Thief attacks sleeping person when pickpocket fails

floki

When your thief, Imoen for instance, tries to pickpocket someone and fails the person turns hostile.
That I can understand, you either succeed or the victim has nog items or your skills are to low to steal anything.
And when you´re busted the victim turns hostile. Great.

But when you try to rob a sleeping person and fail that person still sleeps and your thief attacks?
I find it strange that you would attack a sleeping person because your pickpocketing skills did not work.

Is that supposed to be or is it an oversight/bug?

JumboWheat01

They want their shiny loot, gods blast it, and someone rolling away in their sleep is NOT going to deny them!

Myrag

Turn off AI.
When pickpocketing fails person turns hostile. With AI enabled you auto attack them.

scriver

*Reaches over with his knife to carefully cut the sleeping man's purse*

*Looses his balance for a moment and accidentally stabs victim several times in the face*

Papa_Lou

These replies gave me a good chuckle.

However, I don't think it's an oversight or bug. Sleeping NPCs are likely considered the same sort of target as an awake commoner within the game's code, except their sprites don't move. I doubt there was any way to really differentiate those two entities, besides making a whole new kind of creature just for sleeping characters, which would have been a waste of space.

So since the game makes it so that any pickpocketable, neutral character goes hostile if your skills fail, it'll ultimately apply that to the sleeping characters, of which there'd be no real way to differentiate.

Granted, I know absolutely nothing about game design or how to make technical things work, so all that could make no sense whatsoever. Just my thoughts.

EDIT: I should mention, as @Myrag said, if you turn off AI, your characters won't automatically attack hostile creatures. There's a little lantern button in the bottom right of your screen - Click it so that it's darkened, and you should be fine. Then, when sleeping characters go hostile, you won't have to fight them. Just leave them to their angry, violent sleep.

Bigfish

Wouldn't really require a whole lot of extra coding. There's already a mechanism for inflicting status effects on creatures. Probably more difficult to get wizards to sign off on another change. Not really a highly demanded feature either, and questioning that mechanic opens up a whole other can of worms involving sleeping behavior.

fateless

sleeping people can still go hostile. AI will attack. The only changes between an awake and a sleeping person is sleeping people are stationary. and sleeping people shouldn't trigger guard summons for picking the lock and emptying the dresser next to them.

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