With best skill, perks, enchants and potions, pickpocket chance of success maxes out at 90%. Most people I've seen play pickpocket like this. Quicksave. Pickpocket. If caught, quickload. It's fun to do for like 5 minutes. But pickpocketing with 100% chance of success is kinda boring.

I've been thinking whether it would be more fun to play a pickpocket more legitimately. When you get caught, deal with the consequences. Is there anybody here who does this already?

Yeah, payed off the guards at first, until the fines got ridiculous, then moved to a different hold.

I tried to do this, but after a few botched attempts the playstyle became way too frustrating to continue. If I wanted to avoid paying the bounty, I'd have to go to jail and lose all the skill progress I'd made in pickpocketing as well as my stolen items. If I wanted to keep my skill progress I'd have to fork over my cash and my loot. The only way to hold onto my stuff and my skill gain - apart from never returning to the hold again - would be to bribe the guard or give a bounty hunter his 20% cut. And considering how often you get caught, especially in the beginning... yeesh! Too much of a hassle.

I do that and my charcters don't use potions or magic that improve their skills. Facing the consequences is more immersive too.

I reload a save. I usually save before stealing from a NPC just in case. If its a hostile/no bounty/blah blah and I was stealing weapons or armor from them to make the fight entertaining then no. I keep playing through.

i dont think the game is built that way.... honestly i think your suppose to load.

getting caught is SO hard to avoid when you're starting out and the prices are freaking way to harsh

not yet. but also was a long while ago that i played my last thief. was planning on playing a real one, though. like if i get caught i either pay the guards or go into jail


edit: to the above: no, it is not designed that way. if you are bad at pick pocketing, you are just... well bad at pick pocketing. it's supposed to be this way and makes sense. if you are still a new thief, you have to go for easy targets. like sleeping people. you get an early perk for pick pocketing sleeping people.

I would have rather seen this limped in with sneak an a new magic school added or something more interesting than pickpocket. I did a seperate play through to get the ps3 trophy and haven't picked but one or two pockets since (only for quests)

It's very difficult when you start out, but the secret is to pay for training for the first few levels.

There's a vagrant chick in Windhelm who gives training and a Cat outside Solitude.
It's cheaper than you think to grab a few levels.

This plus some enchanted gear and pickpocket potions is the best way to get through the first few levels "legit"... oh and actually putting points into the perk tree.
Very few people, even thieves actually do that.

Also here's a question... can you tell a follower to wait... then sneak out of sight and pickpocket them?
I've never tried.
...and if so, how do they react?

I don't like how the success is based off of chance. I really wish there was some sort of mini game involving pickpocketing that would be harder with higher valued items. It would get easier if you spent perks on the tree. Most of the time I don't even bother to pickpocket unless I need to, and I'm playing a thief.

Dealing with the concequences are rather fun, especially when you know your Shadowmarks

I been playing a pick pocket he had no fighting skills for a very long time, when I first started out stealing weight was very strange like a .03 pound necklace had the same steal chance as a 2 pound iron dagger. First couple levels I just gathered up gold/sneaking more of a burgler type and paid for a couple levels of pick pocket. After that if I failed stealing I tend to flee from targets and come back later to get what I couldn't but skill gains picked up once I could steal valuable stuff like rings (which I got no fence for). That character started to become more of a rogue once I got the backstab perks (was my only fighting skill for the longest time) I found I had to kill stuff like bandits I tried stealing off them oddly enough it's okay to kill them but it's still a crime and stuff you steal off them is marked as stolen so it just made more sense to start killing them. Oddly enough the sneak bonus attack only counts to the weapon in the right hand I've found if you dual wield.
I got a high bounty in almost every hold but I do okay as long as I avoid guards. I just scope out an area before I start stealing so I can make an escape tried it once at windhelm accidently talked to a guard that said he knew me on a bridge. He attempted to arrest I told him I'd rather die and started to run. I'm thinking I can make this dramatic escape if I dive off the bridge down into the river, unfortunately I didn't scope the area and landed/died on the cliff side. was kind of embarressing.

I quicksave, its too frustrating otherwise. What I do, though, is that if I have to reload, I prevent myself from trying to pickpocket that NPC again for awhile.

Your whole post was great, spoken like a true TES cutpurse and vagabond.
This line just hammers the point home.


Peeps seem to want to be a master criminal yet have a perfectly clean record?
Pfft where's the fun in that?

It's the sign of a good healthy criminal career to have a few active bounties here and there.
Keeps you sharp.

I get bounties in cities for absolutely no reason. I think it's a bug.

I tried to play a pure thief Khajiit, and the frustrating thing is that even with the maxed out 90% pickpocket chance, it really feels like it's more of a 50/50 chance. I honestly think there is something wrong (bugged).

it's weird. sometimes i clear a fort full of bandits just to end up having 1000+ gold bounties in the hold of the fort.

Its kinda random... I can say try and take a sword from a bandit, and then her bow. She catches me stealing the bow. So I reload and steal the sword, steal her bow, steal her arrows. strip her naked and she didn't notice? I didn't do anything different other then re-load?

Same with NPC.

Being a legitimate thief sounds kinda ironic.

Wow this is truly hardcoe. You win.

I didn't know it was a competition. I wouldn't call myself hardcoe I just play to amuse myself.
Only hardcoe thing I've been trying is playing without buying a house to be more of an adventurer and making choices about only keeping what is useful for my character to adventure with, the extra pockets perk from pick pocketing has been pretty useful in that regard so being a thief just coincidentally happened to have some useful things to the way I wanted to play.

This is actually my second thief, after that one that accidently jumped to his death it made me laugh pretty good and I decided that was a good ending to his story and started a new thief character but playing around with the first one gave me the idea of how I wanted to play around with the second.

I did in Oblivion, was pretty dang fun!

I played a pickpocket as a Khajiit once. It was kind of fun, I made alot of money, and got good equipment fast. Plus the ability the steal the cloths off of someones back is pretty amusing, I got tired of it though, playing a thief just isn't that fun to me.

Other than there being no reason to pick pocket a follower, they react just like anyone else if they catch you. The only reason I know this is I accidentally pick-pocketed Lydia one time in a dungeon. If you want to give a follower something, just use the Inventory function for that.

well said....deal with the conciquences criminals or dont be a thief,its that simple...its like when i play my warrior carachter..if i die,i leave whatever weapon i died in my hands with at a shrine of talos as an offering....DID is a little too much for me,wish i could play it but i play on expert and sometimes things get too challenging and honestly unfair