Not my OC though it would have been had I not found this one when I was scouring for source images. But hey, using someone else's is totally on theme here ๐คทโโ๏ธ
Focusing on stealth, pickpocket, and speech this time around.
Edit: Dayum. Arcadia don't fuck around. Pickpocketed her shop key, came back and robbed the place, made a bunch of potions, and sold them back to her. No bounty (so I didn't get caught) but she sent an assassin after me the first time and now the Dark Brotherhood.
Oh, yeah, it's inevitable. I usually do a battle mage or occasionally a warrior earlier in the game and never touch the speech, lockpick, or pickpocket skills at all. For lockpicking, I just do the quest to get the skeleton key and never return it.
But yeah, this is just to do something different before I'm a level 50+ stealth archer rolling up in Riverwood to start the main quest.
Honestly I don't get the point of LockPick and speech skills. All the benefits of upping your lock skill can just be mitigated by being good at the lock game and you can have literally infinite picks in your pocket. Speech on the other hand just gets you more money faster? That's about as useful as Lydia's attitude.
Speech has some handy perks. You can bribe guards to ignore crimes, sell any kind of item to any merchant, increase the amount of gold specific merchants have on hand, sell stolen goods to specific merchants and pass speech checks more easily.
I've never really found all those worth the perk points to get honestly. Ignoring crimes becomes pointless when you have the money to just pay the fines which is basically always after level 15. The merchant situation is kind of neat, but price per pound, the only things worth selling are scrolls, jewelery, and weapons, that gets covered by everything but bars and alchemists. On top of that the 500 gold donation is literally pointless because the same skill tree gives you 30% better prices (40% for opposite sex) which actually spells out to 50 gold more in buying power or -100 gold for opposite sex. If you could invest multiple times or of the perk that gives everyone more money was for 5k instead of 1k it would actually be worth the investment of perk points, but really it offers nothing substantial mechanically compared to all the other things you could do.
I said I thought the perks are handy, not game changing. I usually don't go deep enough in speech to unlock investment, etc. Still, they're more useful than the lock picking perks. Depending on my role play, build and where else talents are needed, I might go as far as "Persuasion" but there are usually other priorities.
Lockpick is pretty useful but I never level it (by the time I would, I don't need most of the loot I'd get with it). Figure leveling it early might open some doors for a different play style (pun intended). Speech....eh, I just never bothered with it ever. This is mostly just to do things completely different this time around (until I become a stealth archer).
It's similar with Mass Effect 2 and into 3. Import a save with Wrex and the Rachni queen surviving, then make sure to get all companion quests with everyone surviving.