Picking the lock

DM:  The guard patrol disappears around the corner, leaving you alone with the massive iron-bound door behind which the princess is securely locked.


First level thief:  I quickly get out my tools and try to spring the lock! 


DM:  Roll your Open Locks skill.


Thief:  24. 


DM:  You're unable to open the lock.


Thief:  Ugh!  I SUCK!

It's no secret that until he lies, cheats, and steals his way to name level or so, a thief by the book is pretty lousy at his chosen profession.  It's so obvious that people have even remarked on how miraculous it would be for the average non-adventurer thief to ever eke out a living picking pockets or burglarizing shops and homes.  A first level thief is going to fail at his bread-and-butter abilities at least three times in four.  It's hard to imagine any in-game rationale for why anyone would choose such a life of larceny, when even mucking out stables is likely to be more lucrative over the long haul, not to mention much less likely to lead to the lockup or the gallows. 

In the dungeon, the thief's theoretically useful skills are long shots at best.  At low levels of play, they fail far more often than not, and when you fail, you fail.  There are no shades of success, no second chances.  If you roll poorly, that lock stays locked.  Period.

There are lots of proposed solutions out there, the most obvious being simply to augment the thief's percentages somehow, whether by granting bonuses for high dexterity, introducing "master lockpicks" and similar items, allowing a thief to specialize in an ability or two, or starting player characters above first level.  This strikes me as an a crude patch that mitigates a broken mechanic somewhat, but really doesn't address its underlying problems.         

Others suggest applying situational bonuses or penalties.  For example, at low levels, the thief encounters a lot of poor quality locks that give a bonus to the skill roll.  Besides failing to address the underlying problem, it seems to me that this renders the improvements that come with level advancement meaningless.  If a thief at low level is going to be picking shoddy locks, at mid-level average locks, and at high level masterwork locks, such that his adjusted chance is pretty much the same, what's the point?  You might as well just assign him a percentage somewhere in the mid-level range regardless of his level, and dispense with all the lock quality tomfoolery.

JB, of the excellent B/X Blackrazor blog, takes the radical route, and allows thieves to succeed at their abilities automatically  (with some exceptions and caveats.)  I'm not entirely enamored with this, but it's at least an intriguing alternative.  It certainly would make the player of the thief feel that his character is contributing to the party's success, and in the unique way the class was intended to contribute, rather than as a lightly armored third rate combatant.  What I don't like about it is that it takes away much of the point of leveling up.  The thief improves as a combatant, but not as a thief.  For the most part, he's already as good as he's going to get in that department.

Nonetheless, I like the basic idea that given enough time, a thief is almost certain to succeed - the key phrase being, "given enough time."  I want to play up the time management angle suggested by JB a little bit more.  Instead of a flat one turn to pick a lock, how about rolling against the thief's Open Locks percentage, with the level of success or failure determining how long it takes him to do the job?  Here's a tentative idea of how that might work:

Roll succeeds, half of listed percentage or less:  1d6 rounds.
Roll succeeds, more than half of listed percentage:  1d6 minutes
Roll fails by 10 points or fewer:  1 turn
Roll fails by 11-40 points:  1d4 turns
Roll fails by 41-80 points:  2d4 turns
Roll fails by 81+ points: 1d4 hours
Roll plus penalties exceeds 100%:  Character is unable to open the lock, but may try again after gaining a level

Time taken beyond a few rounds is assumed to involve finding the right pick for the job, probing and studying the mechanism of the lock, false starts and failed attempts, and similar fiddling about.

Now the thief's skill level, and the roll against it, actually mean something, without there having to be a large chance of total failure.  A more skilled thief has a better chance of picking the lock quickly and cleanly, but even a novice can succeed if he has time to devote to the task.  In adventures with a time-sensitive goal, or where the DM uses wandering monster checks, this can have some serious consequences that add a lot more drama to the adventure than a simple pass/fail check.  The player of the thief and his party have choices to make.  Is whatever's in that chest worth staying in one place for an hour while the plans of the evil cult proceed apace?  How can they buy the thief some more time to get that door open so they can escape?  Failure becomes a choice, a reaction by the players to the situation at hand, not an inescapable result forced upon them by an unlucky roll of the dice, but the dice and the character's skill are still relevant.

I'm not sure yet how, or if, a similar approach can be applied to the other thief skills, but lock picking is one of the most important roles of thieves in my game, and I really like the potential of this system of qualified success instead of total success or total failure.  I'll definitely be giving it some more thought, but in the mean time... 

DM:  The guard patrol disappears around the corner, leaving you alone with the massive iron-bound door behind which the princess is securely locked.


First level thief:  I quickly get out my tools and try to spring the lock! 


DM:  Roll your Open Locks skill.


Thief:  24.


DM:  You start probing the lock mechanism, but it's a bit tricky, and the pressure of the situation isn't doing anything for the steadiness of your hand.  You almost have it, but your probe slips and the tumbler falls back into place!  You feel so close to figuring out the trick of it, but you hear faint footsteps from the western corridor...What do you want to do?

Thief:  Ugh!  I keep trying!  Just how close are those footsteps, anyway?