Crowbars using a skill.

[Cogliostro]

Is there an important technical reason why crowbars do not utilize a skill to work? The combat skill (as in, seige) would make some sense to me.

[SekoETC]

Equality? It takes a day for everyone and has an equal chance of failure for everyone, just like people have an equal chance of missing or hitting past a shield even though their damage varies. Lock breaking is intentionally slow to give people a chance, if some people were especially talented at it then they would get an advantage. If skills were improved through practice rather than being assigned at random then it would make sense that lock breaking could be made more likely to succeed through practice, but not with the current system.

[Cogliostro]

I'm with you on giving people a chance. I've frequently felt that lockbreaking is too quickly over with, and thought back to the times when locks weren't breakable at all... It was a brave new world back then, that felt different.

But on the other hand people need to get into "forgotten" buildings somehow. If it were up to me, I'd make crowbarring work based on combat skill and increased the time needed to break a lock to 10 days for the average person, intentionally making it a very time consuming, rarely attempted thing, to bring back that feeling from the old days when locks were not breakable.

[Arenti]

Oh sure give chars no chance at all to break out of a building when they are dragged in a building. As in one day a person has a small chance to break out, ten days no chance at all to survive.

[SekoETC]

Yeah, if someone is dragged into a building and actively attacked, they have pretty much 0% chance to break out since woundedness will make the lock breaking slower.

It would make more sense if instead of having to start over from scratch after a lock picking project fails, the lock would instead suffer a random amount of damage so that if you rolled a high number each time, you could still break a lock in one day but even if you failed, you would still deal some damage so that the lock would gradually grow weaker. That way no lock could stand indefinitely. If deterioration ranges from 0 to 10000, to break it in one day (8 ticks) would require dealing 1250 points of deterioration.