Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Stealing /pickpocketing/ and sneaking needs a serious rework

SO I have been waiting for you guys to get over your anti theivey bias and make the skills fair in the game. Even if you seperate your character from the main group and park the group far away from your main toon, then cast invisiblity and successfully pickpocket somebody they beline straight for your party and immediatly hit them with checks or get the party busted. WTF !!!!! To say you guys have the security system jacked to crazy levels would be a understatement . Along with pretty much open anything or picking stuff up in invisibility almost always causes the friggen spell or sneak to break. Why even have the thief in the game.....

What? Last time I tried it out of curiosity I just casually emptied a merchants entire inventory without any trouble. Did they change something with the recent patches?

The problem is that you can just save scum to empty all merchants of their stuff anyway. DC's are pretty low, add in some Guidance and just take whatever you want.

The only way I see stealing becoming a balanced mechanic is either...

a) Severely limit what you can steal. Merchants should secure their valuable stuff better. Have stealing have a lower impact overall. Or...

b) Create some kind of reputation mechanic where even successful thieving eventually gains you a reputation as a notorious thief. So even if you don't get caught, there would still be some consequences for getting all that stuff for free. Merchants everywhere would stop trading with you in a normal fashion or offer bad prices. If you want to steal stuff without getting a negative reputation, wait for night time, sneak into stores and make sure there is no one anywhere.

Oh right, BG3 thieves only steal in broad daylight.

That would be an opportunity to include "Fences" (People who buy stolen goods) in a Thieves Guild f.e. Mol's new Thieves Guild in Baldurs Gate City or other Areas where you can Trade with shady people, even Zhentarim or the Trader Goblin in Goblin Camp, who talks about a stolen Ring fomr the Waukeens Rest raid.
So much opportunity to make Thieving more interessting. Its just needs this balance of having a Thief Party doing this and having another reputation as a notorious Thief instead of good standing with Standard Merchants.
I could even think of making the Thief himself allways disguise with the Spell, so to have him not caught by guards or be remembered, becuase nobody knows his original Face (like "No One", from A song of ice and Fire Books who was an Assassin)

As far as stealing, I don't have enough experience to comment. But, as far as sneaking, it would be cool if the 'enemy' wasn't deaf as a doorknob and had at least decent peripheral vision. Presently, I can't use stealth, as it's simply a toggle that makes me untargetable. I mean, maybe I need to jump to the side of them at times, but that's not too challenging, the AI simply can't deal with stealth. Being hidden is almost as good as being invincible, one would think that one might need to work for it a bit.

If the difficulty of thieving was increased (in a more interesting way than just increasing the DCs) and/or a reputation system was implemented, then BG3 wouldn't have to rely on this "merchant immediately accuses the players of stealing, even if said merchant has no way of knowing who the culprit is" mechanic.

Invisibility should persist while stealing. This would work well the implementation of some type of perceptive radii instead of just a sight cone - invisibility would as per the rules give the enemy Disadvantage to notice you while you're within that perceptive circle.