The lines blur horribly with food {what is and isn't in game?} and un-tagged items. Should someone be able to steal my costuming purse along with my coin? What if I bought that purse in game? See the patern? It's a game. We should be able to distinguish, as players, what is and is not kosher to do to another player. Even if we can justify it as our characters.
Marshal Note before I go further. As it stands now you can _only_ steal tagged items, just want to make that perfectly clear while we discuss theory
. I can take the coin, but not your coin-purse (unless it's a magic item). That said:
There is an inherrent difference to services, as unless you're trading cion for services OOG (Giving coin to someone for a ride to the game), the service is always taking place while you're in character. It's not Ben giving a massage to Queenie. It's Kelethuan giving a massage to Demona. The first is already frowned upon by the community, in part because it punctures the IG/OOG barrier. Which leads to...
There are really three kinds of items that we deal with here, the first is cut and dried, IG tagged items are stealable and the OOG physrep should be returned (with the proper caveats in the stealing section of the ARB). The second are non-tagged non-priced items, like my pants. I don't think anyone A. wants to steal my pants or B. if they did would think they could keep them. Then there is the muddy third category, non-tagged but priced items. These are items that have been priced by people, not by Plot or by the rules (it would be tagged/numbered otherwise).
These are things that have a self-defined value, and are being traded for IG coin. If I sell my pants to Nearly Naked Nick for 10 gold so he's no longer so nearly naked, he can reasonably assume he gets to keep the pants for more than the length of the event. Can someone now return Nick to his nearly naked form Waylaying him and stealing his pants? Coin changed hand, the OOG/IG barrier got broken, because an OOG item was traded for an IG item. This is where the friction cuts in... this is an item that is OOG, and unstealable by that.
I don't make a distinction between someone who spent all his time baking these brownies to have X advantage in game and someone who spent X years as staff to have a Magic Item purchased with Gobbie/dragon stamps, which can definitely be stolen IG.
I do make a distinction... and that is who sets the value of that time. If I spend all weekend in Monster Camp as an NPC I know I'm going to get X Goblin Stamps, an amount that has been approved and decided upon as the best compensation for time in the name of game balance. I also must pay a plot approved amount to receive that Magic Item off of a truncated list that has been decided upon in the name of selfsame balance. If I sell a batch of brownies, I get to set the rate of recompense. If we're going to have a functioning economy, which I think would benefit the game, that means that there will by necessity have to be some price fixing by plot. Having the compensation for food items function in a completely different manner than all other forms of compensation is detrimental to both the IG/OOG membrane and having a functional economy.