Board Thread:Midian Ideas/@comment-24302820-20151004044419

This would very much be a metagame skill. The idea is to allow the pcs to quickly grab whatever they can out of a room that would be valuable and portable. It'd be a way to move the scene along without it bogging down with the GM having to determine exactly everything in the room, the costs, how readily the pcs would notice the item, the likelihood of them quickly guessing the prices (or fencing prices, more likely) the weights &/or effective load of everything, and generally grinding the game down to a slog. This way, the skilled character can just announce that they are looting the room, take a few rounds to do so, and worry about what the haul is later.

So, is this a skill that would bring value to the game? Should it be a basic skill, apprenticeship, or proficiency? A basic skill would be the simplest to handle: you grab all of the good stuff and move on. A proficiency allows for a chance of failure, and possibly greater or lesser degrees of success. That is, a well-hidden item could only be found on a roll of 20 or higher. However, this could be seen as a punishment by the GM for the characters not carefully searching the room, and specifically checking to see if that particular table leg is hollow. Also, I'd have to figure out what attribute is most appropriate (Wits, Knowledge, Common Sense, and Awareness are all candidates) and what the target values should be. Making this an apprenticeship just seems like more trouble than it's worth.

Would we be better served by a general-purpose looting guideline? As a rule, I try to avoid these. It adds to the bulk of the rules that a player needs to learn, and generally adds weight to the system. I find that it's better to put things like this into a skill, that way only the players that want to use the rule do so. But, I could be convinced otherwise.

So, what do you think? 