LE everything taken off bodies is stolen

[RaktoastTheSandwichTopper]

but things taken from chests and such arn't

[DoctorKaizeld]

what?

[RaktoastTheSandwichTopper]

When you loot a corpse none of the items are marked as stolen meaning they can be sold to any one. This can make for some weird scenes like selling stormcloak armor to an imperial quarter master or thalmor robes to altmer merchants. So if the items are marked as stolen they would only be able to be sold to fences this would make strange situations less common. It also makes sense that the items would still belong to the deceased

[Serithi]

Not really. Looting the dead has always been legal in TES, not to mention is always a thing during wartime IRL. I seriously doubt an Imperial quartermaster would care who the armor belonged to since they can get it reforged or smelted down anyway. When you're in a war, you can't afford to be picky about where your materials come from. Same for any other merchants and such, it's all materials to them.

 

As for selling Thamor robes to Altmer merchants, so what? Not every Altmer is a Thalmor, you know. Some outright hate the Thalmor. Hell, even among the Thalmor not all of them are hardline zealots like you see in Skyrim.

 

There is still some silliness, but between the two extremes of "all the stuff's legal" and "all the stuff's stolen", the former is a lot more realistic than the latter.

 

And a middle ground of "the act of looting is illegal, but the loot itself is legal" is also difficult if not impossible to put in realistically, because how do you differentiate between a dude who was trying to kill you and a dude you just murdered? And what if there's no witnesses? You'd end up with situations where the kill was valid, but because in that one moment no-one was looking the looting ends up being illegal.