Learn about essential General Skills in Gothic 1 Remake: Sneaking, Opening Locks, and Pickpocketing. Discover how Dexterity affects your success and where to learn these vital abilities.
These are skills you only need to learn once, and have no further application except becoming better at it by raising the governing attribute (STR or DEX). Even raising the governing attribute will not have that much of an effect in terms of gameplay, and most application of these skills are set against prefix values. Like with Pickpocketing, each target has a set value you need to have to be able to pickpocket them, whereas a single point below will fail the operation.
A1.1.1 Sneaking
Sneaking is a Basic skill you only learn once. Sneaking enables you to use the X key (default) for entering sneak mode. Sneak mode is very useful for lurking about at night and getting entry to houses without someone noticing. Although you could live without the ability to sneak, it is a quite profitable skill that will line your pockets from early on in the game. Without sneaking you cannot enter most houses without upsetting and angering most people, and get to all the items lying around in their houses, like chests and loot.
Sneaking only works 'against' humans and somewhat humanoids and your success or failure depends on your Dexterity skill. Most monsters will smell you from afar wether you sneak or not. Although one would suspect an attack from behind while in sneak-mode would do more damage, that doesnt appear to be the case. Still, overall Sneaking is a reccomended skill that will pay itself.
Learned from: Bartok or Jesper (Thieves Guild)
A1.1.2 Opening Locks
The skill of opening locked chests by use of Lock Picks. As with Sneaking, you don't absolutely need this skill, but even more so this is a skill you will make a lot of use of through the entire game. Almost every chest will be off limits to you without this skill, wether in the house of a citizen or in a cave or dungeon out in the wild. Some quests also involves retrieving items from chests, so those would also be out of your reach without this skill.
Opening Locks require lockpicks and is somewhat relying on your Dexterity. Once you interact with a locked chest you have to find the right combination to open them, from either turning the lockpick right or left. Turning the lockpick in a wrong direction have a chance of breaking the lockpick. With a high Dexterity skill the lockpicks doesnt break but instead give you a pointer that that was the wrong direction and lets you start over. The formula seems to be that Dexterity matches the chance of the lockpick NOT breaking. Ie, with a Dexterity of 50, there's a 50/50 chance you can start over instead of the lockpick breaking, A 100 DEX skill would mean your lockpicks never break.
Learned from: Thorben (200 gold) & Ramirez (Thieves Guild, 150 gold)
A1.1.3 Pickpocketing
The art of further robbing the poor citizens of their belongings. To learn this skill you need to be connected to the Thieves Guild, and it might not be for everyone. If you choose to play 'honorable' and turn in the thieves, you will not get to learn this skill. That said, becoming a member of the thieves guild have no real moral bearing on the game whether you're a goody two-shoes Paladin or a Mercenary, and you can still choose any of the three guilds and still be a full member of the Thieves Guild on the side.
Once Pickpocketing is learned, you will get a new option in the conversation tree for named NPC's you talk to if they can be pickpocketed. Ie, when speaking to almost any named human (not Citizen, Farmer, Mercenary, Worker etc, generic NPC's) you will get a new option in parenthesis like "(it would be easy to steal his purse)". Choosing this option will take you to another step where you can choose to "(Pickpocket)" or Cancel. Although pickpocketing is very strict, the wording of the choice to pickpocket or not should give you a hint. If a target is 'easy' to pickpocket it means you probably can do it, while if a target is 'risky' it probably means you don't stand a chance.
Each target has a what seems to be a set skill of Dexterity required to be pickpocketed. Ie, person x can be pickpocketed but to do so you need 30+ in Dexterity - 28 DEX won't cut it. If you talk to him/her, it might say "it would be child's play to steal his purse" if your DEX skill is 25, but there's still no way you can actually steal his/her purse. It could be that there is a slight chance roll involved (+/- a DEX point or two?), but to my experience I could try and pickpocket a target and fail 100% of the times with a given DEX skill, but by raising DEX as little as one point succeed on the first try. If you know otherwise, please let me know. In every case though, be sure to save before trying.
Thus, Pickpocketing is DEX based but very strict. The easiest pickpocketing targets require as low as 10 DEX while the thoughest and most lucrative targets require in excess of 100. Possible pickpocketing loot could be pure gold, a potion, arrows or even keys that unluck doors to even better loot.
Also note that you get experience for every target pickpocketed, and that they can only be robbed once in the entire game. If you rob a person in chapter 1, you cannot steal more later. Another important thing about pickpocketing is that the experience given actually raises by chapter progress. A successful pickpocket in chapter 1 yields 25xp independent of the skill required or item robbed, but if you wait until chapter, suddenly the experience gain for doing so raises to 75. Wether the skill for picking a target in Chapter 1 is lower than picking the same target instead in Chapter 2 also raises is unknown. That said though, there are tons of people to rob and quite a hefty amount of xp to be gained by doing so - a level
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