Thief skills needed in bg1+totsc

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Hi there.
I finally once again picked this excellent game up again This time I'm playing an evil elf swashbuckler using easytutu, no other mods. But I'm noticing that even with 100% pick pocket skill, it sometimes fails and turns the target hostile. Is this due to something like a 5% chance of failing regardless of skill, or do I need over 100% for some people? This has happened with several different low-level random people, like Amish guards in the nashkel mines, and random townspeople in beregost.

How much do I need to put in each of Pick Pocket, Find Trap and Open Lock do I need to be able to have a 100% success-rate for those abilities? (I seem to remember Durlag's Tower requiring over 100% find trap, or maybe it was open lock)

Thanks for helping me out here

Edited:
Moved to ToB forum?
I know I have easytutu installed and tutu discussions belong here, but does that in any way affect what levels I need my thief skills on in bg1? Ah well, sorry for posting on the wrong forum.

[ June 02, 2007, 14:12: Message edited by: Marvin^42 ]

 

As you have realised, this is for the ToB forum due to the presence of Easytutu.

IIRC, there is a trap in Durlag's Tower that can't be disarmed. Other than that, no lock or trap will require you to put more than 100% in the relevant skill, especially outwith the tower. I'm also fairly sure that you can never be totally guaranteed to succesfully pick a pocket- there will always be some small chance of failure.

 

Even more stuff I can't explain :s
Montaron keeps failing Hide in Shadows even with 100% and no enemies for one or two screens from my party. I guess it's a simple solution, but it annoys me that I have to ask at a forum for every small thing I can't explain. Is there any readme out there which explains such trivial stuff which everybody else knows?

 

No complete readme out there that I know of. I've always found that standing in the shadows, rather than direct sunlight, has helped my thief hide. I'm not certain ('twas a while ago), but I seem to recall something being said about your thief getting a penalty when standing in the light.

 

That is logical, but that'd mean someone went over every single area of the game and flagged certain spots as "shadow" or "not shadow"? Sounds unlikely for such an old game :s

Just found another small annoying thing
I got a bit too high reputation all of a sudden, and I decided to just SK it down to 8 to save some time, but my NPCs still moan about us being all goody goody.

 

Actually, it's a bit more than certain spots. Every area has a "light map", showing how much light falls on every little bit of the map.

SK should be a last resort. If your rep gets too high, all you have to do is go find some poor innocent alone in their house, and kill them. Your rep gets instantly halved. Plus you can then loot their house free from being discovered (unless you splatter-killed them, in which case the game acts like they're still in their last position for some reason).

 

Ah, good. It is nice to know I was remembering correctly about the shadows.

 

I sort of think that the percentages listed for thieves' skills (at least some of them) work more like difficulty ratings than actual percentage chances to succeed. If you overcome the difficulty rating (and there seems to be some sort of randomness, or "rolling of die" that plays into this) then you succeed at the skill.

This is most certainly true in the case of theiving in stores in BG2 (it's been a while since I've played BG1, but I imagine it works similarly). With 100% chance of success in some stores you, in reality, have a 0 percent of success. Try thieving in the Copper Coronet with 100% of success, and see how often you actually get away with it. You never will! But get that skill up to 250% and you'll be rolling in loot.

So I think that, at least in some cases, the percent "unit" is actually an inappropriate qualifier.

 

Does that mean that even though my reputation is fairly low, they can still decide to leave because they don't recognize the change i did with SK? Yeah, cheating is all bad and so on, but that's still annoying