Miscreant guide

Here's it so far.

This guide assumes that you're playing a typical criminal miscreant in Allanak with no exact concept and no qualms about twinking a little. If you want to try something weird like a militia miscreant, parts of it might not apply to you. I strongly advise against leaving the city for anything more than picking bimbal leaves or maybe killing the occasional chalton. This guide is for a city-dwelling criminal miscreant with an emphasis on theft and little to none on combat. You can work with your combat skills if you want but it's a sidenote.


CHARACTER CREATION

So, you'll wanna be in Allanak. It's up to you whether you want to play a southsider or 'rinther, the only time this seriously affects the class is if you're trying to raise combat skills. Unless you're willing to spend time in the Byn, this can only really be done in the 'rinth, and you really don't want to be a southsider who goes around fighting in the 'rinth. If you want a combat-capable miscreant, make it a 'rinther.

First off there's race. Human, half-elf and elf are all fine. I wouldn't play a dwarf miscreant, but there's really no reason you couldn't, I just can't verify that your hide will still reach undetectable status with dwarven agility. More importantly, dwarves walk slowly and you will get unhitched from lagging behind when shadowing humans. So will humans with elves but there aren't very many elves, and dwarves are completely hopeless at shadowing elves. Even when not shadowing, the extremely slow dwarven sneak speed is just a nuisance. But if you want, you could totally play a succesful dwarf miscreant.
    Elf sounds tempting, but the agility is frankly redundant. They do get incredibly high agility and thus a higher bonus to stealth and manipulation skills, but it's a bit like wanting more than 90 in climb, you already never fail at that point. Elves get awful health/stun and you should never even think about PvPing with an elven miscreant. However, they do get very high wisdom which improves scan, and the better sneaking speed is pleasant. Roleplay-wise, the race obviously lends itself perfectly to the miscreant class, but I've never been able to enjoy elven RP for more than a month at a time.

Height and weight doesn't affect anything important. The only exception is if you're seriously determined to play a combat miscreant, in which case you may want to be tall in order to have better defense against bash. If you really want to min-max, go tall regardless, just in case somebody tries to bash you one day. It's not something that's ever really gonna matter, to be honest.

Age is a big decision. If you make your character very young, you get bonuses to agility and penalties to everything else. This sounds tempting for a non-combat miscreant--but it's a trap. The agility bonus to stealth and manipulation skill hits +25 at 19 agility, which is the upper end of human exceptional, and then stays +25 until 23 agility which is only possible for humans under 17 years of age with a maximum agility roll, so it won't last very long. For elves, there's even less reason to go very young because the whole agility stat ceases to scale up after elven exceptional. Humans have no agility adjustment from 17yo when the bonus ends until 28yo when the first penalty sets in, so 17-27 is neutral for agility. At 21 you no longer have an endurance penalty, so I recommend starting at 21 to give you 7 in-game years without stat penalties.

Next up is stat priority. The first thing to bear in mind is that miscreants get an agility bonus, and I think it's as high as what pickpockets got, i.e. +2. This makes it very easy to roll AI agility. You're nearly guaranteed to get it if you prioritize agility first, and that's the safe and sensible thing to do. However, bear in mind that agility above 19 doesn't actually do anything for humans. Not even for combat, unless you get to 22 agility which is only possible at <17 age. If you go agi #1, you'll most likely get 20 agility. It doesn't even hit the next defense bonus breakpoint. All you actually get out of that is a slightly better chance to hit with backstab.
    As such, you could consider going agi #2 and hoping for two high stats. It's not as safe as going all in on agility, but if you can land a high wisdom or endurance roll and still get enough agility to reach the last breakpoints, that's a big perk for your character. Exceptional wisdom would give you lightning-fast skill timers (doesn't matter in the long run but a huge luxury in the beginning) and a noticeable bonus to scan. Exceptional endurance can give you 120+ health and stun, making you much less likely to die to things like backstab or falling damage. I wouldn't prioritize strength but hey, you do have that option as well.
    The problem with this approach is that for humans, you can't tell if your exceptional agility is 18 or 19, and 18 misses out on the highest bonuses. Elves can tell if they got 24 or 25 because 25 increases your inventory item capacity from 11 to 12 so you can simply check how many items you can hold. No such test for humans. You can hedge against it with age, but then you have to make a character under 17. I don't even know what the minimum age is, I never paid attention to it. Suffice to say that if you survive for any real length of time, you'll lose that agility from aging up.
    It's up to you whether you want the safe bet on max agility or the gamble on better overall stats. If it's your first attempt at maxing out a miscreant, I would just go agi #1. If you've already tried it and want to optimize it, try agi #2. You can live with +20 to skill checks instead of +25, it's just annoying not knowing which one you've got.

Honestly, ignore strength. It just doesn't exist for this class. There's literally never gonna be a day where the damage you deal with melee attacks makes any kind of difference. If you ever kill someone, it's going to be in ways where your strength didn't matter at all. The stat doesn't affect stealing in any way, and unless you're an elf with poor strength or something, there's no way you'll have encumberance problems wearing anything that a thief has any reason to wear. Just forget about being the burly cutpurse who knocks people out in alleys. Play enforcer if that's your thing. What use you can get out of the miscreant combat skillset is best focused on defense and on landing poisons, and you just can't afford to try for a high strength roll.

And finally, subclass. Miscreants are remarkably unreliant on subclass. You can pick absolutely anything you want without missing out on anything very important. Nevertheless, there's a few choices that give you something moderately useful. I'm not going to list crafting subclasses because those have no synergy with anything, and I won't list extended subclasses because those are honestly just not worth it on a miscreant. Well, maybe the magick ones if you want, but that's not part of this guide.
    Hunter: Gives advanced ride and direction sense, two skills that miscreants lack. Riding might not be very useful if you never leave the city, but direction sense is surprisingly handy for maneuvering in darkness. Hunter also gives you wilderness hunt and, it says, wilderness stealth. The hunter subclass actually lost the sneak skill at one point, but that was when they changed the code to let subclasses give environmental stealth without necessarily giving the stealth skills, so I trust that hunter does indeed still give wilderness stealth. This is nice to have, even if you never leave the city, because a few random rooms here and there like gardens are sometimes flagged as wilderness, as are a couple of rooms in the 'rinth. Hunter also gives journeyman skinning in case you want to moonlight as an actual hunter.
    Nomad: Kind of a meme choice, but not bad if you're determined never to be found out as a criminal. For whatever reason, nobody ever suspects tribal humans of being thieves. It just doesn't occur to most people. Put on a turban, talk about some random foreign product you're selling, and noone's ever going to peg you as a miscreant unless they catch you in the act. Nomad also gives ride and direction sense like hunter.
    Gladiator: If you're that guy who's determined to play a combat miscreant, you want gladiator. It gives you disarm and bash which helps you defend against those skills. If you don't have them, you're very vulnerable to them. Even at journeyman disarm, you're extremely hard to disarm and will even reverse the attempts of new PCs. Apparently this subclass was renamed "pit-fighter" since last time I played, but the website still has it as gladiator.
    Linguist: There are niche concepts where a human really wants to be able to understand Allundean. If you plan to work as a spy for the Guild, spying on the eastsiders could be something you need to do. Learning languages in-game is a nightmare so linguist takes care of that. It also lets rinthis learn southern accent much faster and vice versa.


STEALTH SKILLS

The hide skill is the cornerstone of all criminal roleplay, doubly so now that there's a class with master watch. If you're trying to do shit in the open, and especially if it's in a tavern or some other populated room, odds are pretty high that somebody else is a miscreant and notices you with passive watch. I can't count the number of times I've caught people peeking, stealing and otherwise misbehaving thanks to master watch. As such, you always want to be hidden when you do something controversial like stealing from PCs.
    I'm pretty sure hide and sneak cap at 90 for miscreants but it's hard to be certain because nothing branches from these skills. I just know that when I have a miscreant with maxed hide and AI agility, nobody ever spots me. That was not the case for pickpockets who only got 80 hide. So, assume that miscreant stealth is top tier.

Anyway. Hide! One could write an entire essay just about this skill, but I'll try to keep it a little shorter than that. One of the key things to know about is the bonuses you can get to this skill. There's quite a few and some are very significant. Here I'll list the four most common ones since those are the only ones you need to care about 99% of the time.
    Crowd rooms: Being in a room with the crowded/populated flag gives a +25 bonus to stealth checks. You'll know the room is populated if it says "you try to blend into the crowd" when you hide. It has nothing to do with whether or not anyone's in the room, some rooms just have the crowd flag.
    Sneaking: The simple act of toggling on sneak before hiding gives a +15 bonus to the hide check. There's no reason not to do it. Make an alias.
    Equipment: Some items have skill bonuses. If you have something with a description about camouflage, staying out of sight, blending in or anything like that, odds are that it gives bonus points to your hide skill. There's no way to confirm it and I'm sure some items might be lacking the bonus, or some might have it without any hints. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that there's no distinction between city and wilderness stealth when it comes to item bonuses, so desert camo appears to work just fine in cities.
    Agility: Your agility stat can give a bonus (or penalty) to stealth checks. Look around for the stat tables, they're easy to find on the forum. As a miscreant, you're virtually guaranteed a high agility roll unless you prioritized it #3 or #4, in which case you were silly. The bonus caps out at +25 for humans and +40 for elves, both of which occur at upper exceptional.

Now, there's two sides to the act of hiding. One is your chance of success and the other is what I call "hide strength," which is what determines how difficult you are to spot with scan. While it's hard to find confirmation, I personally don't think the crowd room and sneaking bonuses apply to your hide strength, only to your chance of success. Skill, agility and equipment bonuses determine your hide strength.
    It's easy to see that with all of these numbers added together, chance to hide can easily exceed 100% even for classes that cap at advanced. The real trick is in the hide strength, and you want to do what you can to push yours above the maximum possible scan strength. I think just having max human agility and 90 hide will do that, but maybe very wise elves can scan well enough.

Training hide is pretty easy. Go to a room without the crowd bonus, make sure you aren't sneaking or wearing anything with bonuses to hide, and then hide a few times. It goes up by 1-3 points at a time so it maxes out very quickly. If you think you've reached no-fail territory but still don't feel like you've actually maxed the skill out, you can try to encumber yourself. I've never bothered to test if it affects hide, and I kind of suspect it doesn't, but I've also never seemed to have any trouble raising hide past the point where the agility bonus should have got in the way. Who knows. It just seems to max out fine.


Next up is sneak. There are fewer bonuses for this skill and more potential penalties, but it also hasn't really got a counter the way hide does in scan. While a succesful listen check by anyone in the room does impart a penalty to your sneak roll, the huge agility and crowd bonuses should prevent the success chance from dropping below 100%. However, sneak has a built-in 1/500 chance to fail no matter what, meaning you're never quite sure.
    This all changes if you wear armor. Solid armor (chitin, bone, wood, etc.) worn on the body, arms, legs or feet gives huge penalties to sneak, to the point where you pretty much can't sneak if you're wearing anything above leathers. Softer armors can also give a penalty, but the amount is miniscule and, I think, rounds down to zero on any but the heaviest and most overpowered leather armors. You can sneak just fine in normal leather, and you can still wear a solid helmet, wrists and gorget without penalties.
    The main trouble with sneak is that if someone's watching you, it will cause your sneak to fail. I don't mean it'll cause them to notice you, I mean it literally causes sneak to fail and take you out of hiding. This is the #1 way for sneakies to fuck with eachother, and it's very hard to combat it if you can't spot them with scan. I'll write more on this in the tips and tricks section.

To train sneak, you probably need to encumber yourself. With high agility, sneak will reach a point before it's maxed where it just won't fail naturally, and each fail is only a 5% chance to gain anyway. Luckily, encumbrance imparts enormous penalties to sneak, so just get yourself to "heavy but manageable" and sneak fifty rooms. Goes up by 1-2 points at a time which is slower than hide but still fast and easy. Some believe that it only rolls for a fail if something is actually in the room, which I've never tested. I always just train the skill in city streets anyway.


Finally there's climb, which is technically a stealth skill. Climb is very easy to max as it goes up by 3 points at a time and you have no shortage of climb rooms in Allanak. With master climb and high agility, it's pretty much impossible to fail unless you're climbing with your hands full, which you may need to do in order to max the skill at all. Just fail a climb check every so often and you'll have it mastered in no time at all. Even so, you should be careful where you climb, because falling four rooms is no joke. Three rooms will cost you about 100 stun, four is pretty much a guaranteed knockout even if you don't quite die. You can use rope and various climbing gear to make it extra safe, but I've never felt the need to do that with a miscreant. Leave that to the classes that can't master climb.
    When you do inevitably take a tumble, do not try to stop the fall unless you think you'll die if you don't. Stopping the fall (by typing any directional command while falling) has a low chance of success even at max skill and costs you health and stun if you fail, so you could turn a non-fatal fall into a fatal one. If you fall, let Jesus take the wheel and hope nobody molests you while you're regaining consciousness on the ground.


PERCEPTION SKILLS

These skills are very important if you want to make the most of your miscreant. All of these skills can be maxed for free in total safety, but some of them do require some tricks. More on that further down. The stat that gives bonuses and penalties to perception skills is wisdom, but it doesn't give very much. The first bonus occurs at 16 wisdom with +5 and caps out for humans at 19 with +10. Elves can get up to +20. This makes wisdom kind of an all-or-nothing stat--it doesn't really matter whether you have 10 or 15 wisdom, but having more than that is quite nice.

Peek is the most essential of them since it goes hand in hand with steal. The first thing to know is that it's easy to get caught peeking. It just seems that passive watch picks it up more easily--probably because you typically have to peek several times to scope out a potential mark. A failed peek can take you out of hiding, and there's talk of a bug where even being noticed peeking via passive watch can also break your hide. If it's very important that you remain hidden, refrain from peeking at anyone.
    When maxed out, this skill just about stops giving you hard fails ("he notices you looking") unless the target is watching you, but soft fails ("you find it difficult to bla bla") will keep happening. I think these soft fails are very easy to notice with passive watch, but only a hard fail will actually echo to the room.
    There's something that works against your peek skill in the skill check. I'm not sure what it is, but my guess is the target's peek skill and/or wisdom. Whichever one it is, if the target has a lot of it, even maxed peek will fail with some regularity. Write down which NPCs you seem to fail on a lot because they probably have whatever it is, making them good targets for maxing out peek. It can be pretty hard to fail peek toward the end if you don't make use of these NPCs. Judging by their rarity, I'm going to guess that it's the peek skill and not wisdom, but there's no way to be sure and I couldn't find it in the codedump.
    Peeking into containers is harder. There seem to be different difficulty tiers that go something like this: inventory, container in inventory, worn backpack, other worn containers, containers under an open cloak. Anything under a closed cloak simply can't be peeked into.
    For training peek, the key thing to know is what counts as a fail. Peek has five possible outcomes: success, hard-fail, and three different flavors of soft-fail. Success obviously doesn't give you skillgains. A hard fail always does. Of the three soft fails, only one will: the one that says something like "you couldn't manage to get a look in their pack." The others are "you find it difficult to get a look" which doesn't gain, and "it would be too difficult to peek" which means the item is covered by a closed cloak or something.


Scan is the second most important perception skill. Since very few classes now get master scan or hide, miscreants have a big advantage in the stealth game. You should be able to detect all the lesser classes except maybe for elven infiltrators with max agility, and none should detect you. Scan is how you counter other sneakies, by finding and shadowing and watching them without them even knowing you're there.
    The way scan works, you have a "scan strength" and they have a "hide strength" as explained in the stealth skills section. If your scan strength is right around their hide strength, you'll notice a shadow (or blur, if they're invisible instead of hidden) maybe every other time you look. If you try to target them with a skill or command, you might have to input the command a few times to make it stick. If the difference in scan vs hide strength is more than like 10-15 points, one side or the other fails completely. If your scan is too low, you can't spot them at all. If their hide is too low, you'll be able to see them consistently instead of them flickering in and out of existence. Since hide gets a lot more bonuses than scan, hide usually beats scan point for point and you should never expect to spot anyone who has master hide.
    One thing to remember is that your scan skill is cut in half when you're sitting/resting. Most people don't seem to know this and will stand up, scan, then sit down again. They won't spot a rat that way, so you can feel pretty safe in a tavern as long as everyone's sitting down. Make it a habit to stand at bars if you want to spot sneakies.
    To raise scan, you simply need to fail to spot a hidden or invisible entity. It's as simple as finding one, turning scan on, and looking until you don't see the shadow. You don't have to be in the same room, you can look in a direction. You can just live life with scan on and it'll eventually max out from the random shuffle of hidden PCs, but you can speed it up by using NPCs. In Allanak there are three main sources of hidden NPCs: rats, 'rinth NPCs, and this one elf in the elven building off Wall Road. That one's on the middle floor with some elven merchant, so just step into the building, scan, and look up. He's extremely well-hidden, I've only ever detected as a ranger with 90 scan and extremely good wisdom, and then it was like one in every ten looks. Elves are really good at hiding.


Listen is kind of whatever. It can be a hassle to train unless you spend ungodly amounts of time in taverns during peak hours, and it's not a skill you really need anyway. Doesn't even branch into anything. However, some day you might wish you could eavesdrop on someone at a table or behind a door, and then you'll be glad to have high listen.
    Another thing listen can do is counteract sneak and stealthy actions aimed at you. When someone sneaks into or out of the room you're in, and you're actively listening, it rolls your listen skill against their sneak skill. If you win, they get something like -25 to their sneak check. The same applies when someone's trying to backstab or sap you. If you manage to max listen out and you have AI agility, you actually have okayish defense against backstab.
    Listen isn't difficult to train but it takes a while since you don't just have on-demand access to people speaking at tables. If you're off-peak or just impatient, what you can do is go to a place where there's an NPC with a speech script, and stand in an adjacent room with listen on. Examples include the girl on Miner's who sells rotten fruit, the two people in the clay shop right outside the Red's, and the morning devotions templar.


Watch is very nice to have. It's important for all stealth classes because you want to have the best possible chance to find out if you're not hidden when you thought you were, which is best done via passive watch noticing people looking at you. It also lets you spot all kinds of things. Since miscreants can master this skill, you can become a powerhouse of observation, spotting hidden people stealing from others and all kinds of stuff.
    When actively watching someone, you automatically see all basic hidden actions (look, assess, hemote, animals pooping) and you impart a huge penalty to stealthy skill checks. The penalty is 50% or your watch skill, whichever is higher, so even unskilled watch is crippling. Always, always protect yourself from watch by assessing everyone in the room before doing something dirty. You want to be as sure as you can be that noone's watching you, and if someone is, don't attempt to steal under any circumstances.
    Passive watch can pick up just about anything. Someone with maxed steal succesfully stealing from somebody? If you have master watch, you have a very good chance to notice. There's a bonus if you have the skill that is being used, and miscreants get all hidden skills to master so you should end up with the highest codedly possible chance to detect things. However, passive watch does not give penalties to people's skill checks and will not cause failures. You'll just see what they did.
    Raising watch can be a hassle but it's simple enough: You need to fail to notice a stealthy action while actively watching the person doing it. If you try to train the skill exclusively on PCs, it will take forever because people just don't spam these skills that much. Keep in mind that you're much more likely to notice than to fail to notice, so the target needs to repeatedly do something that you can fail to detect. The best way is to find an NPC that hides, and that you can get to unhide. Watch it, then wait for it to hide, and if it slips out of sight and causes you to stop watching it, you've failed. If you notice it hide and now see its shadow, you didn't fail. Best target is 'rinth NPCs, but rats are good up to about advanced when your watch just always defeats their hide skill.


Hunt is situationally useful. It's probably not something you need to rely on very many times throughout your life, but there's probably gonna be a day when you're really glad you have master hunt. City hunt is actually much more useful than wilderness hunt because cities have well-known routes, so if you're tracking someone down, you might be able to tell where they're going long before you're there. Besides, odds are just higher that you'll get in a situation where you need it in the city than in the wilderness.
    Hunt is a fairly primitive skill. When you use it, it does a skill check for each set of tracks in the room and shows you the ones you succesfully spotted. You might have to hunt a few times to feel confident that you've seen all the tracks. If someone is very hurt, they'll leave a blood trail that always shows up on any hunt attempt, so keep that in mind if you're chasing somebody who's dying--there's no need to spend time hunting multiple times per room, just follow the blood and turn back if you lose the trail.
    It's trivial to max out hunt. You can raise it using your own footsteps, and anyway there's plenty of tracks in the city thanks to patrolling soldiers and whatnot. Just hunt until you know you've missed a set of tracks and that's that, skill went up and you can do it again in an hour or whatever. This should be one of the first skills you max just because it's so easy.


Forage is technically a perception skill and miscreants do master it, so I guess I'll talk about it. It's not an important skill at all and you can neglect it if you want. It's just about useless inside the city, though it does let you forage for really crappy food and water. However, it's surprisingly difficult to actually find food and water, so by the time your forage skill is high enough to find some in a reasonable amount of time, your character should be sufficiently established to not need to forage for scraps. It's mostly a roleplay prop. You have no business venturing out into the wilderness to look for diamonds, but if you really want to, you can.
    Training forage isn't difficult but it does take some time. I don't think it's a 1 fail = gain skill, I think it's like a 1/10 chance per fail or something. I spent days failing one forage per hour and the skill never went up, but then I started to use it a dozen times each time and suddenly the skill went up fine. You do need to find the rooms in the city where you can forage food, but there's plenty of them, like whole streets and such.


Finally there's the search skill. Nearly useless. There are so few hidden exits in the game that it's futile to go around searching for new ones. The important ones are already known to most people. The skill is easy to train so I always do it just because it looks neat when all skills in a category are master, but in like fifteen years of playing Armageddon, I have never had any real use of search. If you want to train it, go to the roof of the abandoned building west of the Gaj and search in the middle. There's a crack you can open into the corridor below. Failing to find it with search will increase the skill.


CRIME SKILLS

Steal is the big one. This skill has a shitload of nuances and I can't go through all of it here, but I'll cover what's important. You could play a miscreant just fine without actually using steal, but it's the iconic criminal skill and one of the more entertaining ways to be a non-combat criminal. Make sure you read the section about the crime code as well.
    With master steal and high agility, it becomes just about impossible to fail stealing anything light unless you're being watched. Stable tickets, keys, gemstones, poisons etc. can be safely stolen when you're maxed out. Heavier items are harder to steal, and items weighing 10 stones or more can't be stolen at all. Anything close to that will be very difficult to steal and never safe to try. If you're trying to steal anything heavier than a shortsword, you'll have a very real chance to fail.
    Until you hit master, I wouldn't steal from PCs. Getting caught stealing is one of the worst types of social suicide in the game. Everyone knows thieves are treated worse than mages. Try your hardest never to become known as someone who steals from PCs, because people will go out of their way to find reasons to kill you, or at least watch you anytime they see you. I mean, it's probably safe to steal tickets out of inventories at advanced, but it's such a needless gamble. How many succesful thieves do you know who started their careers by announcing to the playerbase that they're a thief?
    Don't go bananas with stealing. Just because you could empty the pockets of half the city's population doesn't mean you should. For one thing, it'll get staff's attention and that's the last thing you want. It's also just obnoxious and players will start to be on guard from thieves. You'll be rolling in cash pretty soon and you should stick to stealing items that might generate some roleplay.
    If someone is being guarded, it's very hard to steal from them. It's pretty much like being watched, except instead of causing you to fail, the guard just stops you from trying and makes you look like an idiot. It doesn't actually make you a criminal unless you get past the guard and then fail the actual check the normal way. Stealing from people with guards is something you should only attempt if for some reason you simply have to do it. NPC guards and soldiers are given very high guard skill.

Training steal can be very tricky. Not many NPCs actually have anything to steal, and you constantly have to wrangle with the crime code. One thing to note is that if it's night and there are no soldiers in adjacent rooms, criminal acts won't make you wanted. I believe this applies only outdoors, not in taverns and shops and such. There are four main ways to train steal:
    Stealing from merchants is auto-fail and will make you wanted. That's one way to raise the skill quickly if you know a way around the wanted flag or are willing to wait it out. I've never actually stolen from shops in the 'rinth so I don't know how they react, but stealing from shops is the most straight-forward way to raise the skill and you don't become wanted in lawless areas. I would avoid doing it too much, staff doesn't like it when players fuck with merchants.
    Training with an accomplice is the safest way but requires having an actual accomplice. It also means at least one person knows you're training steal. I've never done it this way but it's pretty self-explanatory, just remember to do it in an apartment or other lawless area.
    Find out which NPCs have stuff that can be stolen and train on these. There's plenty that have little things like coins, food and random bits of clothing, but it doesn't take long before you've stolen all of these items from the city's NPC population. That leaves you with the few that have something heavy that you'll fail on most of the time. There's a half-giant west of the Drovian temple that has a scimitar on its belt that falls just under the weight limit, so you can max the skill out just on him, but once you get near the cap your chance to succesfully steal the scimitar becomes high enough that you eventually will. There's also an NPC inside the guardhouse in front of the Kadian compound gates with a sword in his inventory. One of the mercenary NPCs around the commons has a longsword on its belt.
    Or, if you're a real dirty twink, you can just give NPCs things for you to steal back. I'm pretty sure this will get you skill-locked if caught, but it would certainly be effective. Stroll into the 'rinth, hand a longsword to a random beggar, then try to steal it. Easy but conspicuous. What you can do is find an NPC that picks things up (usually the poor commoners will, like waifs and such, plus anything in the 'rinth), then drop something in the room while passing through and come back after a while to pretend you saw something worth stealing. Easier to get away with but more work.

Stealing out of containers is harder. Stealing from under someone's cloak is harder. Stealing out of containers under a cloak is harder still. If you're trying to steal something that might be deceptively heavy, like a book or a container whose contents you don't know, keep in mind that penalties can stack up to the point where even a maxed out thief has a significant chance to fail. Familiarize yourself with the weights of objects and always do your best to make sure you have a plan B if you fail. There's actually a penalty to stealing from someone who's sitting or resting. You get a bonus for being hidden, though, so always hide first unless you're roleplaying a plain-sight theft. If someone is asleep, you can steal from them freely at no risk, but they might get echoes about someone tugging on them.

If you succeed the steal check, you don't come out of hiding. You have no obligation to emote at the target. They can't see you, and if you succesfully stole from them, they shouldn't find out until they notice the item missing. Some people really hate thieves and will call you a twink if you don't emote how you sneak up behind the guy with a big dollar-sign bag and grin wickedly as you reach into his backpack. Never do that. I don't even consider it correct roleplay so I don't do it even as a courtesy to people I trust. You can do command emotes, like "steal dagger man (while sidling past in the crowd)", or silent emotes which can only be seen by anyone who can actually see you. The former is fine, it only shows if someone witnesses your attempt anyway. The latter is a bad idea since you never know who can see you, but it's not as bad as doing an open emote.

When you inevitably do fail a steal attempt, one of three things will happen:
    A soft fail where it says something like "you failed but avoided getting caught," which doesn't make you wanted. It'll echo to the target that someone tried to steal from them but won't say who.
    A hard fail, which is pretty obvious and will tell the target who did it, but doesn't make you wanted for whatever random reason.
    A hard fail that does make you wanted. It just seems to be a roll of the dice whether it does or not.
In all cases, if the target was an NPC, it will shout "Thief! Thief!" It may also run away or attack you, or it may do nothing. Peaceful NPCs won't attack, but things like 'rinth NPCs might. I've also had a merchant in a lawful room attack me, then immediately vanish when I punched back.


Sleight of hand mainly does two things: it lets you palm/slip items into or out of things, and it lets you secretly unlatch (open) or latch (close) containers and doors. It goes hand in hand with high-end stealing because it lets you delve into people's closed backpacks and whatnot. With this skill, very few things are outside a thief's reach. You can also use it to silently open doors, which is very useful for burglary or when assisting with assassinations. Unlatching isn't failproof even at maxed skill, however--you always have like a 5-10% chance to fail, so it's not something you want to do frivolously. If you fail to unlatch but it's a soft fail, the target will get the same echo as a soft-failed steal and you won't become wanted. A hard fail will have the same result as a failed steal. This only goes for other people's containers, of course. A door or a container in the room will not make you wanted.
    To train sleight of hand you can either slip/palm or unlatch. The former stops being an effective way to train at middling skill as you just stop failing, but unlatching will do fine until the cap. Carry a pouch or something and just latch/unlatch it until you get a fail. For the longest time I thought it was a hard skill to raise and I was sure it had only a chance to go up on failure, but then I discovered that only unlatch will raise the skill. A failed latch won't. At least that's the conclusion I came to when I failed several latches, then failed an unlatch right afterwards and the skill ticked up to the next level.
    The skill also lets you draw weapons silently if they're sheathed in an actual sheath object. This includes knife-belts. To store a weapon in a sheath, you have to remove it and then 'load' it into the sheath object. This means you can draw your weapons in stealth but can't sheath them again without visible actions.


Pick is the alternative M.O. of coded crime. It's a disappointingly primitive skill, and now that so many classes and subclasses give pick, it's hard to find apartments that actually have anything in them because people stop keeping anything in apartments since half the playerbase can now pick locks. It's still an alright skill, and if you want to be a big dick criminal, you at least want to raise it in order to branch pickmaking so you can offer fledgling crooks an incentive to do your bidding.
    The biggest obstacle is getting a lockpick. Not many craft them, fewer still want others to have them, and the automated sources are very slim. There's the black market shop in the 'rinth, but it rarely has any. Picks seem to load up there randomly over time, not right after a reboot like it used to be back in the day. Nine times out of ten, you'll spend the 50 'sid to access the store and find no picks for sale, so it's a pretty bad way to get them. Usually he sells the worst kind anyway which break after a few uses.
    The best "mundane" lockpick is a long, slender bone pick. It's made from bird bones (a thin sliver of bone) and very hard to break. One of these could last you forever. It can pick all doors I've ever tried, but most doors are surprisingly easy to pick--anyone with journeyman pick, high agility and a quality pick can pick all apartments in the game. I checked with an assassin once. Since there aren't very many things besides apartments to pick, you don't need to feel any urgency about maxing this skill out.
    To train pick, rent a cheap apartment and start practicing on the door. Eventually it'll become pretty easy, so just find out which doors in the city are hard and do those. Picks only seem to break on a failure so don't keep trying if you've failed. Once you become skilled and have a decent pick, breakages become rare.

Pick doesn't appear to invoke the crime code. I'm not sure if doing it literally in front of a soldier will make you wanted, but doing it one room away in plain sight certainly doesn't. In my opinion, use pick as sparingly as possible. You can completely buttfuck the game's entire housing aspect by sweeping through all the apartments every other day, but all you get out of this is a month or two where nobody uses apartments. It doesn't really create roleplay, nobody can really investigate it in any meaningful manner, and it's just a net negative for the game. You shouldn't be trying to get rich through burglary, but do train the skill so you have it available in case you need to get to somebody. If you do rob an apartment, don't take everything, and please relock the door so the owner doesn't come back to an empty room after ten passers-by have picked it clean.


Next up is poisoning. For whatever reason, miscreant is one of only two classes that master poison. It's not a core skill for the class since you don't make a particularly great killer, but it is the main way that a miscreant can do it. This is one place where lockpicking does come in handy. People like to leave piles of low-end poisons sitting around in apartments because they're not really worth anything but nobody wants to throw poisons away. This is pretty much all I use pick for when I play a miscreant. I'll look through a few apartments for poisons and take nothing else. You can also steal poisons from people, they often have crappy ones in their backpacks for the same reason.
    The main poisons to care about are peraine and heramide. Peraine induces paralysis, leaving the target completely helpless, but there's a chance with each attack that they break free of the paralysis. This isn't actually an ideal way for miscreants to kill because you probably haven't got high strength and might need to stab someone fifteen times with a dagger in order to kill them. Heramide is less immediately debilitating but the target is much more dead if you can catch them. It induces a rapid stun drain that ends in unconsciousness when the victim runs out of stun, which typically happens in like 10-20 seconds. Both poisons are hard to get and expensive, and if you go around asking people about them, they will make a note to gossip about you to their templar friends.
    Skellebaine is a poison that causes hallucination and prevents spellcasting. There's really no reason why you should be trying to fight known mages, but if for some reason you simply must, consider using skellebaine. I'd still try peraine or heramide first but you might not have access to them.
    Terradin induces uncontrollable vomiting. It can be fatal if the victim has no cure and an empty stomach, but it's one of the more common cures. You can catch newer characters unaware before they've had a chance to find cures, but you shouldn't expect to kill any established PCs with terradin.
    Grishen drains stamina the same way heramide drains stun but doesn't result in unconsciousness. Nobody really uses this poison. Maybe if you're hunting desert elves and can't afford the good stuff, but a miscreant has no reason to care about grishen.
    Bloodburn (aka general poison) just does damage very slowly. This poison isn't necessarily fatal but can be. It seems to do about 75-100 damage in total over its full duration which is very long, something like an hour. Anyone who hasn't got a bloodburn cure is unlikely to be someone you have any reason to kill. It's a useless poison except for training the skill.

When training poisoning, you should make sure you have a cure for the poison you're using. What's annoying is that the skill to make cures branches from high poisoning, so you need to get them from somewhere else. When you fail a poisoning attempt, there's a pretty good chance of poisoning yourself, though high endurance can help you resist even hard fails (you slip and cut yourself). Soft fails (you nearly cut yourself) won't poison you but count as a full failure for skillgain purposes. It can be difficult to find a large amount of poisons to train with, but the skill goes up by three points at a time so it's very fast to max out once you have the resources. If you really just can't find cures, you can use grishen and skellebaine for training and simply wait out the harmless poison when you cut yourself. When training poisons, you'll notice you end up with a bunch of crappy daggers with useless poisons on them. Instead of acquiring more daggers, pour water on them to rinse off the poison.

If a weapon is poisoned and you have the poisoning skill, you can assess it to look at the taint. Up until a certain skill level - I'm not sure but I wanna say advanced - it'll just say "a shiny sheen." When skilled enough, it'll tell you what color and thus which poison it is. I can't remember all of them, but bloodburn is grey, peraine is green/yellow, terradin is black. Poisons are not guaranteed to land on hit--it could take several hits for them to proc, and then the target might resist. You should try to use two poisoned weapons when necessary.

There's are hidden skills for poison tolerance, apparently one for each type of poison. Supposedly you can raise it by poisoning yourself, and some players have been known to do so over extended periods of time in the hopes of building up resistance. I have no idea if it works and I've never cared to do it myself. If it does work, this is just about the only use for the brew skill's ability to create poisons designed to go in food and drinks. I really wouldn't go around poisoning myself regularly, it just sounds like a massive hassle for marginal benefit. For all anyone knows, you might spend months building up a 10% tolerance to one type of poison.

    
MISCELLANEOUS SKILLS

Brew is useful for making cures, and with quality tools I think miscreants can make all cures despite capping brew at advanced. Not quite sure, though. I never really went in-depth with this skill. Since its revamp, it has a vast and convoluted system for herb colors and flavors and whatnot, and you can search the forum for lists to help you along. It's too arcane to bother with here. Annoyingly, brew branches from poison which means you get the skill when you don't really need it as much anymore. I typically end up getting the cures I want early on and then never needing them ever, so I tend not to care much about the brew skill.

You should train barrier. It can be your last defense against discovery. If you fail a steal on someone and sneak away, they're likely to see your hooded sdesc in the distance and you can bet they'll try to contact you. Barrier goes up very slowly because psionic skill timers are three times as long as normal, so just keep at it until it branches into expel and then get ten more failures with like 4-6 hours inbetween. Expel is largely useless, I've never once found a reason to have the skill but technically you can use it to fight back against mindbenders. Expel is nearly impossible to train without pissing off everyone you Way with so I've never bothered.

Haggle and value are nice. They cap at advanced but advanced haggle isn't bad, especially if you have high wisdom on top. Value isn't terribly important, but you can use it to estimate the weight of objects in order to build up a general idea of what things weigh, but it's not the most dependable because item weights can be inconsistent and the value skill doesn't always give accurate information.

Pickmaking is nice when you can get it, but in order to get pick high enough to branch pickmaking you already need access to picks, so you're unlikely to really need this skill by then. It's a cool perk to offer newer criminal PCs, however. Obtaining picks is one of the first big hurdles and you can get people to do all kinds of informant work and whatnot if you pay them in picks. It's also a way to draw attention to yourself because you'll be the prime suspect of every burglary in the city if people find out you're peddling picks, so don't advertise it too much.
    Most picks are made of 'a piece of bone' which you can buy in unlimited amounts for practically no money from the slaughterhouse, but last time I played, you gained the skill at such a low starting level that you can't actually make the bone picks yet. I don't know what tools might help with pickmaking, if any. Instead I had to use barakhan tails. A thin sliver of bone (bird bones) can also be used since it has a shit-tier lockpick alongside the good one, but bird bones are kind of hard to come by because they're hardly used for anything else so nobody saves them, so you might want to keep these for when you can make the best picks.
    There's a whole bunch of similar-looking bone picks you can make. They can be assessed to gauge their quality, and you can look at the difficulty of the crafts to try to figure out which one's better than what, but I never committed it to memory. A long bone pick, a thin bone pick, a slender bone pick... whatever. They all seem to be crap, you want the long and slender one.


COMBAT

A lot can be said about combat, but I don't view miscreant as a real combat class so I won't go into advanced theorycrafting here. The most important thing to remember is this: you will never become really good at fighting. You can become alright, and it's worth training up to that point if you play in the 'rinth or (for whatever reason) the wilderness, but you don't need to make it a priority and you can skip it entirely without missing out on anything important. That said, miscreants can become okay semi-assassins. They have all the utility skills covered, that's for sure, and they get advanced backstab/sap and poisons. Don't bother trying to go the strength route, it's just not worth it. You'll generally want to make poisons do the work. I wouldn't bother with sap for that reason, and sap doesn't seem to hit as reliably as backstab does. I also don't recommend trying any kind of PvP if you don't have at least 110 health, and certainly not if you have under 100.

Backstab damage is a factor of your backstab skill, weapon damage dice, and strength. Strength plays an insignificant part so ignore that. From my experience, miscreant backstab caps at 60 which is the lowest point of advanced, so the damage won't be particularly high--count on 40-60 with a good weapon. However, you do get to hit quite reliably, especially if you're an elf. Backstab gets a bonus (or penalty) to hit chance of three times the difference in agility between you and the target. If you have 20 agility and they have 14, you get +18 to backstab for the purpose of hitting. Keep the same in mind if you're a human trying to backstab an elf.
    You branch backstab from throw. Throw can be raised to journeyman by throwing darts at a dartboard, so do that until you hit journeyman. I'm not sure what constitutes a fail with dartboards so I just throw ten times and move along. Once you're done with darts, throw knives either at chaltons and vultures or at random 'rinth NPCs. Keep in mind that NPCs with the 'sentinel' flag (which means they can't move out of the room) cannot be hit with ranged attacks and won't give skillgains. Sentinel NPCs include the scripted mugger crews, shop guards, and of course merchants.
    Backstab can be trained the same way: chaltons and 'rinth people. It goes up by 1-3 points at a time so it doesn't take very long to hit advanced. I like to do ten more fails after that just in case I was wrong and it caps at 70 instead of 60. If it gets hard to fail, you can try to backstab something that's already in combat, which incurs a huge penalty to backstab chance. You can find scrabs fighting chaltons and eastside NPCs fighting eachother regularly, but I had no major trouble reaching advanced the normal way with AI human agility. Being hidden gives a bonus to backstab chance so don't hide when you're trying to fail.

Throw isn't worthwhile. You only get to advanced and you won't have the strength to do real damage, so you're better off forgetting this skill as soon as you're done branching it into backstab. I suppose throw is the only way you could ever even begin to think about killing a half-giant or mul, but if you're at that juncture in your life, you've done something really wrong.

All the general combat skills cap at low advanced. Your parry won't amount to much unless you spend ages painstakingly raising your defense. You should max your parry out no matter what, just to have it, and you can do this easily by stepping into one of the midden heaps that have rats in them and bashing one of them. They'll all assist and you'll take a harmless hit or two, after which you just stand up and leave. If you want to take it further than that, you have to do a bunch of grinding in the 'rinth which isn't something I would do on a class with so little combat potential.
    Weapon skills are raised the same way they are for any other class. It might even be easy to hit advanced because miscreants have poor offense gain coefficients so you'll be able to leapfrog your offense to get weapon gains on basic 'rinth thugs. Since you're likely to get limited combat training throughout your life, I recommend getting all of it from humanoid opponents so you eke out as much efficiency through the hidden racial combat skills as possible. You have no use for piercing_vs_reptiles or whatever. If you're gonna turn your miscreant into a fighter, you need to min-max a little.
    You get piercing and bludgeoning. If you took the gladiator/pit-fighter subclass, you also get slashing up to apprentice. It's not wholly useless because your weapon skills help you defend against attacks from those weapons, and slashing is the most commonly used by NPCs outside the 'rinth. Consider training both of your main weapon skills for the same reason. If someone tries to PK you, it's almost always going to be with piercing or bludgeoning weapons. You need every bit of defense you can get if you're gonna play the class in this way.
    You should use dual-wield as your primary style. Don't try to go two-handed, you're not gonna kill people with straight melee damage. You want to maximize poison chance and that's all.

When you do have to attempt to kill somebody, open with backstab. There's really no reason not to. The delay isn't that much longer than 'kill,' and while the damage isn't likely to put the target any lower than 'does not look well,' backstab deals as much stun damage as it does health. If the target has spent some stun on psionics, you might knock them unconscious with a good backstab. If not, combat proceeds as usual and you just hope to land poisons before the guy either runs away or beats you. You should only attack unarmed PCs, both because you're quite fragile yourself and because it gives you a higher chance of getting an instant round of combat swings immediately after the backstab. You'll only get a few seconds before the guy either flees or realizes you only backstabbed him for like 50 damage so he can probably draw a weapon and kill you before you get to act again.

One trick for killing aides and other softies that you know you can beat in a fight: find out where they live, break in while they're there, steal their key, lock the door, and now you've got free reign to whittle them to death. This can be done entirely from stealth. Pick the lock, hide, unlatch the door, sneak inside, latch the door, steal the key, and dramatically reveal yourself by locking the door from the inside. Only miscreants can really do this as no other class gets enough sleight of hand and steal to reliably pull that off. There's just something fucking neat about the idea of ganking someone so thoroughly that they have no warning and no escape inside their own home. But only try this against people you know are completely harmless. You never know if someone happens to have exceptional strength and spars with their mudsex partner three times a day, or is a secret mage, so don't make a habit of it.

Other general PvP tips apply, as with any other class. Always watch your target just before you attack, in case they try to hide or move away at the last instant. Don't attack without full health and stun. Don't queue up commands with delays. You know the drill. A miscreant's frailty in combat means you have to be particularly careful when you initiate a fight.


CRIME CODE

This has always been a nebulous topic. The crime code has so many quirks and nuances and bizarre outcomes that you have to experiment with it yourself before you can really understand it. One thing to remember is that you can only see your wanted flag while you're in the zone that you're wanted in, so if you decide to wait it out in the 'rinth or something, you won't be able to check.

There are different degrees of wantedness. In other words, some crimes are mild and some are severe. Theft is on the mild side. Wanted flags have a varying duration with a good deal of randomness, but the maximum is about an hour and a half--I guess a full Zalanthan day. Sometimes theft will get you the maximum but often it'll be less. I've seen as little as five or ten minutes. I'd say it's usually around 30-60 minutes. Violent crimes will typically give you the maximum but theft can be waited out without the need to get into a white Bronco. Just hide in place, or maybe climb up a couple of rooms if it's possible.

When you are wanted, make sure you have nosave arrest on. It's probably best to have this on at all times unless you're very diligent about checking before and after every criminal action. If it's off and an NPC soldier tries to arrest you but you evade the subdue, they'll attack you immediately. That's really bad for you. Resisting arrest almost always leads to your swift death. The only problem with having nosave arrest permanently on is the fact that PC soldiers will also be able to subdue you at will with no chance for you to avoid it. If there are shitheads in the Arm, keep this in mind. Some soldiers have been known to capitalize on the knowledge that most people play with it on, and use it to effortlessly PK in ways that frankly border on griefing.

If you get arrested by an NPC soldier, it will start dragging you to jail and throw you in a cell to wait out your wanted flag. During this time, templars might come and find you there and do what templars do. Your weapons will also be confiscated and you won't get them back afterwards unless you talk someone into getting them from the room they get moved to when you're put in jail. You can attempt to flee and break free from the soldier's subdue enroute to jail, but it's really unwise unless you think you'll get killed in jail. When you try to flee from a soldier's subdue and fail, there's a random chance for the soldier to attack you immediately. That chance is higher if you're not a citizen of Allanak, and I don't know if 'rinthers count as citizens in this context. Fleeing will also cause your nosave arrest to toggle off, so you may want to quickly turn it back on as you make your escape. In these situations, your best bet is always to climb up since NPC soldiers can't really climb. Still, it's a good idea to raise your flee skill just in case this situation comes up.

The crime code is particularly arcane with regards to stealing. You can hard-fail in plain sight and become wanted or not based on absolutely nothing that I can detect. Sometimes you'll get an echo about eyes in the room turning towards you before turning away again, but sometimes you don't and still didn't become wanted. Also beware that unlike other criminal actions, stealing doesn't actually tell you that you've become wanted when you have. It just shows up in 'stats.' If you attack someone or walk through the gates with spice it'll say 'You are now wanted!' but not so with a failed steal.

At night and outdoors, criminal actions can be taken without becoming wanted if there are no soldiers in sight (i.e. in adjacent rooms). It doesn't appear to apply indoors and I suspect it's a specific room flag that got manually placed in streets, plazas and the bazaar. I try not to trust this too much since you can't easily test whether or not it applies to the room you're currently in, but it's a good idea to do your steal training at night just in case it saves you some time idling out a wanted flag. It's a good idea to put the "current time" tag in your prompt (help prompt).

Rooftops are a good place to lay low while wanted. Nobody really comes up there, certainly no soldiers. In some places you can see over the edge and will be warned if someone's climbing up the wall. Some roofs have shelters or hidden trapdoors leading into the building--there's one on the roof above the Gaj that leads to the apartment hallway on the top floor. Just be careful climbing down, falling is one of the shittiest ways to lose a character. Some particularly cuntish imms have also been known to give bad account notes to players who don't spend ages roleplaying out broken limbs from a knockout fall.


NOTES ON STEALING/PLANTING
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TIPS AND TRICKS

Here's how you find out what your skill timers are:
    First you need to know what your exact wisdom is. This can be found out with a simple formula: mana = 100+((wis-13)*3). This means that if your mana is 100, you have exactly 13 wisdom. For each 3 over or under 100, you have +1 or -1 wisdom. 18 wisdom would be 115 mana, 9 wisdom would be 88. Half-giants get a -40 penalty to mana and muls get -15. You can see your mana by toggling the infobar on or adding %m to your prompt. Remove it again as soon as you know, there's no reason to ever look at your mana again.
    Then we need to look at the wisdom table to find the 'learn' substat for your wisdom. You can find the stat tables in the code forum somewhere. Your learn substat is what determines your skill timers.
    That exact formula is: 2*((60-learn)+(current_skill/7)). To put it in words: sixty minus your learn substat, plus whatever you have in that skill divided by seven, all multiplied by two. There's a minimum of 16 minutes.
    The skill timer is double for combat skills and triple for psionic skills. Just take the number that the above formula gives you and double or triple it.
    As you can see, skill timers vary wildly depending on wisdom. Low wisdom can have timers upwards of two hours while very high wisdom can be under half an hour. It sounds dramatic but it's not so bad in reality, because you can't possibly make use of such short skill timers. Regardless, it's easy enough to max out a miscreant even with crap wisdom, it just means it takes a bit longer to cap your skills. If you spend any real amount of time roleplaying, your skill timers are likely to be totally irrelevant. You can do some hilarious things with super-high wisdom, though, like max out climb in 8 hours.
    



If you're shadowing someone and they step into a climb room that you can fall down from, you'll get left behind and stop following them. You can use this yourself if you think someone's shadowing you. If you have to do something particularly dirty and want to be as sure as possible that you're on your own, climb over a building on the way to the scene of your upcoming crime. If no climb rooms are available, you can also 'flee self' and run away, but this doesn't unhitch the person and they will latch right back on if you pass through their room again.

There's a few ways to check if you're hidden. It can't be done everywhere but there's plenty of places that'll work. Find any door with a guard in front of it and try to sneak past the guard. If it says "the door is closed," you're hidden. If he sneers at you, either you're not hidden or he has true sight which certain guards do, though mostly special ones like in the senate building and such. Some shops will also say things like "who's there?" if you try to offer something while hidden. You can try to sneak through script-guarded doors like the Arboretum, you're hidden if it lets you through without an emote from the bouncer.

There are some no_hide rooms in Allanak. Not all that many, but the ones off the top of my head are the cooking pits in the Gaj and the west and east stables. You can hide in a no-hide room but it just doesn't actually remove you from sight, it just says "is hiding here." Sometimes people won't notice that and will just act as if you're standing around. You remain hidden when moving out of the room again. There's no way to tell if a room is no_hide besides seeing others with the 'hiding' ldesc. If wanted, soldiers from adjacent rooms will come running when you step into a no_hide room, but if you can get out of the room before they try to arrest you, you're safely hidden again. No_hide rooms can be useful for checking if anyone's shadowing you.

When stealing coins, you can only steal up to ~100 at a time. It usually isn't worth it, but coins are very easy to steal and sometimes you'll find an NPC with a bunch of money. Stablemaster NPCs will pocket all ticket money and may have thousands in cash if it has been a while since the last reboot. Both the east and west stables can be stolen from, as well as the mount seller in the bazaar, but that one's a templar so I wouldn't do it because staff will freak out if they notice. The NPCs don't do anything if you fail steal, but you can become wanted, and remember that the rooms are no_hide.

You can hide and move around without actually sneaking, and remain hidden. I can't figure out exactly what the hell this is about. Does it still roll sneak checks? Is there a limited number of rooms you can move like this? What's the catch? Never found the answers. All I know is you can hide and walk around hidden at walking speed and it appears to work just as if you were sneaking. I try not to use this because of the unknowns.