FYI, the security skill actually does have an impact in the lockpicking minigame. The higher your skill, the more smooth and consistent the pins bounce. Once your skill is really high they’ll almost always bounce slow and at nearly the same speed every time. The perks keep pins locked in place when you break your pick as well. That said, I still don’t really like the minigame. I play it on thief characters, but everyone else I either do the quest for the magic pick or I train alteration and use the unlock spell. The speechcraft game was kind of counterintuitive – if I know a character doesn’t like admiration, why would I ever try to butter him up at all? After I got in the swing of it I didn’t even really pay attention to it; I played it more as a visual puzzle and eventually got so good at it I coudl wihp through it in a few seconds. Even better is just a charm 100 + fortify merchantile 100 3 second spell. Completely bypasses the entire speechcraft system.

[…] previously mentioned that I consider these things to be idiotic. Once you figure out the lock-picking game in Oblivion for example, you can open any door or […]

@Steve: Heh, funny thing is that I read about it just few days ago. Googling the Oblivion lockpicking stuff was like one of the first things I did when I realized that:

a. I suck at the mini game
b. Lock picks are actually scarce in this game
c. At low levels it is actually hardly worth buying them

There is a mission early in the Thieves guild that makes you break into one of the guard towers in the Imperial City. I was out of picks, so I hightailed to Burma, and bought like 20 of them from my fence for over 200 gold. Then I went back to the Imperial City and proceed to break every single one.

Then I made another trip, bought some more lock picks and wasted them again. Finally, I just decided to save my game, and load it when I break too many and somehow managed to pass the mission. I got 50 gold for the mission, and maybe another 50 in stolen loot. Totally not worth it.

Nowadays I’m a bit better at it, and when I’m running low and I’m on a quest and don’t feel like taking a detour I just use the console:

player.addItem a 15

This plops 15 picks in my inventory. I know it’s cheating, but that tower mission was such a buzz kill that I almost quit playing the game at that point. So I’d rather cheat a bit, and have fun than frustrate myself until I don’t feel like playing anymore. :)

But yeah, once I get around to it I will definitely pick the skeleton key so that I no longer even have to bother with the console thing. :)

@Ben: True, but Morrowind had lock picking as a skill check and it was perfectly fine. You would just walk up to the door, press a button and it would either open, or not. Lockpicks were also plentiful and very cheap to buy in that game. It was a better solution IMHO.

@Mart: Very true. I think I mentioned it in the other post but Oblivion suffers from what I call an Xbox driven UI design. The inventory screen is atrocious!

I couldn’t figure out why they split it into so many nested tabs, an shown so little on each of them. As if they wanted to maximize the number of mouse clicks to accomplish every task. But then I realized that the UI was designed with consoles in mind. That inventory screen was made to be navigated with a XBox controller where you would click left-right to switch tabs, and up-down to scroll within them. It was optimized for that. The side effect is that it sucks for mouse users.

@Alphast: Actually, I believe that the Security and Speachcraft skills are even less relevant than you think.

I think that the security skill limits how many tumblers fall down when you break a lock pick. And it depends on the named level (eg. Apprentice, Journeyman, Expert) rather than actual value. So if you are an expert at security you get the same chance to pick a lock as a novice – you just don’t get punished for failure.

In the social game I believe Speachcraft governs how many “points” you gain or lose from each quadrant. So if you are an expert your successes are maximized, and your failures are minimized. And I think it is also a 4 step advancement ladder, rather than a gradual increase. Which means that two Journeyman’s will get the same bonuses even if they are like 15 points apart in terms of their skill level.

Oh, and ironically the easy lock picks (with just 1 tumbler) are the only ones I never usually had problems opening. :)

By the way, to get a simple magical “unlocking spell” for free, just join the mage guild in Borma. The first quest is about steeling a book and the NPC just gives the spell away. It will work only on easy locks, but that will save a lot of lockpicks.

I hate the social mini-game in Oblivion more than the lockpicking one, to be honest. First because the lock picking one is only optional, and second because the social game is plain unrealistic. There is no way any thief in his sound mind would try to boast or threaten an Imperial guard, for instance. And also, as Luke explained, because the “psychology” of the NPC’s has actually no translation in their actual dialogs.

This said, it is not true to say that the relevant skills are totally unnecessary with these mini-games. The skills change two things:
* for the lock picking, they change the probability that a lockpick will break at the end of the mini-game (the actual opening of the lock).
* for the social game, they change the position of the quadrants to make it easier to “win” the puzzle.

So it’s not irrelevant to be good, it is just that you can still “be lucky” or “help your character skills with your own (player) skills”. Is it wrong? I don’t think so. I think it is poorly done and brought in Oblivion. But isn’t it what all games do for the combat part, for instance? And nobody is complaining about this.

To conclude, I don’t think it is the principle which is wrong, just the way it is translated into game mechanics in Oblivion (or Thief or any other RPG). I would not like that all PC RPG would replace all my actions on screen by a “dice roll”. I can do table RPG if I want that (which I do twice a month…).

Seems to be like these mini-games is to please the console crowd. A lot of console games that I played have some sort of mini-games, like button mashing, sequence matching, etc.

I’m somewhat partial to these, because it is fun the first few times. And subsequently gets super boring after that. The only upside is that you can potentially break any lock and gain access to any loot. But the really very bad downside is it becomes an action game, not an RPG.

I guess as long as games are made for consoles, they will have some sort of mini-game madness in it.

By the way, you forgot to add the card game in M&M7. That was quite fun to play too. And best part is it’s non-essential to the plot.

Lockpicking in CRPGs has been suffering for a _long_ time. I remember programming macros back in the late 1980s to automate dozens of lockpick attempts in the game Wasteland. Somewhere along the line, some programmer decided that it would be fun to have lockpicking as part of a CRPG, and it’s been in every game since. Is it _ever_ fun? Minigame or skill based or a combination (Fallout 3 has a minimum skill to attempt a lock, then a minigame), they are all boring by the end of the game. The slight challenge they present early on is just likely to highlight a poor save system. I say, drop lockpicking from the games altogether.

You know, in Oblivion, there’s some magical lockpick you can get that will automatically unlock these things, and you don’t have to do the minigame unlocking thing. You have to do some quests involving some statue or other…I can’t remember…it’s been a while.

For the record, I HATED the lockpicking minigames. I read up, found the quest line, did it (only time I liked the “levelled mobs”), got the lockpick and never did that stupid minigame again.