I'm fairly confident the strongbox suggestion I did a few post ago is a good middle-line. It enhances Lockpicking without making it a mandatory skill. I think there was a discussion about loot tables some time ago, but maybe adding one possible loot to the encounters is probably not as hard as revisiting the existing chests and doors to enable or not, one by one, the "locked" tag as well as manually setting a lock value.
Just as a reminder, I suggested that those strongboxes could be opened by lockpicking ( doh! ) but also be brought to someone in town to force open/lockpick it for you for a price. Either keeping the gold inside, making it some kind of gambling ( if there was only gold or a big sum, you "loose", if the sum was small or non-existent, you'd keep whatever else was inside almost for free ).
As for what could be inside, it could range from small stuff like potions and scrolls to more solid stuff like arrows/arrow heads, books, maybe some weapons like daggers and knife, gear like boots, belts and bracers, crafting ingredient with varying degree of rarity... Not expecting large sized items like swords, chest armors, big two handed maces :p
This way it would work just like Loremaster and Repair, abilities you'd want to grab but you can also avoid altogether. With 3 skills being "replaceable" by NPCs but also being costy in the long run should you choose to ignore them, you would want to invest some points in some of them ...
I was thinking it may be time for a recap of the various suggestions though. Something clean just for future references and to the developer's attention.
From the top of my head there was things such as
- hiding the keys from the ALT overlay,
- revisiting existing chests to either remove the key and/or add more locks overall,
- disarming traps with Lockpicking, adding strongboxes,
- reviting lockpicks so that they would either be indestructible but have a set Lockpicking value or give the player a way to get a lot of them if need be,
- damaged/less items in forced chests ( raw force or magic ),
- lucky find/more item in a lockpicked/opened by key chest
- more...
This is by no mean a complete list of what was suggested here, but it would take a little time to parse the 2 pages and honor everyone's suggestions so far in a clean way.
Maybe if I get some spare time I'll look into it tomorrow.
Last edited by Dr Koin; 24/04/14 12:56 AM.
