Arelith

This is something I've been wondering for a bit ever since the rules change. Currently, to steal a book from a shelf assigned to a character/faction, you need to either pickup-spam the fixture to break the ownership or you need to basin it to break the ownership. Both of these are very hacky workarounds and it's not clear to me that neither qualify as leveraging what's effectively a bug. So I just wanted to confirm, are both of these methods legal? As otherwise book theft is essentially disallowed under the current rulings.

It's legal to steal a book.

It's not legal to take the bookshelf out of the quarter.

So, one could pick up said bookshelf, basin it to remove ownership, take the book they want, and then either rebasin it to replace it as it was, or just leave it without the faction/name on it

Rei_Jin wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 26, 2023 9:17 am

It's legal to steal a book.

It's not legal to take the bookshelf out of the quarter.

So, one could pick up said bookshelf, basin it to remove ownership, take the book they want, and then either rebasin it to replace it as it was, or just leave it without the faction/name on it

I realize that stealing a book itself is legal. From an unwarded shelf for example. But I haven't actually seen a clear ruling on how basining/spamming the fixture to negate active ownership is viewed. It's not automatically necessary, as fixtures aren't restricted by default, but it's important to have an official ruling on since otherwise you can be immune to book theft by adding an ownership tag to the fixture.

Usually the rule is if you have to ask if it's an bug/exploit it's usually one and you shouldn't be doing it. When in doubt, cut it out!

To my understanding, it's also 'legal' to open a book/notebook from a shelf and just copy it's contents onto a piece of paper. Which is probably easier than messing around with a fixture, but not helpful if you're looking to take a tome or something with a mechanical usage.

I'd say if a bookshelf is 'warded' with a name on it, you PROBABLY shouldn't use a bug of picking it up repeatedly in order to steal something from it. Seems a bit of a exploitative work-around as compared to something like an abjuror 'dispelling' the ward, granted that's probably not what's always going on with a name-owned bookshelf anyway.
Probably best to leave stuff with names on them alone!

Cthuletta wrote: ↑

Sat Aug 26, 2023 12:52 pm

To my understanding, it's also 'legal' to open a book/notebook from a shelf and just copy it's contents onto a piece of paper. Which is probably easier than messing around with a fixture, but not helpful if you're looking to take a tome or something with a mechanical usage.

I'd say if a bookshelf is 'warded' with a name on it, you PROBABLY shouldn't use a bug of picking it up repeatedly in order to steal something from it. Seems a bit of a exploitative work-around as compared to something like an abjuror 'dispelling' the ward, granted that's probably not what's always going on with a name-owned bookshelf anyway.
Probably best to leave stuff with names on them alone!

Part of why I was asking this was to confirm that it's a considered a bug as far as the rules. Since if such is the case and it's considered illegal then it's strange for book theft to be considered legal at all given how costless applying ownership properties is.

Keep in mind people used to steal entire bookshelves and all of their contents and it was grey-area permitted because they called it a single item. So the DMs had to catch up with a rule that you can only steal one book from the shelf, not the whole bookcase. The ownership issue on the case itself is a matter of mechanics trailing behind the rules and it's probably not at the top of anyone's list to fix, if they even want to fix it.

I mean it's wonky, but there's a reason. Personally I'd say only do the basin thing if some strong RP demands you really need that book because it is a little cheeseball and you might get called out for it and that DM might have their own interpretation of the rule that doesn't align with what anyone says here.

You'll have to read the thread to get the overly complicated version of the answer. But, in short it is within the rules to steal books from character/faction shelves.

viewtopic.php?f=37&t=36017&hilit=bookshelf