What's the most effective way to steal inside one turn?

The Steal command (and mug, also known as capture, and all other attempts to steal) has a success rate determined by the following formula. Note as Kaiser points out below, you can cut your enemy's level in half with the Discord Lore (unless they're immune to instant death, like bosses)

Success % = (Locke's Level + 50 - Target's level)/128

There's also lots of ways to steal more than one time per turn. You can have any two of the following relics:

• Brigand's Glove: turns Steal into Mug
• Genji Glove: allows two weapons, thus two attacks (affects Mug)
• Thief's Bracer: Doubles percentage chance of stealing
• Master's Scroll: 4 random attacks instead of 1, per weapon

There's also the Thief's Knife item which has a random chance of attempting to steal. Possible combos I'm considering are:

• Brigand + Genji: 2 Mug attempts per turn
• Brigand + Master: 4 Mug attempts per turn (but random targets)
• Master + Genji + Thief's Knife: 8 attacks per turn, possible chance of theft

So what's the most effective combo? Without (previously) knowing the % boost of the Thief's bracer or the % chance of the Thief's Knife, I've been going with Brigand's Glove and Master Scroll (Genji Glove before it) to maximize attempts per turn, but what's the most efficient way to do this?

Ideally I'd like the most chances to steal inside a single turn when using mug (or normal attack + Thief's knives, if necessary). Yes I know I can use Steal without an attack and be sure I won't kill things, I'd like to know the most effective way per turn to do this.

Solution 1:

Stealing once with the Thief's Bracer has a higher rate of success than stealing twice with the Genji Glove + Briggand's Glove combo.
The chance will be greater by (Locke's_natural_chance_to_steal)^2

Concerning Ben Brocka's answer, that's not really how probability works, though it is an extremely common misconception. For this example, I'm going to claim these assumptions to be true, based on my understanding of the game mechanics:

1. Steal has a fixed percentage of success, based on the formula:
   Success % = (Locke's Level + 50 - Target's level)/128
   (FF Wiki via agent86's comment)
2. The Thief's Bracer (originally Sneak Ring) doubles the steal success rate
   (FF Wiki via agent86's comment)

Let's call our fixed steal percentage rate "S". With the Thief's Bracer, all we have to do is double the rate: 2*S. We can't just double the success rate with the Mug command, though. To find the probability of success over multiple tries, we want to sum up the probabilities of each successful outcome. Here are our scenarios:

We steal successfully on the first try - Success!
We miss on the first try, but steal successfully on the second try - Success!
We miss on both the first and second tries - Fail!

So, with each attempt to steal having an S chance to succeed, and a (1-S) chance to fail, our probabilities for each of these scenarios looks like this, and add up to 100%:

Success: S
Success: (1-S)*S
Fail:    (1-S)*(1-S)

So our probability of success is the sum of the probabilities of each successful outcome:

S + (1-S)*S = 2*S-(S^2)

Using Ben's example of an assumed rate of 1%

Thief's Bracer:  2S     = 2*.01     = 2%
Brigand + Genji: 2S-S^2 = .02-.0001 = 1.99%

So in this example, the difference is pretty negligible. But let's take a look at stealing from a monster that's Locke's same level, so both levels = "L".

S = (L + 50 - L)/128 = 50/128 = ~39%
Thief's Bracer:  2S     = 2*.39     = 78.0%
Brigand + Genji: 2S-S^2 = .78-.1521 = 62.8%

The higher the success rate of steal, the less effective the Brigand+Genji combo is over the Thief's Bracer, and it will be S^2 less of a chance.

I like to run with the Brigand+Genji when I'm strolling around the world (So that Locke can actually do some DAMAGE!), and Thief's Bracer when I'm hunting for a particular treasure or fighting a boss. I can't comment on the thief's knife since I don't know the % for it, but it could be hashed out in a similar way if there were only one enemy target. Everything else in Ben's posts is spot-on. I kinda miss ye olde glitchy SNES version, though it's refreshing to play a version of the game where I can't exploit so many bugs!