Pickpocket campaign
Abby_Zero
Member Posts: 68
I’ve always been obsessed with open locks and stealing in this game.
In Ultima 7 I had a private island stuffed with every single potted plant, gunpowder barrel and piece of cutlery that wasn’t bolted down in Brittania.
Similarly, I find myself compelled to loot EVERY SINGLE chest, bookshelf, drawer, etc in any town or city.
I never messed with pickpocketing, so I was wondering-
1- what class/race(s) are best
2- what my ideal pickpocket score would be
3- am I missing anything?
In Ultima 7 I had a private island stuffed with every single potted plant, gunpowder barrel and piece of cutlery that wasn’t bolted down in Brittania.
Similarly, I find myself compelled to loot EVERY SINGLE chest, bookshelf, drawer, etc in any town or city.
I never messed with pickpocketing, so I was wondering-
1- what class/race(s) are best
2- what my ideal pickpocket score would be
3- am I missing anything?
2
Comments
2. That depends on how you're playing the game. If you're role-playing and want an innately good pickpocket, you'll want to get it pretty high. On the other hand, you could ignore the skill and just use potions of master thievery on the occasions you do want to steal things. They bump your score up by 40 points and they stack (which is ridiculous IMO). Technically, you could go without putting any points in the skill and just use potions during strategic crime sprees. The problem in BG1 is you don't have that many thief points and if you want to master finding traps and opening locks you'll have to be sparing in allocating points to other skills. Personally I never go higher than 45 points in BG1. By BG2 I might take it up to 60 and supplement it with gear and potions. Are you using a secondary thief? That way you can focus on locks/traps with one, and have another rogue focusing on stealth or pick pocketing etc.
3. Well, there's a distinction to be made between pick-pocketing characters in the game and robbing stores. Robbing stores takes a considerably greater score to succeed. I'm not sure what it is in BG1, but in BG2 you generally want well over 100 points to succeed.
Edit: another factor is whether you're allowing reloads in your play-through. In a no-reload game, picking pockets is a very risky proposition and you'd want your score through the roof. On the other hand, if you are allowing reloads you can relax a bit.
Beamdog updated the pickpocket requirements. Some items that are worn can not be picked unless your score hogh enough.
Finding people who have pickable items can be a chore though. The 'easiest' way is to save, go on a killing spree and see what everyone drops, then reload to go after your five finger discount targets.
Is there a good ‘ideal’ score to go for?
I noticed that people say open locks and find trap are ideal at 100 in the forums
I will have someone else do the traps and chest with my bard so I can take the pickpocket skill as high as I need
My current main campaign main character is a fighter/thief elf with pickpocket around 45 so it seems I’ll be able to do some mischief once I get to Baldur’s Gate proper
Gives 2-300k extra gold in the game.
I also use the option that thieving potion don't stack so getting a good number is more important using that tweak.
Much harder to steal in SoD though so I believe the rules changed there as far as difficulty goes.
if you want to truly experience the joy of pickpocketting, EE keeper yourself with a very high starting pickpocketting score, like 70-80 at level 1. Even with a score of 80, your pickpocketting is still going to fail VERY often, but at least it will be possible. That way you can actually enjoy pickpocketting to it's fullest - pickpocket Gorion in candlekeep and you'll be able to get 2 belts of antipode (pretty much trash belt but still fun), pickpocket the one guy in barracks in candlekeep and you get Dagger +1. Without the starting boost to pickpocketting, honestly it's not that fun because it takes WAYYY too long to get a decent score since you probably need Find traps and open locks as well. Unless you don't mind waiting till level 5-6 and then going back to all the places you visited and pickpocketting them, or if you make one Thief with the sole purpose to pickpocket.
Some quests you can get double rewards by pickpocketting them before finishing the quest.
I also found a really funny bug with pickpocketting - if the pickpocket fails, you can sometimes start dialog with them, and the 'failed pickpocket' will not make them hostile, you can do this over and over to pickpocket certain targets, keep in mind it doesn't always work, so save often.
Just my personal opinion but if anything requires repeated saving and loading 3+ times (besides a difficult fight or some sort of puzzle/timed event) based on a random number generation then there's probably something inherently wrong with the system, and it's better just to cheat a little by EEKeeper'ing a higher pickpocket score and keep the game flowing than to constant save/load. Again, even with a score of 80-90, the pickpocket still fails VERY often, so it's not like setting your score that high will make it super easy, it will just prevent the constant loading.
And yes i know you can use Potions of Master Thievery, but that requires that you know exactly when you're going to use them, not exactly a fun thing to do (looking up where the good items are to pickpocket,) aside from using them to rob from stores you know have good items. I don't think BG1 actually had that many of those potions until later in the game. I know they're all over the place in BG 2 so it's not as big of a deal.
From the description of this awesome mod:
Note: Altered behaviour on failed pickpocket attempts requires either ToBEx or a sufficiently up-to-date version of the Enhanced-Edition engine. This behaviour is consequently not available on all supported platforms. The rest of the component will work regardless of platform.
In the unmodded game, a merchant would instantly turn hostile (and often try to attack a fully equipped, combat-ready party) whenever a party member failed to steal an item from his store. Similarly, neutral, non-joinable NPCs would simply turn hostile after a failed pickpocket attempt. This component alters that behavior as follows:
Merchants will no longer turn hostile after a failed theft attempt. They will instead opt to report the theft to their superiors (thereby lowering the party's reputation) and refuse to have any further dealings with the party
A PC can now talk his way out of a failed theft/pickpocket attempt if one of his mental attributes and/or Lore and Reputation score is high enough
Neutral, non-joinable NPCs will now initiate a special dialogue after a failed pickpocket attempt rather than simply turn hostile
If a familiar fails a pickpocket check against a non-hostile NPC it will be reprimanded (which will make it run around in panic for a short while)
In summary, whenever you fail a theft or a pickpocket attempt, you now get various dialogue options for dealing with the situation depending on your Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma, Lore and Reputation scores. The initial requirements are fairly low (12 for either of the mental attributes, 20 for Lore, 14 for good Reputation and 7 for bad Reputation). However, each NPC keeps track of how many times you've tried to talk your way out of a theft, and the aforementioned requirements exponentially rise with every further failed attempt. Also, even with the highest attribute scores, you can have no more than 3 botched theft attempts per NPC. After that, no amount of talking will be able to convince that particular NPC of your "innocence". Lastly, this component allows parties with a high reputation and party members with a charisma score above 10 to pay a fine to various law enforcers (Flaming Fist, Amnish Centurions, Saradush Militia) after a failed theft attempt instead of having to face them in combat. The amount of gold that needs to be paid depends on the party's reputation or the charisma score of the party member who had committed the theft.
lvl 9 is already enough to skill pick pocket , open lock and find traps to a smooth 95 (getting the missing 5 points from the +DEX book) so you could theoretical spend 51.000 xp on another class within BG1 if you fancy.
stay away from bards , they lockpick is lvl bound and rubbish until you hit the higher levels. (at lvl 10 they have 85, and cant open locks or pick traps !)
Damned marsupials get everywhere...