the idea presented here. To give you a sense of how helpful it is to give the players information, there is a craft for splitting logs that is (or was, last time I checked) tagged as "cooking" rather than "lumberjacking". Before the skill tags for crafts were implemented, a thread came up on the GDB asking why it was so difficult for master lumberjacks to split logs, when in fact it wasn't the difficulty that was the problem, but the fact that the craft had been given the wrong skill. As for sleight of hand, being able to tell whether your action has succeeded is particularly useful when performing magic tricks, given that your success or failure determines how you will emote said tricks.

If people are using sleight of hand to tell whether they are being watched, the solution is to make successful sleight of hand actions provide a hidden room echo that only people who successfully scan / watch / whatever can see. The person using sleight of hand successfully would be told that they have concealed their action from anyone who is not paying attention, but would not be able to tell whether anyone was in fact paying attention to them.

[Riev]

Anecdotally, as a code spammer myself, it could also have just been someone who wasn't good at Sleight, getting "more than one fail to be sure". Or, testing something that may have been heavier than a small knife, to see what could be sleighted.

I know I had one PC obsessed with the idea of paying people through master sleight of hand and coins in a pouch. I did a LOT of testing that, if someone was invis, probably would have been quite concerned about.

[Synthesis]

The solution is not to make the message the same whether you fail or not.

The solution is to tell you whether you failed or not from your own perspective.  That is, you have a fail message and a success message, but it's generated by the result of your skill-check diceroll, not after the watcher's skill-check diceroll.

[nauta]

The solution is not to make the message the same whether you fail or not.

The solution is to tell you whether you failed or not from your own perspective.  That is, you have a fail message and a success message, but it's generated by the result of your skill-check diceroll, not after the watcher's skill-check diceroll.

Hmm, I guess -- I'm still not sure -- Armaddict's observation/worry is that someone with master sleight of hand would only fail rarely and then when a PC or NPC is watching them -- so they could infer from an uptick in failures (via the echo) that there is a PC nearby, watching them.

Which, I guess, is why people are saying 'file a complaint' rather than 'change the code' -- it'd be pretty easy for staff to check to see if sleight of hand is at 'master' and someone is spamming sleight of hand checks.  (I find skilling up sleight of hand so incredibly boring I tend to spam it.)

[Seeker]

I agree exactly with Synthesis.  The way he describes it is the way the code was probably intended to work.  That's why if its not working that way, I'd suspect it was a bug (code error).