by Augur Wildwood on Tue Mar 18, 2003 8:26 pm
I believe it says in the rules (or at least the Etiquette section of the manual) that looting other player's bodies without their consent is against the rules. A player might give consent to have their stuff looted by another player if they have to log and can't get back there, or if there are too many mobs in the area and a strong rescuer can get to the body easier, or if they are at the healers and the rescuers tell them that their stuff might decay soon. Those are the ONLY reasons (that I can currently think of) why another player should loot another player's corpse. If your things get looted, you can page a GM and complain about it. Looting someone else and keeping stuff (even stackables like gold, bandages, kindling, etc.) is theft, pure and simple.
As a side note (and this has been said elsewhere), when you are on a rescue do not loot anything -- even monsters you kill during the rescue -- because you might inadvertently get stuff that belongs to the player you are rescuing that have been looted by those monsters you just killed. This especually applies to gold that might be in the player's main pack. Monsters always seem to loot that first. If you go around looting during a rescue, thinking you deserve some compensation for your trouble, you could wind up with anywhere from 2-60k gold that actually belonged to the player you are rescuing but which was looted by the monsters that killed him/her. If you can't live with not looting on rescues, I suggest you don't do rescues.
Having said all that, I'd like to second what Atei and others said above. It is a very good idea to only keep newbiefied items in your main pack and keep everything else in one subpack. I only keep my spellbook, runebooks, keys, and one subpack in my main pack. The subpack has potions, bandages, kindling, and other sub-subpacks for things like scrolls, regs, and lootbags. Everything that can be .owned should be .owned. But even for things like potions and bandages that can't be owned, if they are in that one owned subpack, then they won't get individually looted by anyone, including monsters. You get everything back when that one subpack is recovered, unless you also had gold in your main pack.
Lastly, It is a good idea to carry some spare owned bags in that subpack also, so that if another player does loot your corpse (with your permission) they can drop all of the owned armor, clothes, jewelry, weapons, and that all-important subpack into one named bag and hand it to you or return it in the Lost and Found that way.
-Augur