All I ever hear about is how everyone benefits from teamwork. healer, warriors, malopaths, all of them like to scamper around in groups of two or three so that they can take on big trouble that they couldn't handle alone.
Well what about the thiefier types? In the city right now, thieves see other thieves as merely competitors - not partners - 'cause we don't have any way to benefit from each other's company they way other Roles do.
So how about this:
A new skill, called FastTalk or simply Distract, which relies on Charisma (remember him?) and which, when used, has a chance to entrance the target. While fasttalking, you can't do anything but fasttalk; anything else interrupts the effect. While someone is being fast talked, their effective "see" skill is reduced, making them easier to affect with hiding, sneaking, peeking, and stealing, as well as a few other actions that try to go unobserved, such as malopathy and all that.
This skill could be a thief Role-specific skill, or it could belong to many Roles (lawyer, politician, etc.), or it could be its own role, perhaps; Confidence Artist.
It needn't be a single skill, either. To add some straetgy and specialization, it could be broken into different skills to affect different targets:
seduce(gender), which affects members of a specific gender,
Fast-talk, which affects all humans who are predisposed to wish to talk to you (people not of opposing alignments, for instance?)
and distract, which affects beings such as animals, robots, etc. normally incapable of speech, and is not as effective or more difficult to learn than the other varieties.
Here is an example of this skill in use:
Thieves A and B have decided that they want to get some lunch for themselves, so they head to Arby's. Thief A strikes up a conversation with Arby, commenting on how much he likes his haircut, the weather these days, and so forth. Soon Arby is nodding along politely, and fails to notice when thief B slips quietly into the shop, snatches a pair of burgers off of the back of the grill, and slips back out. Thief A, at a signal from B, waves a polite goodbye.
A and B enjoy tasty burgers free of charge.
This is just one example of the skill in use.
Pros:
- Provides teamwork aspect for thieves, and allows thieves to assist members of other Roles as well.
- Provides a solid, useful application for Charisma (I'm sure in time there will be many of these; but it wouldn't hurt to have a few now)
- Adds sophistication and complexity to theft; also, inspired by real life shoplifting and pickpocketing tactics.
Thought of another charisma-based skill that could be useful: "Lure".
With the "Lure" or "Entice" skill, you can effectively "drag" a target who is not incapacitated. So you would attempt to "Lure Deathsucker South" in order to get them away from the patrolling stormtrooper, for instance.
Luring would be best to draw targets away from nearby authority figures, or out of CrimeNet zones. Because it has a lot of potential power, it would probably be best if Lures were limited to moving the target one single room, and causing them to quickly walk back to the previous one before resuming their normal business.
Naturally shopkeepers would have an absurdly high resistance to being "Lured".
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