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Do you want a sneak system? Yes, but only if the system currently in place is revamped, as I feel like it has a good number of issues that could be hammered out.
How would you want to keep track of it? It would probably be easiest if the staff who concluded a stealth activity successful/not successful went ahead and adjusted the tracker.
How do you think it should affect stealths? A "free" stealth every year to the top sneaks for each herd and the outcast with the most successful stealths (so five characters total), where they take an item or character without much more than a "BillyBob takes Karen's knife because he can." While you may be like "well that's unfair as hell," please consider that ALL the herds will have one of these characters, and thereby will be able to just free steal your item back in, at most, a year - so I think it has its own checks and balances; this also is a way to mend the "I can't get my stuff back!" issue that Jen brought up. Other people may be quipping in at this point, "but herds are supposed to have an advantage," but I feel like they still do with a ratio of four to one. Not to mention, thieves tend to be outcasts in our society, too, so it really just makes sense ICly! However, I don't really approve of any other "auto-win" system unless it pertains, directly, to the character's stats and accumulated in game successes, though I also feel that characters should not be rewarded for the time they have held a rank, as players become grossly inactive in their positions at periods, and I feel like rewarding something as easily maintained as a rank (anymore than the rank magic already does) unfair. I also like small stat increases and maybe a tiered ability system, such as the one we have for Battles, which rewards players for being good at what they do (and being active at it)!
Other thoughts or concerns: I intensely dislike the riddle system and feel like it is just, in general, dysfunctional! As I've seen, a very small fraction of OOC players participate in stealing, mostly because I also feel like its a bit of a crap shoot... More often than not, I can identify a stealth as targeting my character, even if its not, and so I feel like the likelihood of your stealth being passed is, at this point, more likely related to the fact that a herd used all their guesses without hitting the proper character (which happens more than you'd think, from my memory of helping with stealths in the Basin. Some had as many as 10 valid characters!), or the outcast didn't look at the board in time... or, the worst case scenario of the dreaded stealth floods, where there are up to 10 of them to filter through, and only 1-2 herd members taking the time to look through them. To be fair, some players to write great riddles - but at the end of the day, I personally call the stealth board "the silly poems about our characters board," and on days when its flooded, "Satan."
This also leads me to my second point, which is that the only persons I have had "infiltrate" a thread with the intent of gleaning information from my characters (either through manipulation or trying to remain hidden) has been Chan, with Shadow, and Hawk, with Thranduil, and while characters are often seen nosing about herds, they are almost always caught immediately (and often unrealistically). I feel like our current system leaves the region of intelligence gathering and spying almost completely invalidated, because while it is in our guidebook that we can do these things, there are no systems in place to protect both parties from any power play or general hurt feelings. The players who want to use it at risk of unfair/biased/plain unkind behavior from their peers, and the players who are the recipients of these sneaky behaviors are equally at risk of the sneak taking advantage of the situation. It boils down to the fact that the current system is largely dependent on individuals, how well they write, and their moral compass - and I feel like this area of stealth in particular could benefit from a stat based or some other form of formatted system.
The Realization I Provided Only Problems and Not Solutions, Some Days Later
Aha I do it a lot while trying to make sure I hit all my points... but to be honest, I think this time I just needed more time to puzzle over a secondary way to making stealing fun for everyone and a little more realistic.
I think that a way to resolve a lot of the issues that I see around the riddle system would be to have an IC system working alongside an OOC system, much like what is going on in our battlefield. A thief will post in a thread with the character they want to steal from (ensuring active characters are the ones involved in this system), OR may post a thread in a new OOC region, which would symbolize all of Helovia, much as the Battleground does. Either way, this post is In Character, and involves the sneak attempting to get close enough to the character in question to take the item they would like, or the character themselves.
Like battles, these sneak threads take on a series of stat to stat rolls, comparing, also, the writing and strategy involved in this series of posts. Unlike battles, the final "closing post" would come only after a staff member in charge of rolls and stealth evaluation determine whether or not the sneak was successful, with the closing post explaining how the object/person was taken.
I feel like this solves many issues, including, primarily, the impersonal nature of the current system, in which characters who have no way of knowing each other know of each other, and makes it based on the accumulative skills you and a character have earned. This system would also allow the application of a rewards system, similar to the Battle Buffs, much easier to implement and much more logical ICly! I also do not feel that this puts any more pressure on the staff than the current stealth system, and that it would greatly enrich the game.
How would you want to keep track of it? It would probably be easiest if the staff who concluded a stealth activity successful/not successful went ahead and adjusted the tracker.
How do you think it should affect stealths? A "free" stealth every year to the top sneaks for each herd and the outcast with the most successful stealths (so five characters total), where they take an item or character without much more than a "BillyBob takes Karen's knife because he can." While you may be like "well that's unfair as hell," please consider that ALL the herds will have one of these characters, and thereby will be able to just free steal your item back in, at most, a year - so I think it has its own checks and balances; this also is a way to mend the "I can't get my stuff back!" issue that Jen brought up. Other people may be quipping in at this point, "but herds are supposed to have an advantage," but I feel like they still do with a ratio of four to one. Not to mention, thieves tend to be outcasts in our society, too, so it really just makes sense ICly! However, I don't really approve of any other "auto-win" system unless it pertains, directly, to the character's stats and accumulated in game successes, though I also feel that characters should not be rewarded for the time they have held a rank, as players become grossly inactive in their positions at periods, and I feel like rewarding something as easily maintained as a rank (anymore than the rank magic already does) unfair. I also like small stat increases and maybe a tiered ability system, such as the one we have for Battles, which rewards players for being good at what they do (and being active at it)!
Other thoughts or concerns: I intensely dislike the riddle system and feel like it is just, in general, dysfunctional! As I've seen, a very small fraction of OOC players participate in stealing, mostly because I also feel like its a bit of a crap shoot... More often than not, I can identify a stealth as targeting my character, even if its not, and so I feel like the likelihood of your stealth being passed is, at this point, more likely related to the fact that a herd used all their guesses without hitting the proper character (which happens more than you'd think, from my memory of helping with stealths in the Basin. Some had as many as 10 valid characters!), or the outcast didn't look at the board in time... or, the worst case scenario of the dreaded stealth floods, where there are up to 10 of them to filter through, and only 1-2 herd members taking the time to look through them. To be fair, some players to write great riddles - but at the end of the day, I personally call the stealth board "the silly poems about our characters board," and on days when its flooded, "Satan."
This also leads me to my second point, which is that the only persons I have had "infiltrate" a thread with the intent of gleaning information from my characters (either through manipulation or trying to remain hidden) has been Chan, with Shadow, and Hawk, with Thranduil, and while characters are often seen nosing about herds, they are almost always caught immediately (and often unrealistically). I feel like our current system leaves the region of intelligence gathering and spying almost completely invalidated, because while it is in our guidebook that we can do these things, there are no systems in place to protect both parties from any power play or general hurt feelings. The players who want to use it at risk of unfair/biased/plain unkind behavior from their peers, and the players who are the recipients of these sneaky behaviors are equally at risk of the sneak taking advantage of the situation. It boils down to the fact that the current system is largely dependent on individuals, how well they write, and their moral compass - and I feel like this area of stealth in particular could benefit from a stat based or some other form of formatted system.
The Realization I Provided Only Problems and Not Solutions, Some Days Later
Aha I do it a lot while trying to make sure I hit all my points... but to be honest, I think this time I just needed more time to puzzle over a secondary way to making stealing fun for everyone and a little more realistic.
I think that a way to resolve a lot of the issues that I see around the riddle system would be to have an IC system working alongside an OOC system, much like what is going on in our battlefield. A thief will post in a thread with the character they want to steal from (ensuring active characters are the ones involved in this system), OR may post a thread in a new OOC region, which would symbolize all of Helovia, much as the Battleground does. Either way, this post is In Character, and involves the sneak attempting to get close enough to the character in question to take the item they would like, or the character themselves.
Like battles, these sneak threads take on a series of stat to stat rolls, comparing, also, the writing and strategy involved in this series of posts. Unlike battles, the final "closing post" would come only after a staff member in charge of rolls and stealth evaluation determine whether or not the sneak was successful, with the closing post explaining how the object/person was taken.
I feel like this solves many issues, including, primarily, the impersonal nature of the current system, in which characters who have no way of knowing each other know of each other, and makes it based on the accumulative skills you and a character have earned. This system would also allow the application of a rewards system, similar to the Battle Buffs, much easier to implement and much more logical ICly! I also do not feel that this puts any more pressure on the staff than the current stealth system, and that it would greatly enrich the game.
