so i decided to try poisoning people thru pickpocketing for the first time ever. i put a lingering damage health poison on a random meat seller in riften and she dies in about 5 seconds. the guards go nuts!! even tho i'm stealthed and or invisible they show up red and chase me down.

now here is where it gets weird....the entire town of riften (aka all of the vendors and citizens) turn on the guards and i have a huuuuuge melee on my hands over this stupid dead meat seller. so i start sniping down the guards and upon killing the last guard it gives me the message that the last witness is killed and 2k bounty removed....then all of a sudden i get 1k re-added and one of the citizens (the meat sellers husband? i dunno lol) shows up hostile so i kill him and get another 1k added.

is this how its supposed to work? i'm really confused.

It's not a good idea to kill those that you would do business with. You can't bargain with a corpse.

And, yes, you can set in motion a series of events that will depopulate a city with little involvement of your character. It's always good to save first before doing these things. You may find more success, and better results, if you limit your mayhem to dungeons and lairs.

this was just a test....i saved before i killed her of course so i could care less about that. my question pertains to aggroing the guards. i'm used to wiping someone out with a bow or from behind with a blade and not getting any aggro....but the poison even tho it was done successfully from stealth and i booked it after dropping it on her so i was out of sight still aggroed the guards regardless where i was.

also it didn't give me a bounty but the guards remained hostile even after leaving and returning.

I had an assassin character that killed with lingering damage health poisons exclusively. Several times she aggro'd guards that couldn't or shouldn't have seen her slip the poison into her target's pocket. It was pretty hit-or-miss, though. Sometimes she'd be halfway across town when the target breathed their last and still aggro the guards, sometimes she got away clean. I'm used to saving often, but having to reload so often due to guards attacking was immersion-breaking even for me.

alright thanks.....i thought maybe i did something that broke my game and was going to have to sift through my mods. guess its just one of those things that will never get addressed heh. heck i think i had to dl'd a mod just to fix the Blue chopping blocks.