The Cyrodiil Look: Cahmel’s New Travels (Let’s Play Oblivion, Part 8)

None of these events are embellished. Everything NPCs say in this episode is a direct quote from the game.

When we last left our increasingly uninspiring hero, he was turning petty theft into a passion and livelihood. Personally, I blame society. What’s a hip young adventurer like me to do, man? You got people on every street corner slinging Fighter’s Guild invites, violence outside, dodgy AI inside—where else but crime am I gonna turn to? I mean, I guess there’s the Mage’s Guild, if you’re into, like, pestles. That’s just not who I am.

Of course, now that I’ve pilfered the rough GNP of Cheydinal, it’s time I got to selling some of it, which means I have to get arrested. For those of you who missed last episode: there is a correlation there, but explaining it won’t make it make sense, so I shan’t bother.

Planning my arest was exactly like the montage of a heist movie, but with the complete opposite goal in mind. My plan was to commit a crime that was instantly noticeable to everyone, but that wouldn’t completely screw me over. This is a little harder than it sounds, mostly because it turns out there’s no actual rule against public nudity in Cyrodiil.

Before long, I’d formed a plan I could be…well, not proud of, obviously. It was a plan I’d acknowledge having come up with, with a bare minimum of murmuring and failing to make eye contact. It had, as its output, my certain incarceration.

Ever walk into a restaurant on a slow day and feel bad for the owner? Yeah.

Stage one of the plan was entering the local tavern. I don’t know what the Radiant AI determines are peak hours, but evidently, 3:40 in the afternoon was not it. Except for the patron, the place was completely unoccupied.

As I approached the bar, I hesitated. There are some instincts it’s hard to repress. As an adventurer, I’d long ago swallowed my silly taboo about grabbing other people’s property and stuffing it down my pants, but my mama’d brought me up with the common decency to wait until they’d turned around first. I’d once stood near a shopkeeper for the better part of a morning waiting for him to check out the window so I could swipe an armoire.

But it had to be done. After all, I was an aspiring master thief. I couldn’t afford to be subtle.

I waited until I knew the bartender was paying attention. This took the form of her saying, “Greetings,” in a tone like she was hailing me from a passing train. Nestled within it was that wistful fantasy of me disappearing into the sunset, leaving her alone and peaceful far away from my smelly outlander hide.

That made this a little easier—the realization that I hated all NPCs almost as much as I hated working. And you know what? Maybe this little operation would be good for me. This wasn’t going to be pretty, but if I was gonna be a thief, I was gonna have to learn to be ungentle.

I took a step forward, reached out—her eye twitched involuntarily–and touched the mug on the bar.

“You treacherous little filcher!” she spat, expression immediately screwing up into one of bitterest rage. I retracted my hand, then walked outside.

Right into the scowling face of a guard.

“IT’S AL OVER, LAWBREAKER!” he howled, froth flying from his mouth. “YOUR SPREE IS AT AN END! I’LL TAKE ANY STOLEN GOODS YOU HAVE. THE NEXT MOVE IS YOURS—PAY THE FINE, OR I HAUL YOU AWAY!”

(Bounty: 1 Gold.)

The fine for touching someone’s worthless cup–put out on display on a public bar–is apparently one gold. I’d complain, but in Morrowind, the penalty for taking someone’s fork was citizen’s execution, so globally speaking this is actually pretty liberal.

I politely informed the guard that I’d like to be put in jail, please.

“HOPE YOU ROT, CRIMINAL SCUM!”

Jail is one of the great disappointments of Oblivion, at least for me. There was a lot of vaguely plausible marketing noise made about the game’s brand-spankin’ new system for dealing with incarcerations, saying jail would be playable and escaping would be possible. Technically, both of these things are exactly correct, and also the opposite of what I was imagining.

The image those statements invite is of a playable prison area, with other inmates and a schedule and guards you have to outwit. You’d be able to escape through brute force, by overpowering guards and stealing weapons, through stealth, by filching keys and stuff, or through cunning, by persuading people to give you a hand and tricking guards.

What we ended up getting is a 5-by-5 prison cell with a bed and a door. Using the bed skips your sentence, which means it’s basically the jail system from Morrowind with an extra loading area. As for the door, it’s got a level 5 lock, and you’re allowed to smuggle in one lockpick. Assuming you can get the door open, which isn’t unreasonable, you can then escape from prison—if by escape, you mean stumble around, fight a bunch of guards, get your gear back, and then leave with every law enforcement officer on the planet out for your blood and a bounty at least a few hundred higher than it was before. At which point, you’ve locked yourself out of every town or quest in the game. Congratulations.

Obviously, escaping from prison isn’t so much a choice as a self-imposed penance, and has the approximate effect of just resisting arrest in the first place. Actually, it’s slightly worse than that, because it puts you in a position where it’s harder to run away and it kicks your bounty up a notch.

I consider my options, then quietly decide to just serve my damn time. This turned out to be about a day in jail, a day in which I somehow lost a point off my Armorer skill. I guess a day of not repairing things inside a stone room is way worse for the ol’ muscle memory than a day of not repairing things in a grassy field.

This better turn out to be worth it.

Next episode: The worst morning ever, followed by a journey of epic proportions.