Are they wearing nice clothes? Holding a Progia-11? Have on a titanium Rolex? They probably have money.
Or they might not. It's a gamble.
But for real, I remember once that staff talked about pockets and bags, and how they weren't exactly needed.
Maybe instead of walking down streets and going on "pickpocket x from y" sprees, actually watch them to judge if they indeed have a wallet, or phone, or etcetera. They could have a really baggy jacket hiding their phone pocket, or something else of the sort.
What you're asking for is a way to tell who is carrying what so you can go for the most expensive thing to your knowledge and that is poor form.
Pick*pocket, for stealing chyen
Steal from for stealing a specific thing, useful when you know they have a thing or you're fishing around to see if they have a thing
And steal which lets you steal something from a person.
You want commands that let you see if they have wallets. Great. That exists in . You want to know if they have a lot of chyen. That's just . You think they have an interesting item on them and you can't quite tell what it is but your'e going for it anyway. That's just . They already exist. You can roleplay those things however you want in your head.
If you want to know if they have a wallet and a phone and a fat stack of chyen in their pocket, but don't know which is worth the most… well, you can RP to find that out. Or don't, go in blind, and hope for the best, since you're suppose to limit yourself to one steal a day.
Watch and observe as a player and character (this is called RP) instead of relying on a command (this is called gamey).
All the tools for determining someone's inventory already exist in the game.
You already know of frisk, for determining exactly what someone has on them. The entire inventory.
You have the ability to observe them to see what they put in and out of their inventory. Great for seeing that they have a progia-7 or a wallet.
You can observe them through casual RP for months and realize that they always have a LiteTerm on them when they go in for their job.
What you want is magic thief eyes that tell you that squares in a person pockets equal a wallet, a cred chip, a phone, or 2000+ chyen. You got to work to know what a person has, not just casually glance at them.
And again, you say you want to size them up and figure out their wealth, you can do that already through RPing with them and observing them. It already exists!
The thing is that, even if this is completely true, it's unbalancing and leads to less player interaction. You can still get a good feel for what someone has on them but you'll have to spend days, weeks or even months watching and learning. INTERACTING. I don't think we should add features that will take days of you being out and about interacting with other characters and compress it into a one second command.
Steal the sledgehammers.
RP
We all really understand what you want, and what you desire, and probably no one else is going to agree it's a good thing. What you want subverts RP. That is not a good thing.
Steal is necessary because you need a way to get an object without having to rely on someone OOCly agreeing you should have it. Steal is a stat and skill check.
You have the power to tell if someone has an inventory full of stuff and the power to take it already. You don't need any more power to subvert the RP required to get the information.
The best thief could take the bags containing all the combined inventories of other players, thereby hoarding all the stuff in the entire game. This would suck for a lot of reasons, the least of which losing an entire bags worth of stuff because someone typed is silly in a game where you have to put so much time and effort into getting objects, which are actually limited in number based on rarity.
So you have a magic hand-waved inventory. You have it, so does everyone else. You'll have to live with it because the alternative world is a nasty one that doesn't promote any kind of balance.
Size and shape is also a pain to consider. Clothing for example, has a length and a weight, but the length really doesn't make much sense because you can fold clothing. A dress might be longer than a katana, but it should fit in a backpack, but you can't just say it's dimensions don't matter. That means a big coding resource to consider things that can change shape and size so you can fit it in your backpack.
And weapons and things like that have containers. You can wear them. And then stealing them doesn't work because they're secured to the targets body, which does nothing to benefit you in the first place. So even if bags were made, then stealing would have to be completely reworked to be able to access containers.
And this is just so you can look and see into those containers to see if there's anything you currently want. While in the current system, you can just watch and see that they put something away, or heck, pay for data for what other people have seen people have, with no coding changes required and no extra command required just to see what is available for theft.
And this doesn't even cover the fact that there would need to be a system of different defense values for containers that people would have for you to steal from. A purse is sometimes easier to steal from than a person's pockets, but not always. And a backpack that's closed is going to be terribly harder than one that's been left open…
And then you have to program a billion different containers in game so not everyone is walking around with a WAI tactical backpack.
And then those poor newbies with only two hands that have to decide if the wallet they have is more important to carry or the weapon they just mugged off a person because they don't have a backpack yet, which probably necessitates code for adding pockets to things because why do I have to carry around my wallet n my hand when my jeans are described as having pockets?
I mean, this isn't even being dramatic. Getting rid of our inventories, as they exist, would be really, really hard to do.
The rich looking guy is probably has a nice phone. The bartender you watched pocketing tips all night probably is going to have a lot of cash on her as she walks home. This is how you size people up in real life and this is how you do it in SD. The point is to experience being a thief including all of the work that goes into that, not to push button, receive loot.
Also, I don't think crates are as big and heavy as you think they are. And even if they -are- as heavy as you think they are, if someone can stash it in their inventory, they have invested enough resources into their stats to be able to do so.
Additionally, you can't steal things in people's hands anyway, so what you're asking for just takes away the ability to steal it in the first place :/
There are items that already cannot leave your hands to go in your inventory if they're past a certain size - though if you buy them off the rack sometimes they'll go in your inventory even if you couldn't freehands/stash/lower it, depending on what you have in your hands. If you think crates should always be in a person's hands, that's good to put on Ideas too with a short explanation for why.
People's primary concern with your size command idea is that it basically allows a risk free size-up opportunity without any roleplay involved. Stealing an item or just a chaotic steal grab have risks attached to them and will lead to roleplay because of it one way or another.
Clothes with pockets don't exist and there's appropriate containers for certain items. That being said, that doesn't mean your inventory is endless. If you see someone stashing seventeen sledgehammers or any large number of items you should report it if they're something they carry around with them constantly. There was an incident where someone was told they couldn't hold dozens of sandwiches in their inventories at all time a couple of years ago, so staff does like to be made aware of people being unrealistic.
I don't know how theft works beyond the basic commands for various reasons, but maybe an alteration of your idea could see (if not already programmed to work this way) i.e.; steal wallet would target the wallet (if multiples) with the most heft to it, which could either be a lot of chyen or a lot of business cards stuffed in it, which would presumably be the most noticeable to a thief and we could move along those lines for other items.
You'll get used to the inventory system. It's just a matter of time.
If you can't steal items in a person's hands, maybe a solution would to have the disarm command weigh the thievery skill when it isn't combat items (if this isn't already implemented). So someone with high theft would be accustomed to quickly snatching an item out of someone's hand with maybe less overall notice or similar to someone disarming a weapon.
What I would suggest? Cyberware X-ray vision mod, boom! Now you can see what other people have in their inventory.
Also I wouldn't mind for the evaluate or appraise command to be able to target what characters are wearing to give you a value idea, but you can figure it out by yourself really and most people will tell you its unnecessary.
Then again, with the limitation of stealing just 1 time per character per day…you aren't going to be stealing much, assuming you respect this, which I am assuming most people don't and its hard to verify. I am not in favor of this limitation but I undestand what it gets at. Stealing 20 items while in the shadows for 20 minutes, looks kind of silly from outside and not very stealthy.
You can frisk people and still remain stealthed but as you say it is overt and they will run away most likely.
As for crates and large items in your pockets, I think this has something to do with size or some stat, some characters can hold more items than others, some big items fit in some pockets and others don't, in my personal experience.
I've been told forever not to stash crates in my pockets and I don't anymore, but again I am probably in the minority. Conversely, if I am handling them your thievery wouldn't be that helpful.
Finally there is a super easy way to make a very educated guess on whether or not someone has a crate in their pocket and I am sure you can figure it out. Like most people said before, do the legwork, use your eyes, stalk motherfucker, RP, etc.
Settle in and embrace the RP. Part of playing a thief is learning how to be a good one, both IC and OOC.
You should only rob one person a day? Is this a thing? I don't play a thief character but if I did, I'd rob as many people as made sense.
However, I think this is yet another good opportunity for me to pimp FORENSIC MAYHEM! There's a lot of tell-tale signs that people use ICly now to identify things about people. We should expand on it and give people with forensics some love.
http://www.sindome.org/bgbb/game-discussion/ideas/forensic-mayhem-207/#last
I think it's a decent idea, but I think a decent pickpocket or thief can size up a player on RP alone. I think it was stated a few times who people are that deal with hard cash on a daily basis, and I'm sure they can contest on how often they are robbed, and they have tricks they learn on how to adapt to thieves which I will not reveal here because it is quite clever.
