Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Help Tips & Tricks Please explain Pickpocketing to me

Hello there,

I don't know if I don't understand a certain mechanic or if it's a bug or a mixture of both, so here we go:
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I am trying to steal from an NPC with Astarion. Here are my questions:

• Why doesn't my Guidance bonus count? No matter if I cast it in turn-based or in real time
• Why is my chance (red circle across the dice symbol) so low? Rolling a 20 with a +9 bonus should be roughly 45%, shouldn't it?
• Since this confused me a lot - I tried savescumming but gave up after around 20 tries.

Of course, all of this is still possible due to the random nature of dice throws, but maybe someone can help me out here.


Thank you

Unlike all other skill checks the pickpocket UI needs what you need to ROLL to succeed, so the target number will go down as your skill increases instead.

So it's basically a 29 skill check but because I have +9, the target is 20?

And why doesn't Guidance add any bonus?

guidance doesn't help because its the wrong kind of skill check
enhance ability -dex does help

what you need has other things; is it in sunlight or other llighting, is it in town, are there other people watching, have you already been spotted doing something iffy before

p.s, there is another spell that changes what you look like i.e, a human becomes an elf or halforc... this doesn't actually help with pickpocketing but it can help when you want to go back to the same area after without the guards grabbing you