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SPOILER INFO
This article describes a perk whose grossly misleading description might lure you into wasting two perk points on something completely useless. I consider this a bug report, not a spoiler.
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This article refers to one of my past Skyrim games.
There is a perk called Bribery which, according to the description, enables you to bribe guards, that is, avoid paying your bounty. I was not interested in it at all, as I always avoided committing crimes when there was a risk of getting caught, and the bounties were ridiculously low anyway. Apart from which, the Bribery perk required Haggling 1 which was completely pointless. Who in his right mind would waste a perk point on getting a minuscule reduction in prices?
The situation changed when the Morpork War got really out of hands. I had killed a score of guards, meaning my bounty was 20 000 septims, give or take, meaning all Morpork guards always attacked me on sight. It became a real annoyance, because those sons of bitches got respawned, so each time I visited Morpork, I had to kill another five or ten guards, which made normal playing impossible. I could have easily afforded the bounty, except that those uniform-wearing bandits wouldn't take any money – they insisted on imprisoning me in Cidhna Mine, and that was way beyond my dignity, considering how mighty I had grown. When you can slaughter a town, you won't be locked up like a common criminal.
So I figured I'll take the Bribery perk in order to get those metal-plated dog turds to stop pestering me. Unfortunately, after I had taken the perk, the "bribe" option still didn't appear in the dialogue. So I had to read online help. What I discovered was utterly crazy.
The first shocking discovery was that in order to bribe guards, you have to be a member of the Thieves' Guild. A number of people who wrote about it on forums acted as if it was perfectly normal. Fucking lunatics they are! Well, never mind, I fully honor their right to their own opinion as well as their right to be lunatics. The important thing is that a severe unexpected restriction such as that ought to be included in the perk description. I would have never taken the perk, had I known it, because I will never join the Thieves' Guild. But there wasn't the slightest hint of a warning anywhere. A fucking mean rip-off that is!
But that is not all. I also discovered that the bribe is larger than the bounty!!!! Honest to God, I am not making this up. You'd think that instead of paying the full bounty, you can pay a smaller sum and gain some time. Not according to Bethesdian logic, you can't. The Skyrim game generously offers you the option of paying a larger sum in order to avoid paying a smaller sum.
Now, let's be very clear about this. Paying the bounty means that your crime record is cleared, while paying the bribe means that it is not cleared – you'll still owe the bounty to the hold. Now what kind of an clinical imbecile would pay a larger amount of money (the bribe) and not get the bounty cleared instead of paying a smaller amount (the bounty) and get the bounty cleared? This is comparable to paying rent for your apartment which is higher than its purchase price.
Amazingly enough, there are that kind of clinical imbeciles on forums. They rationalize this earth-shattering absurdity with the excuse that when you pay the bribe, you get to keep your stolen goods. My head wants to explode when I'm reading something so idiotic. How often do you carry thousands of septims worth of stolen goods? And even when you do, what prevents you from dropping them outside of the town or somewhere, then going to the nearest guard and paying your bounty, and then picking up your stolen goods again?
But it gets worse. It would appear that bribes increase as your level increases. This is really the limit. It would make sense if bounties increased (like quest rewards do), but instead the bribe-to-bounty ratio increases. In simpler words, the more powerful you are (meaning, the easier it would be for you to kill the guards), the more money they assume to be able to extort from you.
Seriously, the guys who conceived the Skyrim bribery system really need to give up the drugs. Either that or Bethesda ought to employ someone to check the work of its game developers for obviously insane nonsense before a game is released.
Whatever. The point is, bribing is worth the trouble only when the bounty is tiny, so that the bribe is much less than the selling price of the stolen items you are carrying. It is not a solution when your bounty is in the thousands.
The only solution I was able to find was to enforce the payment of the bounty with the console command
player.paycrimegold 0 0 2816c
This command clears the bounty and removes the corresponding amount of money from your inventory.
The last parameter is the code for Morpork. If you want to pay your bounty in another hold, you'll need to find the appropriate code.
You don't need to enter the amount to be paid. The above command always pays the full bounty. There is no option for paying only a part of it.
After that, one more thing remained to do. The game had stolen two perk points from me by giving me a grossly misleading description of the Bribery perk. So I had to find the ID codes for Bribery and its useless prerequisite Haggling 1, as well as for the two perks I would have otherwise taken next (which happened to be Corpus Enchanter and Extra Effect ). I entered the console commands
player.removeperk 00058F72
player.removeperk 000BE128
player.addperk 00058F7D
player.addperk 00058F7F
and the two trash perks were indeed removed and two proper perks added.
[originally published 2017-04-16]
