Stealing skill

Stealing skill encompasses a wide variety of theft-related skills. These include robbing coins from the pockets of characters (both PC and NPC), shoplifting, and stealing gems from players' open containers. The skill also has a few more esoteric applications, almost all of which are considered game secrets.

The Elanthian justice system understandably treats these acts as criminal offenses. Stealing from NPCs carries the charge of pickpocketing, and is the lightest of the stealing offenses. More serious charges of are those of shoplifting and "felony stealing", which is stealing from another player character.

The teaching of stealing was once permitted almost everywhere, but has relatively recently been declared a crime. A mechanical alteration has made it so only guilded Thieves may teach stealing, although in-character reasoning behind this sudden reality-jolt is dubious at best.

Paladins are not permitted to learn Stealing. They will suffer guild-specific penalties if they somehow learn the skill for any reason.

Stealing is seldom counted for guilds' survival requirements.

The bonus to some of guilded Thieves' abilities enjoy that comes by staying within a city and maintaining a clean reputation is applied to the Stealing skill. Agility and Discipline boosters help with stealing as well. If one has more hiding and stalking than stealing those skills will provide a small bonus to stealing while hidden; if not then it's best to steal while unhidden.

Until recently, Stealing was also the skill used to determine how difficult a player was to succesfully steal from. Perception was used to determine if the would-be victim noticed the attempt. It was conceivable that a character with high Stealing and low Perception would be difficult to steal from but would hardly ever notice an attempt, and that a character with high Perception and low Stealing would be easy to steal from but would almost assuredly catch the thief in the grab. In 2007, this was changed so that Perception would apply to both of these checks. Non-larcenous characters, therefore, now have no reason to need to train Stealing at all.

Many of these measures seem to have been implemented to give Thieves Guild members a larger advantage over other player characters in conducting these sorts of crimes. For a period in the early 2000s, other guilds' abilities were sometimes viewed as more beneficial overall to a life of crime than the Thieves Guild's. This was especially true of Moon Mages, who have many magical abilities that allow them to be stealthy and elusive.