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SPOILER INFO
Some may call this a mild spoiler. I think it's rather a bug warning. A minor aspect of gameplay has been designed in an unacceptably mean way and I think you ought to know about it.
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I don't mind that you can't steal stuff when someone is looking. That is, you can, but the witness will raise alarm and the guards will arrest you. That is perfectly normal.
I don't even mind so much that a person downstairs can magically see you stealing something upstairs. That is physical nonsense, but it's not too disturbing.
What I really hate is how they have designed the system of stolen goods trade.
Firstly, it makes no sense that Khajiit caravans don't buy stolen goods. Neither makes it sense that Enthri with all his cloak-and-dagger attitude doesn't buy stolen goods. Then there is that secretive fellow on the Windhelm marketplace who totally acts like a fence, but his actions don't correspond to his words.
I wouldn't put up with that kind of nonsense, so when I encountered a merchant who was obviously shady, I used the console command
player.setav BypassVendorStolenCheck 1
That is not cheating. That is correcting the obvious lack of reality in the game.
(Do not forget to enter player.setav BypassVendorStolenCheck 0 afterwards, or else all vendors will be buying stolen goods fom you!)
I also used that console command in the rare cases when a vendor was my steady girlfriend. After all, they can be reasonably expected to help me get rid of hot merchandise.
I played hours after dozens of hours and became increasingly confused about not meeting any merchant to whom the game itself would let me sell stolen items (that is, without my having to use the console). I mean, if the Khajiit caravans don't buy stolen goods, if clearly shady merchants don't buy stolen goods, then who does?
Eventually I searched for information online and found out that fences will begin to buy stolen items from you only after you have become a member of the Thieves' Guild!!
I couldn't believe my eyes. Are they trying to tell me that unless I do that disgusting job for that jumped-up little worm Brynjolf (which appears to be the only way of joining the Thieves' Guild), I will never be able to sell any stolen goods to anyone? Never, as in never ever? That's crazy!
Apart from that limitation being a logical nonsense, it makes the gameplay absurdly unbalanced. The time when you really need to steal stuff is in the beginning when you are very poor. In order to complete Brynjolf's mission, you need reasonably high skills, meaning you will have played for a considerable time. This means that you can probably live quite comfortably off your loot. In other words, by the time you will be eligible to sell stolen goods, you will already be so well-off that you won't really need to risk punishment by stealing. I mean, it's not like there's anything all that valuable to steal anywhere. Cleaning up dungeons and enchanting is far more profitable than stealing and so is alchemy.
And as if the above wasn't outrageous enough, there is even the rule that the first time when you steal more than one item from someone's house, the owner of the house will somehow know who the thief was (even though there were no witnesses and there is no bounty), and send a group of three thugs to kill you. Each one of them is strong enough to wipe the floor with you (unless, again, you are on a level so high that you are bound to be so rich that you won't need to steal.) You can't even run away from them. That is, you can, temporarily, but those three overwhelmingly superior thugs will never give up chasing you, which means you can just as well start a new game (and remember to never steal again).
I can't imagine what possessed the developers of Skyrim to make stealing for money so utterly, overkillingly unfeasible. Stealing in vanilla Skyrim is for cleptomaniacs only, that is for the people who steal because they enjoy the act of stealing as such. For let me repeat it one more time for clarity: you can only afford to steal when you are very very strong. If you steal in the early phase of the game when you actually need the money, you, firstly, can't sell what you've stolen, and, secondly, are certain to be killed after a while.
That is insane. The people who conceived the theft system in vanilla Skyrim are either mind-blowingly stupid or they get some kind of a perverse enjoyment creating a game feature that is useless for all practical purposes.
Therefore it's necessary to tweak the theft system if you want it to make any sense.
Firstly, I am using a mod that makes all Khajiit merchants buy stolen items.
Secondly, I will continue to use the console command player.setav BypassVendorStolenCheck 1 in order to make obvious fences (such as Enthri or roadside skooma traders) buy stolen items (and, of course, set it back to 0 after the transaction). The same goes for shopkeepers who are my intimate partners, should I acquire any.
Thirdly, for my most recent game, I created a rule that when those Hired Thugs attack me, I use the console to decrease their health 10 times and speedmult 4 times.
That is not cheating, it's repairing Bethesda's blatant blunder. (Wow, I just invented a new acronym: BBB – Bethesda's Blatant Blunder.)
[originally published 2016-11-30]
