When does adding skills to a particular thieving category become useless? For instance, if my lockpicking is at 125, is there ANY reason to add more? What about the other skills? Is there a point where it doesn't make sense to add skill points to certain categories? Do they ever max out?

I could be wrong, but I believe that the number in the thief skill category I.E your 125 indicates a %. So, your 125 = 125% chance of successfuly picking a lock, therefore, I think that there would be no reason to put anymore than 100% in any skill, and use the valuable points in other categories that are lacking.

I do no remember the source (either the core rules OR the BGI manual) but it said that char having >=100% in a thieving skill will have a 99% chance in it. So, make it a 100 for a cool number and thats enough!

[ 08-28-2002, 12:40 AM: Message edited by: TaSSaDaR ]

125% for Lockpicking and Detect/Disarm traps.
200% for Pickpocketing
100% for Set Traps

Rest divided equally into Move Silently and Hide in Shadows.

I am not the backstabbing type. [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Note that the chance to go Stealth is dependant on the average of your Move Silently and Hide in Shadows scores.

ADD] The reason for exceeding 100% is because there are times when the game imposes penalties on you. So a lock may have a penalty of -30%, and since you have 125%, your effective chance is 95%.

[ 08-28-2002, 12:46 AM: Message edited by: Dundee Slaytern ]

And when the lock implies penalties you just Knock it!!

I never had my thief (Imoen in fact) pass 100 in any skill (ring of lockpicking gave her 80) and still got no trouble at all with the locks around the game. And why would you care of maxxing anything exept Set traps?? worked pretty well on Shadow dragon - the trap tactics ;)

Haha, the power of cheese. You'd think perhaps the dragon would notice these traps suddenly appearing, unless the wardstone hid them.

P.S. Off topic, but how do you quote other users? I would have liked to quote TaSSaDaR.
Thanks [img]smile.gif[/img]

You just press "quote" right of my message header ;)

And anyway, I have beaten that dragon WITHOUT those traps in the end, harm way is the one that worked, but all those traps just gave me a lot of fun ;) And the wardstone is no cheese - the dragon doesnt see ya, and you do ANY sort of things you want ;)

While Knock is an excellent way of lockpicking, it also means no EXP. Higher level locks can easily grant you 2000 EXP a lock.

Agreed. But for XP you may try it 2-3 times. Myself i just once encountered a lock that didnt open on the first attempt, and it did open on the second ;) And i didnt use knock at all ;)