I decided to try running without astarion.
DC 15 lock, 6 kits burned with four inspiration on my first lock attempt.
Barf.
Not sure what ring and gloves yall talking about.
This is missing all sorts of information. What were your stat bonuses?
Actually, I mean look. Let's assume you had ZERO bonuses. +0 to sleight of hand. For some reason you were using a REALLY crappy character for this. This means you had a 25% chance of succeeding on any given roll. If you are being honest, and you REALLY burned through 10 attempts on this without opening the lock, do you want to know what the chances of that happening were? Roughly 6 percent. And this is assuming ZERO bonuses. If you used modest bonuses (let's say, 14 dex and proficiency for a modest +4 bonus total; for context Astarion's at level 1 is +7 from expertise and 17 dex, I believe.) If you were using someone even MODERATELY good then the chances of you failing 10 times in a row are a mere .2%, or 1 in 500 chances.
And this is assuming you did NOTHING ELSE to increase your chances. Guidance, which shadowheart has by default and which you can get from a locket. Bardic inspiration. Pretty sure there are spells or abilities you can use to get advantage on the roll. The rings and gloves we're talking about....actually I forget where they came from personally, but I am pretty sure they're both somewhere in act 1. The gloves give advantage on any sleight of hand check when you use them (which is a pretty large bonus), and the ring gives a +2 to sleight of hand checks.
The point is this: Failing 10 times in a row to open a DC 15 lock, if you are using the very easy things you have access to and a character that is even *sort of* good at sleight of hand stuff, is absolutely not normal. It is, in fact, if you used everything, extremely unlikely, statistically.
