LE Lockpicking

[cppcooper]

Lockpicking 101

 

You twist the cylinder applying different amounts of pressure on it so that it will turn. You try and slide the tumblers up into place, just above the shear line for the tumbler and the rest of the lock. If all goes well putting the "driver" pins above the shear line will cause the cylinder to rotate a VERY small amount, just enough to keep them propped up above the shear line. The key pins fall back down afterwards, usually.

 

The pins are designed in a number of ways to mess around with the shear line and cylinder rotation. A well designed lock will allow you to get the pins "stuck" above the shear line while not being placed properly. Either the key pin is stuck up there too; in which case the lock has the key pin on both sides of the shear line. Or the driver pin has a big gap/drop in its shape and will rotate the cylinder too soon, preventing the bottom of the pin from going above the shear line.

 

To expect this amount of detail while being easy enough to consider fun, in a game, is out in the wide expanse of space.

 

However the lockpicking currently employed in Skyrim, is beyond easy. It is down to a matter of whether you have a lockpick and have some luck & intelligence to just tap the rotate key without the lockpick breaking.

 

The graphic for locks is an improvement though. The basic mechanics too, it has been simplified to make it easier for everybody to learn how to do.

 

There is only one stage to lockpicking as is though. A common lock has about 5 pins, or more.

=======================================

 

Mod Request

 

Each difficulty of lock has more and more pins, possibly with different behaviours for each of the pins.

For each tumbler you click into place the cylinder for the lock, rotates. Simple.

Edited November 21, 2011 by Sagenth

[Jenistos]

Okay. So you're suggesting that the core lockpicking minigame remains the same, with a small adjustment: for an average lock, we'll be actually lockpicking five (or so) locks. If i got that right ... did I?

 

Something along the lines of:

Novice: 3 pins

Apprentice: 4 pins

Adept: 5 pins

Expert: 6 pins

Master 7 pins

 

... ? ...

 

So this is a linear increase in difficulty. If you combine that with the current lock difficulty, represented by the size of the "sweet spot" that you need to hit in order for the lock to open, you get an exponential difficulty increase (my nightmare: breaking 50 to 100 locks, just to open a single, lousy master chest (as of now, it costs me about 10 locks to open a master chest - now you multiply that by seven)).

So this issue needs to be thought through a bit ... by reducing the significance of the sweet spot area or completely dropping the the sweet spot concept (but that wouldn't be nice, would it!)

 

And guess what: I've got another badass idea: remember the lockpick pro mod? Here: A site we've had to banlist because they continue to spam mod authors with advertising links/mods/skyrim/lockpick-pro

That mod basically previews the sweet spot area (in its raw form, that IS cheating). But if someone were to implement this in the lockpicking mod suggested by you in a particularly tricky way, this could deal with the exponential difficulty increase problem mentioned above. Lemme explain:

A "tricky" implementation of Lockpick Pro (LP) would involve displaying more than just one sweet spot on the LP meter: and of course, the majority of the sweet spots on the LP meter would be random, misleading, fake and/or inaccurate; only a master thief with lockpicking at 100 and a lot of perks invested into that tree would get a more-or-less accurate LP meter.

 

By the way, all of this lockpicking should still be happening in the real time (so that a thief can be spotted and arrested).

[cppcooper]

Actually I had a slew of methods planned to avoid the massive use of lockpicks. The main one was to make lockpicks health increase by about 5,000% then increase the skill increase by about x3. Then remove the skill increase for breaking lockpicks altogether. The main reason is because you will never reach the end of the lock if the health isn't increased.. and lets face it you don't learn much of anything by breaking a tool. Do you learn anything useful by breaking a hammer? Not really.

 

Okay so I lied. If I could I would implement some arbitrary stuff like finding the sweet spot and rotating while turning. That is to say moving your mouse in the correct direction while also pressing your keyboard to rotate the cylinder. I doubt it will be easy and or possible though. If I can do it though I would try to make it possible to do in one long fluid action.

 

*Break Over* It is a busy day today :S

 

I might consider implementing the cheat in a fashion that shows you what you've already done.

 

 

Edit: Also I was thinking about randomizing the size of the sweet spots.

Edited January 3, 2012 by Sagenth

[csrgamer]

Then remove the skill increase for breaking lockpicks altogether. The main reason is because you will never reach the end of the lock if the health isn't increased.. and lets face it you don't learn much of anything by breaking a tool. Do you learn anything useful by breaking a hammer? Not really.

 

That's when you learn the most. You know what not to do. You learn from you mistakes much more than you learn from your victories.

[Jenistos]

Agreed (more or less).

Psychologically speaking, if you can reflect on your previous actions, you may as well learn ... a lot (it is an egocentric experience - it happened to you; i.e. you didn't just read about it in a book). If you lack the ability to reflect (or when you are just way too lazy to), you learn nothing.

 

Sagenth, think this through! Imagine a player, whose lockpick breaks in the middle of the process - such a player won't be motivated to finish the task, knowing that he/she won't get the reward.

[madmorbius]

The lockpicking annoys me. Even forgetting about the mechanics of actual lockpicking, the activity itself (in game) is backwards. You set the cylinder with the tensioner, and then pick the lock, eventually turning the tensioner to spin the cylinder. Skyrim has you inserting a tensioner at different angles trying to turn the lock while the pick is in the center. Nitpicking...

 

Oblivion used a more realistic approach to lockpicking, where you had to jog the pins in the correct order and make 'em stay. Imaginary Bethsoft lockpicking just bothers me and I'd love to see it replaced.

[cppcooper]

The lockpicking annoys me. Even forgetting about the mechanics of actual lockpicking, the activity itself (in game) is backwards. You set the cylinder with the tensioner, and then pick the lock, eventually turning the tensioner to spin the cylinder. Skyrim has you inserting a tensioner at different angles trying to turn the lock while the pick is in the center. Nitpicking...

 

Oblivion used a more realistic approach to lockpicking, where you had to jog the pins in the correct order and make 'em stay. Imaginary Bethsoft lockpicking just bothers me and I'd love to see it replaced.

 

 

Correction their is no tension wrench in skyrim, there is only a hook pick and your telekinetic powers to rotate the cylinder. I personally prefer the current method over oblivion lockpicking, because the potential for modification is greater.

 

Since you brought up the relation of skyrim to real life as far as lockpicking goes, I believe the feeling they were going for with this game was an old school lever lock type feel. It just seems so foreign and wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_tumbler_lock

 

With that said it kind of makes sense how lockpicking works. In fact the key hole even suggests the type of lock.

 

For the sake of fun however cylinder locks are far more joyous to pretend you are masterfully unlocking with a mere bent piece of metal. For the sake of not correcting all the fallacies of skyrim lockpicking discussion, I will shut up now.

[cppcooper]

Agreed (more or less).

Psychologically speaking, if you can reflect on your previous actions, you may as well learn ... a lot (it is an egocentric experience - it happened to you; i.e. you didn't just read about it in a book). If you lack the ability to reflect (or when you are just way too lazy to), you learn nothing.

 

Sagenth, think this through! Imagine a player, whose lockpick breaks in the middle of the process - such a player won't be motivated to finish the task, knowing that he/she won't get the reward.

 

People don't need minuscule motivations. It takes a lot of effort and time to get to 100 lockpicking in comparison to other skills, with x15 increased experience for success that ends up getting you there a lot faster than you do already, with or without failure gains. People aren't motivated to unlock something by being rewarded for failure, that is how people are motivated to abuse the system. To get my lockpicking from level 90 to 98 I grabbed a pocket knife and a rock, if I had been better rewarded for succeeding I wouldn't have felt the need to do so; I made a big supper and came back frequently to save.

 

So although I appreciate your consideration for balancing motivation into it, I am not convinced by your argument. I don't like providing ways to abuse the system. The only thing making success so hard right now is the fact your lockpick breaks, so by decreasing the likelihood of that happening (by increasing the health) I am actually increasing the chance of success. If it only currently lasts for 0.5 seconds on a master lock before breaking you will end up with 25 seconds.. to get past all 7 pins. That is still challenging, but you now have the ability to let up slightly and continue rotating. With the skeleton key or the unbreakable lockpick perk, you can hold down the rotate key and let up to move closer to the sweet spot. This makes unlocking locks really easy.

 

In conclusion, I do not believe that one learns from failing to succeed when it comes to lockpicking. If your character was truly learning from the previous mistake they made of pushing too hard and breaking the lockpick, they would stop pushing so hard. In real life, I have not learned a damned thing from failing to unlock a lock. I learn how to unlock a lock, by unlocking it. It is 100% straight forward as a learning experience, you figure out how to do it and then you work backwards and figure out how you did it; unless maybe somebody is teaching you.

 

I am going to need a more convincing argument to reward failure. Although as the game is right now, I would agree removing the reward would be bad, for early levels or not having any perks in the tree. This is about fundamentally changing the way lockpicking in the game works though.

 

- Sorry for the tiny essay but I did think it out, so I will defend those thoughts.