I wouldnt mind the idea of a level based crime system such as GTA, where each tier gives worse consequences.

KEEP IN MIND THESE ARE ONLY EXAMPLES. THESE BOUNTY LEVELS ARE NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENTING ACTUAL NUMBERS. THEY ONLY REPRESENT AN EXAMPLE OF HOW THIS IDEA COULD WORK.

25 Gold Bounty - Guards will attempt to apprehend you, giving you a fine and confiscating your stolen property. Having inssuficient funds to cover to fine results in jail time.

50 Gold Bounty - Guards will attempt to send you straight to jail, and perhaps a fine as well.

100 Gold Bounty - Guards will ALWAYS know you are a criminal. There is no leaving town and returning undetected. You are identified on site as a lawbreaker.

250 Gold Bounty - Guards are occasionally sent in packs to hunt you down. Could include one heavily armored guard/constable to serve your warrant. These guards will locate and follow you outside a cities limits, until you are apprehended or subsequently one of you is dead.

500 Gold Bounty - Death Warrant is issued. Jail is no longer an option. Either pay your bounty/bribe and official, or spend the rest of your life on the run.

I mean those are just a few ideas and I think it could make being a criminal much more exciting.....what do yall think? Feel free to add suggestions!

I like the idea for the most part, but there's one problem. Let's say you rack up a high bounty in one city, then go to a different city. Why should any of the guards in that city be able to recognize you immediately? Did they get a fax with your face and crime level?

Some people will disagree, but I think there should be a different bounty level for each city or region.

Agreed. Maybe there could be a time frame for how long it takes other regions to 'get the news' of your crimes. Say if your crimes arent forgiven within 5-7 game days, the whole region is on the look out.

Or maybe once you get to a certain bounty level ALL guards know who you are. Because while I agree with you, it does make sense for a criminal to become to notorius that they are known nation wide.

I like the way red dead did it,you could draw the law out and if you kill enough lawmen they back down on pursuing you. I honestly do not think regional crime will come back as we knew it in oblivion,that was the top tier complaint almost as much as vampires and werewolves. I always seen it as a way to make you ease up on theft,I doubt this is even an issue anymore.

HOLY FRICKIN HELL GREETED BY CAPSLOCK'D AND BOLD'D TEXTZ

Asinine snide aside, something similar along your ideas on the OP and your second post here on this thread would be welcome in my book. But for some reason I was under the impression that the different holds in Skyrim each have different social (which includes crime) systems/norms, and what counts as a crime in one doesn't considered as such in the other ones. Perhaps an example for this is that an occasional bar fighting (provided that it was non-fatal) will be penalized in Solitude, but not in Winterhold (just making this up in the fly, mind you).

I don't know about it all, but I'm digging the sending guards out in small squads.

Yea I doubt there will be regional crime,the way the whole faction thing is being kept such a huge secret. I would wager you can wager small scale wars. Then crime in one area might result in a reward at another hold.

Interesting theory. The OP isnt necessarily the greatest of ideas, its just something to get you thinking. The general idea is of different crime tiers.

I just hope that Skyrims opposing factions are not like NV, in which you can only pick certain factions and joining some screws up others. I have a feeling that is what its going to be like, but Im keeping my fingers crossed hoping otherwise.

Nah, I like Oblivion's system. It works very well within the TES universe.

When do the Guards riding dragons show up?

I like the idea of news of your crimes spreading, and to expand on that, what if you could kill the messengers spreading the news (like the Black Horse http://uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Courier) to stop you from having a bounty in other towns? To expand even further on that you could then forge a document to send back to the city where you originally committed the crimes, saying that you were apprehended and jailed/killed. This then remove your bounty, but then make the next crime you commit in this original city give you a higher bounty.

I doubt that this will be in Skyrim, but thank the Divines for modding, right?

Not to be argumentative, but I disagree. The crime system in OB and MW were dull and meaningless. The bounty system was horrible, and no matter what you did or how much you stole, you never felt like it had any affect on the game whatsoever.....Short from guards chasing you.

As a theif/evil/assasin character, Id like to see more consequences for these actions.

That's an interesting thought, however 500 gold is a little low for a DEATH WARRANT without the option to go to jail. That should in my opinion be more around 1000-3000 gold.

I agree. The crime system needs a nice overhaul and I can't wait to see what they've done with it. Two Worlds 2 had a sword meter on the top right of the screen that filled up as you committed crimes. Once it is maxed out then you are "wanted".

... yeah, and maybe they can implement a court system with lawyers and stuff where you go to trial and are sentenced to life in prison, then you just stay jailed... or better yet, sentence you to death, stage your own execution, then you have to start all over again...

You bounty levels are kind of low. 1-100 bounty isn't that high. If you up the intervals it would make better sense.

Thanks for your imput. Fail. If you meant to be funny, it wasnt. If you were serious, well, thats just a bizaare idea.


Like I said though, the OP isnt supposed to be exact numbers or repercussions. It was just an idea to get the ball rolling. So dont think that 25 Gold Bounty and 50 Gold Bounty were meant to be exact figures. I just meant them as examples.

I've been a big proponent of making crime higher risk (And higher reward), since crime is an undeniably huge part of stealth-characters.

I've already posted it somewhere, but I'd go one step further, and make certain crimes not capable of being paid off with gold, unless the character has an exceptionally high Speechcraft/Mercantile skill. Making a Prison Sentence an inevitability would really raise the stakes of high-profile crime like; Murder, Assault of Law Enforcement, Grand Theft (Items worth more than say, 5,000 Gold), but conversely, the opportunities and incentives to do these actions should be increased.

I am pretty sure thats almost exactly how the system already worked. on the point in which getting a bounty past a certain point does actually prompt the guards to try and kill you on sight.

I make a lot of stealth characters and none of them have ever broken the law. Since when has 'stealth' been dictated only by theft and murder?

Well, two defalult stealth classes are thief and assasin, and there was a guild for each. Plus its an open world game. People like being bad in those.

A combination Fable and Morrowind style crime system could be good. Fable has it that you can have different bounties in different regions. Morrowind has the death sentence. Here's how it could work.

Every town and the surrounding extent of the Hold has a managed bounty. If holds share certain allegiances with whatever plot elements the story says, they could possibly share bounties (so it'd be a bounty with a faction as opposed to every town). Crimes committed in this region are determined in the same way as which jail you go to. Stolen items are only confiscated if they are from the region you are being arrested in.

Crime levels:
0-500: Petty theft, guards will not notice, nor will they instantly recognize you if you talk to them. You can confess your crimes to a guard to pay off the fine.
500-1000: Moderate crime, guards won't take notice to the crime but will arrest you if spoken to. NPCs may take notice of your crimes through dialog.
1000-2000: Wanted, guards will track you down when they see you and attempt to arrest you. You can pay your fines, go to jail, etc.
2000-5000: Very Wanted, guards will track you down, and your ability to pay your fines is now gone (This is Skyrim we're talking about, they don't care about your silly money)
5000+: Death Warrant: Guards will kill you on sight.

Bounty Deprecation:
Over time, your bounty can decrease as people stop caring. For every 20 seconds you are wanted, your bounty will go down by 1 gold. That means if you have a bounty of 500, it will take 10000 seconds, or nearly 2.8 hours to go away. (This formula isn't a suggestion, just a speculation. You could probably create a more complex formula to have varrying levels of deprecation.)
Essentially, it shouldn't take that long to forget about a stolen loaf of bread. If you steal a ton of money, then people might remember you longer. If you have a death warrant, your bounty will never go away without paying the right people.

Stolen Item Deprecation:
Stolen items shouldn't remain stolen forever. Depending on how valuable the item is, people may forget about it. For instance, the time it takes for an item to stop being hot is 20 times the item value, in seconds. Items worth more than 1000 gold will never be forgotten unless taken to a fence, and the heat can be removed for a fee. Items worth less than 50g can be sold to traders if they are not the original owner of the item. They will not buy items if guards are actively searching for you.

Reputation:
If a guard is friends with you, they may be willing to look the other way when it comes to crimes. In Oblivion, this was judged with disposition, where having a disposition of 90 made you just fine, and the guard would even take care of your bounty for you. I think it should be a system of Disposition weighed against responsibility, where a guard can be conflicted between helping the player and doing their duty. Sometimes authorities must even arrest their friends. But this system can be made a bit more dynamic as well. I'm not willing to crunch the numbers, so I'll just scale them in terms of success. If you are famous enough, such as being leader of a guild or a protagonist who has finished the main quest, the disposition of all NPC's, including guards, would be raised a bit in your favor (unless it's a bad guild). Guards should feel wrong if they arrest the champion of Cyrodiil, for instance. A select few guards can spawn with high enough responsibilities that they put their duty before all else.
Disposition Low, Responsibility Low: Guard is not your friend, but they are irresponsible. They will confront you, but accept bribes on the spot to let you go free. They will not remove your bounty.
Disposition Low, Responsibility Moderate/High: Guard is not friends with you and you are wanted. Regardless of responsibility, they will confront you.
Disposition High, Responsibility Low: Guard is your friend, but not very responsible. They will confront you as all guards do, but let you go and remove your bounty for you.
Disposition High, Responsibility Moderate: Guard is your friend, and moderately responsible. However, because you are their friend, they cannot bring themselves to arrest you. They will not go out of their way to remove your bounty.
Disposition High, Responsibility High: Guard is your friend/you are famous. However, they are very responsible and their duty is important to them, so they arrest you.

That's the basics of how it could work. I do think that the bounty system could use a bit of work, to add a deeper level of gameplay to lawless characters. This affects lawful characters very little though. When I play, I usually play as a thief. If there isn't any sort of increased dynamic system, I don't think I'd mind very much, but it'd be nice to have regardless. I suppose if there's this sort of bounty system, there should be a counter-system for other characters, the ones that piss off the evil organizations as opposed to the lawful ones.

... bizarre, two ars, and I never intent to be funny.

It boils down to: do you want to play The Elder Scrolls, or medieval GTA?
Never mind that in OB the player's bounty will increase depending on the number of crimes, and every guard in the game will be after you, there is a reason why the crime system is the way it is in TES: you can't be a fugitive forever and play TES, as you need to go into cities, and talk to other NPCs, even talk to guards and nobles to complete quests, which you cannot do if you are a fugitive; so, you need a sort of easy way out: pay a bounty or go to jail and sleep off your sentence while losing some stats.

And stealth characters don't really need a "tiered" system either. The whole idea of stealth is that they don't see you. If they don't see you, how can anyone tell which crimes you committed in the past?

They actually had that in Daggerfall. You could choose to plead guilty or not guilty, guilty would give a lesser sentence/ smaller fine, not guilty would then present you with two other choices debate and lie. Choosing debate would use your etiquette skill (speechcraft skill used for politeness and speaking to nobles) whereas lying would use your streetwise skill (used for being blunt/ speaking to peasants). The cool thing was that being part of the criminal underworld (Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, etc.) actually upped your chances of debating / lying your way through. Presumably the judge/ jury was paid off or something to that matter.

It's not really a question of stealth. There are other ways besides thievery to break the law. You can be evil playing any type of character you want. Being evil (Or at the very least morally gray) tends to put you at odds with some lawful organizations.
Healer/Mage/Battlemage - Necromancer/Conjurer/Warlock
Fighter/Knight/Crusader - Mercenary/Marauder/Bandit
Ranger/Acrobat/Monk - Thief/Assassin/Agent