Pickpocketing is the most underrated way to soft-lock yourself

[DragonbornVet]

Been replaying and decided to see how far I could get by exclusively pickpocketing every NPC I meet. Not stealing for profit - just the act itself. And I'm genuinely surprised how many quests you can completely break without ever drawing a weapon.

Like, I pickpocketed the Dawnstone off Meridia's Shrine worshippers before the actual quest even triggered, and now I can't get the quest to start properly. Or that time I lifted Aventus Aretino's dagger before talking to him and the Dark Brotherhood quest chain got all weird. The game's leveled lists and quest flags are apparently held together with duct tape.

What's wild is that pickpocketing doesn't feel like it's supposed to be a soft-lock tool. It's just... nobody talks about how fragile quest design is when you can remove key items from people's inventories without consequence. Speechcraft perks make dialogue feel pointless, sure, but at least dialogue still fires. Pickpocketing just lets you break the entire game's spine and keep walking.

Has anyone else accidentally nuked a questline this way? Or am I just finding new ways to ruin my own playthroughs.

 

[EbonyWarrior]

Yeah, I've definitely done this to myself more than once. The Aventus thing is brutal because the Dark Brotherhood questline is so front-loaded with those specific items and dialogue triggers. Pickpocket the wrong thing and suddenly Astrid's whole "we know what you are" moment doesn't land right, or the contract itself gets borked.

What gets me is that Skyrim's quest design assumes you're going to interact with NPCs in a pretty specific order. Morrowind had the same problem honestly, but at least there you'd get a journal entry telling you straight up that you broke something - "this NPC is dead and you needed them alive" kind of thing. Skyrim just silently fails and you're left wondering why Meridia won't talk to you.

The Dawnstone one especially is rough because that's not even a main questline - it's just a Daedric quest, and the game doesn't warn you that removing it from someone's inventory is different from, say, buying it from a vendor. There's no "this person needs this" flag on most pickpocketed items, so the quest system just assumes it's still there.

Honestly though, I think that's kind of on the player more than the game's design? Like, Skyrim expects you to not pickpocket quest-critical items from people, which is fair. It's not like the game hides that you CAN do it - it just doesn't hold your hand and say "don't do this." Morrowind would've let you break quests even worse if you tried, so I don't know if this is really a Skyrim-specific fragility so much as "open-world RPGs break if you're weird enough."