Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Guard Bribery Busted?

So I doubt the system is fully implemented yet but just in case im giving some feedback on it. When you commit a crime guard stop you and you can either roll a speech check or bribe them... I was in the goblin camp.. murdered a goblin.. got stopped then paid the fine.. then killed the goblin who stopped me and paid the fine to another.. did that over and over until everyone was dead and then I found out I could pick up my gold back from theyre corpses. This kinda took me off by suprise because I was expecting it would go to combat at some point but as long as only one person catches you can murder spree the entire goblin camp by bribing your way through it without loosing anything.

Meh, sounds like classic Larian.

You broke easily breakable system. Pat yourself on the back you clever rascal.

Perhaps an area-specific "reputation" could help? Every time you get accosted by a guard, your reputation gets worse. Mechanically, this could be represented as the DC of any subsequent persuasion check increasing by 1 and the gold required to bribe increases by X% (multiplicatively, so the bribe price goes up exponentially). I'd also suggest that your area-reputation affects stealth/sleight-of-hand DCs as people and merchants are now more wary of you.

And money paid as bribes should be lost forever.

This seems perfectly reasonable to me ...
Goblins are not exactly organised, especialy when drunk ... maybe they could move few guards, so they keep an eye on each other a little better.

But i like this and even tho it may seems like exploit, its a good one in my opinion.

Nah ... i really hope not. :-/

Maybe if every guard would bring back to garison some report about you, and THEN your area-specific reputation would go bad, that would make sense ... still not quite for Goblins tho.

But concidering how this situation was described ... guard on one side of camp is killed, second guard on that same side of camp is bribed ... and then instantly whole camp knows that you are scumbag who allready killed one of their friends.
Kinda ruins the whole point of bribing, doesnt it?

This is common practice in many video games and i honestly hate it ...
I allways wonder what did they do with that money? O_o
Did they eat, and allready digest it, so i cant get it back in any way?

Nah, sory but the fact that anything you give/pay/smuggle to npc inventory is still there for you to take after you kill them is in my honest opinion only good.

If you wish to have some "ensuring" mechanism ...
Those guards could yell at some other guards to acompany them on their way back to garrison, so you are discouraged to attack them in order to get that money back.
But you certainly should have that option.

It doesn't ruin the *whole* point of bribing, no. You still have gotten away with your crime at the cost of a bribe. Just in future you'll have to pay more or make a more difficult check. You can also think of it as: the guards know you will pay, so they'll try to extract more and more money from you, just as people do in real life.

As for your other points about realism/reasonable-ness, they're a bit hypocritical.
You want one aspect of the system to be realistic (money not disappearing) but you like the fact that the other aspect is unrealistic - this exploit only works because a single guard/merchant "notices" any crime, even if their are countless other witnesses. In a "reasonable" world, the guard or merchant would shout "Stop! Thief!" while coming up to you, and everyone around you would hear this. And because people are nosy, they'd then watch you interact with the guard, put something in his hand, and then walk away. If the crime was murder, everyone would immediately know (or at least, there'd be rumors that) you're a murderer even if you successfully bribe the guard.

I would be fine with the suggestion in your last paragraph, where guards call for the others as reinforcements. But this would require that said guards *actually* are a force that could win against yours and that the money, once deposited in the garrison, it not trivial to immediately re-acquire. It also requires that every location have multiple guards and a garrison to do this. This is a bit too much realism to put in a game that is not centered around thieving.

I have no problem with such concept ...

I just have to ask, how exactly they know? O_o

Did the first guard come to them and said: "Hey dudes i just got bribed by that guy who murdered Steven ... ask for more money next time he kill one of us!"

Nah ... by the model you suggested, they "just do" ...
You kill some guy in the valley, single guard see you, and in that very moment whole freaking town know that you are murderer!
Then you bribe that single guy who saw you ... and in that very moment whole freaking town know that you are exploitable person, and kindly forgets that you killed somebody.

Thats what i dont like about it.
So ... yeah, exactly as you said:
"As for the point about realism/reasonable-ness, its a bit hypocritical."


On the contrary.
I want them both ...

I was just coming out from that described situation instead of thinking about some other scenario. :-/

Premise was clear:
You kill a goblin
> other goblin (singular) see you and wants to arest you > you bribe him
> you kill him > other goblin (singular) see you and wants to arest you > you bribe him
> you kill him > other goblin (singular) see you and wants to arest you > you bribe him
> you kill him > other goblin (singular) see you and wants to arest you > you bribe him
> you kill him > other goblin (singular) see you and wants to arest you > you bribe him
etc. ...

That was the situation we got, that was the situation i was working with.
No yelling mentioned, no other withnesses mentioned, no futher cooperation with other guards mentioned.
> Therefore (and i would say logicaly) none of them was included.

So ... you are saying that once i kill a guy ... in this particular case a Goblin, meaning most likely a guard ... and other guard will see me ... they start yelling "Murderer! Murderer!" ... and then calmly approach me completely alone and accept my bribe?
While whole town, all other guards and everyone around watch this bcs of his yelling? O_o

We most likely live in different reasonable worlds ...

Bcs in my world, if you get to the situation where you even CAN bribe the guard(s) its in such situation, where NOBODY except them can know about your crime ... bcs if there would be any withness, that bribe could mean problems for them in the future.
Obviously the more guards, the higher the bribe ...
But once they start notifying others for your crime, no matter what crime it was ... bribing is no longer a question, unless it happens in jail.

And since bribing was the point of this topic, it have to be possible. O_o

Great.

Wich is never the case in Baldur's Gate III. since we can wipe out whole goblin camp quite easily as we both know ...
Funnily enough, still Goblin guards are trying really hard to appear as "force that should be recognized".

Disagree ...
Triviality of tasks is subjective and not every guard in the world can afford safe by Gringotts.

I would have no problem if that goblin would just speedrun somewhere out of the screen and dig it there, or hide it in some hollow tree ... after all, they are selfish, greedy and not so smart creatures. :P

Only if you take it litteraly.

As i said abowe, personaly im quite fine with this "exploit" as it is ...
As long as it is allways single guard who notice you.

To make it more realistic (and keep it easy, since as you said this is NOT primary goal of the game).
Larian could in my honest opinion try to include some invisible roll for every guard if they will accept bribe ... or if we will be so unlucky so they would be greedy and ask for double ... or even worse, we will be so unlucky so we meet some honorable man, who will get offended when we try to bribe him.

Rag, please. Your sentence-by-sentence responses are a pain to even read, let alone respond to, and I'm not going to go through the effort here. You might find that people are more positively responsive to you and you have more meaningful conversation if you respond to larger and fewer chunks of people's posts.

I will respond to this self-contained part:
Sure, this is a good idea that matches very well with D&D's contested check. Be given the dialogue option:
- [Persuasion] Attempt to bribe
You roll a check against the guard's...idk, let's call it a "Profession: Guard" check which is 1d20+their proficiency. Every interaction with a guard would then have a different DC. Alternatively it could work as you suggest; Larian could pre-roll this check so the monetary amount shown in the dialogue option reflects the guard's honorability, and a roll of >20 means they're incorruptible or something.

Furthermore, and this is getting a bit off-topic, this system would work even better if there were different stages of success/failure.
- Fail by 5 or more? The guard is offended and initiates combat
- Fail by 1-4? The guard asks for more money. No more checks required: either you give the higher sum or combat starts.
- Success? Success.
Hopefully this would be part of a larger "degrees of success" mechanic implemented throughout the game, so it wouldn't be significantly more work to add it for guards too.

When you sell items to somebody and then kill that NPC, the NPC will drop all items you ever sold him.

I am not sure if this is also true for money, but it may be a side effect of the trading system.

Heard that several times ... mostly from Niara ...
I can only tell you the same i said to her and that would be: Im aware ... but its the same pain for me to write, or read long chunk of text without quoting ... so i gues that is how you maintain ballance.


That is certainly possibility ...

But to be compeltely honest, i would have no problem with it if options would stay as:
- Go to jail.
- Attack.
- [Persuation] ...
- [Intimidation] ...
- Bribe.

And invisibly in the background, the game would determine Guard nature ...
Like roll 1d4 where:
1 - Greedy (asks for double)
2 - Fair (gets offended when atempt to bribe, incerase difficiulty for Intimidation)
3 - Coward (accepts bribe, easier intimidation)
4 - Regular guard (no effect)
In case that chances are supposed to be 25/25/25/25%

Where chances would reflect type of guard ...
Meaning it would not be 1d4 but 1d20 ... and results would be different ranges.

So Flaming Fists guards would have (for example):
1-6 Fair members.
7-12 Regular members.
13-19 Greedy members. (they are mercenaries after all)
and 20 Coward member. (since the chance of coward among their ranks should be quite low ... but you still can potentialy meet newbie)

But Goblins for example would have:
1 Fair members.
2-5 Regular members.
6-12 Greedy members.
13-20 Coward members.

Of course if we would meet some I dunno Roayal Guards, or some Order of Paladin guards ...
They should also reflect that by having:
1-15 Fair members.
16-20 Regular members.
/ Greedy members.
/ Coward members.
For obvious reasons.

Now why invisibly and in the background ...
Its quite simple really ... if nature of the guard would not be created by random, people would quite fast noticed guards they can easily intimidate, or that they can easily bribe ... by this, nobody would ever know results of their actions in advance.
And that is ... i would say essential for "realism/reasonable-ness".

---

This was true for early builds ... money included ...

Then it was not, things starts to disappearing when you killed the guard, only part of their whole inventory was accessible.
Pretty lame change in my opinion, i presume you guessed.

But somebody noticed that if you KO them instead of killing ... their inventory remains intact, so thats what i do ...
KO > loot > finish.

So i cant really confrim curent state, since i didnt try it, but wanted to say this.