LE Rewarding Lockpicking

[Caneghem]

Problems with lockpicking...

1. It's too easy

2. It's not rewarding enough to justify perk investment, even if it is made difficult

 

To give an idea of the difficulty... An unskilled layman should be able to pick novice locks with about the same regularity as a current unskilled novice picks a master lock. With no perks, you could only attempt the novice level locks, though they would get easier with skill. Each perk would open up the possibility of opening a more difficult lock type, and make lower lock types significantly easier. At master level, novice would be as easy as it is currently with no perks (i.e. virtually no chance of failure).

 

Jamming

Lockpicks are insanely cheap and ubiquitous, so rather than try to find ways to prevent them from piling up, make it so that it doesn't really matter how many you have past a certain point. With every snapped lockpick, there should be a chance that part of the lockpick will break off inside the lock. The best way to model this might be to have the lock increase in difficulty, or even be totally inoperable. New perks could revolve around reducing jamming frequency. Learning rates for failed lockpicking attempts should probably be bumped up to balance out the fact that a lot more failing is going to occur. If there is some way of making lock jamming save/load proof that would be ideal.

 

Reward

Right now, opening chests is just a little more loot. In a game where money quickly becomes a non-issue and the best gear is player-made, there must be significantly better stuff locked in chests than just lying around. For starters, the loot should be spawned from static tables. Novice lvl 15 loot, Apprentice lvl 30 loot, etc etc. To really seal the deal on making lockpicking a useful skill though, start designing unique (though not overpowered) items to place into the loot tables for locked chests only. Unique enchantments and the like would really make it more tempting to skill up lockpicking. Perhaps Master level chests could occasionally be holding a dragon soul?!