the % should go above 90 for really small things. especially with natural 100 plus the 5/5 light fingers and so on...whats the point of all those perks if u cant reliably lift small objects. 95% max would be nice, and everything u lift decreases the percentage a bit for the remaining items.

My pickpocketing is very low. Like another poster here, I'm more of a burglar type. Also, unless I'm much mistaken, those fishing jobs Delvin gives me result in a mark that never sleeps, and an item on the mark with a zero chance to steal! However, I like TheMagician's approach. I really should try it myself, since when I do pickpocket, it almost always advances my skill. Sneak and lockpicking have been 100 for a long time for me.

Had a fubar on the pickpocket front recently that did require a saved game reload. I've been trying to plant items on merchants to see if they might start offering them (daedric arrows) but without success, I might add. Anywho, I tried to sneak an arrow onto Adrianne in Whiterun. Stupid, I know, especially since she was sitting at the grinding wheel, and I was in plain sight of those two Alik'r mooks, and probably a guard by the gate. Well, she cried out, and comes after me. She was punching me while a guard wailed on Aela. Neither of us were resisting, or even had weapons out. This went on for a while since we were taking absolutely no damage whatever. I decided to calm things down with a shout. Unfortunately, I forgot to switch shouts, and fried Adrianne. Finally, I unsheathed and sheathed weapons, and that got a guard to initiate the arrest dialog. From the list I selected the Thane gambit. To my amazement, it worked! The guards, with Adrianne's corpse right there, said, "carry on then."

Oh, yeah, I don't have any problem with that. They could just preroll it like a leveled list as soon as you enter the room. Honestly, though, it makes no difference to me. I don't really care what other people are doing. I don't think it's any different than grinding a skill. You can do it if you want to, but it sort of takes the fun out of the game. Some of my best experiences have come from "oh, sh*t!" moments when I failed at a task.

Fubars are one of those grey areas. If you royally screw something up because you misunderstood how a game mechanic works, or your cat stepped on the keyboard, or you thought you had one shout equipped when you actually had a different one equipped you're probably going to go for the reload. Every case is different but if the event was entirely external (eg. cat on keyboard) I think that's a justifiable reload. I sometimes create save points before trying something if I'm confused about a game mechanic, but it really depends on whether or not the character would know it. If it's something like ('what key do I press to do x?'), that's an issue external to the game world, so a save point is fine. If it's just something that my character could equally be confused about I'll just take the hit. Having the wrong shout equipped is another tricky one. If the shouts are based on the character's intent then I don't see any reason why you can't just reload the game. After all, character's don't have shouts equipped to the wrong hotkey, player's do. At the same time, if I'm running around like a madman in the heat of battle with Flame equipped and I accidentally flame my companion instead of healing them, that's the kind of mistake that a character would make just as easily as a player so I'd let that stand. Players just have to decide for themselves what sorts of fubars justify a reload.

Don′t worry, future releases will feature a pickpocketing mini-game instead so you don′t need any skill...

...and there′s my first sarcastic comment about the evolution of TES games...but I don′t like mini-games, and it′s a purely subjective opinion!

Yeah, I keep getting the 25 gold bounty everywhere. From pickpocketing people way out in the middle of nowhere. That I kill when it fails.
Assault and Murder, amusingly, the bounties actually disappear when you killed the witnesses (Glitches with Horses, rabbits and foxes not withstanding)

I agree. People can Just re-load

I hate the 90% cap

I wish you could either steal, or fail the item
No percentage of success

Would make pp perks actually worth getting

As I see it... If there was not a 90% (or even a 95%) cap... then the expert PC could never ~ever make a mistake.
But if it was only a strict yes or no (worse IMO, a guaranteed success or fail), then there would be no element of luck (or difficulty for their skill to overcome); and in such a fickle and risky task as pickpocketing ~or Lock picking (which also has a fair amount of luck involved ~even for the consumate trade skilled professional).

I like the way it is now but the items that increase pp chance definitely seem bugged. Maybe the cap could be a bit higher than 90% but shouldn't be 100% ever.

I only reload when I die or when trying things for fun that I don't actually want my character to do. Am I the only one who loves to see how long they can survive when all the guards want to kill them?
If you reload when caught then there isn't really any use to guards and crime and it ruins the game imo.

I accidently killed a companion from the Winterhold college with a misplaced fireball and I didn't reload.

I save and reload all the time, that's what it's there for, if Bethesda didnt want players to do so they would have used an alternative save system. I'm not going to artificially handicap myself by putting limitations on where I save - already do that with my armour and my health/magic/stamina (eg putting points into magic because I don't use as I have too much health already) and its just a pain.

Just a tip for those obsessive enchantement and potion effect stackers: If the percentage exceeds 100% instead of actually exceeding it, is set back to zero and counted from there on. Everything works like that. Defense, damage, stagger, steal, etc. chances and even perk points. I had one save file where I went insane to test out the max results I can get with cheating. I increased my Smith skill through console, got a bunch of perk points for it then re-setted my level to 1. Rinse and repeat. I had around 225 perk points when the system broke and set itself back to zero then continued from there.

Tried testing damage cap with fully perking and raising to 100 the two handed, one handed, archery and sneak skills then enchanting equipment to give me even more bonuses. I had an amulet and ring that both gave me +35% to Archery and One Handed dmg. Tested it and it turned out that when I equipped that amulet AND ring (60% bonus to both skills) my attacks actually became weaker due to the huge amount of bonus effect stacking, breaking and resetting.

On normal gameplays you probably don't encounter this too often unless you are heavily min/maxing a character but it can happen like in the case of pickpocket percentages.

To be fair, it is really not 'cheating'.

You don't have to use the console, and you don't exploit any mechanics that function in any other way than what they are intended to.

Actually I think they should give a special perk at the completion of the thieves guild quest. You are supposed to have uncanny luck. So make the pickpocket minimum 10% and maximum 100%. This will be a far better reward than those stupid greater powers.

I think there may actually be a glitch or it could be something else. Like what you see % wise is only a base stat reflecting your skill lvl and perks. Then comes what you do not see the little modifiers in the background that can come into play without ever really showing you the true % chance of success thus playing on player misconceptions. For example in a table top rp game I play and run the player knows what their pickpocket skill is, but what they do not know is all the modifiers stacking up for or against them so they never truly know if they will always succeed or if this time they are doomed to fail until it's too late. I am hoping for the latter as to me it adds to the excitement and thrill of being a pickpocket knowing that even though it says 90% there is a chance even if a small one that in reality things stacked up against you and they are really 60%.

Just as an aside: If you can bribe gaurds or are a thieves guild member the small bounties for pick pocketing aren't so bad. Paying them actually increases your Speech too. It all just depends on how you feel like playing though and I've done my fair share of reloading saves =)

its so annoying that some things are too expensive and just cant be pickpocket, even with 100 pickpocket and all the perks

It should be a minigame, with fluxuating percentage, random events, moving with the target and timelimits before the target becomes suspicious.
Stealth should be woven into this and stealthing about should be considered suspicious behavior, triggering defenses and awareness when spotted.

Like it is now, it's almost not worth having in the game at all.
90% success is far too much of a gamble and it's stale as a .. box. Boring and risky at the same time, worthless!
The worst thing about it is that we can't influence the outcome, if we could, then it would be worthwhile taking the 73% chance when we got the chance to do so, playing up to that point, not knowing when another good opportunity might surface.


Lockpicking got it's minigame, while flawed, it's still pretty fun. It could certainly be trimmed beyond what it is now, but it is functional.
Pickpocketing is not functioning, it's broken and thus shouldn't even be in the game.
Actually it's not broken, it's nonexistant.

I do find it rather strange, my sneaky character can jump up and down 2 feet in front of a guard, in broad daylight, without being seen but still gets caught 10% of the time when stealing even the lowest value items.

For this sole reason I always carry a selection of Paralysis Poisons with me.

very good. mind if i steal this and put it in my thread?
http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1322156-my-ideal-skyrim/page__fromsearch__1
i take it you mean that whether or not the item appears when pick pocketing is determined by your pickpocket skill? this is good. anything that conflicts with it at all?

Here is how I would do it:

100% chance
Real time
Pickpocketing takes time. NPC AI reacts quickly so be quick. But you can't be quick, your character must be quick, hence the character skill influences the length of pickpocketing window.

To make things interesting, a small mini-game to add player choice into equation:
As time passes, objects start to pop-up in a list...
You can stop and collect the item(one item at a time) or you can continue to search... If you collect the item, the timer will be reset and it will take as longer in next attempt.

Perks can enhance certain parts of the mechanic and NPCs will notice things after a certain time and become aware so no abusing.

Really? I would never have guessed, because that's not a feature of role playing games. Tell me, do you also save and reload each time you shoot an arrow?

If the dice rolling on this one is seeded, what you're talking about is exactly the reason it is seeded - to prevent it from being an obvious exploit.

Sorry, but I really think you fully misunderstand what the save/load feature is there for.

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I have no objection on pickpocketing (and lockpicking for that matter) become a realtime based minigame featuring a window of opportunity. As long as us "old timers" get that "auto attempt" click area to simulate true character skill with no player skill influence on success.

Just read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory

But 10 people in 100,000 are likely to do that. Then just one of them needs to complain on a forum. Complaints for very unlikely events are to be expected when millions of people are doing an activity.

Reloading changes the chances, I know that. Even the OP points that out because the fifth time it worked. Really pickpocketing is pretty boring because there's no skill involved and it will likely just lead to reloading -- not a great game mechanic.

Actually, that is WRONG maths...

Sorry, couldn't resist

I agree. The problem is you can just try again and again to win and you can even win in your first attempt, this is true for any degree of luck. Why is skill designed as a mechanic of luck? This is not right. Luck should be separate. Skill should be about efficiency. That's why I used time in my proposed mechanic above at post #72.

I'm not so sure of this for Skyrim, indeed the luck involved seems rather fitting.

Especially considering pickpocket is a thief skill, and the narrative of the Thieve's Guild in Skyrim almost exclusively revolves around how luck is related to the profession.

I'd like real-time lockpicking, but in truth... pickpocketing happens in an instant. I think pausing sort of mimics that, and scrolling through thier inventory is anolgous to casing out a target. So in that sense, a mini-game doesn't add or take away really anything.

In truth, I think luck should probably be the deciding factor for a succesful attempt... and that skill should come secondary as a multiplier.